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Everette Maddox

After a long absence, poetry has returned to Burlington City Arts at the Firehouse on Church Street downtown.  Some years ago the BCA canceled its ongoing writing programs and popular First Friday reading series, an open mike poetry reading the first Friday of every month, explaining that literature was not part of its mission.  I guess graphic artist Dug Nap has persuaded BCA otherwise, with readings on alternate Wednesday evenings.  The night I was there, young people, mostly high school and college age, some twenty-somethings, read work mostly about the types of confusion that young people mostly suffer from, that is, erotic and identity issues, and were used as a sounding board by Dug for his whimsically observant narratives centered upon the types of confusion that young people mostly suffer from.  Twice the age of most of his audience, Dug establishes a comfy, inclusive atmosphere in which anyone might feel like sharing.

That same month witnessed an explosion at the monthly (more or less) reading series hosted by Michael Breiner at the Flynndog Gallery, in the space until recently occupied by the Outer Space Cafe, on Flynn Street in South Burlington. 

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Tags: Burlington City Arts, Burlington Vermont, Dug Nap, Everette Maddox, Firehouse Gallery, Flynndog Gallery, Michael Breiner, poetry readings
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Over the past weeks I’ve received a couple of invitations from a poetry professor at the local university, to a reading this evening by poet Natasha Trethewey.  I am totally unfamiliar with her work.  So… why should I go?  The publicity that Professor J– has sent me includes a picture of an attractive woman of indeterminate age, perhaps in her thirties?  That’s not enough to entice me out of doors on a rainy evening.  It says she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner.  Well, good for her, but in today’s literary environment that tells me nothing.  Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer last year.  W.S. Merwin won it the year before.  These names may mean little to you.  What they mean to me is that you can win the Pulitzer with a lifetime of great work behind you and a recently popular but relatively weak book, or even despite the fact that your work sucks.  Trethewey’s won several other prizes, too, none of which I’ve ever heard of.  Today’s poetry world is full of prizes.  Every issue of Poets and Writers magazine has pages upon pages in the back, listing all of that month’s prizewinners.  I’m not sure that every one of them is great and fully deserving of our attention.  Finally, there’s a quote from the introduction to Trethewey’s most recent book.  The introduction was written by Rita

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Tags: Natasha Trethewey, poetry, poetry reading, Rita Dove
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When friend and web site designer extraordinaire Tim Twinam sent me an email saying he liked my last post, I realized that I’ve been blogging for a year and this is the first time that anybody has written in to comment on the poetry.  Ironic, considering that a book of poetry is the raison d’etre of this site!  Along with that realization came another – although I allow myself to feel a mild disappointment at the silence which greets verse, I don’t really expect anything different.  Story of my life – it’s like a taboo subject.  Perhaps it’s because the poems are so awful there is no polite response, but I don’t really believe that.  Most likely, nobody feels qualified to say something.  Except for pop songs, television, movies, and video games, art is something our culture has walled off from daily life.  We have lost the habit of responding to a poem as if it were an intelligible statement about something of mutual interest, part of a conversation.  Not an altogether unjustified reaction, since so much modern poetry has given up on that, too.

Grouse, grouse, grouse.

Okay, Tim, at least you’re willing to talk, bless you.  So… yeah, I find Canada’s Maritimes to be pretty damn numinous.  A few years ago my son and I went on a trip to Newfoundland.  The purpose was to visit Anse aux Meadows, the site of the first known European settlement in the New World, dating to five hundred years before Columbus.  Newfoundland is a giant island shaped like an “L”, and Anse aux Meadows is at the top.  It’s a long way up.  On the road there, we passed through Gros Morne National Park.  In the park is an area called the Tablelands.  A mile’s hike from the road one enters a long ravine or narrow valley between towering, barren, brownish rock cliffs.  The rocks are hundreds of millions of years old, formed (if I understand correctly) by one continental plate sliding under another and forcing the earth’s mantle up.  It was a chilly afternoon with rapidly moving clouds.  I had the place to myself, and stood for a long time in that desolate, ancient valley, beside the little stream that runs down its center.  Returning to the car, where Isaac was napping, I encountered a rock in the middle of the path.  I was certain it had not been there before, but I could not imagine how it got there during the hour since I’d passed.  It is about the size and shape of a human heart, salmony brown with grey veins.  There’s a story of a shaman who was asked if he could talk to the stones, and he answered, “The trick is knowing which ones.”  I felt that this stone definitely had something to say to me.  It wanted to hitch a ride.  I hesitated, because I was unsure what I was inviting into my life, but it is hard to argue with a stone.  It’s sitting in my living room right now, and I am waiting for the day when I have learned how to listen to it.

Tablelands, Newfoundland

I have seen my mother’s bones,
naked, shattered, immense,
and the waters threading down them
braided at my feet
and rushed through the rubble
calling loudly

Tags: Newfoundland, poem, poetry, Seth Steinzor, Tablelands, Tim Twinam, Vermont author
Posted in Places, Poems, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Yeah, you!  I’m talking to you!

I received an email the other day from the Vermont Arts Council inviting me to nominate a candidate for Vermont Poet Laureate, and I thought, who better than me?  For all of you who agree, follow this link to help me throw my hat in the ring.  You can find everything you need to know to fill out the nomination form right here on this web site.

Poetry doesn’t need to be boring or mystifying or trivial.  It can be about more than some feeling or experience or passing fancy or perception the author had.  It doesn’t have to be a word game.  It can do more than advertise how sensitive or perceptive or humane or smart or verbally adept the author is.   It doesn’t have to come in little bite size pieces that you can read while folding toilet paper.

Poetry can engage the world on all the levels that you do.  It can make statements, tell stories about characters doing things, express points of view and arguments and ideas, contain adventure and excitement and jokes that are actually funny.  It can be so big that it takes hours and days and weeks to read.  It can be so vivid that you don’t want to watch a movie instead.

I want to wrest poetry away from the clammy fingers of the Standard MFA Workshop American Lyric that are clenching it by the throat, squeezing the life out of it.  I am sick of reading award winning poems that tell me in twenty lines or so about some tranche de vie.  Why are you telling me this?  Who cares?  Why should I care?  Why should anybody care?    I am sick of being dazzled by verbal brilliance – it hurts and it’s bad for the eyes.  I am sick of poems that dare me to understand them, like an adolescent with something to prove to himself.

Where are the poems that back an eighteen wheeler up to your head, unload, and leave you with completely rearranged furniture and a new set of tenants?  Who is writing them?  I’ll leave it to you to decide if I’m such a poet, but if you agree with me that this is something poetry needs to do and that too few poets are trying to do it, then VOTE FOR ME!

The deadline for nominations is March 25.

Tags: poetry, Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost, Vermont Arts Council, Vermont author, Vermont Poet Laureate
Posted in art, Poetry | 9 Comments »

Here’s what we’re up against: I just looked at Amazon.com’s list of “100 best books of the year.”  There’s a sidebar which allows you to browse the editors’ picks by clicking on any of 23 categories, including “Business & Investing” and “Food Lit.”  Poetry isn’t even listed.  So bless you, hardy soul, who has found this web site.  Strike a blow against Corporate Cultural Hegemony!  Buy my freaking book.

Tags: Amazon.com, poetry
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Join me at 9:00 p.m. on November 10, 2010, in the Gamut Room, Hepburn Hall, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont.  I’ll be reading from To Join the Lost and some newer work.  There’s a New Orleans poem that might be ready to be unveiled by then.

Tags: reading, Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost, Vermont author
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I’ll be reading from To Join the Lost in the Gamut Room at Middlebury College the evening of Wednesday, November 10, 2010.  Although I’m not sure the feelings it arouses in me could properly be called “nostalgic,” there definitely is a charge for me in returning to this venue.  I was one of the founders of the student-run coffee-house back in 1974, together with Eve Ensler, who actually did most of the organizational work when I bowed out to write my senior thesis.  She may never have forgiven me.  Sorry, Eve.  I’m not sure of the time yet – watch this space.

Tags: Middlebury College, poetry, reading, Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost, Vermont author
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The author in China, drinking tea with ground up turtle shell jelly.

Not for the money, that’s for sure.  Booklist and Library Journal ignored To Join the Lost, which is what I guess they do to titles not offered by the already bankable (I don’t think either of them regularly reviews poetry anyway), and without the imprimatur of those two gatekeepers one’s chance is greatly diminished of entering the literary Valhalla represented by a review in the New York Times or other national publication, and since it is reviews that spur sales one is stuck with whatever business one’s hometown paper can inspire (if one is lucky enough to obtain their notice, which I have been) and of course friends and relatives.  That stack of cartons in the living room, author’s copies, isn’t likely to get much smaller any time soon.

But it’s an itch I cannot help but scratch.  A college professor once told me, “Seth, words come too easily to you.”  True of prose, not of poetry.  Poetry is hard.  I can bash out five hundred, a thousand words of prose without any effort at all.  Ten lines of verse is a good day.  Is it the challenge?

Partly.  There are several kinds of challenge here.  There is the gamesmanship of working in form.  If you’re not thinking about form when you write, as you write, with every word that you write, then you’re not paying attention to the thing

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Tags: Booklist, epic narrative, haiku, Library Journal, poetry, Seth Steinzor, sonnet, To Join the Lost, Vermont author, writing
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• T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and their descendants, who are legion, have convinced everyone that, if you don’t “get” what the poem is “about,” it is your fault for not being as smart and sensitive as the poet.  You might be up to song lyrics.  Some song lyrics.
• High school teachers, college professors, and those impressed by such people have  spread the idea that a poem is “about” something that it is your duty to “get” or you are not as smart and sensitive as you should be and you will be graded accordingly.
• Poets, content to live in the little ghetto of the personal lyric, intimidated by the popularity of that modern fad the novel, have given up on the idea that poems can and should tell stories and discuss ideas and convey information and talk about things that people are interested in hearing about and, generally, do everything that prose does, only differently.  So we are stuck with poets showing us how smart and sensitive and verbally dexterous they are.
• Academics to whom poetry is a means of pursuing professional advancement and obtaining intellectual and social status, from which the common run of mankind is excluded, have convinced people that poetry is a specialized taste for the intellectually and socially superior, best left to professionals.
• Critics have purveyed all of the above, and also the falsehood that poetry is medicinal, that it somehow makes you a better person or spiritually enriches your life or is an indispensable accoutrement of the educated soul.  Yuck.  They also spread the falsehoods that poetry “should be” this or that way  (e.g., “good poems rhyme” or “rhyme is dead”), or poetry has this or that special subject matter differentiating it from all other arts (e.g., “the subject of all great poetry is death”), in short that poetry is anything other than a particular means of verbal communication suitable to talking about anything in the world.  Since the critics are clueless, there’s nobody to point you to the good stuff.

Tags: critics, Ezra Pound, literature education, poetry, reading, T.S. Eliot
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Poems that skirt meaning or avoid it altogether may be appropriate, somehow, to a time and place that has grown uncertain of meanings, but as acts of communication they are failures – intentional failures, perhaps, but failures nonetheless – and despite their possible congruence with the zeitgeist, one wonders whether it is preferable to multiply examples of a problematic situation, or to seek a way through it.

But put that aside. As a Vermont author who realistically may expect his audience to number in the dozens, my concern is more practical.

When our highest awards and honors go to poets whose work represents failed communication, that helps explain the state of the market for poetry. People are not going to engage with an art form that is not interested in engaging with them on levels that they can understand and, more importantly, enjoy.

And that is all I want to say about Rae Armantrout, for now. Or John Ashbery, for that matter. The question I want to ask is, cui bono? The obvious if only partial answer is, people whose main interest lies somewhere else than in communication; that is, somewhere else than poetry.

Tags: failed communication, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Vermont author, zeitgeist
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