These woods are behind many empty structures. Emptied of humans, or legal ones. There is an abandoned house next to ours, with a sprawling yard of chicken coops and open gates for long gone animals. Next to it, the infamous Oronoka restaurant, once lauded for its signature steaks, free birthday cakes, glass boots full of beer, remembered for the three hours it took to eat a meal there. The restaurant closed in 2003 but locals say the tables inside are still set.
In which I find myself in disagreement with Robert Bly
Earlier this week I read Robert Bly’s “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” after Matthew Zapruder posted a snippet of it on Facebook. Bly’s upset, in this essay, about American poets’ belief in Eliot’s objective correlative, and their lack of passionate interiority, which he argues Spanish poets such as Lorca possess in abundance.
Here I will say that I too love Lorca, and that I feel the dark tug of the wild imagination. (I imagine that is obvious.) So what’s my disagreement?
When it gets warm enough I like to go outside to write in the morning. Usually I don’t get past the front step, but today I walked myself down to the river. Invisible in the picture are all the dogs who visited. On my front step it’s cats, lots of cats. There’s The Mountain: a big round animal who’s the same shape whether she’s lying on her front or back, The King: an enormous black and white bully, and Little Grieg: a very cute and vivacious murderer.
Soon we are moving to Ohio and I will have to name new neighborhood cats. (I hope.) And—thank goodness—there will still be a river.
From October to December of last year, I was interviewing poet and scholar Evie Shockley over email. The results are now in print; to see the rest of the interview get yourself a copy of the new Denver Quarterly.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you like to tease or play games with the reader?JOHN ASHBERY:
Funny you should ask—I just blew up at a critic who asked me the same question, though I shouldn’t have, in a list of questions for a book she is compiling of poets’ statements. I guess it depends on what you mean by “tease.” It’s all right if it’s done affectionately, though how can this be with someone you don’t know? I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you’re not going to alienate and hurt him, and I’m firmly against that, just as I disapprove of people who dress with that in mind—dye their hair blue and stick safety pins through their noses and so on. The message here seems to be merely aggression—“hey, you can’t be part of my strangeness” sort of thing. At the same time I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress.
“It is easy to observe infants whilst screaming; but I have found photographs made by the instantaneous process the best means for observation, as allowing more deliberation.” -Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Seeking: details of your weeping
I am writing an essay about crying. Where have you cried? What was it like?
“Pure Poetry and Mr. Wallace Stevens.” New York Times (1923-Current file): 53. Aug 09 1931. ProQuest. Web. 29 Apr. 2013 .
CPR: Would you make an observation about today’s poetry landscape.
HC: It might be overly concerned with observing itself.
Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education
This is the best news slash how am I not going to do this in every poem henceforth?
The quest for sincerity is like the quest for a perfect lawn.
- Page 1 of 21
- Next »
