A poem

I'm going to post poems on a regular basis this coming year. And though explaining poems goes against many critical grains, I will most times at least give a little background about the poem.

This poem is about aging and poetry anthologies. I have dozens and dozens of them, as most of you probably do, too. And the ones with pictures of the authors from 30+ years ago show young writers who have grown old, since we can look up current pictures on the internet. Sometimes, the poets have aged gracefully. Others are paying for all that "romantic" smoking, drinking, and drug use from many years ago.

But what really interests me is that most of their poetry doesn't age at all. Or perhaps I should it doesn't age to me. For a long time, I felt the poetry of someone like Allen Ginsberg aged badly, but lately I'm not so sure. I do think his "first thought, best thought" idea for writing poetry was much of the time an excuse for laziness. At the same time, I have always been amused by poets who claimed to have worked on a specific poem for 20 or 30 years.

In short, we are trying to write poems through the lens of who we are--what we know, what we love, and, yes, what we look like. There's no other way.

So with all that in mind, here's a poem for today:

Settling for the Anthology

The desirable women who wrote poems

Selected for The Best American Poetry 1994

Have grown old on my shelf. Their breasts

Sag, they scratch graying hair in the grocery,

Take out the book to prove to themselves

They were once anthologized. The men, too,

Have grown on, truculent maybe, a little

Ridiculous, trying to book readings at small

And smaller colleges, mostly commuter schools

Now, and they pretend they can still drink,

Are still desirable to young girls, when they

Know too well the fatly shuffling figure they see

In the plate glass is the poet himself. And so

It goes on, one succession in the natural world

Replacing another, the new poets emitting

The aroma of sex and drunken desires while

The ones who age shop at Wal-Mart for images

Of one thing that reminds them of something else.

Those who believe in the poetry of aging

Have not aged. Those who believe in the poetry

Of youth have forgotten it. In the small streams,

Freshwater mussels stay clamped shut as

Storms come, rushing them from one stone

To another, a place to lodge, a code to crack.

Two losses

First of all, a happy Christmas and a blessed New Year to you all.

Two losses, though. I'm very sad that Jack Klugman is gone. His work was a joy to watch.

But I am crushed at the loss of Charles Durning, who also died yesterday. He was 89. Durning was a great actor in my estimation, equally able to be brilliant in comedy or drama. In addition, he was an honest to goodness hero from World War II.

He was wonderful in many great films, including Tootsie and O Brother, Where Art Thou? He was one of the best character actors in the history of American film.

Our world is a less interesting place now that he is gone.

Image right: Charles Durning during World War II.

Books

I buy books by the armload, both new and used. Always have. We give them away by the bag-load, too, for causes we support that have yard sales and so forth.

I've bought some gems during 2012 and enjoyed them as always. I've also bought some that deeply disappointed me.

Gordon Bowker's James Joyce, A New Biography is no threat to Richard Ellman's famous earlier bio of Joyce. There is an odd sense of prudery about Bowker--as if a Puritan had chosen to write about such a frequently bawdy writer almost as a scold. Bowker's books isn't bad by any means, but rather than shell out the bucks for it, I'd get it from the library.

I've always loved Wallace Stevens's poetry. It is hard-edged and oblique, but it has a strange quality that keeps bringing us back. I think I may have tried to read Joan Richardson's two-volume biography of Stevens a long time back, but I decided to try again and bought both volumes through different used booksellers on Amazon.

Alas, even at a few bucks a volume, it's nearly unreadable. There is an awkwardness and thickness to her prose that makes one feel as if the books would be about 80 pages each if the vamping and speculation were cut out. Made me sad to find out I still can't read either volume.

By far my biggest disappointment of the year was a book with the modest title of Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This book is massively researched and beautifully written, much like their biography of Jackson Pollock, one of the best biographies I've ever read. (As of this writing, I've read it three times.) And yet it is about someone I don't know. It is my opinion they hate Van Gogh. And I mean loathe. Whenever there were two ways one could interpret his actions, they chose the worse of the two. I've read Van Gogh's complete letters more than once, and the person who wrote those letters isn't in this biography. I'm not sure why, either.

But I finished the book and closed it, deeply disturbed and saddened that one of my heroes had been ripped off the frame of his life with such determination. I don't doubt their facts are solid. What I do not understand is why they came to dislike him so much. At any rate, while I still love their book on Pollock and will read it again, I will never again tough their Van Gogh.

But that's the book world. One never knows, but the joy of the search goes on.

Amazon Reviews

Interesting story in today's New York Times about the alleged gutting of reviews on Amazon to remove reviews written by friends and family of the author. Here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/technology/amazon-book-reviews-deleted-in-a-purge-aimed-at-manipulation.html?hp

The story points out that Amazon's "sweeping but hazy purge has generated an uproar about what it means to review in an era when everyone is an author and everyone is a reviewer."

Let me say for the record that I've never solicited a review on Amazon or anywhere else. And I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account, so I'm not using social media to spread the word. Even worse (for my bottom line), I have never been interested in fame, unlike, it appears, most of the world.

I will say that there are plenty of fine writers who are constantly looking for places to publish their work. And the traditional way is hard--anyone who has tried that route knows it. In a bit more than a year, it will have been 30 years since my first book came out. But I know the pain and frustration of rejection as does everyone who ever tried to be published.

I'm sure the review section for books on Amazon has been abused. It seems obvious that it would be. I will go further here and say I loathe the anonymous responders to news stories in the media who believe they are doing something important by sitting and yelping after stories all day every day. Occasionally, fine. But as an avocation, it's a waste of everyone's time.

I really feel for unpublished writers who are looking for venues. I'm on your side. And volunteering a well-thought-out review of a book is fine. But authors who solicit and use such reviews are mistaken if they think it will change how the world, in the end, views their work. It won't. 

It may change how much money the writer makes, and, sadly, that's the only reason a lot of people write. But I can't imagine doing that, and I doubt any writer worth her salt could, either. 

It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

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Hither and Yon: The speech by the NRA's Wayne LaPierre regarding the killings in Newtown, Ct., is the single most reprehensible public utterance after such a tragedy in my lifetime . . . No date yet for publication of my next book, but I am writing . . . My most recent book, Emerson's Brother, has sold only modestly, but it's a quiet, moving novel that I think anyone would enjoy, so you might give it a try . . . And yes, I think it's okay to try and interest you in one of my books on my own blog!

Back Among the Living

Hello to all. Just getting started blogging again after a very long time away. Thanks to everyone who has read my books and followed my career over the years.

More to come soon!