[log in to unmask] wrote:

>In a message dated 1/19/2005 7:00:58 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
>
>
>>Subject: Re: Amplified Bards
>>
>>Charles Bernstein: Against National Poetry Month As Such
>>
>>http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html
>>
>>Dominic
>>
>>
>>
>Do you know why they make you pay the Union dues
>even if you're not a member? Because everyone in the shop
>benefited from the ones who got up off their asses to fight
>the good fight.
>Finnegan
>
>
The quote may explain in part why I send the Academy fifty-five bucks I
don't have so I can get a journal I don't read and two books that gather
dust. Because I would like to believe in my infinite self-delusion that
the Academy does some degree of good for someone, and my contribution is
a help. I can't get to New York for the members-cost readings; and
frankly I don't like to listen to people read poetry aloud especially if
they have no clue about how to recite. But if the Academy is not
exactly preaching the Gospel, it isn't translating it back into tongues
either. So maybe it's a neutral presence instead of some manifestation
of the Great Poetic Satan.

I'm not suggesting Bernstein is WRONG in his assessment that Poetry
Month is a load of crap. It probably is; it reminds me of the old days
of "National Brotherhood Week," a concept and event that Tom Lehrer
judged, juried, and executed about forty years ago...or Stan Freberg,
who sang a nasty little parody called "Take an Indian to Lunch This
Week." What do we do for the other 51 weeks?--read Dan Brown drek? Is
a week of Ann Lauterbach (not that the Academy would have much to do
with her) a corrective to The DaVinci Code? How about a month dedicated
to Jewish enlightenment in which they read nothing but St. Teresa of
Avila's Interior Castle and Pascal's Provincial Letters? Will anything
change?

I suppose the singling out of April as a month for poetry is game show
thinking. Yet, yet, yet Bernstein tonally reminds me of Groucho Marx
singing "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It." Would he favor force-feeding
high school students and/or Local 133 of the Steamfitters Union a diet
of his own work, Silliman's, Leslie Scalapino's, or even Frank
Stanford's? I know Stanford's The Battlefield was read in a
round-the-clock marathon at Brown when it was reissued, largely because
of Wright's and Gander's clout up there; what's not recorded is how many
people died of confusion. Or do we start off with the presumably
accessible stuff and let people find their own ways from there? I was
introduced to poetry not by being mistaught Robert Frost in high school
but by having a genius teacher hand me prose translations of Les Fleurs
du Mal, even if she knew I was going to read them for the
sensationalistic snarly aspects. They change as you do.

I agree with Bernstein, however, that the big chain sponsorship of the
month is rank hypocrisy. Borders and Barnes almost never stock the
chapbooks and small-press books of local poets. When I bought Joe
Salerno's Only Here I managed to get it via Amazon--apparently Barnes
now also stocks it. I also got a lovely thank-you note from his widow
because on his website comments page I mentioned an act of kindness
extended to me by Joe a few months before he died in 1995.

But try and find the work of a wonderful Jersey poet, Joe Weil. Or try
to find Rebecca's stuff or the work of one of our silent members, Renee
Ashley. Or of any of the people here who have The Book out there. Big
city chain stores may have this work, but out here in the 'burbs we are
consigned to a diet of Rumi (okay, but enough already), idiot-edited
versions of Rilke (Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties like Getting
Money Out of Women You've Schtupped), and When I Am An Old Woman, etc.
None of this stuff is unworthy, but the overexposure at the expense of
lesser-known writers is irritating. Is Jennifer Lagier, who appears in
When I Am An Old Woman, represented on her own in a chain bookstore?
God knows Barnes & Borders make enough money off Dan Brown anti-Catholic
swill masquerading as archeology to subsidize a hundred different
chapbooks and lesser-known poets. Someone might actually LOOK at one
and choose to spend three bucks to own it.

I suppose on points I agree with Bernstein but I doubt that the APA is
solely responsible--we've lived in a dumbo culture for much longer than
that organization has been doing the best it can under all but
impossible circumstances.

Ken