Williams and Subjectivity

So, today, while I was eating a rueben at Applebee’s, I was thumbing through the latest edition of the American Poetry Review. When it comes to that journal, it’s kind of hit or miss with me. Anyhow, I happened across something that touches on my aesthetic beliefs about horror in literature. APR republished an old essay by William Carlos Williams, entitled “The Practice.” Basically, Williams is reflected back on his other profession (the one that paid his bills), medicine. Basically, he suggests that without his practice of medicine, he wouldn’t have been able to write. Basically, making daily house calls kept him in touch with other people’s humanity, and that, in the end, fueled his writing.

That is why as a writer I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man?

It’s something I always circle back to. People make literature interesting, as language can only go so far. In the end, it’s always Achilles or Hamlet that keeps us reading, not the meter Homer or Shakespeare wrote in. The drum I often beat about horror is: in order to understand or comprehend inhumanity, you also have to understand and comprehend humanity. Squirting blood can only get you so far, and it’s the people written about that keeps readers reading. Have an uninteresting character, and you have an uninteresting story. If we adapt this to poetry, it’s a matter of voice and persona, in most cases. You have a listless voice, and you have a listless poem.

But that’s not the all of it. APR also published some other material on Williams, some of it from Robert Lowell, and then there’s Christian C. Thompson’s essay “The Science of Subjectivity.” Thompson basically seeks to examine Williams through the Lens of Immanuel Kant. But, those greater points aside, I found the third paragraph of the essay and instructive reminder of what it is to be a writer:

The serious poet — whether he or she realizes it or not — is a social scientist. On a daily basis the poet is inundated by a vast amount of cultural data which excites the sensibility, is synthesized and stored by the brain, until on occasion, something happens–sometimes immediately, somtimes weeks, months, or years later, which results in a poem.

As writers, to an extent, we are the sum of our experiences. Even if fiction is largely contrived, there’s still some form of observation going on, some sort of stimulus that has warranted a response. For Williams, it seems, this came by way of his patients and his house calls. And, it makes one wonder, at least, what might happen to horror writers if they took these observations, this sort of writing ethic to heart.

Reuben, Care of Applebees

Making a good reuben, I like to assert is a delicate art. First of all, no one ingredient should outshine the other, with one exception. It’s a corned beef sandwhich, so if one is only tasting the Russian dressing or the sauerkraut — you might have problems. So, if the kruat is too boldly sour, or if the Russian dressing (thousand island, heh) is too sweet, then the sandwich classifies itself as a failure. This is why I don’t like the reubens one can easily get at Arby’s. The dressing, on occasion, can be far too sweet.

So, the new reuben at Applebees? My answer: meh. My sandwhich was tamed down, so it wasn’t a case of one ingredient overpowering the other. I thought the actual sandwhich could have used more corned beef, but that’s what you get at a corporate chain. Skimpy portions, and generic cuts. There’s a profound difference, in this regard, between this and Boar’s Head, or, even better, a mom-and-pop deli that cures it’s own meats. At least, however, it’s a couple steps above Arbies. And, of course, with Applebees everywhere, it’s convenient.

Bandersnatch Books Blog and Website

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My Advice to MFA Students

The word(s) “post modernist” or “avant garde” do not make you cool. Those are just vague, and often vogue, terms used to describe new ways of writing. Clothing yourself in such language makes you no better than militant new formalists who think throwing around terms like “iambic pentameter,” “Dactylic Hexameter,” or, even worse, “Spondee” makes them the defenders of classical western culture.

In Search of the Perfect Sandwhich

I am very much a sandwich person — by far, my favorite food.  I have many ambitions in life, and two of them includes finding the perfect Hot Pastrami and the perfect corned beef rueben.  Living in New Jersey, one would think that I would be in culinary heaven.  Well, maybe.  So, I decided to embark on an adventure.  Every workday I have off, and I have some pocket change to spare, I’m going to try a new deli in my quest for the perfect sandwich.

So, today I went to Yussi’s Deli and Takeout in Lakewood.    The deli is on one of the main streets in Lakewood, which means it shares the street with a few other Jewish establishments, as well as some Hispanic eateries.   The deli on the inside looked clean for the most part, with hardly much in the way of seating.   There was a display case of kosher salads and such, but the long and the short of it: hot pastrami on rye with mustard.

For a little over $10, I got the sandwhich it self, a pickle, cole slaw, some fries and a can of coke.  The fries were so, so — deep fried, crunchy, but essentially flavorless.  I didn’t eat the cole slaw and found the pickle passable.  As for the sandwhich, the pastrami was a little greasy and soaked into the rye halves.  The cuts themselves were good, and generally more flavorful than the Boar’s Head pastrami one can find in the supermarket.   Perhaps a little too heavy on the mustard, though.

Final rating:  would I return?  Quite possibly, but certainly not a perfect sandwich.

Belatedly, I do Admit

That for reasons I won’t mention,  Daverana Enterprises and I have dissolved our working relationship and have gone our separate ways.

In other news, Death in Common, after being pulled for lack of pages numbers has apparently met another delay.  Since I no longer work for Daverana or Janrae Frank, I don’t know what happened.  I just hope the book goes back on Amazon soon, and in the form and format that was contracted and agreed upon by each individual contributor.

Death in Common Recalled

Temporarily pulled off of Amazon and BN.com.  There were some problems with how it ended up being printed.

Rambling on the state of “Horror” in poetry

I posted this Wall-o-Text on Chad Helder’s blog.  Figured I might as well move it here and own up to it!

The state of “horror poetry” reminds me of the state of National Poetry Month, wherein everybody groans and quotes TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, “April is the cruelest month…” Much derided, often the subject of scorn, but for some reason it never fully goes away. But, here are my two cents in random ordering….:

–Sturgeon’s Law applies to everything. Sure, a lot of horror poetry is crap, but so is a lot of poetry, a lot of horror fiction, a lot of science fiction, a lot of fantasy, and a lot fiction in general. It’s for this reason all writers should be voracious readers in the medium/genre that they’re writing in. You have to pick through a lot of crap to find what personally speaks to you.

–A lot of poetry written, and especially published on the internet, blogs, or a Lulu storefront, is crap because of what I stated above. The poets themselves don’t voraciously read poetry, and the poetry they have read is likely centuries old and written by a centuries dead white male — who, incidently, is writing in an outdated, antiquated form of English that roughly resembles the language we’re speaking today. I am not knocking Shakespeare, Keats, Poe, Shelley, Chaucer, or any of that gang as writers though. Their skill and brilliance is evident. Plus, I am not knocking form, either. People still write in iambic pentameter these days, but they’re doing so using contemporary language, idioms, and metaphors. (As an aside, if a writer is using “thy” or “thine” in a poem, they really shouldn’t complain if people point and laugh at their work). So, you have people who don’t know much about poetry who try to write it.

–Horror poetry is often, and rightly so, shown to be abysmal because of the above. But, in this case, it’s further complicated by the market place. Of the few journals that accept and publish poetry within the genre, most of what’s being published have all the red flags of what I mentioned above. Take Weird Tales, for example. They have never, ever published a poem I liked. There have been rare instances where Asimov’s has published a few interesting works — usually by Bruce Boston or Marge Simon. Much of it, however, is in sloppy rhyme, or it’s written like prose that’s been chopped into lines.

–Like it or not, we live a for-profit, commodity based society. People want to make money. And, for the large part, you cannot make money writing poetry. The money in writing usually comes from writing screenplays, non-fiction, romance, mystery, and so forth. Poetry is near dead last, next to scholarly monographs (where the writer is usually compensated by his University, not his publisher, in the form of merit pay or another professional notch on the belt, during the long slog towards tenure or getting out of adjunct hell). You will hardly ever find contemporary poetry on a best seller list. I’m not bemoaning that fact either; I’m just pointing out reality.

So, some newbies approach writing poetry, find out how tough the market place is with very little financial reward, and then they move on and try writing a screenplay or novel. Even worse, after receiving umpteen rejection notices from The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, lesser journals, and presses like Graywolf, Ecco, Sarabande, or others, they run all butthurt to iUniverse, Authorhouse, or create a Lulu marketplace.

Basically, if we live in a for-profit society, poetry offers no financial incentive to keep talented writers around. To write poetry is to largely languish in obscurity, even if you made it with a high profile book from Ecco or Scribners. It’s more than likely that you still have a day job to pay your bills. To write fiction is to at least have a glimmer of hope of becoming a full time writer.

–”Academic Poetry” is never the problem or the solution, either. If you take the above couple of paragraphs into mind, most high profile published poets these days end up in academia. Teaching poetry becomes their day job. However, there’s this weird false conception that “academic” equals “pointy head” or “Language Poetry” or “Post Modernist.” This is wrong, too. That’s just one little corner of the great, vast poetry world. Not everybody writes like Jorie Graham. Not every writes like Mary Oliver or Sharon Olds, either. Poetry coming out of academia is very, very diverse.

Which leads me to final point….

– “Horror” is only a content description. This is why Sylvia Plath can be termed a horror poet, but if you’re talking about contemporaries, many fit the mold. For instance, how is the following Frank Bidart poem NOT horror?

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180503

Which makes me come back to my central point. Poets of any content type should be voracious readers. Nothing is ever truly new, when it comes to subject matter.

When Good Books Get … Expensive

I once tried to refer a friend to a particular prose poem anthology, only to get an email back saying: “Um, out of print, and you don’t want to know what used price is currently on amazon.”

I was about to do the same, with the anthology The Poets’ Grimm.  But, I check the aforelinked first.  Goddamn.  61 Bucks and change (not including shipping) is too much for book.  I know Story Line Press has been out of business for years, but then again, scarcity is one of the occupational hazzards of the small press.

So, can somebody please, PLEASE, get the rights to republish this in a new edition?

Death in Common is on Amazon

While I have yet to get my copies, and that contributor copies should start dropping in the mail in like two weeks, Death In Common: Poems From Unlikely Victims is now available through Amazon.com!

Featuring work from Michael Arnzen, Wrath James White, Christopher Conlon, Mark McLaughlin, Monica O’Rourke, Steve Vernon, Bob Freeman, LL Soares, Barry Napier and a host of others. It sports a cover by Bob Freeman, too.

Basic Premise: taking a cue from Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, Death In Common: Poems From Unlikely Victims tells the stories of twisted pile of corpses found in a basement along the Jersey Shore. The dead only share one thing in common: they were killed by the same person.