You're All a Bunch of Phonies

perhaps the greatest picture of Salinger

Aspartame Spores

I have added another of my poems, again from this summer. There is something peculiar about warmth that spurs thought...Perhaps the ability to observe without having the body concerned with keeping warm. Anyways, I'm just thinking out loud. Take a look.

Commentary on Greenfield

Perhaps Joyelle McSweeney's description of the many readers who upon reading Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, "Gnash their teeth, pound their flagons and cry for 'content!'" most accurately portrays the goal of Greenfield's work, to juxtapose the romantic with the verse of pain and abstraction, to perhaps find a more well defined self from this tumultuous, beautiful, paradox. Although reviewers such as McSweeney may remark upon Greenfield's work as coming out of the confessionalist tradition, as his pseudo-autobiographical description of fractured parental relationships may presume, his work transcends this exhausted form. In fact the reviewer Jeff Menne describes Greenfield's work as playing off both the New Brutalist and Language poetry movements. As New Brutalism stems from the avoidance of polish and elegance Menne's argument holds some water.

Yet Greenfield creates a full on attack on traditional poetic forms perhaps more alike to a postmodern destruction of early definitions of self. In his piece together he mocks the Romantic, "Where piety kneeled piety prayed through the soft textured ceiling," while showing the inability of this language to grasp the world around it in his description of being beaten by his father, "Whipped with a belt/ until my back bled." In this way Menne's relation of Greenfield to Language poetry seems more solid. Language poetry places emphasis on the disjunction of the signifier. Thus the you, the self, made up of the signifier, has become increasingly lost.

In fact, the elliptical, Stephen Burt, commented as well on Greenfield's description of the memoir, a method of self-description, as disjointed and fractured, again harkening back to postmodern need to redefine self amidst its destruction. Continuing on in the sticky realm of postmodernism, McSweeney described Greenfield's self-concious use of the metapoetical as a richer development towards meaning. She quotes the line, "In a revision of the line, I walk along the electric ruin of/ memory." In A Carnage in the Lovetrees Greenfield beautifully employs the "revision" of self through his "ruin of" traditional and confessionalist methods of coping with "memory" and meaning.

Greenfield's Discovery Amidst Chaos

A Carnage in the Lovetrees shows from the title alone the chaos present in the world today. The Lovetrees, whether they be familial trees or a greater world tree have been ripped apart. In the aptly titled "Burn the Family tree" the narrator, a child we might assume to be Greenfield watches as a, "man at the spire of a tree was mutilating the scene." Greenfield's father, we might assume, apparently applauds this, "spectacle," thus spawning the narrator's pivotal line, "Heartbreak after ha ha heartbreak," painfully laughing off the destruction of his security.

Yet Greenfield goes beyond the recognition of such destruction. His blending of the visceral and the raw within a loose, streaming structure seeks to move poetry forward into a meaningful expression in the messy world he finds himself in. For instance the poem, "Piece Together" begins by acknowledging the shortcomings of early poetry and its, "hovering above the cries,/ above the bodies of pain," while mocking romanticism almost laughably, " Where piety kneeled piety prayed...to the king of kings in a heaven so in love/ with its own perfection." From here Greenfield juxtaposes this romantic jargon with, probably, his own torturous treatment, and subsequent release.

Whipped with a belt

Until my back bled. Father also put salt styptic into the cuts,

Came to me as I slept and held me down. Lyrical instructions.

Saint Theresa wept at seeing the marks. Kissed me hard and

Wrapped her arms about my neck. Lyrical intentions,

also a flower. She was sixteen, moaning I love you I love you in the

dimming.

Thus while Greenfield roots his work in the events of the past, he does so to illustrate how powerful poetry grounded in the events of this chaotic world are when compared to that perched above reality.

In addition, Greenfield uses form to catalyze this immersion into the, "bodies of pain." In his opening poem, "Schema" the use of abrupt dashes to chop up "beautiful" images, "after a window opened/ to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after--/ mother sews a fell-off button, heats a stew, sews at a factory." Greenfield also organizes his poems, such as, "Avatar in the shape of a wing," in clumped bunches of sentences, where the mess of their form matches the destruction of banal metaphor.

The engine knocked in its cavity. Beneath the hood, the coded

need for maintenance. In a field-burning haze, the midriff of the

sky provides neither ascendancy nor grounding. Between two

indifferent pressboards is our sovereignty, the smeared wreckage

of the cumuli.

Here the world is being squeezed together and the beauty of nature, the cumuli, holds no more power as a poetic device.

Greenfield sees the world in the broken, chaotic, disjointed self that it has become. His verse finds solace in the destruction of the old and immersion in the cries of the self, as it becomes increasingly distant.

(New) Poem

Another summer poem, breaking out, after strep throat quarantine and collapse.

Reaction

As Flynn's Some Ether relives his traumatic past through the power of the elliptical, both Tony Hoagland and Calvin Bedient lend opinion which feels ungrounded. In Hoaglund's review, he conveys a strange ambiguity with the idea of confessionalism. He regards the term as a nice idea which will someday become antiquated, if it isn’t already, as Bedient accurately states. In this way the rest of his review struggles. Although he acknowledges the fact that Flynn's book doesn’t make any promises that confessionalism is a healing act, he seems to regard it with a familiar calming quality which damages his more center position in the end. Yet Bedient's review also presents problems. His argument is structured around Flynn's ties to his past and his inability to create the new. He combines the valid point that poetry comes from the now, "everything has yet to be done," with his description of Flynn’s work as a “banal narrative.”

If one does not realize the elliptical nature of Flynn’s work the fact that it is indeed rooted in the past is a very worthy criticism. In addition Hoaglund’s description ofEther as, “a snow globe in the hand of the dazed survivor of a battle,” does not give credit to Flynn’s shaping of the past into a disconnected world of elliptical allusion and residue. I would much rather compare Ether with Hoaglund’s phrase, “Dazed but curious, connected but detached,” instead of the whimsical connotations arising from “snow globe.” Flynn’s work shows that pure confessionalism brings no solace and instead finds meaning through its disjointed nature which provides an ether for dealing with grief.

I dreamt your suicide note

was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,

& in the bag were six baby mice.

One can never find normality after loss. Flynn moves us towards a deeper understanding.

Ether Flow Chart |---------------Vehicle-ETHER-Radiation

| |

|-----SELF=--nothing |-----------|

|| |

Residual---LOSS======TRAUMA--Mom is an atom bomb. Dad is a

Feeling Finger-

| Print.:

Ringing--firsthand.

-Deafening of senses

-Overwhelming of sense

Read it from left

to right to left using gravity...nothing connects .

Some Ether

Nick Flynn’s Some Ether explores the depths of loss amidst this increasingly impersonal, inconsequential, complex and painful new millennium. In the opening of the chapter “Oceanic,” he compares the chaos and entropy around him to a coast guard description of the ocean, beautifully creating a means of description from unconventional allusion, “the ocean is always looking for a way into your boat.” In many ways this quote describes the relentless trauma that existence presses upon Flynn, through his loss of parents, self, and identity, and the residue that follows.

In the dialogue of contemporary poetry Flynn’s work involves elements of both the elliptical and the disillusioned. The author Stephen Burt identified these aspects as representing a cohesive school structure in his essay “The Elliptical Poets,” to strong criticism about the unity of such a school. Nevertheless Burt’s elements are evidenced in Ether. Although Flynn makes great use of allusion, he does so in an elliptical manner. Therefore references struggle for perfection. In the case of an ellipse, the mathematical shape, it verges on becoming a perfect circle, in poetry a perfect, ordinary allusion. Yet the ellipse can never be a circle. Let us now add Flynn’s world of loss and abandonment. Flynn’s mother committed suicide when he was twenty-two and he met his father for the first time at a homeless shelter he volunteered at. Thus how can Flynn find an expression of self in the wreckage of the world around him? The use of the elliptical allows allusion to express the disillusionment and loss present in the world around Flynn. For instance in “Bag of Mice” he writes, “I dreamt your suicide note/ was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,/ & in the bag were six baby mice.” In terms of allusion, the fact that mice here represent suicide shows the crazy, incomprehensible, impossible nature of the act. Ether works tirelessly to find self where the two vehicles for his conception have been destroyed.

“My mother cut/ a hole in the air/ & vanished into it. The report hung &/ deafened followed by an over-whelming silence, a ringing/ in the ears. (p. 63)” In the quest for self Flynn also focuses on the affect trauma has on senses, its residue. Indeed the ringing of the ears shows the overwhelming affect of loss. Yet Flynn dives further. In “Residue” he quotes Rainier Maria Rilke, who states that the perfection of color is the absence of residue. As residue is forever inherent in Flynn’s self this perfection becomes impossible. In this later poem in Ether the book comes the a climax. The forces of elliptical allusion and a need for a medium of expression and self combine in the poem, “Some Ether,” “physicists were searching outerspace/ for some ether electromagnetic waves.” Indeed Flynn’s desire for ether finds credence. In a forever shrinking world of information the need to escape accessibility and the search for an avenue of real thought become prescient problems.

Notes:

Nick Flynn 2010 Academy of American Poets

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/758

Flynn, Nick Some Ether 2000 Nick Flynn Graywolf Press, Minnesota

Standing above Erosion

I have added one of my poems from this awakened summer, beauty amidst destruction of the unawakened, the chaos of our current existence.

Opening Remarks

Hello. This blog serves as a vehicle for commentary of current poets. I hope this resource becomes a meaningful tool for expression and opinion. I also have links to current magazines and authors in order to facilitate discussion. Enjoy.