OK, gimmicky title. But there we are. I want a gimmicky title. I want to write one of those upbeat, chatty, pro-positive art essays that makes people cheer. But I’ve no idea what to say past the desire to say it. I need to explicate the desire itself, I guess.
I came to poetry through genre fiction and 70s singer-songwriters. It started probably around 1981 or so, when I finally got into an honors English course, the only honors course I ever took. We did 20th Century poetry. I remember Eliot and Cummings mostly, as well as a light brush up against Stein. Something in this made me slowly turn from Louis L’Amour westerns and Robert Heinlein sci-fi. But not the music. I’ve kept up with music as closely, or perhaps more closely, than I have poetry. There was a day in class where the teacher, Mr. Lovett (Love it!), had us each bring in a song to share. I chose Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes.”
I’m typing this on Saturday morning listening to Bob Dylan’s new album, Tempest. It’s his 35th, and it’s good, even if it’s being over-praised. I understand the desire to over-praise Bob Dylan, to see in a new Dylan album the possibility that there’s hope for ourselves (“I pay in blood, but not my own,” he’s singing right now, and then “The more I die, the more I live.”). If Dylan (or Leonard Cohen or Neil Young or Ian Hunter [the former lead singer of Mott the Hoople], these rock and roll singer-songwriter boys) can be a genius in his 70s, then maybe I can too. Maybe I can be that rock and roll boy one more time. And then the pitch: the new album from Ian Hunter (the lead single is at the bottom of this post), which is going over-looked by nearly everyone so far, is a loud, rock solid, rock affair. Please love it. Please love all of it. I’m over-praising. So we over-praise the new Bob Dylan album. The nation turns its lonely eyes to you, as they say. Or something like that.
Bob Dylan, “Early Roman Kings”
That’s my favorite track from the new Dylan album. There’s hard work in art. There’s the hard work (or the obsessive work, maybe, which isn’t necessarily hard, but it is a long road) of making art. And there’s the hard work of what you do with it after you make it.
In a recent NYTimes article, Stephen Burt is a lover:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/stephen-burt-poetrys-cross-dressing-kingmaker.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all And what poet wouldn’t want to be a part of that? The positive (some say over-positive) embracing of “what I like.” I want the world to like what I like. I want, by extension, for the word to like me in that way as well. I want to love and to be loved.
I want you to go out and listen to the new Ian Hunter album, the new album from Amy Cook, the new album from David Byrne and Annie Clark (St. Vincent). I want you to read Mary Ruefle’s new book of essays. David Dodd Lee’s poetry. Cole Swensen. Of course, I want, through this, to have you like me as well, that my association with the things I like will be my connection to you. We will be there together, where being there together is enough, to kind of quote Wallace Stevens.
Bob Dylan is singing, “Set ’em up Joe,” and Ian Hunter counters with, “Laugh because it’s only life,” and then, “Easy come, easy go, it’s just another Rock and Roll show.”
I’ve put together a little query manuscript of Michael Benedikt’s poetry to send to potential publishers, hoping to interest one of them in publishing a selected poems. It’s an excellent collection. It’s going to be an excellent collection. But, for me, there’s more to it than that. Michael Benedikt was in many ways at the top of the literary world by the end of the 70s. He’d published five books of poetry, edited two important anthologies of poetry (among other things), and was poetry editor of The Paris Review. Important dude. And then, on or about 1980, he just turned off. Like a light-switch. Poof. No more books. No more editing. A poem here or there in journals for the next 27 years. By 2007, when he died, there were no remembrances, no panels at AWP. Gone daddy gone. Everything he's ever written is out of print.
That’s another possibility. So we over-praise the new Bob Dylan album and we forget whomever it is we forget this week. It’s why we sometimes feel this need to go back, or at least why I’m feeling this need to go back.
Making art is one thing, and then what happens to it? Stephen Burt believes that the role of the literary critic is to be the lover, to talk about what makes you cheer, to cheer, and in cheering, bring people into that moment. The things one doesn’t want to cheer for, one passes over in silence.
I have children, and so silence rarely fills our house. But sometimes I feel this silence, this silence of passing over. It’s also the silence of being passed over. The story of Michael Benedikt haunts me, not because he’s largely forgotten, but because I find so many of his poems compelling. He made good art, at times great art.
All artists feel this silence at some point. The pressure is to dress up as a carton of milk and go on Let’s Make a Deal: “Pick me Monty!” Monty Hall was his stage name. He was born Monte Halperin in 1921. He’s retired now, I suppose. I really don’t know what he’s doing. His legacy includes The Monty Hall Problem, though, also called the Monte Hall Paradox (from Wikipedia):
“Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Vos Savant's response was that the contestant should always switch to the other door. If the car is initially equally likely to be behind each door, a player who picks door 1 and doesn't switch has a 1 in 3 chance of winning the car while a player who picks door 1 and does switch has a 2 in 3 chance, because the host has removed an incorrect option from the unchosen doors, so contestants who switch double their chances of winning the car.”
So we should switch our guess, even as it seems, logically, nonsense. When we choose Door Number One from three doors, we’ve a one in three chance of being right, but once door number three is taken out of the equation, we should switch to two, because we’d then have a 50/50 chance of being right. Who would have thought?
Either way we want to pick the car, and we want to be the car that others pick. In a recent post on VQR, Sean Bishop writes about trying to increase one’s odds of getting one’s poetry published:
http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2012/09/11/the-poetry-factory/ It is, as he says, the factory approach. Something inside me wants to have a problem with it, just as something inside Bishop wants to have a problem with it. It all just sounds so depressing. But the distribution of art has always been depressing.
I ramble because I’m flighty and conflicted. That begins the art act. But then, some other being has to take over. Someone with an MBA or something. Spreadsheets and catalogues. Over-praise and mass-forgetfulness. And above it all a desire in each of us to notice and to be noticed.
Ian Hunter, “When I’m President”
Things are going to be different then.
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