It must be lucid, elegant, thought thru, for constraints, context, from the point of inception. When complete, nothing should need to be added or removed for it to function. It must function to satisfy user and creator. And “one false note always breaks the magic spell.” (p. 26)
Sounds like a poem as much as an architecture.
In the designer’s autobiography, Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation, (p. 28) she relates what Corbusier said to her in the late 1920s: “Life needs play, just as concrete needs expansion joints and the eye’s pupil closes under the effect of light,” he said. “Every structure must contain an overriding element of play.”
You miss out with a dire intention to do purposefully, perfectly. It’s a precise art, yet designing tightly, you miss the mark as well.

What’s the value of poetry? Ron Silliman said a prof at Berkley asked his students to go out and busk in any way they could until they raised $50. Some people could work they magic and be back in an hour. Others took a week, or so. He then sent the students back out with copies of the Berkley Bard and asked them to come back when they have sold $50 worth of copies, each at 25¢ each.

Although sales need to put a dollar figure on it, poetry owes it life to the idea of potlatch, trade economy.
Which is not to say it doesn’t sell. There was a rush for the table when he said the words, print run of 200, only 8 left here. (I didn’t know poets could move that fast!)
Speaking of moving fast, rob has his notes from the Silliman talk here with a good side shot of crowd.
Poetry, Silliman was saying, owes its life to the risk of being present. Poetry where the poet is not present bores the reader. He said the most exciting area of poetry today is haiku. (There was a yippee and “I love you, Ron Sillman” from the audience in the exuberance of a haiku high moment). In that lean form, he explained, there is no where to hide sloppiness, inattention. It requires a presence in the work that should be in any scale of work, whether poetic treatise trilogy or further into minimalism than most haiku.
Where there’s verbiage and poetry that ebbs and flows, intensifies and steps back, there’s more place to hide. You can discern in a glance when there’s less material. Is there thru the whole 6 syllables symmetry, sound play, sensitivity to subject? You could appreciate it for many readings as with a long poem, but this thin slicing can go about quicker.
*
He gave a whirl-tour of early U.S, poetry, largely the males.
A book on the San Francisco Renaissance said, “In a very real sense, Ruth Witt-Diamant was the most powerful figure in the postwar poetry world of San Francisco” as she conceived the idea of their Poetry Centre and was an energizing and directing force. [source] The debate on what was going on there now often talks about the New American Poetry but her influence and the influences of some others have got mislaid. For example the zen-cowboy poets like Lew Welch and other beat poets who haven’t been canonized in the same way as some. They were creating magazines, readership and participating, some since the 1930s without attempting publishing routes. This makes them less visible in source but no less palpable in effect.
Silliman estimated that in the time of Ginsberg’s peak of the 1950s, there were about 100 English practicing, publishing poets. It was conceivable to be at least a nodding acquaintance with everyone and have read the work of everyone. You just had to know a couple dozen people to know all the major players. If you include doggerel dabblers and those writing for communist newsletters, the figure might come in around 500.
By the 1970s this has expanded to about 1000 poets. Currently, the active, publishing English poets (In the U.S. I believe) number somewhere around 20,000. This turns over or churns out more poetry collections published daily than used to come out yearly. The large presses make about 4000 titles a year and Silliman himself receives about 1000 review copies a year. Deep reads of 3 collections a day?
One naturally has to be discriminating on what will work for you. Do what you can and not worry about what you can’t.It’s no longer possible to even survey all the names let alone know the works. Poetry used to be local to a greater degree. International isn’t the marked form it once was.
Trane DeVore, grandson of Robert Creeley, reads more internationally than previous generations would have considered. Mark Young, although living down under publishers American writers. Ex-pats moved from or towards WWII to Italty and more from the Vietnam draft came North to Canada, I’d say international borders are more permeable for ideas than ever and the idea of nation is less of a fixed notion than it once was. This impacts how poetry moves, literally and figuratively.

Communication isn’t what it was. 24 hours on the internet shows 2 million new blog posts being written and 864,000 hours of video getting uploaded to YouTube. Some people were in earlier and started building nodes, such as Laurable who has amassed over 475 poets and 2,500 poetry links, many audio. Her health has since derailed it developing more but it remains as an archive/resource.
There are more poets active than perhaps have ever existed. Blame literacy and access, population explosion, mechanization and the ideas economy. It’s a very different world. How can one raise a voice thru what amounts to white noise?
Earlier he said the challenge is

Differentiation – how do you stand out from the masses of what’s already being written? It’s probably easier to gain a small, dedicated audience for your work, but I think it’s much much harder to take that next step toward a broader audience.

He gave the example of Zoe Strauss who went her own route to distinguish herself. Rather than the galleries and agents, in 1972 she did one weekend a year where she scotch-taped photocopies of her art to the underside of an underpass. It wasn’t a random underpass. It was one close to the gallery strip of Philadelphia. The advantage of cities is that there can be enough like-minds to create a catalyst.
If she had stayed, say, 100 miles from a cultural hub, she might have taped her art to a post and remained anonymous to an indifferent audience indefinitely. She guerilla marketed in a key place, on a set date annually for a decade. She created a buzz and crowd gradually gathered.
One thing that struck me is the notion of people who are not on the radar as a participant in a school of poetry. Poets who participate for decades, engaged in reading, conversation, guiding, but don’t play the publishing game so from formal channels are invisible but in real ways, are pivotal.
People used to take a geographical barrier, quite psychologically, as if the blanked out part of the map where Canada is, for U.S. maps, or where the U.S. is, in Canadian maps, was literal. There wasn’t a cross-fertilization. When George Stanley of the Black Mountain School hopped over the to Kootenays, he fell off the edge of the American map. We are all subject to our times, and geographies and Louis Dudek and Robert Duncan were writing in parallel on their respective sides of the 49th parallel.
Does geography impact as much as it used to?
*
He related that Mayakovsky said a poem is made by people waking around with notebooks and that blogging can be understood as an extension of that sensibility.
The English writing poetry community wasn’t that large in the 1950s and 60s, and it was dispersed. There weren’t yet blogs. The listservs were not yet there. If you’d already had the soft contacts of luck and could meet up with poets in person or could carry on letter conversations, great, but what about the rest of the people? In San Francisco Poetry Talk series started. (Last year a digital archive released, going back to the “San Francisco renaissance, archiving 4000 hours of poets.)
The San Francisco Talks started out with people talking off the top of their head of what they were thinking about poetry. Each had a stack of books to lift and pull from, excerpts from say, Stein and WCW. By round two, people were getting more prepared. It was streamlined so quotes were in the body of a talk that had form and outlines. By the third round people had written formal papers that they then presented. In all cases it was filling a void for people wanting to talk shop. People would gather in seats and some pacing at the back or holding up the walls. It was more of an event to meet at a meeting of minds. Even with the increased formality it has the spirit of a free for all. “No one could steer the ship because no one knew where the front was.” It was an exploratory era of people throwing ideas onto the table about the direction and possibilities of poetry.
In a way that sounds like it’s been transferred by impact of large number of participants into a comparable thing. How, flying in a flock, can you tell which way the flock tends? And yet culturally there are these motions, the slowest movement towards the edge and most tight wheeling towards the centre.
*
Looking back more recently Silliman said that when he started his blog in 2002, he had the ambitious goal of getting 30 hits per post, the equivalent of the size of a good poetry reading turnout, anywhere in the world. He got 140 his first day. It peaked at 1500 readers per day. It is now steady at 700 readers daily with 3 1/2 million visitors overall. In August it will be 10 years old.
(For comparison, I started Humanyms about 6 months after that and this poetics one at Livejournal in August, 2005. I didn’t have stats on Humanyms until late 2006; since then, a quarter million hits have come in. I didn’t put stats on pesbo until 2010 but it’s around 8000 hits/year.)
He said twitter is ideal for pointing towards larger chunks of info. It and Facebook and LinkedIn can point to the packages of ideas elsewhere. Blogging is ideal for medium-length materials.
*
Amanda was good enough to ask about the term “School of Quietude”. It’s a term borrowed by Edgar A. Poe, as a response to a rejection letter who asked him to make his writing more quiet. It’s a worldview of poetry where the value is on outbritishing the british, present “timeless values” in literature as one might have from the lifestyle of a mansion in delaware.
A “kept poem” doesn’t challenge its world. It speaks of its own fridge perhaps. It reinforces the status quo. This resonated well 50 years ago. Poets were fewer and many funneled thru the sensibility of Robert Lowell and John Barryman, the next generation of students of Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin and Robert Bly passing on the culture, making their own adjustments but it got grandfathered into status with it being 10% of U.S. writing but half of the grants and most of the teaching positions. Napa, Dodge, Key West all have such safe honoured mellifluous poetry as esteemed. In that environment Wallace Stevens is avant garde.
Privilege and entitlement beget themselves. There’s a place for poetry that comforts but poetry that defines itself as Poetry and excludes other forms and voices?
West Chester University Poetry Conference he says, hopped to another poetry lineage of aesthetics.
He said much more, but that probably assures you that the half I didn’t catch or pursue here, you sure missed a lot. Silliman gave 2 talks and a reading while he was in town and talked to someone over 100 people, which is good for any reading, or blog post.
There were chats after the A B Series readings. I kept gadding about, chatting away and twice I was told from a few people simultaneously of a photo-op happening, but by time I recovered the camera or the right lens, it disappeared again.

Did catch this tho, of jw, John Steffler and Silliman.

Jane Munro read from her wonderful ghazals in Pedlar Press’ Active Pass. She changed her reading line-up to follow from the Long Poem workshop that preceded her. She read some serial poem including p. 34, poem # 20 which has 7 couplets and ends with:

A year of patience, a friend called it. When exhausted,
do not start anything. No recriminations, no fixes.
A year in the compost bin. When mud floods you.
When your outlook’s cut to bits.

Some resonant sighs popped around the room from those lines. An arm-rub-of-goosebumps from myself and a person in another row.
From poem #19,

I develop a technique for unlocking doors one-handed.
Always carrying too much stuff.

A couple chuckles from around the room.
She gives a rich texture in her poems, not sticking to purely visual as is the lazy poet’s default and outer limit, but going into touch as well in this middle bit of poem #17

Mind like a pussy willow, texture of a catkin.
Yesterday, grey nubbins, engorged raindrops.
Swags of mist drifting in and out of the forest.
There were years when I couldn’t shower alone,
carried babies front and back. Now, I study stones –
how old they are! How sleek and round.

She mentioned the linkage to renga forms, the soft connections between lines in the ghazals. It’s exemplified well here with the forest mists becoming showering as a young mom. From roundness and youngness of babies to roundness and oldness of stones. It flows forward without an overly controlling hand of wanting to explain the points. Beautifully pointed gestures, not as with a spear but scalpel.
If you missed Jane Munro’s reading at Tree last night, there are the books but you can hear her in the voice as well. She has cut a CD called After the Fire. (At that link has audio samples and a youtube clip.)
Both she and Jay MillAR advised the potency of the word aloud.
In MillAR’s case the people who came for the Tree Seed Workshop (14 at the start, growing to 18 or 19 by the end of the hour) took turns reading from Sharon Thesen’s The New Long Poem Anthology and experiencing the long poem rather than talking around it. You could do it yourself by buying the book I suppose. I won’t be recreating with a 30-page blog post excerpt. (Besides, as Ron Silliman pointed out in his workshop, blog are optimal for medium-length thoughts.)
To appreciate the long poem in his long poem course, people read aloud as a group. The intro to that 30 hour TNSOW course is 3 hours and that evening we had 1.

He called it more “an awareness workshop” to taste the variety in long poem directly. He gave a whirlwind overview of the Canadian history with the long poem, the players of the modern and post-modern generations. He recommended looking up a 1980s issue of Open Letter on Long-Liners Conference, a conference at York University where Dorothy Livesay was the keynote speaker, where modernist and post-modernists met.
In the issues Fred Wah looks at different writers methods in using the long line and long poem. What does it make room for and what estrangement is permitted?
Jay gave each person a slip with a quote from the Vancouver Poetry Conference to consider; Jack Spicer saying in 1965:

“And you have to go into the serial poem not knowing what the hell you’re doing. That’s the first thing. You have to be tricked into it. It has to be some path that you’ve never seen on a map before. I think all of my books as far as they are successful have just followed the bloody path to see where it goes, and sometimes it doesn’t go anywhere.”

The long form can take its sweet time getting no where so seems akin to the slow food movement, rebelling against the spins coming at us all the time, pitches of plots and excitement spots. Marketing is geared against allowing boredom and slackness. This can be playing with a different set of rules. My peruse is small. Maybe some other practices use the form to different ends.
MillAR mentioned that Dorothy Livesay hoped the long form would bring in the people, to represent the voice of the people.
We read/heard Louis Dudek‘s At Lac au Coeur (“we have no time to hate or despair […] cover fear with laughter”) and Christopher Dewdney‘s The Cenozoic Asylum (“meditations[…] they come whole to the hand” as well as cut out remixed text from botany field guides and Penthouse).
Dudek, although known for wildly meandering all over the place in poems, did so in a sort of organized fashion, numbered stanzas and summing up stanza of his points. Dewdney’s excerpt from what would become a multi-book wander “The Natural History of South Western Ontario”, was over the top purple prose, a giant baroque piece of prose, supersaturated with details, a barrage of a list poem.
They are both meditations, in their way. Dudek by stepping back and looking and Dewdney as a meditation thru manstra-ing vocabulary.
*
There’s the long poem with long sections or short numbered serial thoughts. What would make the long poem poetry and not just literary non-fiction? There isn’t arc movement as some flash fiction, short stories or novels. Nothing need be tied with a bow. The canvas is large and aiming to not be reductionist to page-appropriate single simple sentiment. The movement is more lateral, sidewinder than nose to nose explaining of point unambiguously, if there is a point or points and not just talk. The lines between short-poem and long poem get blurry for me. Is a collection of fragments add to a word we call novel or poem? Mike Blouin, Chus Pato, Daphne Marlatt are playing in this sandbox as well. Does the label matter, except for where to look in a bookstore?
How would it relate to process poems? Is length just a description of the size of chunking? What about a theme book that writes the minimum necessary number of pages revolving around something that can get a sound bite for marketing? Is that distinct from a long poem? Is a long poem more a matter of compression in composition and must be allowed to expand in mulling over years. A lot of words expelled in a short time makes a lot of words and a long manuscript but not necessarily a long form? Is the long poem aiming to escape the grip of point of pith the short poem, not stray to process poems territory, but be engaged with that middle ground, neither point of departure nor destination?
The long form can explore more but can it express more or just take more time? Any form can have a comparable what or how. The outward is misleading somehow. The long poem can take longer loops and more loops thru to enjoy a walk instead of expressline to destination of aha or haha or oh.
It seems to fit in with Ron Silliman’s current post Why would a poet who writes 1,000-page poems read haiku? It’s “the questions of attention”. One can be present, or sloppy, at any scale, whether haiku or long poem. He says, “I can’t even imagine staying awake for the time it takes to slog through many a half-page text by Seamus Heaney. If he’s not fully present in his own poem, why should I be?”
For myself if a poem can’t hook me with each phrase, I’m mentally checking out. It doesn’t matter if the poem is a haiku or 40 lines or book-long. Once I start to predict what’s coming and skim to see if I’m right, and if I am, I’m gone.
Silliman says, “If you drift off in the long poem, you are apt to be gone for good. So the demand of the poem is to continually keep one’s attention present. Not the narrative present, which is something else altogether, but to the presentness of the text itself.”
At any length, the challenge is there, to not keep the reader who will love you whatever you do and support whoever they feel needs support, but to bring your genuineness of communication to someone else who wants to genuinely communicate as well.

Claudia Coutu Radmore’s response to the photos at the Red Wall Gallery will be enclosed in a book at the vernissage at SPAO tomorrow night. If you’re too far to come, a pdf is here, without the images.
btw, she’s started a blog for our haiku group, KaDo. Check that out too.

Photographer Vincent Versace talks with host Ibarionex Perello at Candid Frame about what matters to him. A lot of it applies to poetry or any art form, including living generally. It’s about an hour long in all but well worthwhile.
For example, “There’s a certain point in your career, or when you do this a lot, in any art form, where you can look at your work and you know what is good and bad without ego. You can look at it and say, that’s crap, that’s okay and this is really good.”
He talks about strobe light vs. sunlight. He points out any point of artificial light is to achieve natural light. In poetry we can replicate something in the world by a complex route but making the simplest possible without simplification is the elegant solution. It doesn’t reward our egos the same when something comes easily but it’s important to stop when something. It’s rare to overcook something until it cycles back to fresh.
He photographed Suu Kyi who said today to Baird of Myanmar, “A lot of dead people seem to be prepared to vote on the first of April. We can’t have that, can we?”
To Versace she said, “Access is granted if you do right by your pictures.”
It was a pivotal moment for him, pushing him forward. What would it mean, not to just take an excellent story with photos but to do Right?
He said he’s photographed a lot of people in his career with the “it quality” but she did something that no one else had done before. Whoever she talked to she could transfer the “it quality” to them.
He related a Mies van Der Rohe quote: “An interesting plainness is the most difficult thing to achieve”.
Equally true in poetry. For whatever decisions you make of what to include, exclude and at what density, or complexity, getting to the essential plainness that is interesting is key.