Julian Gough talks on Clive James’ books, particularly the departures of the second book, from a year ago. It is an interesting entry point and introduction. (I seem to find essays and discussion around aims more interesting than anyone’s poems these days, such as this, and James’ reflections on listening for the flavour.)
Gough quotes James as saying,

“I threw away surrealism early on. I thought I’d try and be clear and intelligible, at least on one level. A retreat in order to advance.”
It worked. He needed a base in truth and clarity, because he didn’t yet have a base in self. He would have floated away—as so many young poets do—in a second-hand drunken boat, down an endless, meandering river of bullshit. But it takes a precocious wisdom to realise that. Instead, he mastered the art of writing brilliant poems that contain no ambiguity (much harder work than it looks). There is a clear line of ethical argument running through each of them, superbly expressed. They look playful, but the words are always doing a specific job.

A hard thing to do, especially in text, stripped of the context of tone, life. Love the analogy of BS river. Sometimes you want landfall. What’s the point in listening for long when what is said doesn’t mean anything to the speaker. Poetry is a form of connection and communication. Grice’s maxim’s of quality, amount, relevant and fittingly direct, are pretty hardwired to win. Why should poetry be exempt?
A certain amount of conversation is just place-holding, breeze-shooting, dadaist almost. But as pleasant as all that is, if you never have substance or personal or emotional divulgence, it’s as if a wall is keeping you from any “meaningful” connect. Or if you are 100% divulgence, that one-note orchestra fatigues as well.
A dither and blather and blare is for a domain other than poetry? That idea has eroded with me. If someone is going to take my time, I’d rather they need that if I don’t. At least some use was done.
If you ask someone why they are still talking and they don’t know and keep going, does that lack of meaningful intent not involve an unconscionable opportunity cost? Or does that assume a closed system of finite energies and direct cause and effect and a Protestantism need to squeeze purpose into each economical gesture? If one can talk and one’s point is unconsidered, petty, spiteful, irrational, maudlin, cosmic-width abstract, adding up to nothing, but cherished as archival trivia, and by being that, valuable as the bulk of existence…that’s another world view. The world is bigger, can afford mental room for unfocused things “without use”.
Clive James in the same article says,

[…] you get into what my friend Bruce Beresford calls the Departure Lounge, and two things happen: suddenly time really matters, you can hear the clock, and also you have all these freedoms, because you’ve got more of life to reflect on. There’s no young man’s version of the stuff I’m writing now.”

Each person is turning over whatever they need to. Some distill fast, some slow. What we value varies. Is anything good poetry? If it’s a tool for what we are trying to fix, refines or is better than the kludge we use, that’s a better kazoo up that wazoo for the toot of our own special tune, who’s to complain if there’s a fan?
When is it useful for the Inner Poetic Censor step forward? What’s worth chucking on the table and what’s just worth chucking?
I’ve got a line “at the qwerty’s gearbox, a pencil vein”. It amuses me. Life’s short. How much opportunity cost am I willing to give up to build friend lines for the line?
I have a problem in that my worldview is that the ultimate meaning of the universe is absent. It sums up to nothing but its own self-perpetuation so far as life on earth by some definition. Nothing ultimately matters and all ultimately natters.
There are stories that can be told and one can get good at the toys of making a good one but all is trifling. One can achieve feel-good stories of story arc of emotion culminating in a speculated order of how things are but…it’s hard to commit to trifles. Truffles, yes. Trifles, so far as they please the hedonist.
The game is to gamble and keep payoffs of well-being above the penalties of daily life’s crapshoot.
But if one is to be in the game, one needs to excel. So how does someone writing poetry for 60 years see the game?
Clive James says,

“I expect to be judged on each one. I’m a great believer in the stand-alone poem. And the stand-alone poem—you have to be able to stand by it. If you’re toying with any ethical conundrum then I think your position should be clear. For me, the essay and the poem are very close forms.” And his poems are beautifully, and formally, constructed to carry an idea. First there is the idea: then the poem.

Even if nothing matters, one has to approach a moment as if it does. It is only constructive to create forms and respect and respond to forms of life and creation. It creates a compassion for self and others to listen, to build.
All options end anywhere but it is a design to live, not in brittle cheer, not in self-enforced grief, not in unsustainable beligerance, nor suppressed neutrality, but floating towards each response while setting longer course, skyward, rather than after any given cloud. There’s a stability in the constructions of story. It doesn’t matter whether one is fiction or true or a mix. It is a matter of keeping level, productive.
Some can live while in angry anarchy without mellowing. Some can live a self-contained strand of social contract of appropriate that is much narrower. All are ballast and helium to rejig how each floats.
Gough said,

If, on many days, I prefer the wilder poems of more morally reckless poets (poets with far higher failure rates), I nonetheless always return—a little sulky and hungover—to Heaney and to James. Their murmur and boom are the voices of my conscience.[…] Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth.

What is he saying? He is nourished. It is as holy of thing as we find in life to be nourished by what we can hear.
There’s a place for those who take higher risks with words. And for steady-on ones.
Poetry is communication. What do we tolerate in the speech act? Why we tolerate or don’t speaks as much about resonance with reader as what is read.
If we only antagonize ourselves for no gain for ourselves or author, forget about it. Good energy thrown after bad. (Or are we widening our capacity to hear?)
Are we indulging time from a person or only so far as our need our own amusement gets filled? So long as our hoops get leaped thru? What standards do we hold over someone’s option to be heard?
So what if someone has nothing in the depth to say that we need?
If reading is a relationship with author, what range is healthy? Perpetual acquaintanceship or exclusively instrumental relaying of information is okay sometimes.
In talking, what if someone never veers course, is never petty, never emotional, never cheerful or funny or fearful and never changes a point of view, fond of frequent identically repeated story-bank?
Is this a matter of what masks we like our poets to wear for us? Our rules or be called “slight poems”, not rigorous enough, or too juvenile or undeveloped, or shall we ascribe motivations and intents and moral failings of not being sufficiently crafted, a bar too low, a bar too high.
Once there are enough bars, is there necessarily prison? Which side is who on?
Just tell me a story. Just refuse to tell me any story. Be coy. Or be blunt. Strip it back to sound. Strip it back to monotony and surprise. Make it seem sensible, except for the matter of being (in)appropriately absurd. Make it just patterns of light and dark on the page that are aesthetically pleasing, or deliberately unpleasant.
So long as it’s for me. Or so long as its not for me but I can be a voyeur in the unintended craft. If I can’t have that, who cares, there are millions more poets and accidental poetry and art saturating the world.
Do whatever you like. But keep doing something. For your own sake.
Don’t worry about boring me because only a boring person is bored. If you don’t like the channel of poetry, shift off to some other.
This seems sensible to me.
More on that reading about poetry, that meta-level…Poetic Closure (by Barbara Herrnstein Smith as pointed in in Barbara Myers article on ending a poem in the most recent Arc. The second Barbara speaks of it signaling a leave taking, a coherent closure. This makes sense. If poetry is to be an act of civilization, it should be civilized act, not some awkward dash from the room of the words. A poem is curating something. Something by way of door, even if not a click of lock makes sense.
From listserv direction (of people vying for my poetic soul), The Art of the Poetic Line (by James Longenbach) devotes a book to that aspect.
He speaks of the 3 kinds of use of lines: parsing lines (breaking where the syntax naturally pauses, emphasizing structure), annotating lines (enjambed, cutting aginst grammatical units, emphasizing words that wouldn’t be highlighted in prose-reading) and end-stopped lines (each line a sentence).
Longenbach states,

“Neither a parsing nor an annotating line is inevitably preferable; there is nothing wrong or right about any particular way of ending the line. But by placing lines so utterly in service of syntax, reducing the tension between syntax and line, a poem dominated by the parsing line can make its own lineation seem increasingly unnecessary. [On the other hand,] The excessive use of the
annotating line can come to seem mannered or fussy, a way of jazzing up uninteresting syntax, just as the excessive use of the parsing line can come to feel dull, a way of merely repeating what the syntax is already doing on its own.”

Is the question what is valuable or the better question, what is valued? If something needs saying, is it better it be said, or need that wait until someone with comsummate skill arrive? If someone with skill is here but has nothing fitting it, does that person practice anyway? Or consign self to silence?
If an actor can find no script or play and director at his skill level, does one starve or work beneath self and elevate the trivial with transcendence? If there is too much material, must only the things the best have time to do, be said? Can a Shakespearian actor be as good at improv? Are they inherantly not just different but unequal?
We each bring a different world to a poem. Desires and results can vary. It’s not what you do but knowing the outcomes. Consciously or unconsciously guiding the outcomes of the listener/reader.
When one’s audience is only onself as one writes, one still gains from knowing what one is doing to oneself, the implications of the cascades of choices forced by choices, the capacities embedded in the thought-act.
What kind of world is one building? And to what end?

Tightrope Books has made a Best Canadian Essays 2009. They keep making interesting choices those folks. I’ll have to get my hands on that sometime for at least a flip thru.
I did find Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Now that looks interesting. I don’t know what kind of funding allows over 300 pages to be produced for $13 of heavy stock and colored plates in it. It’s cooperation of a lot of people.
Varied styles of poetry. Book reviews are at the front instead of the back like teeny-fonted film credits. There’s plain English not attempting to sound more impressive than thou. An article on “divine flakiness” quoting Kurt Schwitters and Lisa Robertson and by neither “seriousness is the enemy. it creates enemies”. There’s an article on Chinese film, one by CD Wright, and 5 new poems by Rae Armantrout, from p 244

We think the gesture
must come first,
the body follows
by remaining

Rather a nice interview on rob mclennan’s novel Missing Persons. A good read. It is both sketch-like and highly detailed at the same time about the first couple years in a family after the dad dies leaving two kids to sort their way thru adolescence and the mom to figure out how to navigate their teenage years and relationships both.
Some further thoughts from Gary Barwin on the Caged Match.

it will be missed even if it stays online.

After seven years of publication with the dedicated services of volunteer editors and webmasters, and with contributors from all over the world, Simply Haiku is regretfully shutting its electronic doors. However, the archives of Simply Haiku will remain online and the search engine will continue to function.
HTTP://WWW.SIMPLYHAIKU.COM

lighthouse
mom scrapes off punky-soft lower half of clapboards
down to the tar paper and strappings. she stands in
bleached-plumed sunhat on bamboo scaffoldings, leaning,
white-paints the upper half of the still intact boards.
paint tracks down the underbody of the building.
funny, the sense dreams make until waking fully.
funny, the sense dreams make when waking more.
for OSI prompt

Gender makes the difference you want it to… and we can dismiss it at that. Yet there are patterns of visibility in writing. How to account for those? Is it just market demand? Men like to read men and women like to read men?
4 years ago I did a spot check of gender represented in my CDs. 12% of my music was by female artists and 15% a mix of genders. People who commented found my numbers out of line with their library.
To do a head count of gender of 3 of my poetry shelves today, I get 103 male-written titles, 50 female-written titles and 9 mixed gender collections.
I suppose if females produce less, I could be disproportionally selecting female authors compared to what’s on the market. (That was my push for a while for music and poetry to correct my own gender bias.)
Admittedly, owning isn’t the same as being happy to read after the purchase fact. 35/103 (a third), 21/50 (just under half) and 5/9 (just over half) I look at and say I enjoyed. What to make of that? Enjoying is a different measure than learning from or being able to access and resonate.
It could be unrelated to anything gender. We ascribe meaning to random patterns and then act to make things real. It could be sampling effect.
Over at Huffington Post Amelia Gray writes,

Publishers Weekly Reviews Director Louisa Ermelino noted that the editors ignored gender and genre, and that “it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”
Is Ermelino disturbed in the same way that she would be disturbed at a penny landing on heads ten times in a row?
Is she disturbed because, unlike a penny, the likelihood that a book written by a man will register a higher acclaim than a book by a woman is not a 50/50 chance?

Sometimes the skew is there but the Canada reads list of recommended literature is 2 females and 3 males, which isn’t remarkable and noticeable on account of gender. [hat tip: CanCult] This list is close to half female.
Gray also related what Kamy Wicoff pointed out, “Here’s another one for you: 65% of books sold in the U.S. are purchased by women; women wrote 0% of the Best Books of 2009. Really?”
Is this randomness? Randomness + something systemic?
I appreciate Gray in the article looking at what could be informing the numbers,

J.A. Tyler, of mud luscious/mlp reported that the last 100 general submissions broke down into 59 male and 41 female, but the chapbook submissions were 41 male and 14 female.
Adam Robinson’s Publishing Genius saw 80 male and 20 female submissions.
From Roxane Gay’s PANK, a journal some speculated would be more female-sub heavy, 65 submissions were from men and 35 were from women.

Are women publishing less overall or is that something particular to who submits and making the cut skews in different ratios?
What does that reflect from society’s shape or from individuals? Is it how females spend their time, or how gratification is?
What behavior underlies? Do more women write for friends and in circles where the material does not leave to go to print? Or are women disproportionally creating online journals, being earlier innovators to use the internet and its lower cost structure than paper-routes? Since women still, on average, are 20 cents behind per dollar in wage gap, and are more likely to be raising kids at home, access might be better positioned to go digital routes?
Or is it a matter of material not being produced at the same rate in gender aggregate?
Is it a matter of not material means, or material produced, but some cultural effect of gender construction? What could that be? Males are to chase down opportunities? We all have the same number of hours per day and make choices of how to apply the time. Are males networking more to promote one another whereas females, if networking, don’t on aggregate, have the mindset of promotion and marketing and CV?
Females or males can write in a voice of the other gender (gendered language habits if they exist, as well as life experience recounting) or to a different point in gender continuum than the author is in. For example, a female femme, writing machismo or visa versa. A neutral gendered male writing close to neutral gendered female. In the Guardian article, Sheenagh Pugh points out the case of Caroline Carver, a middle-aged white woman appropriating the voice of a black male fisherman in horse underwater so well that no one suspected it wasn’t a male. If a female writes a male point of view, is it still female writing? If a male writes from a female point of view, is he still consigned to “male writing”? Do the categories even make sense? We all are the tellers of stories, whatever stories we can tell, whatever ones we listen to.
The insecurity that seems at the base of males winning more contests, awards, jury panel positions, presidencies is the fear that males are intrinsically more capable. Or, if awards reward mediocrity by decision committee cancelling out the most polarizing items, females not winning could be a sign of being more divisively interesting?? If one is biologically the underdog, what to do to reconcile that potential reality with dignity?
The national myth (of America and Canada) is about rising above your station of poverty or loss. People with any disability or disadvantage can be fulfilled and play a role in society. What if females are capped? What if females were given equal wage and fulfillment of job and security of roof, parity in housework, birth control pills to stabilize any mood discrepancies, equal literacy and access to information, and still generation after next, with old girl clubs in place to leverage ladies up in parallel systems for literature, still failed to produce as much work, and as much value, and as much quality of creativity? What if it’s not a matter of difference of skills but absolute inferiority? That’s feeding my virulence of wanting parity and equity.
I grew up chanting girls are better than boys (tongue stuck out) but I’ve never been fundamentally convinced of it. Nor do I want to be.
I always aim to keep one foot in skepticism as a matter of course. I disprefer to be convinced of anything 100% because all the data is never in and all the filters are never off. I want to avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias.
There are too many billions of people to parse, too many cultures, too many variable, flux over time, individual fluidity, subjectivity in measure. People we presume to be one gender, could be the other. (Billy Tipton comes to mind.)
I’m sold the story that females for millennia have been subjected to second class citizenship. It seems too tidy to be credible. There are too many individuals and changes involved for even systemic patterns to hold. Who tells that story and who chimes in and what impact does that have?
The idea of women in their own league, sporting events only open females leaves me uncertain. In a way it feels like a tiering of excellence. Normal, i.e. male, female, and then special Olympics. Schools where people are streamed by gender gives better academic results for males and females. So long as males and females do different things, hold different domains, what rises as relevant and resonant will vary.
Do women write female poetry? was a question raised at The Guardian on the heels of the Aldeburgh poetry festival and a discussion panel on “the female poem”. [via]
The discussion in comments included Degus saying,

We are never not experiencing our age, gender, etcetera. Are you saying that poetry comes from – or ought to come from – somewhere that has nothing to do with our actual, everyday, breathing experiences? That the origins of poetry lie, somehow, in some way, outside us? That to allow our age, gender, etc, to show in our poetry is to contaminate something that ought not have anything to do with such ordinary – even vulgar – things? […]
Is it the best use of poetry to use it to conceal this side of who and what we are [?…] why should we so wish to transcend ourselves? Is there something insufficient about ourselves when we are only that which we are, day in day out?

The notion of gender is said to not make any difference. Yet counting gender distribution anywhere (book store, awards list, members of parliament, number of managers, people who choose to teach, or any number of careers) show a pattern. It is an artifact. It’s changing, I’m told.
My first formative bias comes from a gender-split community where menfolk socialize in a different room from womenfolk, whether euchre nights, or church, or family gatherings. There is an unquestioning of men wearing the pants in the family that has only started to shift to the model of partnerships rather than female obedience. I am dating myself. As I talked about a couple years ago, each generation has its own notion of gender and embraces a wave of feminism from its own starting point and context.
In my workplaces in life have been 7:1 female to male bosses. Bias is hard to shape once formed. If a matriarchal culture arose around me, would I be able to refresh my eyes to see the alternate shape of data?
Does one slice of female discourse exclude males? Does one part of male discourse not overlap with female? Anything domestic a male can engage in. Anything that is verbally roughhousing a female can engage in. It depends on personality and family culture more than gender. Even if something is not intrinsically gendered, if functions as if it is is if labelled as such. What is ascribed to gender presentation or derivation still has an impact. What unconsciously is complicit with gendered domains is a social grease so we can move on to issues that matter that aren’t gender. Gender is an incidental conveyance, like “race” or size or hobby, more than a cargo.
Gender isn’t a binary but a continuum. Some people are not cisgendered, lining up with the current roles assigned to sex. Gender doesn’t apply to most things, even if there are marketing attempts to make everything from yogurt to shoelaces to vocabulary something intrinsically gender niched.
As Sheenagh Pugh said at her blog recently “I’m still less convinced by gender-based anthologies. I don’t feel I necessarily have anything in common with X and Y just because we share the same reproductive equipment; I don’t write with that.”
It’s a sentiment I frequently hear. What of expression can we attribute to piping and to the minority of times when we are shunted down a chute of one gender?
Women have ownership of birth and menses. Is there anything that males have exclusivity on? Either can child rear, pee standing up and have comparable orgasms even if structures vary a tad. There are no structural absolutes on who dominates or penetrates which gender. Females can vote and own property rather than be property in most places. Males and females can be property in some areas still. Males are likely to have more muscle strength and a higher starting point even if they haven’t exercised. Is any of that have a bearing on writing or reading appeal?
If we are writing about things that pertain to embracing femaleness, yoni and self-breast love and childbirth, is that the full reach of a woman writing? Would that not reduce female into being piping? What position does that put the rest of the person, male or female?
If writing outside that envelop, are we writing as women but not doing women’s writing, as when someone writes cowboy novels, the author doesn’t seek to be a cowboy story writer when putting on the vampire-fiction hat.
Is the male experience substantially different, with national and class culture held constant in Canada? Do males and females confer more respect to males still, or are females less likely to get respect or need to do more to earn it? Are defaults different?
Yet at the same time we have aggregate behavior, trends of habit. Or we have ghost blips in statistics. Intuitively and by number it seems more males, at least as figurehead, lead. And lead in economic gain and in literary gains. What account for it?
There’s Women of the Avant Garde, 2 and part 1. In it the host said females weren’t represented before that worldwide revolution of feminism in the 1960s.
The most salient part of the segments is the sadness that a sound piece was derived from a woman and her friends acting like crazy people to drive off men from attacking her, and that women systemically believe and believed it so and that a mechanism like that would need to be developed.
To develop it further into names and birdsong and performance art is interesting. More interesting is what it says about the construction of threat and deterrent and response. Many females do literary work. What about this marks it as feminist?
The podcasts were a route to a link to Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein which I feel I could “get”.

GLAZED GLITTER.
Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.
The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

It seems timeless. Hard to believe it is century old.
Sarojini Sahoo wrote an article on 4 leading feminist writers of India of the last century: Kuntal Kumari Sabat, Maitreyi Devi, Amrta Pritam, and Kamla Das.
I found Maitreyi Devi’s story particularly interesting. As a young woman she had a romance with someone who would go on to become a well-known Romanian author, Mircea Eliade. After they each moved on to other places and people, he wrote their story, but in Romanian. The word eventually got back to her. Feeling unfairly represented by it, she wrote her version of truth in a novel as a rebuttal. The English translation of his Romanian novel is entitled The Bengal Nights while the English translation of her Indian novel is entitled It Does Not Die.
I wonder what the overlap was in the narrative? What parts don’t relate to each other at all?
What would the alternate story be for the future practice of Her version of success and thriving? Is it happening already but the pieces haven’t be strung into a popular dominent myth of How Things Are?