March 7, 2013

Music from the Court of Emperor Charles V.

Spent snow day preparing manuscripts to send to contest and the like. The internet makes that –if nothing else– far less bulky an activity than it used to be.

Fixating on the things which can go wrong with my flight tomorrow. Unfortunately, the proximate international experience is the multiply disastrous pilgrimage to Ireland this summer. I’ve lost the notion that one can just go to an airport, get on a plane, and after a certain passage of time arrive at one’s destination. On one level I hope that the flights are either canceled or not when I get up tomorrow morning. United, however, is perfectly capable of getting me to Chicago, canceling or causing me to miss the Zurich leg, and then telling me it can’t get me on a flight to Asheville for two or three days. That is not only the worst case, but the likely one.

Received in the mail a magazine called Fence. It is beautiful to look at, beautifully produced, so with some anticipation I took it to the café to browse. The contents turned out to be dramatically bad, bad in a way recognizable from some of the work my students brought into class last semester. All observations are random and equally valid, or equally perverse. If a good or telling line breaks forth–well, that’s just what happened; one should not pick at it hoping that it be a thread either into or out of the labyrinth. The poems mean nothing, nor intend, I think, to mean anything. All that’s offered is a fragmentary moment, which one takes or leaves as one does a passing sight on the street. It is a kind of Imagism, I suppose, but with the anticipation of larger meaning knocked out. One admires the work image by image or not at all. I took a nap one day and woke up with this being the new poetry of the world. Unlike the other new poetrys of the world I’ve witnessed, this has nothing to recommend it except, perhaps, truth to the fragmented experience of the smart-phone, twitter, shattered and scattered world it represents. It is ensign poetry for the kids I see working their laptops, texting, reading a book, gossiping to their living friends all at the same time–thus doing nothing at all, taking in no unified impression or usable data. It is the poetry for a world in which nothing has meaning but the brute generation of text. Books and books of this detritus are on the shelf now. Was nobody watching?