Trust in the Daemon

Harriet blog invited writers to identify female poets "of intense, even transformative value." Stephen Burt picked Louise Bogan:

It seems almost incontrovertibly true that the practice of poetry requires a kind of irrational commitment, a belief that whatever you find in the language, and whatever you find in yourself, matter in ways that other people cannot or do not or do not yet understand—you can call it, if you like, a trust in the daemon, or a faith in the language, or a devotion to something no one can quite name. And it seems true as well that you can’t make good poetry—except by accident—unless you think hard and patiently, sometimes with all the learning you can find, about what you’re writing, about what you’re rewriting, and about what other people wrote before you were born. If you are looking for a poet, a critic, a writer whose lifework contains both truths—who found the hot and the cold, the knowable and the unknowable, and who respected both—you could do a lot worse than to read all the poems and at least some of the prose brought into the world by Louise Bogan, who came from a hard early life amid mill towns in Maine to become the author of several handfuls of perfect, and frightening, epigrammatic and lyric poems; she was also, for decades, the in-house poetry critic at the New Yorker, explaining as best she could the poetry that she felt was best (and was modern) to readers for whom it was all (still) new.

Nobody in the history of American poetry has come closer to the effects created by W. B. Yeats: sometimes these effects made her imitative, but sometimes they made her terrifically memorable. Some of her poems (including a self-lacerating one called “Women”) addressed gender directly; many of them addressed what she took to be a woman’s (a cisgender straight woman’s, in today’s terms) attitudes towards romantic and erotic love. Bogan brought her critical gifts to her poetry, but she knew that without passion and weirdness—without the capacity to surprise yourself—those gifts were not enough: if you want to shock your students, or your teachers, or yourself, try her four-line advice to aspiring writers, “Several Voices Out of a Cloud.”

"Jane, Jane, tall as a crane"

Harriet gathers up some responses to Richard Greene's new Edith Sitwell bio.

Overloaded

American poet-critic Stephen Burt can't keep up:

"I think I can keep up with books, more or less, which are countable, finite sets of things (especially since they do come in the mail): but if the proliferating, ramifying, exciting discourse about poetry now takes place in a million web journals, at all hours of the day and night, I’m not sure I can keep up with them. I’m not sure that I could have kept up with them when I was 20, or 25, or 29, and without dependents, and eager to stay up all night."

Pillow Fight!

Would you believe a new online mag called Mayday is devoting a section of its new issue to a series of responses to someone's elses response to Jason Guriel's essay/review "Going Negative"? Would you? Check it out here.

Crystal-Balling It

Jason Guriel celebrates Randall Jarrell's success as an "amateur futurist" in his latest post.

"Facing the future, after all, wants bravery. And every now and then some intrepid soul does get it right – has gotten it right."

Child's Play

"The children at play in Suzanne Buffam’s poem 'Play' have the fun they have because of the rules they set for themselves. They don’t escape from this play unscathed--and neither does the reader--but then play doesn’t always end in pleasure."

Jason Guriel's new column is up. Read it here.

Real Enough

In his latest turn at Harriet, Jason Guriel (whose new book of poetry, Pure Product, is inching ever closer to publication) extends his previous column on late novelist Roberto Bolano into a meditation on the phenomenon of made-up poetry moonlighting as a plot device in novels.

"It’s fascinating when novelists – especially those who aren’t known as poets – actually do write some poetry, for the purpose of, say, prodding along a novel’s plot. We usually neglect them, these works-of-art-within-works-of-art, but they’re not without their critics and admirers."

Read the rest here.

Bolano's Bards

Jason Guriel -- whose columns at Harriet have been burning up the discussion boards -- turns in a thoughtful report on Robert Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives.

"It is often the young who invest the most in the idea of art, which doesn’t always return a profit. Bolaño’s poets, particularly their younger incarnations, invest so much in the idea of the poetry of Césarea Tinajero (a modern day Sappho with almost none of the scraps) they fail to notice the idea is a Ponzi scheme that will never pay off their lofty expectations."

Read the rest here.

"The war news have been good for quite awhile"

Jason Guriel devotes his new blog entry at Harriet to a poem that Brian Bartlett "found" in a series of 1918 letters exchanged between Bartlett's 22-year old grandmother and a 20-year-old Canadian Army enlistee.

"In the audio commentary for his film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Monte Hellman notes the great advantage of working with “non-actors” like James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, innocent amateurs who don’t try to act. The great advantage of the speaker in Canadian poet Brian Bartlett’s recent poem “Dear Georgie” is the fact that he doesn’t know he’s in a poem. If only more poems’ speakers sounded like him, a natural who’s not angling for Academy recognition. Poems’ speakers usually sound like poets."

Read the rest here. The painting above, incidently, is called "A Battery Shelled" (1919) by Wyndam Lewis. And here's a trailer from "Two-Lane BlackTop," the film Guriel mentions above.

When Harriet met Guriel

Jason Guriel -- set to join the Signal family this Spring with his second collection of poems, Pure Product -- is Harriet's newest blogger. Check out his inaugural post, where as usual, he says some smart things:

Perhaps the best strategy for writers in the age of the Internet – especially for writers like me, who are prone to blunders and benefit from rigorous editorial intervention – is to navigate the Web, and especially blogs, with a kind of self-imposed, print-era prudence. This may entail drafting blog posts longhand, typing them up only when they’re just right, and then withholding them until every one of their words has been weighed. Although the reduced presence of editors in the DIY-world of the Web is surely good for some version of democracy, it isn’t necessarily going to be good for the quality of that democracy’s cultural products. More and more, as the 21st-century rolls out, writers – blurring with (and into) bloggers – will to need to be their own most ruthless editors.

Read the rest here.