Many of the stories and events alluded to in "Goodbye to All Them" were chopped down. There's some leftovers that should see the light of day, I think. And hey, that's what personal websites are for. I gave them titles here to classify them.  Here goes.


The Kenneth Fearing 'Salt of The Earth' Quote/Idea That Went Nowhere
Cut this out because it was just too obvious.

"[He] is going to tell you that this part of New York is blessed with insouciance and spirit, that most of the people who live here are wonderful, seeking the beautiful things in life, which they are prevented from finding elsewhere. According to him, they...," he pointed around the gin mill, "and we, and all the people in other ginmills at this hour--at least in ones bounded by Greenwich Street and Second Avenue, by Fourteenth Street and Houston Streets--and all those people now in their studios painting pictures or banging on typewriters, writing, singing, dancing, kibitzing, screwing, listening to records, are all the salt of the earth. Well, I don't think so. ... As for you, young man, stay here in this place you think is Heaven, and you won't be, either. I promise you that.." -- Kenneth Fearing, 1929, quoted in Lionel Abel's The Intellectual Follies.


I do think that poets in New York, more than writers of any other genre, or artists in any other medium, think they are salt of the earth.  That writing poetry while in New York contributes to a greater good.

The Friend of a Friend Gallery Curator Story
I cut this because it was just too nasty for anyone to believe really happened, and the East Village Poet exchange I kept was shorter and got the same point across. It ended up being one one sentence in the final draft:

Friend of Friend Gallery Curator throws champagne on my shoes in June; the lack of immediate sympathy is striking. 

It was once a standalone story, 10-12 pages long. The penultimate, still much shorter draft, follows.

Friend of a Friend Gallery Curator puts on an art show about self-portraiture. Months before, she had asked me to be a part of the show one night at Bartender Poet Friend's bar. She asked me about other poets. I refer a couple, and get the invitation for the opening in the mail.

I attend the opening with my wife. I wear a jacket and tie; this is one of our last date nights in New York.  The gallery is crowded with poets. On my way out, I thank Friend of a Friend Gallery Curator for having me as part of the show.

"You should be thankful," Gallery Curator says, staggering, "since I always thought you were a dick-asshole and I hate your guts."

She flicks the contents of her champagne glass on my pants.

I have no idea why this happens. I complain to Tall Poet #1, best friend of Friend of a Friend Gallery Curator and whose book I lobbied for publication, who at first tells me by way of consolation that the Gallery Curator "did not mean" what she said.  Pressing the issue, Tall Poet #1 clarifies, tells me this was told to me to "protect you from the truth," i.e., that Galley Curator did in fact mean it.

In any case, Tall Poet #1 and Tall Poet #2 are both surprised I am upset by the Champagne Incident and in effect take the Gallery Curator's side. Even during the New York Exodus Summer, the lack of immediate sympathy is striking, the sequence of events odd, extreme. This Incident, they tell me, is not only no big deal, it's also an unnecessary distraction in their lives; they are both going on their First Book Tour and have a lot on their plate.

Tall Poets #1 and #2 never speak to me again.  I had been friends with them for five years.

Addendum:
A comment from a reader on the Book of Faces:

I still don't understand why the curator threw champagne on you, let alone what your relationship with her was. It reads like you didn't even know her. For other people to take her side, there must have been some sort of controversy between the two of you, right?

And my reply:

I don't know. I honestly don't know. Gallery Curator was a Friend of a Friend. I met her, like, twice before that. I didn't know Tall Poet #1 were best friends before this all happened.  That story both shook me up and baffled me. People do think I am a dick, I am sure, and hate me, same as anyone else. But I still can't figure out what happened. I probably should have written that, but the draft never got that far. I thought at one point it was good stuff for the final essay, but like you indicate, there seems to be more there, but there isn't.

Of course, Tall Poets #1 and 2 were dear friends. That, to me, was what was going on emotionally speaking.

Self-Flagellation Passages
Cut because I already beat myself up enough in the final draft.

Toward the end of my time in New York, poetry itself takes on the role of bully. I can see this now, but I didn’t realize it then. I thought everyone, for example, would get the Inside Poetry Business Joke of the Martial epigram the Poetry Society of America pastes on the subway around this time: "Someone I flattered in a book pretends/he owes me nothing. Oh the trash I have for friends!"

It so happens that, after a decade living as The Poet in New York, that I was sick of being a Poet at all, tired of having The Trash I Had for Friends.  It so happens that, even now, when I think of the word poem, when I see a poem and start to read it--the affected high speech, the desperation to make something new for the sake it it--I draw back, as if I had picked up an acrid smell. 

"Things are divorced from their names," Sartre writes in Nausea.

On one level, what I was experiencing was a spiritual condition, the period of unconsciousness that precedes a conscious and surreal one.  On another, it is an instant discomfort.  The nose-curdled talk of poems and poets flash across my eyes and moves immediately into my upper chest, a combination of anxiety and sadness.  I could say anger, too, because I feel so many poets and the poems they write, rather than uplift or illuminate the human spirit, trounce on it and revel in the trouncing. 

But that idea is an old one.  It's more about anxiety, anger, and sadness now. 

"The remarkably limited range of their minds is matched only by their perplexing definition of friendship," Raymond Carver writes about Parisians, "a definition that does not seem to include any suggestion of communication, still less of intimacy."

The New York Poets' specifically unwarranted self-regard and aversion to intimacy, I have come to think, must in part come from how poets regard friendships as forays into their own work, and work as forays into friendship.

Whole books that have been written on poetics of coterie completely ignore the prosody of friendship. Because there is no such thing.

Self-Flagellation Afterword
That I have to express all this and allude to a Pablo Neruda poem offers hope that I can someday not be sick of being a poet, and that I need to resort to a poem to make my first assertion bear more power to myself.  I can’t express my ambivalence without thinking of this line. I am disillusioned not only with poems and the power a poem has or its purpose, but also what being a poet and calling oneself a poet means. 

This is not a hopeless situation; rather, as I write this, it feels liberating to write it down.  When I was hired to teach "creative nonfiction"--which, I admit, sounds less glamorous than teaching poetry, more like teaching air conditioner repair--I felt a weight lift from my chest.  I was not required to call myself a poet any longer.  It feels like I had moved out of the house where I was forced to sleep in the basement and wake up at 5am to wash the windows every day, all to wait in a hard chair in the front room each day for a prestigious guest, a guest who never arrives. 

Stray Notes, Way Too-Inside-Baseball Poetry Stuff
These are quotes and sentences I had been waiting to use forever.  They're just too didactic for anyone to care.


The poetry I read around this time will go down as some decadent rococo Late Style. Even when I read a good poem--maybe especially so--I find that I have to go through the hard work of applying a circumstance, narrative, some concrete thing to apply or latch onto it, since there usually is none.

We are in an age, like Emerson's, that waits for the arrival of a poet who can write about our world and circumstance, use it as raw material for a synthesizing vision and the context for action. That arrival will probably not happen in our lifetime. That Poet of Our Age is probably 10 years old, and she is playing Pokemon on a Nintendo DS.

Why American Poetry Is Boring; Or, Flogging a Dead Horse
Again, these are inchoate ideas I have had swimming around for ages, and more suited for an aesthetic-type essay.


To appropriate Pound, whose ideas were much better than his poetry, poetry should be at least as relevant as popular culture.  The current tendency is to carry the world at arm's length, never reacting to the subject, never indicating the speaker's own attitudinal stance; or, it is carried from a poetic persona of Everyman, the ordinary fella/gal who is simply telling it like it is.

What results from all of this is the dilemma of the poet who wishes to strike the major chords rather than minor, the all-encompassing rather than the quirky particularities of a variegated culture that surrounds him or her. 

Richard Poirier, examining Emerson's take on this 200 years ago, sees the conflict as beneficial, how the desire for universals, in a sense, keeps our geniuses in check.  What a luxurious time indeed it must have been when a "stylistic impulse that becomes especially evident when the writer's rhetorical claim to ordinariness is coupled, as it so often is, with rhetorical practices that give every indication of individual, eccentric, and unique mastery..."  If only we poets these days had an eccentric impulse to keep in check, when the criticality of the present time has it in check all too neatly.  What results, Poirier says, is a poet's "mythology of public philosophy and public poetry," which, I would say, ends up demonstrating how opposed this desire is to individualized subject matter.

So when the poet sets pen down to paper, from theory to practice, Poirier says, we are burdened by an Ersatz Notion of Ordinariness, a gumshoe writing poems on an extended vacation from the real world. Any notion of particularity is suppressed by generations of misreading and misappropriations of William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson, let alone Whitman, Dickinson, Shakespeare, freaking Goethe.

"Stylistically," he continues, these works "dramatize how difficult it is to use language when, if one is to be true to oneself, it must presumably be at odds with prevailing or accredited usages."  Which, when one thinks about it, is one of the major reasons poetry is written, as opposed to prose of ad copy.  Frost, another one of Poirier's favorites, used a single word for this: "extravagance."

If one is to be true to oneself.  Extravagance.

A Baudelaire Quote on Modernity I Thought Was Killer and Was Going to Change the World
Cut because I use it too much already.


"If we cast our eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we shall be struck by the general tendency of our artists to clothe all manner of subjects in the dress of the past. Almost all of them use the fashions and the furnishings of the Renaissance, as David used Roman fashions and furnishings, but there is this difference, that David, having chosen subjects peculiarly Greek or Roman, could not do otherwise than present them in the style of antiquity, whereas the painters of today, choosing, as they do, subjects of a general nature, applicable to all ages, will insist on dressing them up in the fashion of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, or of the East. This is evidently sheer laziness; for it is much more convenient to state roundly that everything is hopelessly ugly in the dress of a period than to apply oneself to the task of extracting the mysterious beauty that may be hidden there, however small or light it may be. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the-eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past; the majority of the fine portraits that remain to us from former times arc clothed in the dress of their own day. They are perfectly harmonious works because the dress, the hairstyle, and even the gesture, the expression and the smile (each age has its carriage, its expression and its smile) form a whole, full of vitality. You have no right to despise this transitory fleeting element, the metamorphoses of which arc so frequent, nor to dispense with it. If you do, you inevitably fall into the emptiness of an abstract and indefinable beauty, like that of the One and only woman of the time before the Fall. If for the dress of the day, which is necessarily right, you substitute another, you are guilty of a piece of nonsense that only a fancy-dress ball imposed by fashion can excuse."--Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life"

Another Quote I Thought Was Killer
Cut because too many people use this Orwell essay for writing-about-writing-or-writers essays already.


"His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in--at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own--but before he even begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape."--George Orwell, "Why I Write"

The 'Disruption' Shibboleth-Boondoggle
Again, another old standard sequence of thoughts and quotes I used to trundle out when I talked with other poets.


"Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else's? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty."--Kenneth Goldsmith, "Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo."

I drew consolation from ideas like this, that becoming a conceptual artist might end my sickness over poetry. I then realized that this idea of "poetics of flux" and disruption, while modern, is also from the world of commerce. I realize this looking at advertising books at the agency day job, where I proofread the fine print of cell phone ads:



--Jean-Marie Dru, "Beyond Disruption: Changing Rules in the Marketplace"

Another idea, as bathetic as it sounds: I just think that I want to feel something when I read a poem. Not all the time, but enough to remind me that there's a hand pointing me in a direction. I need, in other words, metaphor.

Ted Cohen on Metaphor

"If irony is like metaphor, and unlike idiomatic expression, in so far as Y is dependent upon X, then what distinguishes metaphor from irony? The difference between metaphor and irony is profound. Understanding a metaphor is, or can be a task of much greater difficulty and complexity. It may be difficult to understand why irony has been used, and it may be difficult to detect it, but once it is known that the expression is ironic, it is almost routine to compute what the speaker means by his ironical utterance. One takes the ironical expression and performs a standard operation upon its literal meaning, and thereby arrives at the intended meaning. With a metaphor, however, one must remain with the words of the metaphor, so to speak, trying to find a way of understanding how those words can be combined in order to convey something other than the literal meaning of the expression. With a putative ironical expression there may be an argument as to whether it is in fact ironical, but there will be no significant argument about what, if it is ironical, is meant by it; but with a metaphor there is often a very significant argument over what the expression means once it is has been declared to be a metaphor."--Ted Cohen, "Metaphor"

I would try, during this time, to read poems divorced from the everyday. I enjoy them on the surface level; I must swap out my own experience or narrative or content to make the work whole. Once I decode the concept, once I perform the 'standard operations' Cohen describes, I am left with what only can be classified as loss or emptiness. A memory from when I am a child, where I am finished using all of the pieces of building blocks, the structure now build, an empty feeling, not of accomplishment or satisfaction, but of boredom and sadness it's all over.

Cut From Ending
I think I should have kept this.


After we leave New York, my wife and I walk around the Central Park Gates, I felt joy. The concept was simple: put a bunch of saffron gates around the park. After I decoded that concept, what did I feel? It is an feeling joy I had not felt reading poems for many years. There is no disruption, no 'extraction of any mysterious beauty that may be hidden there.' Just joy.

Labels: Baudelaire, Emerson, Fearing, Goodbye to All Them, How to Be Inappropriate, Kenneth Goldsmith, Leftovers, Lionel Abel, Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Poems, Raymond Carver, Richard Poirier, Sartre

Friday, September 25, 2009