the evils of new formalism
Ah, 1983. I was thirteen years old. My whole life was before me and had I just been hardened, say the word, "directed," a little more I would have embraced free verse poetry as the radical and revolutionary form that it is and started name dropping "Zachary" into every other line. Like this:
… I'm Zachary, it's hard
being Zachary and I
was throwing up and having
sex with a bunch
anonymous people who
aren't Zachary I was
thinking how hard
it is being Zachary did
I mention I'm Zachary?
That should win me the William Carlos Williams Award For Extreme Words, the Walt Whitman Award For Extreme Willies and the Charles Bukowski Award For Extreme Vomiting. Apparently that is what the general public wants. I wrote a letter to my friend, Writergal76, yesterday on the subject. It looked a little like this:
There's snow in the air and I've been reading a biography of Charles Bukowski, who is dead and since I'm trying to figure out why everyone loves him so. I have a hard time dealing with anyone who name drop themselves in their own poetry and it seems every other poem Bukowski writes is about what a drag or blast it is being Bukowski … which really isn't that interesting to me. And then I got to a poem by him (I can't keep any of poems straight, they all sound so similar to me) about jazz and things that happened in the 1950s in cities I've never been to people I don't know about and I thought "you know, nostalgia sucks!" Especially when it is about things I really don't care, like night clubs that are now defunct. So I looked up Birdland where Miles Davis use to play. It was opened on Broadway in NYC in 1945, named after Charlie Parker. It was a jazz mecca but what does that have to do with any of us now? Nothing, really. But still it all sounds really neat and maybe if I went on a cold day like today I could meet someone fabulous on stage or in the back alley or maybe loitering around the corner? Perhaps. I am still not sure what makes Bukowski exciting to people. He has a couple of good poems but everyone has a couple of good poems. He liked to drink a lot and sleep with people and moan, but so does a lot of people as well. Maybe it was that he got published with Black Sparrow Press? They also published Diane Wakowski, who was my next door neighbor for 20 years in East Lansing. She never told me she was a poet. One day I was in Berkeley, in a used bookstore and I saw her book, Motorcycle Betrayal Poems and I thought, "huh, I have a neighbor with that same name … what a small world!"
What I found interesting about all of this is this comment from Wikipedia: Wakoski received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism … [!] and here I thought it was a complex economic and political climate that led to our slow turn towards conservatism … when it was really all those damn sonnets being written in the 1980s! Of course formal poetry is another shade of evil! Why waste our time dealing with death squads? Ethnic cleansing? Corrupt multi-national corporations affecting the global marketplace? Noway, not at all, nohow, none of those are as corruptible an influence as New Formalism! That and nostalgia for places we've never been to … and poets wonder why we are seen as out of touch with the general public? Curious!
Reminiscing, the bastards, of Birdland,
that jazz joint no one I knew ever went
to, not one. Don't lie, you could never stand
free jazz. Music isn't what I resent
but what I'd give to see! Pull that bow string
back to your ear and the reed, the arrow
shaft, in-between two fingers, quivering
under pressure. May there be tension. Slow
tension between your shoulder blades. The bow,
that C of ash, crying release. You sing
under your breath, "I shall be released." No
jazz, not even Miles Davis, could equal
that, dear Kali. World Destroyer. Compel
the world to hang still as the arrow flowed
from your right hand and all of hell followed.