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Tuesday the Vrzhu way

Question: What are some good novels in which the main character is a poet?

Subquestion: How about novels written by poets where the mc is a poet? Anyone? Anyone?

Uberquestion: What is the best novel about a poet?

I'll name some I can think of at the bottom of the post. But, c'mon, chime in!

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If you live in the Washington DC area, here's a few cultural events coming up to mark on your calendars:

First up, some totally awesome readings this month. Here's the skinny on a couple thanks to Kim Roberts, Funky Cupcake Queen of the Universe:

Come hear Kim Roberts read poetry with Thomas Sayers Ellis (fabulous poet) on Sunday, August 17 at 4:00 pm.  Reading in the  Langston Room of Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Streets NW, DC.   Free Admission, although donations  will be collected.  More info: (202) 387-POET.

Another upcoming reading highly recommended: Gregg Shapiro is coming into town from Chicago to read from his new book of poems, Protection.  He'll be reading with two other poets, Dan Vera and Francisco Aragon, on Wednesday, August 20 at 8:00 pm at the American Poetry Museum Anacostia Gallery, 1922 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave. SE, DC.  Free Admission.  More info: (202) 889-5000 x141.

Page Two

At the National Gallery of Art, Max Ernst: Illustrated Books includes pages from  Ernst’s collage novels La femme 100 têtes (1929), Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (1930), and   (A Week of Kindnesses (1934). These collage books are watershed in the history of collage and book art. Without them such works as Tom Phillips' A Humument would be inconceivable, as would I believe some kinds of concrete poetry.  In case, there are collages of Ernst's that are haunting and beautiful and unforgettable.

Also at the National Gallery, there's time to see films by Michelangelo Antonioni: L'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse, and Deserto rosso are coming up this month.  The era when movies were allowed to be as complex, probing and provoking as other areas of modern art (novels, poems, plays, art, sculpture) is over. But these movies are will still reward your viewing and thinking, especially on the big screen.

 

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A useful execise is to take statements from another art and apply them to poetry.  Where, for example, is poetry's Gyorgy Ligeti?

I don't believe in making plans. In architecture you have to. If you build a house without a plan, it will fall down. But in the other arts, you don't need one: those huge paintings by Brueghel, full of a lot of small figures, do they have a rigid composition? I don't think so. Or Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: it doesn't have a plan. And neither do the works of Shakespeare, or Proust, or the plays of Ionesco, or Beethoven's late string quartets.
- György Ligeti

My compositions defy all attempts to categorise them: they're neither avant-garde, nor traditional, nor tonal, nor atonal. And certainly not post-modern, for dramatizing the past in ironic fashion is something that is completely foreign to me.
- György Ligeti

I am in a prison, One wall is the avant-garde; the other is the past. I want to escape.
- György Ligeti

I cannot understand this idea of you have avant garde, and you have this postmodern neo-tonal stuff, as if these were the only two possibilities, there could be no third way. There are always a hundred ways. You have to find them.
- György Ligeti

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Novels with poets as main characters

• Snow by Orham Pamuk
• My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
• Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley
• Camp Concentration by Thomas DIsch
• Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
• Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess

Wasn't there one about Kit Marlow too? Or Emily DIckinson? Would a novel about Whitman be redundant? Perhaps we should divide the list into historical novels about poets  and ones with fictional poets.  I think the latter category would be harder to fill out. And I'm not Bellow's novel should be included in it. Any opinions to the contrary?

Near misses

• Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt
• Pale Fire By Vladamir Nabokov
• WIfe to Mr. Milton by Robert Graves

I'm sure I've forgotten some obvious ones here.

Saturday Vrzhudocs

Atlanta Queer Lit Fest - Readers

More exciting news from Atlanta where the organizers of the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival (link) have released the initial list of readers for the festival:

Mark Doty, Kate Bornstein, Alex Sanchez, Daphne Gottlieb, Ed Madden, Kate Evans, and Dan Vera

I'm delighted to see a number of poets on the bill who are connected to the magazine I edit, including remarkable Mark Doty (who is judging our James White Poetry Prize in its inaugural year) and the treasured Ed Madden whose work we've published in the magazine and whose new book Signals is just out from University of South Carolina Press (it's a fantastic book).  I've heard from a few other poets who've been invited to read and the ATLQLF site mentions that more will be announced so I'll wait to note them till they're officially listed.

Yours truly appears at the bottom of the list and let's just say I'm over the moon to be in such cherished company.

The dates for the fest are Oct. 15 -19 at various locations to be announced around the city. 

Sounds like a festival to add to your Fall calendar!

More info at www.queerlitfest.com

Tuesday at the Vrzhu Plus Video

First of all

Check out this line up at the upcoming Atlanta Queer LIterary Festival:

AQLF is excited to announce its initial slate of authors appearing at the Oct. 15-19 event:

Mark Doty
Kate Bornstein
Alex Sanchez
Daphne Gottlieb
Ed Madden
Kate Evans
Dan Vera

That's right, Mark Doty AND Dan Vera of Vrzhu Press on the same ticket. If you're in the area there, do NOT miss.

Two Gedankenexperiment. Or should that be Gedichtenexperiment?

1. Reading Don Share’s inimitable Squandermania blog where he crosscuts pulled pork and poetry made me think of this:

Classify poems, or poetry genres, or poets according to the kind of food they would be. Example:

Wendell Berry’s poetry would be sourdough anadama bread from locally-grown pesticide-free winter wheat: good for you, a little chewy, a little sweet, a little sour.

You could go at it from the other end too:  Whose poetry would be pulled pork BBQ?

2. Reading the ubiquitous Ronsblog here compelled me to this game:

Describe your own or someone else’s poetry (or a poetry genre) using Zukofsky’s calculous definition:   

    I’ll tell you.
    About my poetics—
    …
    An integral
    Lower limit speech
    Upper limit music

    -Louis Zukofsky, “A”

Of course LZ is here describing his poetics, not his poetry or his poems, a distinction widely disregarded (the primacy of poetics (in its recent meaning) in poetry’s avant streams is a direct result of Zukofsky). What is the difference between poetics and poetry, between poetry and poems, between poetics and poems?  And which one of these is the ontological difference?

In any case, we can still use this as we wish. Example:

Robert Frost: lower limit Edgar Guest; upper limit Horace
Wallace Stevens: lower limit Edith Sitwell; upper limit Lucretius
Elizabeth Bishop: lower limit Marianne Moore; upper limit Robert Lowell

The lower limit doesn’t have to mean lesser, worse than, etc. It can sketch out the territory between a poet’s apposite tendencies or obsessions, or her historical place in a certain line of development. You could use this same trope for a particular poem, or poetic group or any other subcategory you care to use. It's as easy and fun as keeping your razor blades perpetually sharp with a little vaseline and the inside of a shotglass.

Where poetics all began

About poetic making itself and the forms of it , what specific power each has, and how one ought to put together accounts of happenings if the making of them is going to hold together beautifully, and also how may and what sort of parts these accounts are made of, and likewise about as many other things as belong to the inquiry into poetic making, let us speak once we have first started, in accord with nature, from the things which come first.

-Aristotle, Poetics

Meeting the ghost of John Berryman

A hand touched her shoulder and was withdrawn. She turned around to face a man who seemed to have been recently beaten about the face with a sledgehammer. Blood streamed freely from his left eye socket, and from his mouth, dying the salt-and-pepper tangle of his long beard to a crimson that deepened to maroon and brown where it spattered his tweed coat.

“Please take no notice of my appearance,” he said, dabbing nervously at his forehead with a handkerchief. Then, in a tone of elucidation: “I’m a poet.”

-Thomas Disch, The Businessman: A Tale of Terror

E. M. Forster on everyone who isn’t Paul Valery, and everyone who is

Well, the very first sentence [of Valery’s An Evening with M. Teste] is illuminating. “La betise n’est pas mon fort.” Stupidity is not my strong point. No, it wasn’t. Valery was never never stupid. If he had been stupid sometimes, he would no doubt have been more in touch with the rest of us, who are stupid so frequently. That was his limitation. Remember on the other hand what limitations are ours, and how much we lose by our failure to follow the action of a superior mind.

-E. M. Forster

On not introducing your poems by saying what form the poem is in

As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.

-Charles Baudelaire

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Tuesday's post's schedule

Dear gentle reader:

Tuesday's regular post will be up--technically--on Tuesday.  For those of you who rely on our regular Tuesday and Saturday postings (and, yes, a letter poured in on just this issue), we apologize for the missing Vrzhutube post this past weekend and the slightly delayed Tuesday post this Tuesday.  Both will be up by 11:59 pm. 

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