Zukofsky was a Modernist. So it shouldn’t surprise me that he did this. All the Modernist’s wrote this way to some extent. One of my favorites, T.S. Eliot, was very adept at it.

Nevertheless, Zukofsky springs a Ballade on us, which is a specific type of form. It isn’t merely rhymed and metered in a nominal sense. It follows a very specific format. There are variations. The one Zukofsky chooses is the Ballade Supreme, consisting of three stanzas of 10 lines each where the final line of each stanza repeats itself. Then there is a five or six line envoy at the end that also repeats the repeating line.

The Ballade Supreme is often a tributary form and here Zukofsky uses it to pay a tribute to J.S. Bach. So I’m reading and come across this:

A pretty May note,
Singing Bach as they dug,

Isenacum en musica, hear us
Digging - we are singing of gardens - March
Day of equal night, Bach's chorus primus
To chorus secundus to the groined arch -
To vanish as the cone fruit of the larch:
Voice a voice blown, returning as May, dew
On night grass: and he said I worked hard, hue
Of word on the melody, (each note worth
Thought the clatter of a water-mill drew):
Labor, light lights in air, on earth, in earth.

...

Coda, see to it the burden renew,
Sound out thick gardens dug up in purlieu
The shrapnel haunts; May is red blossom, berth
Of what times' mill; blood reads the wounds, the cue -
Luteclavicembalo - bullets pursue:
Labor light lights in earth, in air, on earth.

And Part 8 ends.

Zukofky’s “A” is the perfect example of what I was talking about here.

“A” is a poem that can be classified as an avant-garde free verse poem and Zukofsky maintains that mode through most of the poem, but this well placed ballade at the end of Part 8 perfectly illustrates the freedom that poets are allowed to take in crafting their poems.

I’m not suggesting we should move backward to the Modernist poetics, and certainly not to Objectivism, but we should be mindful of the influences of poets like Zukofsky and his Modernist counterparts. We can take what they’ve done and improve upon it. There are poets today who are doing this and I applaud them.

I suspect that many readers do not take the time to understand a particular poet’s poetic, or weltanschauung, before delving into a reading experience. But I think in many cases, they should.

I recently had a copy of Louis Zukofsky’s “A” sent to my local library from a university library within my state. This will be my first reading of the poem. Understanding a few things about Zukofsky in general and his worldview in particular helps me to better understand the purposes for which he wrote and what he was trying to accomplish. I suspect this could be true for many other poets as well.

Zukofsky begins his poem thus:

    Round of fiddles playing Bach.
        Come, ye daughters, share my anguish -
    Bare arms, black dresses,
        See Him! Whom?
    Bediamond the passion of our Lord,
        See Him! How?
His legs blue, tendons bleeding,
        O Lamb of God most holy!
Black full dress of the audience.

Note: The bold lines appear italicized in the original; all other lines appear without
typographical enhancements.

I find this to be a brilliant sequence and Bach plays a very significant part in the poem throughout. But what I’d really like to focus on is Zukovsky’s devout Marxism.

There are passages in the first 7 parts of “A” that deal with politics – a strong theme throughout – and which would be completely misunderstood without some understanding of Zukofsky’s political background.

Ex. 1:

And on one side street near an elevated,
Lamenting,
Foreheads wrinkled with injunctions:
"The Pennsylvania miners were again on the lockout,
We must send relief to the wives and children -
What's your next editorial about, Carat,
We need propaganda, the thing's
                              becoming a mass movement."

From Part I. Zukofsky had attended a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall and upon his leaving, or after the performance as he stood near the exit, he lit a “Camel” and observed a tramp – a lowly person – walk by. From there he hears tidbits of conversation including a remark on “Poor Thomas Hardy” who admired “our recessional architecture”, patrons of poetry and business devotees of arts and letters discussing the “lyric weather” and the above quote about the Pennsylvania miners.

What’s the deal?

Zukofsky, who grew up in a poor Jewish family, the only American-born child of his family, would have been very familiar with the laissez faire economy of pre-World War II. He was also a committed Marxist in 1928 when the first part of “A” was written. The Pennsylvania miners is referencing the Rossiter coal miners strike under progress concurrent with Zukofsky’s writing of this section of his poem. Carat is a reference to the pen name or a nickname of a writer of the period who was decidedly pro-Soviet.

In many ways, the Great Divide of American politics today was born here in Zukofsky’s time. Henry Ford and a few other well known capitalists of the day were supporters of Hitler and the Third Reich. Many artists and writers, Zukofsky and Charlie Chaplin among them, of the period were strong supporters of Communism. Interestingly, Zukofsky’s literary hero Ezra Pound was a Nazi supporter.

I find these kinds of passages helpful because they illumine the worldview of the poet a great deal. Is the poet sympathetic to the Pennsylvania miners? He seems to be, but why? Nothing in the text at this point tells us why the miners or Thomas Hardy are so important. They’re simply glimpses into a particular time in the narrator’s life. But they add an element of character to “A” that would not be there if Zukofsky simply stuck to impressions of Bach’s music.

Ex. 2:

"Many people are too busy to be unemployed," says
                                              Henry.

A reference to Henry Ford.

(Especially those who have their own factories
                                              to take care of).
"If communism ever gets into a country
And raises Ned with it,
It's because that country needs it."

And he continues to quote Ford with a short editorial note interjected:

If goods don't sell,
It's because they're no good
Or are too high priced."
(Disposed of: the short change of labor.)
As for labor,
"There are more people
Who won't try to do anything."
Says Henry,
"Than there are who don't know what to do,
I am in the business of making automobiles
Because I believe I can do more good that way
Than any other ...."

The interjected parenthetical “disposed of the short change of labor” is a direct attack on Henry Ford’s brand of capitalism.

Ex. 3:

The star, Venus, bathed
In the sunsets
                       of elegant, imperial islands -
Mr. - 'we own your, this government
benefits by our protection...' -
And in Haiti
Mars
Bloody
Tinkered with the other
Stars.

I don’t know who said “this government benefits by our protection” but it could have been any Republican of Zukofsky’s day as of our own. A typical jingoist sentiment. And the reference to Haiti is a reference to the Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Mars, of course, is the Roman god of war.

“A” is full of literary and historical allusion. Sometimes Zukofsky breaks from one allusion to run right into another, jamming them together in quick-running sequences that move past like a flash of light.

I don’t know much about Bach’s political views, but I wonder how much of Zukofsky’s “A” is directed at it. Many of the allusions I’ve come across so far bear some significance to the life and music of Bach. Even when he quotes Einstein he relates it to Bach as in:

Asked Albert who introduced relativity -
"And what is the formula for success?"
"X=work, y=play, Z=keep your mouth
                                    shut."
"What about Johann Sebastian? The same
                                    formula."

The story goes that Einstein was asked how best to enjoy Bach and he said something similar to the quote about work, play and “keep your mouth shut.”

These are the kind of details that might make “A” seem too obscure to bother with for many, but if you can somehow pull them out of a cloud and make them earthbound then Zukofsky makes more sense.

Reading Zukofsky, Ron Silliman (and several of the other Language poets) makes more sense. I still get irritated reading the rehearsed disjunction, but I can understand better why they do what they do. The Language poets in a sense put into practice the views of Zukofsky and Communism on the page with collaborative efforts, which is itself a political statement. Understanding this makes the reading much more enjoyable than just trying to figure it out by reading the plain text.

When you read poetry, do you look for background notes or commentary to help you read difficult passages or do you just go it alone?

Some notes for this blog post have been enlightened by Z-site. Hat tip to Jeff Twitchell-Waas.

1. The Twitter poem experiment for National Poetry Month went very well. While I wasn’t much impressed with some of the poems I wrote for Twitter distribution, it seems my audience liked them. I appreciate those of you who are now following me as a result of the experiment. You’ll be glad to know that I’m planning to keep it running through May. Twice daily – at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST you can catch my Twitter poems by following me on Twitter.
2. If you haven’t seen the free chapbook, Hardwood, based on the full-length poetry book of the same name by Gary B. Fitzgerald then I encourage you to download it for free along with the Poetry Toolbar. A second chapbook titled Softwood, also by Gary B. Fitzgerald, will soon join it. Download the toolbar for free and get both chapbooks and many other literary goodies.
3. Recent purchases include American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernisms.

I will write more on this topic in the near future, and I know I still owe you one on vanity publishing, but I just wanted to remark that American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, appears to be the book that confirms what I’ve been saying on this blog for the last year-and-a-half. The anthology consists of poems that, according to the editors, flow from the preceding poetic traditions of traditional verse and avant-garde poetry, fusing the two into one poetic style that many times is exhibited within the same poem.

While Swensen and St. John call this type of poem a hybrid, I have taken the liberty of calling the movement itself the Millennial School without ascribing a name to the type of poem. I essentially meant the same thing that Swensen says in her introduction, which I’ll quote a piece of in a moment.

When I started this blog in September 2007 I did so with the intent of putting a voice to this direction in poetry, a philosophy I have adhered to since I started writing poetry in the late 1980s when the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics, New Formalism and Language Poetry, respectively, were pounding faces in competition for the Golden Glove. I rejected that neither should prevail and still do. It seems I am not the only one.

My Hybrid Confession
I have not spent much time over the years conversing with other poets about poetics. I am not much of a social being and prefer to keep to myself. Not quite a recluse, but just enough asocial to not be antisocial. I guess, somewhere in between. My point in saying that is that my poetic philosophy has mostly been developed by my own preferences and some observations that I’ve made in the direction of published poetry in the popular journals over the last 20 years. So I am delighted that others have seen the same developments.

Until I started writing this blog I’d never heard anyone speak of the fusion between the traditional and the avant-garde. Ron Silliman speaks of the third wave of poetics and the “post-avant”, but I sense that his meaning is much more constrained than mine. The late Reginald Shepherd, author of Lyric Postmodernisms, defended the same idea on his blog and is one of the poets in Swensen’s and St. John’s anthology.

Here is what Swensen says in her introduction to American Hybrid:

The hybrid poem has selectively inherited traits from both of the principal paths outlined above (traditional and avant-garde). It shares affinities with what Ron Silliman has termed “third wave poetics” and with what is increasingly known as “post-avant” work, though its range is broader, particularly at the more conservative end of its continuum…. Today’s hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villannelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions.

This is precisely what the Millennial School of Poetics, and the philosophy behind this blog, is based upon. The idea is to learn new techniques from any corner of poetics and employ them into one’s own without prejudice as to form or substance.

Swensen continues:

…hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition.

I am currently muddling my way through an epic narrative poem written precisely with these tenets in mind. Titled “The Sandbox”, it is based on my own experience as a soldier-participant in the Iraq War though the setting is post-experience.

I just wanted to share an initial impression of this book after having read the first introduction. I will leave you with these thoughts and return to them later.

For this entry, I will focus just on the simulacra of Simulations and Simulacra in the context of the challenges and opportunities we are faced with in this era in which we live. Simulacra is defined as: copies without an original. Baudrillard cites many examples of this phenomenon in his book, but one version of this phenomenon should be quite familiar to all of us -

• An original event occurs.
• The event becomes a reference point of meaning to its contemporaries.
• Time passes (the amount of time that passes can be surprisingly short), and this event becomes an historical reference point.
• The historical reference point gains new meaning with passing time, and the original meaning is lost, distorted, or completely changed (intentionally or not).

The Politics Of Experience
Consider the recent arguments between Republicans and Democrats about how we overcame the Great Depression. As most of us alive today don’t have direct experience with what happened then, we have to rely on the meaning of the event known as the Great Depression being mediated to us. To understand the meaning of this event, we have a wide variety of places to go to get information and analysis of the event: books, newspapers, television, radio, internet, etc. In fact, even to those who still lived through the Great Depression, their understanding of the event can change based on this overwhelming amount of information available with all of the various interpretations of the information.

The process of understanding this event which has taken on a new meaning in our society becomes, in a practical way, more important than the event itself. The search for truth can be endless, and yet can create more questions and ambiguities at each turn. What can we trust? This sense of ambiguity and the mutability of meaning is what I would like to focus on here in the context of writing.

The Poet’s Responsibility
As poets, our task at all times is to tell a story. For a story to have meaning, it must have a context. And this is where understanding how the simulacra works gives us some food for thought in our writing, and in analyzing the writing of others. Here are some things to consider:

1. Even in our own lives, we are prone to creating and recreating the meaning of events. At the depths of this process, we are making many choices. When I read or write poetry, I examine carefully the reference points that are used and how they function.
2. Common reactions to simulacra are irony, rebellion, alienation, and resignation.
3. Mediation is a process that leads toward simulacra. The more steps between the original event and the last interpretation, the more room for difference. (Sidenote – Television is a deceiving form of mediation because we can feel that we are part of an event when we are getting a very distorted, removed view of it.)
4. Identity is increasingly difficult to grasp, as the context of what makes us who we are gets more complex.

Li-Young Lee: A Postmodern Poet’s Simulacra
Look at this excerpt from Immigrant Blues by Li-Young Lee:

[...]Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.[...]

Li-Young Lee is an accomplished postmodern writer, tapping into the realm of simulacra regarding his identity as an immigrant and connecting with his fragmented family past. Alienation isn’t new to literature, but what makes it uniquely postmodern in this poem is how Li-Young Lee ironically recognizes the distance and chooses to never reconcile it. The poem ends:

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,”

called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

Li-Young Lee recognizes that resolution isn’t possible. He knows that ending the poem with new understanding, with a concrete sense of direction isn’t as impactful as the ambiguity that is left in the void of context. This void of context is the context. Starting this section by calling it an “ancient story” but ironically from “yesterday evening” he intentionally blurs the lines. He doesn’t have a concrete connection with his family history or himself – but that lack of connection is something that we can connect to.

How Simulacra Can Be Used To Connect Us
Many postmodern poets are very adept at connecting us to these fissures in context that we have in our lives, and turning those fissures around from points of confusion to points of unity between the reader and the poet. We understand and empathize, and thus, we experience relief from the conundrums of simulacra.

The take away point here is that as a writer – more than at any time in history – recognizing the challenges in understanding anything as being definite can be very helpful in constructing a believable poem that others can connect to.

Will B. is a high school teacher and owner of the blog The Search for Health in Decadence.

1. The Vanity Blog – For lack of a better term, I’ll call the first category of poetry blog a “vanity blog”. The reason I call it a vanity blog is because the owner, the poet, simply uses the blog to post their own poems and they are not really much concerned with anything else. Vanity publishing has taken a new face from what it was a few years ago – it’s moved online and exists in two forms (digital and print self-publishing through services like AuthorHouse and Xlibris; and self-publishing through a blog). The second form of vanity publishing is the easiest and least costly. Many of these blogs are run for free because the blogger uses one of the free hosts like Blogger.com or WordPress.com, therefore there are no expenses involved (though I have seen one instance where the poet used Google AdWords to promote his blog and obtain new readers). Simply put, most of the vanity blogs exist solely for the poet’s own vanity. The poems are not that good and the readership is limited. However, there are a few poetry vanity blogs where the poems are not that bad, but I will leave that to your judgement.
2. The Marketing Blog – The second type of blog that you’ll find is what I call the marketing blog. These blogs are usually maintained by individual poets, journals and publications, and other poetry organizations. The purpose of these blogs is to promote the works of the poets, events of an organization, or to discuss issues related to a particular journal (such as contests, promotion of the poets published in the journal, deadlines, new issues, etc.). Some of the marketing blogs that I’d recommend are:
   • The Kenyon Review Blog
   • Harriet
   • Blogalicious
   • 32Poems
   • One Poet’s Notes
   • Poetic Asides
   • World Class Poetry
3. The Poetry Journal Blog – Some blogs act like poetry journals. That is, they have submission guidelines and accept poetry submissions from the general public then they publish the ones they like. Some noteworthy poetry journal blogs include:
   1. The New Verse News
   2. I’d love to hear other blogs that are poetry or literary journals
4. Poetry News – Another type of poetry blog you’ll find online is the blog that promotes poetry in general and that acts as a news resource for poets, delivering upcoming contests, new poetry journal announcements, etc. Here are a few poetry resource blogs I’d recommend:
   1. DIY Publishing
   2. NewPages
   3. Poetry Hound
   4. Poetry Hut
5. Philosophy Blogs – The last type of poetry blog you’ll find online is what I call a philosophical blog. Its primary purpose is to advance a particular philosophy of poetics or to discuss poetics in general. There aren’t as many of these types of blogs online as I’d like to see, but there are a few, including World Class Poetry Blog, and in addition to WCP I’d recommend these:
   1. Silliman’s Blog
   2. Lemon Hound
   3. William Watkins

I’m sure there are blogs that I’m leaving out in each category. I’d like it if you posted your own favorite blogs in each of these categories. We could add one other category – the Hybrid Blog – but I’m afraid that would be a huge list. The Hybrid Poetry Blog is one that could fall into more than one category above, such as the World Class Poetry Blog, which exists partly to discuss poetics in general and partly to market myself as a poet and my own works, including the sister site World Class Poetry (practically speaking, however, its purpose is primarily philosophical and secondarily marketing). Other blogs, such as Poetic Asides, serve similar functions.

I hope you find additional blogs to read here in this list and while I realize it’s a rather short list of mostly popular blogs that you’re likely already familiar with, I’d hope the benefit is to help us see how we can use blogging as a tool to further the cause of poetry. By categorizing the types of blogs currently online we may form new categories or expand upon the categories we now have. I’d like to see more poetry journals as blogs and more discussions of poetics taking place on blogs. Any takers?

If you read the Hyperbole Submission Guidelines then you’ll get a pretty good idea of what I’m looking for. If you need further elaboration, leave me a comment here on this post and I’ll answer your questions to the utmost of my ability. With regard to poetics, I will say that I’m not looking for anything in particular, but it must be forward-looking, not reminiscences of the past. What I likely won’t publish:

• Odes to Ezra Pound’s greatness
• Lessons from the Beats (although I love the Beats)
• The virtues of minimalism
• How Language Poetry has changed poetics
• Why poetry is best suited to Formalistic constraints

You can find these discussions somewhere else. I’m not looking to rehash old discussions. What I will welcome are discussions regarding how different schools of thought can be borrowed from to create poetry today or how new developments in poetics will lead to new forms and modes of expression in the future. Hyperbole is not about the greatness of the past as much as it is about the greatness of the future, but I understand that the future is great because of the work that poets of the past have accomplished. I’d like to see your works fit into that broad discussion.

For a better feel for my own poetics (and you by no means have to agree with me), read my Millennial Poetics series of blog posts. The tenth column can be found here.

For further reading and some examples of types of discussions that I find interesting, try these:

• Modern, Postmodern & Post-Postmodern: Why Poetry Is No Longer In Disintegration Mode
• Why Rhyme Is Back In
• Critique Group Ethics: How Should Poets Help Each Other?

These examples are not exhaustive of the type of discussions I want to have, but they do serve as examples of discussions that fit in to Hyperbole’s directional focus. Qualities I admire in poetic philosophers:

• Intelligence
• Passion
• Deep Knowledge (either broadly speaking or within a specific niche)
• Wit
• Clever Use Of Language
• Ability To Communicate Clearly and Concisely
• Inquisitive Nature
• Exploratory Imagination
• Unafraid To Approach The Controversial
• Innovative Personality

And various and sundry related qualities. All of this can be summed up to say that I like and admire uniqueness. Where Ezra Pound said “Make it new”, I say make it new, but make it worthy of reading twice.

Submit your best work to Hyperbole. I’m looking forward to your submissions.

After reading Itinerary, however, I’m going to have to make a point to invest in more of the poetry of Reginald Shepherd. I sing my praises loudly.

I like Shepherd’s poetry for several reasons. No. 1, it’s intelligent. Shepherd writes about things that most poets can’t even dream about. He writes loves poems, but they aren’t sappy. He writes nature poems, but they don’t look like a fifth grader wrote them. There’s no “ode to the little brown leaf amid a cluster of yellows” or “may I kiss your sweet hand, my dear, it reminds me of sasparilla” type of sentimentalism that would make a Victorian nun puke in the chancel. And, yes, I’m aware that sasparilla is correctly spelled sarsaparilla, but the average poet wouldn’t have the good sense to Google it and correct the deficiency. Of course, Reginald Shepherd was no average poet.

I like Shepherd for other reasons as well. I can think of no better evidence than Itinerary that New Formalists are full of shit. Shepherd has that rare knack of being able to incorporate traditional poetic elements into non-traditional forms and tropes and making them look like Cindarella’s glass slipper. They fit. And, what’s more, you hardly notice them until, like that street sign, you’ve whizzed by them going slightly over the speed limit. Reginald Shepherd’s poetry is poetry that every poet in the 21st century should study.

This is poetry that I surmise Ron Silliman would call post-avant. It isn’t strictly avant-garde, but it isn’t traditional either. It’s somewhere in between, and from what I’ve gathered by reading Shepherd’s own blog, it’s the way he saw himself. It’s also one of the reasons I like it.

Shepherd’s Brass Tacks
OK, let’s get into some specifics. The poems in Shepherd’s chapbook Itinerary are written like Postmodern ditties, except that they make sense. He’s got a great ear for the music of a poem while rhyme in his hands is like a carefully tuned Greek instrument. Shepherd weaves alliteration, assonance, consonance, near rhyme, internal rhyme, and other melodies into a tapestry of pagan song like an Orphean choir.

The first line of the first poem in Itinerary, “Refrain”, begins

A state becomes a statement,

Simple. Brief. Obvious. But uncommon. And that’s the beauty of a Shepherd line. He takes a simple word and compares or contrasts it linguistically with another simple word that looks or sounds the same and makes good English sense out of them. Unlike the avant gardeists, who love to play with words until they are not recognizable, Shepherd twitters until the unrecognizable makes sense again. And he does it while using traditional poetic talents without falling over into the excesses of New Formalism: It’s OK to drink from the bottle, but don’t become an alcoholic. Shepherd, far from a teetotaler has shown us that hard liquor can be swallowed pure without leading us into pornographic drunkenness.

His words are full of the beauties of music all over. More examples:

Petrarch doesn’t dream of snow, except
in silver bowls with syrup
mixed into it, pomegranate or persimmon
chasing summer somewhere next to lost,

I just love that “summer somewhere.” It’s one of those obvious internal rhymes that average poets can never make happen. And then Shepherd dresses it up with the assonance of “chasing” preceding his summer. It’s like dropping a tiny dot of lace on an already beautiful dress and watching it move from gold to platinum without visible movement of the beauty barometer needle.

Then there’s

worn-down words, a kind of drown
and drench and quench and very kind
to what I would’ve said.

This is what the Postmodernists have been trying to do for decades – to write as if speaking in plain language – but Shepherd does it poetically, which is what the Postmodernists have failed at. Language is the tool of poetic arts, but too many poets have taken the poetry out of art. Shepherd put it back in.

One of my favorite lines in Itinerary comes from the final poem in the chapbook, “You, Therefore,”

from its earthwards journeys, here where there is

The tripleted internal rhyme with the words “here”, “where,” and “there”, seemingly insignificant words of our language, magnify the smallness of relational love and suddenly these three words become the most significant words of all. Huge!

The poem begins:

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:

And I couldn’t help upon reading that line to think how ironic it is that my first reading of it would be just days after Shepherd’s own exit. That might make some among us believe that the poem would have no particular significance if not for that fact, but they’d be wrong. “You, Therefore” is a masterpiece of language. Here it is in its entirety:

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries, spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy mooonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journey, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

This is a brilliant fucking poem. Shepherd’s genius shines no brighter anywhere than in these lines. There is no end, no final punctuation to the one sentence that encapsulates this love letter. It is beyond significant that the final line does not close. It implies that the thought continues, which is fitting given the first line of the poem.

“You are like me, you will die too, but not today:”

Is he talking to his lover or the poem? Does he mean the poem will die, but not today? Perhaps both. But the best poems are those poems that remind of us our mortality while leaving open the subject of immortality and this poem has reached that pinnacle. From the very first line to the last, there is no death to the thought, to the sentence, to the poem itself.

But it is more than no mere end, no period. The poem is moved forward not by its lack of punctuation, but by its expert execution of it. The poem has six colons, but not a single solitary period. Not even a semicolon. But six colons. Six “pay attentions, what follows is incredible”.

From colon to colon, as I read this poem, I have one thought: Lead me. And like a mesmerized lover, I want to go where ever it is that Shepherd wants me to go. I trust him. And the reason I trust him is because he is a master of the language. It does not, like an unruly child, control the mother; the mother controls the child. And Shepherd shows that he is in complete control. That’s why I like him.

What I Don’t Like About Shepherd’s Itinerary
This will be short. Itinerary is one of the best poetry chapbooks I have read in a while. Shepherd keeps his language fresh, bombarding me with images that I can’t find anywhere else, but he does it in such a way that traditional poetics are not abandoned.

There isn’t much not to like in Reginald Shepherd’s Itinerary. His references to Petrarch are a bit too much. My instinct is that “Petrarch” is a pet name for his lover. And that’s fine. It adds character to the work. But I was hoping for a little bit more diversity in allusion. On the other hand, if Shepherd had satisfied my selfishness there, Itinerary might not be as spectacular as it is.

There really are no weak poems in Itinerary. There are weaker poems, but that’s like saying Superboy is slightly weaker than Superman. He’s still stronger than you.

Caveat: After composing this blog post I discovered that Reginald Shepherd’s friend Robert Philen has been posting to Shepherd’s blog. He says “You, Therefore” is “the one I’ve seen most used as part of the many online tributes to Reginald that have been put up since his death.” It seems I am not the only one who has been taken in by the colons.

Aside from technology, however, there will be other significant factors influencing how poetry is published (as well as other forms of literature) and that will affect the nature of the epic. Some of those influences are outlined below.

If you’ll pardon another digression, this post marks the first anniversary of the World Class Poetry Blog and is the 367th post for this blog. That means, despite the days that I’ve missed posting over the course of the past year, I’ve made enough multiple posts in a single day to have averaged more than one post per day since last September. How fitting it is, I believe, to be discussing the future now.

The Future Of Poetics Through The Past
I think I’ve made it clear by now that the future is dependent upon the past. We’ve discussed the pre-literates briefly, the literate age of poetry not quite enough, and the future of technology. What I didn’t discuss enough in the last post was the future of the epic, but it was necessary to lay the groundwork by discussing the technology that will be integral to the lifestyle of poetics.

If technology is useful in creating and marketing poetry then it seems logical that technologies of the future will change the way in which poetry is written, especially if those technologies are drastically different than the technologies of the past. The question is, how will poetry change? In particular, how will the epic change?

I believe epic poetry of the future will be starkly different from epic poetry of past, but it will not be disconnected from the past. Future epics will use the technology of the future to deliver a creation that will stand on the foundations of poetic traditions yet still stand on its own, somewhat like the way young adults carry on the traditions of their lineage while making those traditions new for themselves and their children.

One important way that future epics will survive the traditions of the past is to get back to the basics of good, honest storytelling. I’m talking about the type of storytelling that the pre-literates enjoyed – heroic tales with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The novel has been able to maintain that basic structure even while re-inventing itself, but poetry has largely gone off on its own like a wayward son. When poets do tell stories it is done mostly through short forms and long narratives, but not epics. The few real epics we’ve seen in recent years have, with few exceptions, been esoteric tales or they’ve been deviations from basic storytelling.

That isn’t to say, however, that the avant-garde strain of poetry that was dominant for much of the 20th century will die. It will live on, but it will live as a flavoring option rather than as a dynamic on its own. While epic poems will strive to return to the roots of basic storytelling, poets will still employ the avant-garde elements that have caught on as a result of the Imagist and Realist schools, the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Postmodernism, Language Poetry, and various other 20th century movements. But those elements won’t be the dominant themes.

I’ve mentioned the splintering within 20th century poetics, which has led to a convoluted cross-pollination between the avant-garde strain and the mainstream strain of poetics and their various offspring. We’ve arrived at a place today where the two strains have fed off of each other and as their divergences have widened, the convergences have strengthened. This marriage between leaving the nest and keeping it within the family will continue to be the dominant movement for the next century, but it will largely be played out in digital media with some print implications.

How Might Digital Epics Look?
We have yet to tap into the new technologies and make the best use of them. The human imagination has not yet caught up with the technology that has emerged from scientific tinkering. But we are getting there.

One of the ways in which the Language School has been influential is in the co-creation process. Language School poetics insists on the reader being a co-creator with the poet, but the Language School poets have also been great collaborators. This has largely been due to the fusion of political socialism into the form itself. Language School innovators are all collectivists and believe that the act of creation itself is a communal action. In print, that co-creation and collaboration process doesn’t match up with the philosophy, but in hypertext and cyberspace it does so much more perfectly.

Not only can individuals from different backgrounds easily work together online, but they can do so in ways that it is impossible to do with print technology. One example of how individuals can work together is through wiki technology. Wikipedia is the most prominent example. Through one simple technology, poets from competing backgrounds can partner under one creation, changing each other’s additions, adding to the creation as a whole, deleting previous entries, and participate in co-creation in real time.

If you can imagine an epic poem written in wiki by a collaboration of different people from various backgrounds (even cross-culturally) then you are following me as you should. But would it work? Well, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. If it did work, the collaborators could then convert the digital experiment to print and market the creation by traditional means.

One thing you can do with digital technology that you cannot do in print is create multimedia incorporating audio and video with traditional storytelling techniques. This could work for prose as well as poetry, but in the epic category you could have a hypertext poem, a long narrative story with the basic structure – beginning, middle, and end – and include throughout, at various places, an audio file or short video presentation to show the action being depicted by the text. I can easily envision a several thousand page HTML document that is written like a traditional narrative and on each page a video clip of the action on that page then at the end of the document a full video where all the clips are combined into a complete movie presentation. Instead of creating a movie based on a full-length prose or poetry manuscript, or vice-versa, the creators can go for simultaneous production and charge admission to the website.

This elevates poetry to the realm of entertainment, which is where it belongs anyway. Before the 20th century, poetry was considered an entertainment form. There was no TV or radio so the forms of entertainment were limited. One of the ways that people sought to entertain themselves was to read and in many families there was at least one person who could read that would entertain the rest by gathering everyone together around a campfire or in the barn getting lost in their favorite stories. Often, this was done with a book of verse.

When the 20th century came around with its modern technologies and scatter-brained diversions, people got away from reading and spent more time driving, flying, watching movies, and engaging themselves in other activities that did not require books. As a result, we have a society of people who have gone their entire lives without reading a single book through to the end. The 21st century doesn’t look promising to bring that to an end.

But people are reading more as a result of the Internet. They may not be reading books, but they are reading text. E-mail, web pages, blogs, and other digital media have become common reading material even for people who would never pick up a book. Still, there are many people who would rather watch a video or listen to an audio recording than to read the text, and that’s why poetry in the 21st century has the potential to reach many more people than the poetry of the 20th century.

Poetry As Entertainment, Not Merely A Possibility
The popular poetries of the past have almost all been seen as a form of entertainment. Shakespeare wrote great plays, both tragic and comic, but they were written as poetry. Edgar Allan Poe gained a popular following overseas as well as in his native America, primarily because audiences found his poems eerie and entertaining. “The Raven”, in particular, was very popular during his lifetime. Robert Service in the 20th century made millions of dollars entertaining audiences with his poetry in a time when readership of poetry was in decline and when the poetry that was being written was flying off the obscurity scale into poetic oblivion at the speed of light. When poetry did aspire to entertainment it was largely because poets were entertaining themselves as they wrote by injecting silliness or obscure references into the poetry in a masturbatory fashion. Not many others got much out of it. That kind of poetry is like having sex with yourself while others watch through a peephole.

21st century poetry will have to get back to being reader-centric and one of the ways that it will do that is through visual presentation. Even when it borrows from the obscure it will do so in such a way that it serves as an enhancement to the simple and easy-to-digest. But always, the chief aim will be to provide entertainment to the audience.

The Types Of Epics That Will Emerge In The 21st Century
As stated before, the epic poetry of the future will stay connected to the epic poetry of the past. Therefore, the traditional epic structures will not disappear. But new epic structures will emerge and I think we’ll see a blending of the types of epics as well. Here is an incomplete list of epic forms and their possibilities:

• Heroic Epic – People still love heroes. The story of a larger-than-life hero with a great story to tell will never die. Not even in poetry.
• The Epic Adventure – Sometimes it isn’t the hero that provides the story. It is the event. Man against beast, man against nature, man against himself – all the classic story lines will continue even as new structures develop.
• Epic Of Place – Yes, even the 21st century will have its Paterson’s.
• Epic of Time – An epic of time, like an epic of place, is an epic concerned with one particular culture during a specific period of time. It could be a future time, a time in the past, or the present, but the time period must be an integral part to the story. It could even involve some element of time travel, which would make the epic a science fiction or speculative fiction poem, or it could involve flashbacks; any element or device that can be found in poetry or fiction is allowed as long as time is central to the epic story.
• Epic of Form – Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an epic of form is an epic whose form is a principal part of the work.
• National Epic – An epic that seeks to tell the story of a particular nation and its ideals through the characters and events.
• The Personal Epic – A personal epic is an epic poem whose chief character is the author himself and can be written in several different styles. It can be reflective as in the case of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait In A Complex Mirror or it can double as an epic of place or epic of time. A personal epic could have characteristics of other types of stories as well such as the confessional poem made popular by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.
• Science Epic – A science epic is a story whose primary theme deals with scientific concepts. Frederick Turner’s Genesis is a good example of what I’d call a science epic. You could just as well break it down into a sub-genre of ecological epic.
• Cross-Cultural Epic – Surpassing the national epic, I believe there is plenty of room for individuals from different cultural backgrounds, even cultures that are traditionally antagonistic toward each other – collaborating on a story whose chief themes deal with intercultural issues. This could also refer to a single-author epic poem dealing with a similar theme.
• Language Epic – An epic poem whose primary theme is to deal with the uses and complexities of language.
• Visual Epic – An epic whose principal characteristics are visual elements – could be textual or video-based.

There are virtually no limitations on epic form, but epic structures are not as free. There are general trends, as noted in my discussion on the literate age, regarding the development of the epic structure over time. While I see more experimentation in this area for future epics, I do think that there will still be recognizable trends. I doubt that we’ll see a resurgence of iambic pentameter for a complete epic, but I do see some potential for new metrical structures as well as a mashing up metrical structures for the epics of the future. We’ll likely see a return to rhyme and meter, but it won’t look like 17th century rhyme and meter. It will look like 21st century meter and it’s entirely possible that epics will play around with metrical elements in such a way that different characters speak with different meters and pitches and story pacing can be controlled in similar ways. Whatever the case, I think meter will be one area where the epics of the future will do a lot of experimenting.

Conclusion
I hope this clarifies my thoughts from the last blog post on this subject. I know this is very sketchy in detail, but I think most readers will understand the challenges of covering such a broad topic on a blog such as this. There is much I could have said and didn’t. There is much more I might have said and probably should have. I have merely tried to offer a sketch of the possibilities. The rest – the imaginary part – is up to you.

For the purpose of this discussion I’m breaking poetic history down into three periods: The pre-literate, the literate, and the post-literate. The pre-literate period refers to the time in prehistory when poetry was an oral art form and not written. The literate age consists of the bulk of history when writing and reading has allowed for the production and enjoyment of literature as a written art form. The post-literate age is now in its infancy and represents a decline in reading for pleasure and therefore a decline in producing written works (yet to come).

I believe it is necessary to discuss the epic past before getting into the epic future so I will digress to a lengthy discussion on poetic history, in particular, the epic. Most of this first post will be nothing new to most of my more savvy and learned readers. If you don’t want a brush-up, feel free to skip it and wait for the next installment.

Ancient Epics And Setting The Rules
In the pre-literate age, the epic was the preferred poetic form. Because there was no writing, entertainment came by way of those who were willing to perform for others. They sang, danced, chanted, told stories, and re-told the popular and familiar. This was their craft.

When men started writing and creating a written language they naturally took the popular songs and chants and put them on the page for people to read. At first, few people could read. But over time more and more people learned to read and eventually reading became a popular form of entertainment.

It’s interesting, though, that when we examine the ancient epics they all have a few things in common:

• There is a larger-than-life hero
• Action begins in media res – in the middle
• The hero must overcome insurmountable odds to eventuate a victorious outcome
• The hero is rewarded for his courage, strength, and/or heroic deeds (the rewards can be material or immaterial, but often come from the gods)
• Usually, the hero is a warrior, but at times we also see an adventurer-hero
• There is usually some element of romance or a hint of sexual relations between the hero and a maiden or beloved, and often even with a god or two
• The gods often get involved in the affairs of men (and that’s not a sexual reference)

Because performers recited the poems before audiences they needed to remember the lines and most epics were huge. Homer’s epics were quite long so trying to remember every line became a chore. That was the purpose for the rhyme. It was as much a tool for memorization as anything else. Nevertheless, the definition of an epic came to be a story or narrative that told of a hero overcoming grand obstacles to reach a worthy goal. Usually the hero was one person but there have been instances when the hero was a lovable beast or a group of people, a nation even.

The movement from pre-literate storytelling to literate storytelling was a bit subtle in terms of forms. They didn’t change much. The forms and methods used by oral storytellers were the same forms and methods used by those who wrote them down. Initially, written works offered nothing new. They were simply a written re-telling of the stories that had been passed down orally for centuries.

In the next installment of this series I’ll discuss the literate age in depth, though not as in depth as possible (that would take a book). I will cover some highlights and mostly discuss the 20th century. See you then.

I had written the post I promised three days ago – on the two poetry markets and how to reach them. But I’m not going to recreate it now. I’ll just let this post serve as the reminder that I’m back in the groove. Over the next few days, expect a few of my usual grandiose sentiments:

• The two poetry markets
• What long-term narratives in the 21st century will look like (thanks G.M. Palmer)
• And whatever else I can think of

Rest assured, I have not given up my license to practice philosophy or forgotten about the need for a solid 21st century poetics. Stay tuned faithful readers.