The link doesn't seem to work, Craig, I'd be intrigued to know what is
'amazing' about the letter.

Best

Dave



David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Allen Conrad" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 1:19 AM
Subject: AMAZING letter in defense of poetry by Eileen Myles


Eileen Myles read this letter at a reading she gave at Temple University
recently.  She gave me permission to send it out over the waves, and to
mention that it's also available on her website:  <A
HREF="http://www.eileenmyles.com">http://www.eileenmyles.com</A>
Let's talk about this letter!  --CAConrad

-------------

The following is a letter/column
I sent to the NY Times in response to
Judith Shulevitz's Close Readings column
in the Times on Nov. 24, 2002.

I found Judith Shulevitz's "Sing Muses or Maybe Not" an enraging and
appalling piece both for her to have written and for the Book Review Section
to have run. I was particularly stunned at the end, where after reading
several thousand words about how uncomfortable poetry readings make her
(Well, Judith don't go!-) she then slides into a riff on the superiority of
recorded poetry over live readings and then rising like a grouchy parent,
exhausted from ranting at her kids, she vindictively states: "Best of all,
with recordings, you can always turn them off."

What's the sour grapes about? It seems to me that Shulevitz is peeved at her
own lack of power in relation to live poets reading and so she richly takes
her comfort where she can--on the end page of the Times Book Review. I mean,
this is the ultimate lowbrow-posing-as-highbrow piece-one is treated to
Shulevitz dragging in bits from Orwell's "Poetry and the Microphone" to
support her point. Elsewhere Shulevitz has written to read Orwell is to
admire him-to want to be him. Judith it's been done. And Orwell died in
1950.
And the poetry he spent his life around was always live. Recorded poetry
back
then was a new idea, as was poetry on the radio. Live readings today
represent something vastly similar. The happy meeting of live poetry with a
very impoverished human need to hear any speech live, but particularly
rhythmic speech is unstoppable. Judith, people just like it. They really do.
They like to sit communally and hear messages that aren't tinkered with by
the government, or intended to sell a product, or gauged to spin some
denatured piece of information that's already been stripped of dangerous and
alarming content. Poetry is and has been for a while where lots of citizen
get the real and irregular news of how others around them think and feel.
What is so discomforting about that?

Are we next going to be treated to how uncomfortable opera makes Judith
Shulevitz feel-how about theater, performance art, live sports, sex, nature,
travel-I mean why direct a 3000-word tut-tut at a vital and ultimately
populist art form? It occurs to me that Judith Shulevitz's discomfort at
these "speech acts" must have to do with an unexamined inability to
experience another's experience of language without retreating to the score
card--giving or withholding points. The excitement of measurable power.
Judith, at its best the phenomenon you're observing is off the charts. There
is so much out there. There's poetry shows on Broadway, there's the Eminem
movie, 8 Mile, and Bob Holman's new poetry club on the Bowery, then there
are
slam teams and open mikes, and queer all-girl open mikes. And traveling
all-girl open mike. There's actually churning life in the ever-expanding
number of writing programs on college campuses, not to mention the
chattering
traffic in the official unofficial poetry world--the lining up and breaking
down, and re-naming and disclaiming of the New York school, the language
school, the ever getting-rediscovered beat school. The pleasure of meeting
all this wealth of live speech simply requires a fearless listener. It
invites some kind of aesthetic citizenry. Who will take the bumps as they
go.
Yet Shulevitz's praise of Allen Ginsberg's recorded reading of "America"--
describing it as "manic" and "one of the comic masterpieces of the beat era"
is not so much wrong, as totally missing the larger point about Ginsberg and
much of what followed him in poetry--that it was often uproariously funny,
then sad, then biting, then incisive. To characterize Ginsberg reading
"America" as merely comic is to separate the poem (and its reading) from its
frantic power--to change powers. One of the achievements of 20th poetry is
its labile nature-its meaning resides in minute shifts of scale within a
single poem. I personally don't think there's such a thing as "political"
poetry, but each transition--those genre-busting attention shifts are where
the politics drips in, and why the people come. Poetry is for the public and
we, the poets don't know who they are.

And, yes there are terrible readings, bad poets, awful reading styles. All
of
these things are entirely true, as they often are about everything,
particularly in the neighborhoods of art because people there are always
making something tentative. You might get there, you might not. How can you
ever know. Poetry is like jazz, in that you go to watch it happen. The more
it's predictable the more you do get "poetry voice," as Judith describes it.
It's a poet putting a predictable rhythm on unpredictable speech. It's
situation of someone getting into a car distractedly, closing the door on
their own coat and then absently hearing its buckle drag for hundreds of
miles. When people started to write in what Williams described as "the
variable foot" they probably did often miss that he was advocating reading
poetry in actual speech rhythms, not poetry voice. It's something in between
that you're hearing, Judith, it's aesthetic failure. It happens. When you
hear poetry voice you're hearing the poet's fear, and I agree with you,
Judith, but, ugh, move on. Don't categorically pronounce that music sucks. I
think you are going to the wrong poetry readings--probably ones selected
from
a menu of choices bound up entirely in your comfort-zone in terms of social
group, access and appropriateness i.e. Louise Gluck is the only living poet
you cite. Most art forms would suffer if they were only represented by this
narrow a sampling. And yet you rant on like a specialists. Can you explain
to
me this know-nothing attitude towards poetry? Does the Times, say in the art
section, print articles by writers who only like dead painters and the very
sight of new work makes them want to barf. . . Do art critics parade their
opinions across the front of Sunday Arts section telling the world how
coffee
table books are really the only way to experience art because-well, gosh,
you
can just close the book turn out the light and go to sleep. Good night,
Judith, Good night, America.

Eileen Myles