Rigorous Roast Beef

well, good, the fires & pyres of prose poetry.

those stein poems are amazing, and only heighten the urgency with which i need to purchase dat book. they are musical, obviously, and, as i think you were saying, the reservations i have about p. poems really probably has more to do with the coolness factor - that is, because it's kind of the form du jour. i suppose i'll allow myself a prose poem in a dozen years (actually, i did one once - it was a scene in which a surfer i know went to a magic shop in reno - reno is, or was, a very wicca high desert place - at a party once, i was talking to someone, and she said she could see spirits floating over my shoulders - dry heat blavatsky). some problematic prose poems, a la t. tost, disliked by some of this blog:


It’s like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I had a pet chicken. Echo. He was my favorite chicken. Had him when I was a child (first chicken best chicken). Tonight the night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. Tonight the night is a black mouth. They killed my favorite chicken. Tonight the night is a black month or a red month. It's December. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it’s the way out.

ok, part of the issue, as lauren sets it out, is that these sentences aren't long enough! there is no sense of the power of syntax, of the power of syntactical transformations - this poem knows where it's going at each pause of event. in contrast to "structure of rime two," the odd authority of this poem does not come from its realization of the transformative suggestions of a hierarchy of transformations - in the "rime," the mere fact that these poems about "rime" are in prose are the first suggestion that everything is poetry, that, even prose is part of a larger chain of being (not to get all dante about it).

oh yes, and this poem's ending slams the door shut on that poor chicken, there is no fanning out, there is so sense of marginalization which p. poems always need to enact, oh so fucking abstract! what i mean is, that since the p. poem is a "marginal" (in the sense that it exists on a border between two, more absolute forms, it needs to exist in the flux of its marginality. my favorite margins are marshes, also known as, marges (margins) margents, sloughs and estruaries. the world of the marsh is a semi-world. if it is in a delta, there is the added marginality of the water, which is saltier than river water and less bracken than sea water).

i think my point is clear - but to clarify: poetry is the marges of the sea. like that wonderful poem of janet frame's:

Sunday Morning

Salt water is poetry.
I did not decide this
or prepare a statement
to astonish; it is always

my pleasure on Sundays
looking out of my window
at the petal-white Dunedin light
to trace the green stalk

to its roots in the sea,
then say as the tentacles
take hold and I drown,
the oxygen of silence withheld--

salt water is poetry
not mine but the providers
whom I thank by reading
and wish never again to breath the silent air.

not a perfect poem, but the flowering city stretching its roots to the sea is true to the idea of our source in the sea.

as for the issue of rigor, i'm kind of surprised that we've never really talked about this idea before. in an early draft of a poem written in order to sneer at the idea of the individual, i wrote:

a poem,
feuds with its sentence

makes a tensile arrangement
a friendship
a concentration
made
from
impulse,
warringly.

at any rate, you see why it's a draft. but, when i look up rigor in the dictionary it says: "strictness or severity, as in temperament, action or judgement. (from latin, "to be stiff")." it doesn't seem to me as negative as this definition wants it to be. well, rigor. i suppose there are a couple of varieties. there is the imposition of rigor, which comes out in the world of the new formalists perhaps. in these, (i think particularly of anthony hecht) there is a woship of a particular rigor, which is formal. this is a kind of empty rigor, a rigor of the received. the other rigor i can think of is not a systematic imposed idea of form, but a rigor of perspective that comes out of a person - treats one's world with a severity. why? because, in the fractiousness of postmodern worldliness, we must be rigorous with ourselves and our surroundings. two quotes, from duncan's letters, and from heraclitus:

"as i think, the isolate particular experience labors to bring forth itself as the eternal communal experience; ie as language (of picture or words or music and dance). a mystery of creation in participation. we labor to mak the war *real* to make it really happen so that it will speak to us. as we labor to realize life. if we did not so labor we would not, i suppose, experience fear or wrath, our reactions as its reality grows."
DUNCAN

"whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: this i prefer."
HERACLITUS

rigorous attentiveness is needed to bring aerie or difficult things into the realm of experience.

i guess that, in some ways, rigor, for the poet, is the struggle to be attentive to the seen and unseen.
boy, i'm spinning out of control here.

i guess that rigor is about form in the sense that it is what form, when it works, is supposed to provide a poem. but, if we follow levertov's "notes on organic form," that "there are no doubt temperamental differences between poets who use prescribed forms and those who look for new ones...their conception of "content" and "reality" is functionally more important. On the one hand is the idea that content, reality, experience, is essentially fluid and must be give form; on the other, this sense of seeking out inherent, though not immediately apparent, form." this suggests to me that the real importance of rigor is about perception, not about, you know, working habits or struggles with vocation or whatever. the real rigor is, how to rigorously attune oneself to particulars of the whole. (subject left intentionally absent. the subject is "it" - i read too much duncan.) so, rigor, for me at least, is the same as attention, alertness, the rigor then becoming a complete part of the act of knowing or seeing, not something tacked on at the end when one is writing. know what i'm saying?

ok, i'm going to kinko's to make more copies of the frontispiece for "measuring"