. . . . . .
In his post over a week ago 4amSonnets caused quite a little disaster with his comments about J.K. Rowling and her adult fans. I hope he forgives me for bringing it up again and even reposting it, as it compels me into a topic I feel very close to: the ways in which the trappings of fairytale, fantasy, and myth are used by contemporary poets:
"The truth is that I have never read a Harry Potter book and do not care to. I have no resentments against J.K. Rowling and wish her every success in the world--which she seems to have had. I simply think that adults should read adult books (so many great books, so little time), unless they are reading children's books aloud to children. Yes, I have seen the movies because I watched them with my kids. Yes, we have the books so that the boys can read them, when they get around to them. But for adults? With so many good books to read, so much great poetry? Please. There aren't enough hours to read all of Tolstoy. Don't waste what time there is reading Harry Potter."
First I just adore his forthright judgement and bald disdain for those adults who flock at the latest adolescent craze, perhaps in the same way they might mob the stores for something like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," or other superficial, book length "studies" as entertainment. On the other hand, I do have some sympathy for those of us who like to read as a form of entertainment. Aren't these genre books themselves doorways into other hungers? Louise Gluck, for example, has said she prefers genre crime novels in her periods of poetic gestation. I"m not really interested in a debate about the craft of Rowlings work, which like most genre work might lie more in its plot development than its poetic or lyric abilities. . .
"Entertainment" strikes me as a word important to our childhood, where we are entertained by our own imaginitive curiosity, a word satisfied by a good nightmare, a strong fairy tale, boogie monsters and the devil and santa claus and tooth fairies and saints and heaven. It's a word that bears the corruption of adult pursuits. Helene Cixous says reading is dangerous. If we haven't stolen the key to the library, if we haven't killed our family, then we aren't yet reading. Reading indulges our desires and our superstitions. When I think about this fabulous craze to read the Harry Potter saga, I'm comforted by the way very serious-minded adults are corrupted by it. Wait all night for a book? Skip work? Read a novel in a night? Discuss it? Sure it's not Tolstoy, but its doing some of the same work.
When I think about this in relation to poetry, I get very excited. Charles Simic--something must be right in the world!--has just been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate. His later work isn't so much bound to the trappings of fairy tale. It's more interested in small photographic dramas, sometimes in brief lists that reveal the extraordinary truths (sometimes brutal) of our regular lives--and I think his point is that life IS extraordinary, because the mind is such a child in its entertainments: sex, faith, philosophy, politics, nature, love and pain. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of prose poems THE WORLD DOESN'T END, a kind of biography of sorts, but one filled with the trappings of fairy tale. His later book, NIGHT PICNIC, is filled with poems that hybridize an adult sensibility with a child's dreamish fantasy (and aren't we all children in the end? Isn't that what it comes down to on our deathbeds?):
Night Picnic
There was the sky, starless and vast--
Home of every one of our dark thoughts--
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand.
"All things are imbued with God's being--"
(She said in hushed tones
As if his ghost might overhear us)
"The dark woods around us,
Our faces which we cannot see,
Even this bread we are eating."
You were mulling over the particulars
Of your cosmic insignificance
Between the sips of red wine.
In the ensuing quiet, you could hear
Her small, sharp teeth chewing the crust--
And then finally, she moistened her lips.
One gets the feeling, after reading Simic, that our adult preoccupations with existence are not as important as our sensual, bodily desires. This is a further endictment of philosophical and religious edicts, since if what is spoken in the poem is true, this leaves us with an animalistic, even predatory God--what, then, is salvation? Different than we thought, but still mysterious. Belief is a kind of nightmare here, where the faithful come to us with gross passions, which in the end are slenderly our own.
It's striking to me the way fairy tale provides the framework for this kind of investigation and even indictment. I can think of whole books that use similar strategies. . . Popa's WOLFSALT, Hughes' CROW, and more recently, Carson's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED, Fritz Goldberg's BOOK OF ACCIDENT, Szporluk's IDIOTS & EMBRYOS. I'm thinking some of these rely on mythic trappings more than fairy tale, and it also strikes me that there are a number of works that deal primarily with revisionist mythologies, books by Sexton and Broumas and even Gluck. But I'm more interested in how authors build new visions, new entertainments, original fables, forcefully creating their own psychological totems. This is in keeping with the work of Blake and Yeats (or HD, Herbert) and related to Jung's work with archetype. If the fairy tale illustrates a warning by means of violence, myth forges symbols for our variant desires.
WARNING (2) by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
In a fire near the river,
a wolf burned the hair off his face
back to the pink creature--
They were drinking and they threw on
gasoline. They were howling
and unnerving the spirits--if
there were spirits--
They were only boys, new
at atrocities.
Don't ever come close.
Don't ever be fascinated
or they'll push you in.
You'll come home
unrecognizable, like the dead--
everyone at the dinner table
passing the salt past you. Glitter.
Whiteness. "Oh,
how we loved you, starry eye."
DARK EROS by Larissa Szporluk
She smirks, sets herself up
on a cinder cone--How does
it feel, she asks the old mountain,
to have no choice but to feel?
Succus of Anoton's glottis.
Rumbles, plutonic debris.
Feel this, she hisses into his
sphinctor, then does something
evil with fruit--oh, the power
to cry! Oh, to be able to cry!
His mouth is under the sea now.
The past is a quasi-fetish.
I was the only child, but my
obsession with you was divine.
. . . . . .
The title to Jean Valentine's new book LITTLE BOAT seems to me indicative of her work in which the domestic and the seen become fragment and artifact in memory. Valentine's poems enact the artifact of language, in which fragments, bits, sensual flashes bear the weight of metaphor. What is the "little boat" and what does it mean? The literal sure, but intuitively we expect--even understand--that it is also something more. The body that bears our spirit? The book that carries our voices and poems? Certainly. In Valentine's work, a fragment of domestic language delivers the weight of feeling, the spiritual weight, and still maintains ineffability. In Valentine, metaphor is mystery, like experience. In Valentine, furthermore, experience IS metaphor, and meaning--spiritual. 
In other news, I began a critical reading and writing course this week with Whitman's "Preface to the Leaves of Grass". It's a first year course but I was really shocked by my students' responses, mostly because I remember reading this as a student and feeling floored by the brilliance of Whitman's assertions, the ecstatic litanies of the Self as fount and source of the Sacred, the body as nation, his great anthem of morbidity and flesh: "all beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain"--in the inclusive nature of his vision, which doesn't erase differences; as it summons variety it anounces equally the worth of our prisoners and our laborers and our leaders, and links kosmos to breath, being to non-being. He's as blasphemous as he is transcendent, not to mention ahead of his time for civil rights, women's lib, and gay marriage. Most of what he says might well be an indictment of our contemporary political climate, especially considering that everything coming out of President Bush's mouth transforms our nation's idea of itself into sick militaristic hunger. 
Friends and Strangers, I should be up this late working on my syllabi for Fall classes--especially since I ordered a new set of books!--instead I'm up reading Alex Lemon's first book MOSQUITO. Another dream, another fight, another / ripped by light--mouth-locked, licked / ecstatic--lost as a sucked moon & lashed, tongued / bright and banished: that's how I feel after reading him, the black blast of his poems, a jacuzzi hotjet in my mouth. In Mark Doty's Introduction, he insightfully points out that pain and language enter a syntactical relationship, one that can result in utterance, or cliche. If pain destroys langauge, "style, unlike the defenseless body," Doty poignantly remarks, "has a sort of permanence." I resist this statement momentarily, but agree that the style of our poetry will outlast this body of ours that filters it.
Unfortunately for Lemon, it seems that every mention of his book is inextricably related to his brain surgery, as if the pulp of that hidden organ were some fruit broken open, torn apart across a rock, and the poetry seeded grit and gleam. There is a haunting of Plath here, where poetic insight seems always to be reduced or to condense her suicidal struggle. I guess I'm thinking also of a recent review in the NY Times of the poetry of prisoners at Gitmo (approved by the US government) which remarks that the verse itself is bland, absent of real poetic insight, juvenile, useless on the page and borne only by the fact of these prisoners' predicament. It's annoying to me that so many reviews and commentaries of Lemon's work feel it necessary to relate the poems to his medical condition, as if that in itself amounted to poetry. Even if Plath's predicament was suicide, and Lemon's, brain surgery, the incantatory excitement of their poems, the visceral drama of their poetry, cannot be relegated to experience, but to craft.
LITTLE HANDCUFFS OF AIR
INFAMOUS. How disappointed I am to reach the end of this 2006 film of Capote's self-destructive quest for a novel! I loved CAPOTE, for its quiet glamour, and for Hoffman's portrayal of a dramatic, careful, stylish if not self-centered, driven and emotionally confident, even distant, cultural aesthete. I was skeptical to watch this version based on Plimpton's biography--and now I know why: it fails in exactly the ways Miller's version succeeds. Toby Jones' Capote is a tripping stereotype of the witty big city queen, falling over himself as he flings the slug of his body at each new stranger he sees, arms flailing to his sides, unattractive and prissy, to interview them. She's a vulgar caricature, and even the accent comes off affected. "Suck my cock you cocksucker" a prisoner shouts down a runway of cells, "I don't snack." Another asks him,"You want to eat my asshole you bitch?" "I prefer it to your face" quips Capote, as he clicks down the cell block like a model on a runway. These scenes are funny and I almost forgive the portrayal of Capote as a social fraud, who finally reveals himself at the end of the movie with embarrassing, forthwright sadness.
I rented it because I wanted to see what another actor could do, another director, and McGrath's vision has the charm of socialite gossip, taking Plimpton's book as cue. After the first ten minutes you can forgive, even begin to forget the Jones' adolescent, clumsy--almost desperate to be liked?--version of Capote, for these sycophantic social scenes in which he carouses with his "Swans", the elite ladies of cocktail entertainments and attentions. But halfway through the film, we experience a terrible descent of soap opera proportion into the psychosexual drama that magnetizes Capote to his Murderer, complete with the awful self-indulgence of romantic confession (Your mother committed suicide? Ah! Mine too!) a mock-rape (in which Perry Smith punishes Capote for the title of the book by stuffing a black rag in his mouth and ripping his pants), and the nauseating moment where Smith admits his homosexuality ("I'll tell you what punishment is for me--its hoping there is someone for you and after years of no one, you find him and you can't have him.")--culminating in a KISS. So in the end we don't even have a murderer, but a lonely, lovesick closeted, misguided small town guy looking for his true love. 
Here's where Jones' vision of Capote really falters for me, because as he reveals the author's desires and hidden failures, it's almost impossible to tell if he's still lying and manipulating his murderer in the interest of his novel. It's as if, in the end, he can't find a center for Capote as a character, driven novelist or erotic fantasist. It's ALL an act, always self-consciously done, and even if this makes his Capote PAINFULLY human for his flaws, it also reduces him to a queer looking for love in an over-acted, and can't we say it now? played out version of a gay bildungsroman gone wrong, gone criminal? Don't we have better movies doing this, say THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, or AMERICAN PSYCHO? This is beside the point, since what's nauseating isn't so much the acting as the screenwriting itself that begins by building a kind of portrait of eccentricity and brilliance, insinuating the self-destruction of the author and thereby his vision of the world, and instead coughs up the wet eros of a bad romance novel, in which Capote's great despair is depicted with all the flushed embarrassment of a schoolgirl crush ("I can be myself with you. I don't want you to die." Or after Perry's death: "He said he loved me and he always will.") 
Tonight I'm filled with doubt, until a few lines put themselves right. Then a walk, toward the waves leaving sentences none of us can read, and a moon with its sharp rind, archer's green, lash of the ecstatic. . . and then I sighted a few stars whose names I knew, arcturis and mars, and I let myself be seduced by a bit of darkness, and some shells broke like half-clocks under my feet and I heard the small deaths in the water, and some salt spoke to the whorl of my ear, saying I didn't know you / were coming so soon / without your mystical brothers , and then I combed the books there for a few more talismans against believing our hearts are worthless:
Friends and Strangers, we live in paper houses. Pollo was scared and ran from the bed, where he was sleeping, and into my lap at the desk. Earthquake! I scooped him up and ran out to the beach to see if we should head higher. . . Now I'm swept up in thinking about King Lear and Salmun Rushdie's novel, THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET.. .
In LA there's always talk, and sometimes a good t.v. movie, about the next Big One, a major quake right in the middle of the city (which lies directy atop the San Adreas fault). The quake is inevitable, and overdue!, and every once in a while I get myself in a panic. Buy a bookbag and fill it with necessities: dry foods, cash, clothes, water, pens, a little journal, and a few books. Funny that the books trouble me most. If my room collapses, this bedroom by the sea will be the perfect grave for me. It's got my art, and my books, and my bed. But leaving it. . . I guess I don't have a question about being stranded on a desert island, I have a question about the three books you can carry in an earthquake, in an apocalypse. Friends and Strangers, what are your three books? I take that back, if you were forced into hiding, into flight, into exodus, into night--what is the single, manageable book you'd steal with you? It has to be realistic! No hardbacks, no large books.
I still return to the places 
"Entertainment" strikes me as a word important to our childhood, where we are entertained by our own imaginitive curiosity, a word satisfied by a good nightmare, a strong fairy tale, boogie monsters and the devil and santa claus and tooth fairies and saints and heaven. It's a word that bears the corruption of adult pursuits. Helene Cixous says reading is dangerous. If we haven't stolen the key to the library, if we haven't killed our family, then we aren't yet reading. Reading indulges our desires and our superstitions. When I think about this fabulous craze to read the Harry Potter saga, I'm comforted by the way very serious-minded adults are corrupted by it. Wait all night for a book? Skip work? Read a novel in a night? Discuss it? Sure it's not Tolstoy, but its doing some of the same work. 
DARK EROS by Larissa Szporluk
The largest of Hawkinson's work is this hanging organ, a pipe instrument of plastic bags and large metal horns that looks like the white balloons of our body's organs, intestines, liver, kidneys, lungs, all hanging above us in the Ghetty's front lobby. There's a strange sanctity about entering a room of the white counterparts to our red and black insides. Death is white. So is heaven. Is God. In this installation our insides, our very morbid innards float above us as an emblem of working song. Again in his work, the gross of the flesh takes on an air of mystery, beauty, spirituality. The human bag of slop that is the body becomes a totem for divinity, a literal instrument for transcendence, for creating music, the very symbol of our humanity that has struggled, like Odysseus, toward its own godhood, or at least toward being able to define what for a person "godliness" might mean. 
I really love Paisley Rekdal's new book of poems, THE INVENTION OF THE KALEIDESCOPE. Big, fat, confessional reveries--glowing odes to art and broken loves, in their variable forms and subject matter: pornography, family, self and fruit. Her lyrics sting, sing, singe the edges until the spirit feels--"deliciously, yet delicately, fired." I'm finding it difficult to write about, because the poems are layered and dramatically centered. Each poem is a "clear song
This week I'm married to Bjork and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. All horn and sail. California, fog or high knifing green. It's the end of the semester (FINALLY) so I'm split between grading term papers and final exams and dreaming about my re-print which is due out later this month.. . Summer school starts right away, but it's such a relief to feel myself at the end. These semesters feel like they go on forever. My secret May is filled with white turned inside-out, my beautiful hanging entrails, like Hawkinson's song at the Ghetty, UBERORGAN.. .
Here are a few more bits of her gold:
