I Support Joe Wenderoth (Buttons Available)

Hey, there was a controversy on Silliman's blog about a certain Joe Wenderoth poem from his new poetry collection. People were really getting heated up over what the poem "meant," to what degree it was ironic, and to what degree it represented the aesthetics of the "School of Quietude." This latter doesn't really exist; it just refers to people Ron Silliman wishes would be quiet, I think, because the various philosophical (and other) meanings of Quietude don't rubricize the diverse writers Silliman lumps under that epithet in any useful manner at all.

That much said, I think Ron is a great guy and as a poetry cynosure he does a pretty darn good job of trying to be as inclusive as possible.

And he did say he really likes 85% of the Wenderoth book he partially bashed. That's a great compliment. Ron has great taste quite ofen.

I liked the poem quite a bit. In fact, I'll reproduce it here along with the various commentary.

I submitted a comment but it got zapped. I doubt Ron did that deliberately. Shit gets lost on Blogger. But I saved it, because the same thing happened to a comment I left before, so I'll reproduce the whole darn daisy chain of bitches and laurels for ya.

I was shocked to learn Ron is a lover of Project Runway. Just made me like the man more. I'm a total addict for several seasons now. He must be one of them there Philly metrosexuals I hear about lol.

Anyway, here's the whole testosterone monkey fest for your enjoyment, and thanks to Ron for starting it. Wenderoth should be glad his work divides critics, as any poetry worth its salt will.

Ron wrote...
Wednesday, September 17, 2008



Of the 19 authors whose books I read in judging the Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams’ award that I thought deserved greater praise & attention, Joe Wenderoth’s name comes last alphabetically, tho that’s no reflection on No Real Light, a book that is full of sparkle. Many of the poems here come across as a post-NY School aesthetics updated to a less urban landscape, e.g.

   What Does Death Insure

death insures
that one will never hear
again
the sound of a small plane
sketched out in the sand
of a windless summer afternoon

or

   Operation Enduring Freedom

like an eagle
into the sun

over frozen fields

bone-fed grasses

or, the poem from which this book takes its title,

   King Hiram

there is
where all this rings true

no real light

Poem after poem here jumps out at you like these, crafted with an exact eye & a strong sense of when to stop. Not that they’re perfect – that first poem would have been considerably stronger had the term “summer” been dropped from its final line – but because they evidence a mind completely awake to the world.

Which is why, when suddenly it dips into the clichés of the School of Quietude, you wonder what’s going on:

Twentieth-Century Pleasures

A woman has two children:
one is seven, a girl with Down syndrome,
and one is five, a deaf-mute boy.
Every day, the woman’s husband beats her
and calls her a lazy whore.
After a few years
the woman moves back into her mother’s house.
She locks the doors when her mother is at work,
but her husband, having promised to kill her,
gets in through a basement window.
When she hears and meets him in the basement,
pleading for her life,
he breaks her spine with a hammer.
As the two children watch from the steps,
he shoots her in the back of the head,
then turns the gun on himself.
The seven-year old, the girl with Down syndrome,
runs four blocks to the police station.
When the police arrive at the house,
the five-year old,
the poet,
a deaf-mute boy,
is kneeling by his mother’s head,
pressing the pool of blood back toward her.
They pull him away and he doesn’t resist.
They think he has been playing there
in a pool of his mother’s blood.
That is truly what they think:
he was playing in a pool of his dead mother’s blood.
Later, with his bloody hands
he says things they cannot understand,
and they know then, at least,
that he was not playing.

Think for a minute how Charles Reznikoff would have handled this same narrative & you can see all the elements of melodramatic overwriting that come into play here, up to & including putting the poet onto a line all its own complete with italics. All we need are violins.

And this is the real issue of No Real Light – it has some of the best writing I’ve come across this year, but it also has more than a few real clunkers like the above. Of the 19 books I was wowed by in the contest (out of an original pool of 150), it easily is the most uneven. If this wasn’t his fourth book & he wasn’t already an associate professor at UC Davis, I’d be inclined to think that Wenderoth was a beginner who didn’t know how to put a manuscript together. That may still be the case, but at this point it’s inexcusable.

Reading Wenderoth’s web page at UC Davis, I get the sense that he may be more interested in poetry that is performable – in the Henry Rollins sense – than in the printed page, which may explain this puzzle. A poem like ”Twentieth-Century Pleasures” just might work very well at a reading to an audience inexperienced in contemporary poetry – those short pieces would likewise – but it does so for all the reasons that make poetry as performance an inherently debased art. The exact same qualities that would make you cringe at an episode of Matlock work very well at pulling forward stock emotions from audiences who aren’t trained to recognize such manipulations. There’s a reason why so many poets who participate in slams are notoriously unread. This might not be slam material, but the dynamics are fundamentally the same.

So Wenderoth is a puzzle. Eighty percent of this book is tremendous, maybe even 85. But I wonder why he doesn’t know to separate out work that simply reveals the gaping weaknesses of a performance-oriented poetics. I can envision, say, a half dozen very good books by him, followed perhaps by one collection of such performance pieces that are as lurid & mawkish as one might imagine. That would be a strange but do-able approach. Wenderoth’s current strategy undercuts much of what is excellent in this book.

Labels: Joe Wenderoth

And here's the commentary train, which sort of turned into a sausage-fest, but not the sort I like to watch on d.v.d....
45 CommentsClose this window Jump to comment form
k.s.rosenberg said...
Ron,

I am a bit confused about your School of Quietude
definition of certain types of poetry. Could somebody explain this to me.

September 17, 2008


Vance Maverick said...
That last one is indeed surprisingly crude. Turning back to the first couple you quoted, it casts a shadow over them, bringing out a sentimentality in them (though they remain well made).

Wikipedia tells us that Hiram was a key mythological figure for Masonry...wonder if that's the reference for the third poem.

September 17, 2008


Ron said...
In this instance, the idea of the poem as a bad short story broken into lines is the SoQ marker. But any poetics that thinks that American literature is a derivative tributary of British lit would qualify. In the U.K., the SoQ would be that writing that thinks it is better if it is indistinguishable from the old (viz Andy Motion or Simon Armitage or Glyn Maxwell).

September 17, 2008


alan hay said...
I'm all for the strategy of naming the 'unmarked case', and I'm always pleased to see the wrecked spectre of Poe hanging around. I do sometimes wonder though if post-avant vs SOQ isn't pretty much hip vs square. If you just called them squares everything might be clearer.

September 17, 2008


Johannes said...
Ron,

Your misreading of "Twentieth Century Pleasures" is shocking. How on earth could this be "quietude"?? Your statements that the piece is "overwritten" "cliche" and a "clunker" are so normative and workshoppy. The proof is in the pudding: this clunkiness is the very anathema of quietude. Your reaction suggests you have much more in common with quietude than you would care to admit.

Look at the title. Could it be that we are in the realm of the intentionally tasteless? The narrative is of course over-the-top! Down syndrome, abuse, deafness. I read the end as a tasteless joke.

All of your language betrays an incredible amount of elitist aestheticism - it's tasteless, it's for a beginning audience. It's no *artful* enough. I am surprised that you have no self-awareness about making such claims.

But this is at the core of a poem like this (in difference to the other examples which seem far more lyrical, far more acceptable by quietist standards).

Perhaps you are right, this would make sense to an audience of non-specialists, who do not know that art is supposed to be smooth, lyrical, perfect, well-wrought; who are not officers to protect the purity of expression. Clearly it does not make sense to this specialist (you) who wants his poetry to be elegant.

Johannes

September 17, 2008


Jordan said...
Thanks for the follow-up remarks here in the comment box.

The italicized the poet sounds harmless to me, and it also sounds a lot like: Franz Wright; like frame-breaking, which ought to be at the least not inconsistent with post-Brechtian poetics; and the complete opposite of an "only disconnect" poetics that enforces permanent parataxis.

That said, I'm not much of a Dostoevskyan. I know, I know, button pushing beats window dressing, but still.

September 17, 2008


Jeff said...
For what it's worth, which may be nothing at all, I would argue that Wenderoth is acting the enfant terrible here (a pose he often assumes and one that does not wear well), and that by giving his poem the title of Robert Hass's collected essays, he's signaling that he's attacking certain kinds of poetic cliches and poetic poses (in an essay published a while back in APR Wenderoth made it clear that he's no admirer of Hass). So the flat tone of the poem and deliberately bad writing are intentional. Think about how Hass writes about his mother when you read the italicized line in the poem.

September 17, 2008


Joseph Hutchison said...
"[P]oetry as performance" is "an inherently debased art."

Somebody give me a time machine so I can go back and warn Homer! Yes, if only those tedious epics could be rewritten as fragmentary collections of really clever wordplay. If only...

September 17, 2008


Kirby Olson said...
I thought all these poems were terrible. The last one was just really terrible.

Lifetime TV would have done a better job on the last one.

Reznikoff had some dignity and some respect for his audience.

As does Lifetime TV.

September 17, 2008


Jonathan David Jackson said...
Yet another half-nasty mis-reading from you based on unchecked assumptions about the poet and a kind of sophomoric labeling that you would never countenance being done to you or those who you consider your peers. And your incredibly generalized definition in the comments section has so, so little to do with "Twentieth-Century Pleasures," a most loud poem that resonates even with recent politics of disability and child-rearing as raised by the Republican vice presidential candidate's son. In fact, narrative can be quite innovative (especially when it blurs specific reference and plays with the question of the universality of the blunt suffering figured in the "Twentieth-Century Pleasures"--the narration of seeming "pleasures" itself being the ultimate ironic intervention into a century that often did not care about disability in any substantive way such subjects...real subjects about fallible people and not just poems about poems and tricks about tricks) and it is not always a mark of something ill to engage narration. It is just another tool as vital as hypotaxis and parataxis and fragmentation and irony and all the strategies of poetics. It takes a really vicious, unchanging, unlistening person not to see this.

But you rarely if ever exhibit any sense of interpretive generosity: you see poems as you or your peers would have written them (removing "summer" from the last line of "What Does Death Insure" is how you would write the poem and wholly incidental to how Professor Wenderoth wrote the poem) instead of interpreting what is actually before you carefully beyond the passive-aggression (or just plain aggression) of your relentless narcissism and biases (as in you think most every poem is really about you and your tastes and preferences; and you think you are always right about everything with little room to interrogate your own biases; and you think you are a chief arbitrator of taste and you may be for some but not for others).

September 17, 2008


John Gallaher said...
I read a review of this book (in Pleiades maybe?) that was the flip-side of your reaction here. 20th Century Pleasures was singled out as one of the very few poems that worked, excpet that the reviewer didn't trust that the poem wasn't really just a send-up of this sort of poem. Maybe he's just playing here. Or maybe he was not playing. That sort of thing.

September 17, 2008


Name: Matthew Guenette said...
I keep my copy of Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems—which I love—on the “HOAX” shelf in my mind, right next to the prize awarded it.

eyeye
want my
ey
mon
back…

CLASSIC! That’s how a friend of mine who also loves the book put it.

As for Wenderoth, before now, the worst I’ve heard anyone say of his poetry was that it was knife-sharp and often hilarious. I wish LangPo was often hilarious…

Funny how a thing gets defined by otherness, by what presses in on it. Based on this blog, one definition of SoQ might be: that poetry which LangPos rail against.

Someone once told me this blog reminds them of really smart right wingers—who aren’t gay, mind you—spending all their time talking about what’s wrong with homosexuality. Or a kid in the corner holding his breath. There’s a lot wrong with those analogies, but I didn’t feel inclined to point that out.

September 17, 2008


neverneutral said...
Dear Ron,
I don't know if you have already posted about this, but the benefit for the Aura Estrada Prize will be held tomorrow in NYC:

http://premioauraestrada.com/events_eng.html

Hope you can give us a hand promoting it.

thank you...

e

September 17, 2008


mark wallace said...
It seems to me that the poem in question here can be read either seriously or as satire. That could be considered fascinating ambiguity, but I'm not sure it is, mainly because on either reading I'm not sure the poem works very well. As a clumsy, sincere, emotional poem it's not really gripping, even when factoring in the idea that clumsiness in the face of shock might be part of the point. As a satire on the self-obsessed trauma of the confessional poet, I'm not sure it goes much farther than saying that the poet, in the aftermath of trauma, takes his own emotions as more central than the shocking incident in question and as more central than the language used to write about the incident. That's a marginally interesting critique if hardly a startlingly original insight.

My guess is that, if and when the writer reads this piece aloud, his vocal inflections are likely to emphasize one of these possibilities more definitely.

September 17, 2008


Steven Fama said...
Dear Ron,

Those who suggest here that "Twentieth Century Pleasures" is biting parody seem to have a point.

The tone and style are very similar to some of Robert Hass's poems, it seems to me, and the title would appear to be a very big tip-off that Wenderoth has Hass in his sights here.

If the poem is indeed a sarcastic swipe, you have missed the mark. It's as if you criticized Wenderoth's previous book Letters to Wendy's because it didn't entirely consist of complaints about burgers and fries.

September 17, 2008


Ron said...
I think I agree mostly with Mark Wallace here. I had not thought of the Hass volume -- I own the book but have resisted reading it, in part because I like Bob's work and expect it to give me new qualms.

But the scale of the poem doesn't work with the rest of the book, even if one thought it a terrific bit of satire.

September 17, 2008


Steven Fama said...
You've not read Twentieth Century Pleasures because it might give you qualms?!!!!

My goodness, the book's almost 25 years old. After all these years, curiosity alone should spur you to take a look.

Anyway, some of the best books to read -- especially literary criticism I think, are those that trigger qualms. Such qualms often shake one's own views onto firmer ground. Or maybe shake them onto something a little different.

If you really want to shiver with a book of poetry criticism, go find a copy of Yvor Winters Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937). Lucid and, from my perspective 70 plus years later, staggeringly wrong. But definitely worth a read.

September 17, 2008


JeFF Stumpo said...
Poetry as performance an inherently debased art? You've been watching too much Def Poetry Jam.

Poetry as performance can be, and ought to be, poetry that cannot be successful on the page. The integration (not just use) of sound, the use of gesture and motion to create a new level of metaphor (think of the complex sign/written/spoken pieces performed by ASL duo Flying Words), cognizance of physical presence (that is, knowing what one looks like, what the audience's expectations for that are, and playing for or against these expectations) - these are the hallmarks of poetry in performance. Admittedly, to find a poem that actually does these things is rare, just as finding a spectacular page poem is rare.

The poem in question by Wenderoth, satirical or not, does not immediately strike me as a performance piece. Perhaps it is better in performance, but because it just happens to perform better than it reads, not because it was crafted to be performed.

September 17, 2008


Johannes said...
Mark,

I don't think either one of those pat interpretations get at the poem. If the poem was either one of those, it would indeed be not that great.

To me it's something much more startling and unsettling than just irony. But it's certainly not a sincere emotional poem. I don't understand how you can read it as such.

This is a poem we're going to have to do a bit more work than just the easy old categorizing.

In some ways it reminds me of the Chelsey Minnis book Ron had ambivalent feelings about the other week.

Johannes

September 17, 2008


Matt said...
"But it's certainly not a sincere emotional poem. I don't understand how you can read it as such."

Oh. That's the way I read it. I guess that means I'm dumb. I also wasn't aware of the Hass connection. I'm ashamed of my ignorance.

September 17, 2008


William Michaelian said...
There’s a tempest in my teacup!
Oh, well, it’s after three o’clock.
I think I’ll switch to beer.

September 17, 2008


peter said...
i just agree with Johannes. his first post especially.

September 17, 2008


mark wallace said...
Johannes, I can see your third way here: the poem as celebration/critique of the bathos of American culture, a flarf-like gesture. I think that may complicate the role of the traumatized poet satire a bit, but it still contains the same satire, that of the poet picturing his own sensitivity as in any way relevant in a culture of this level of tastelessness.

Still, reading the poem that way doesn't make it that much more successful for me because the other readings are still possible. The poem's ambiguity here seems the ambiguity of a poem that isn't quite able to clarify its intentions, as opposed to one that is purposefully layering them. If it wants to be a kind of narrative flarf, I think much flarf already does that sort of thing better. The poem is really kind of tamely and politely tasteless, don't you think?

September 17, 2008


James said...
The entire poem is a satire of the soft tone and topics of NPR-narcotized narrative writing, taken to the most mawkishly raw, absurd place. The whispery, italicized line is a deadpan jab at sanctimony. Wenderoth did the same thing in his Letter's to Wendy's, involving there the absolute pornography of fast food commerce. And the clunkiness in the poem is on purpose, etc.

September 17, 2008


John Gallaher said...
I’m reminded of a review of a movie many years ago I never saw, one about a telethon where Meatloaf battles a car. It’s a phrase that has always stuck with me, and in this context it goes something like if you’re making self-consciously bad art to parody unintentionally bad art, you’re still just making bad art.

September 18, 2008


Tortilla ex Machina said...
I am not sure that these poems are 'crafted with an exact eye.' Not to be petty, but I was stopped by the second word – 'insure' – which is a misspelled, unless the poet means that Death buys insurance.

Although I do like the idea of Death buying insurance. That would make a nice poem, too.

I think he means 'ensure.'

I do think that he could lose 'summer' though, as you suggested. Although I hope that I never do, personally.

September 18, 2008


Kirby Olson said...
I'm starting to like the poem better now that I see it in line with his other poems (which I haven't read, but which are referred to here). Thanks for sharpening the context for me.

September 18, 2008


Andy Gricevich said...
It is amazing and depressing that we live in a culture so sarcastic that a poem with absolutely no markers of irony can be read as intentionally ironic. And it probably is. But that basically makes us a culture of assholes, unable either to take seriously something as serious as familial abuse or to say anything genuinely critical about the cliched, insipid, or otherwise ineffective ways in which such "soft" topics are presented to us.

Instead, we get crap like this poem, which--if it is a "satire"--just produces another instance of the thing it's supposed to satirize. How horrid it is, what a jaded existence it takes, in order to so knowingly nod: "it must be ironic, because it can't be serious" (and for no other reason). How smug, and how genuinely elitist, is this "we know better" training in the most shallow kind of irony.


Anyway, it isn't worthy of the name "satire." Satire is about pushing a logic to the point at which its illogic breaks through. This poem doesn't push anything. Its most "over-the-top" moments are of such a familiar type as to be unavoidable. It just repeats what's forced upon us anyway.

September 18, 2008


Curtis Faville said...
Ron's distinction was never between "overwrought" and everything else. Zukofsky is certainly the most "overwrought" writer who ever lived, but its "wrought" is continuously creative at every level.

Quietude's defining limitation is its slavish adherence to previous models, its fear of ambiguity and elaborated meanings, its reluctance to address difference* in language and thought.

You run into a lot of these "tough-guy" stances in heavily male poetizing. The "my cock is harder than yours" attitude. The claim of irony or "reportage" is weak if the writing is uninflected and dry.

Alan Dugan was a master of these poses, and he usually managed to bring it off, the same way Catullus does, through ironic self-regard/self-deprecation , sarcasm or humor.

Just reproducing police-blotter narratives has a certain cache, but it's very old news. The odd bird like James Ellroy will do it, but it certainly has limitations.

Ron's objection here is really more to the confusion which is created through a truncation of styles--the reader is left wondering whether these are just "examples" of style, or a schizophrenic misapprehension of the effect the different approaches cause. Oral poetry can achieve certain affects which are lost on the page, and vice versa. A writer can disarm a reader by not defining a central "voice"--all the poems end up seeming like "specimens" instead of the expression of a single integrated mind.

The other kind that absolutely offends me is smarmy radical ranters who presume that you (the audience) accept (or should) their narrowly focused prejudice about the world ("I know everyone here agrees....").

_____

*And I don't mean sexual-ethnic-cultural "difference" but cognitive difference.

September 18, 2008


Rain Delay said...
If it's emotionally sincere, it sucks.

If it's satire, it's unfunny satire, which basically makes it worthless.

Stop overthinking it!

September 18, 2008


John said...
It's also a satire of Kinnell's bear poem. The poet marked by blood.

September 18, 2008


Johannes said...
I agree with James comments. Well-said.

John G., Andy etc
I don't think it's mere parody. Also, I think to write a maudlin emotional poem about this would be far more expected, far less unsettling than this is.

Curtis wrote:
"Quietude's defining limitation is its slavish adherence to previous models, its fear of ambiguity and elaborated meanings, its reluctance to address difference* in language and thought."

Holy cats! Quietism (think Jorie Graham) is now positively based on ambiguity and elaborated meanings!

Mark,
I think you're closer. But I found this poem more unsettling precisely because it's so between registers (it may seem "politely tasteless" - but what a weird effect!).

Johannes

September 18, 2008


Johannes said...
Also, Joe Wenderoth has a performance piece in the new issue of my online magazine Action,Yes - www.actionyes.org.

September 18, 2008


Kirby Olson said...
I don't know what it is. Warhol had this kind of tongue in cheek aspect. I think that's where Wenderoth is aiming.

A certain kind of blankness.

I'd read some of his poems from Wendy's, and I think people are arguing, Andy, not that the poem can be read in and of itself in a new critical way, but with the support of the rest of Joe's work to show that it has a kind of satire in it.

To me, more precisely, Joe's work is somewhat more along the lines of Warhol's blankness -- he has car crashes and tomato soup cans, but doesn't really comment on them. He doesn't have a point. But he's putting the detritus of fast food, soap opera culture, into a new frame, as Warhol did.

I sort of like Warhol.

But I don't need two Warhols, personally. Or three.

One was plenty.

September 18, 2008


phaneronoemikon said...
It is so odd to hear Kirby speak
as if he understands anything. The Earth is always already a Warhol, a
War-Hole, a Various hall, Wave-Ars-Ole'.. What is the point.
Life is beyond Determination, hence Difference.. In mythic terms look at the delimited 'affect' of "The Tower of Babel" ie "The Hierarchy of Eternally Nascent Geometry"..

babe El
The blue OX

sad ness or Zen
Nessie or Elasmo

E, alas, more..

pluroma..
contradiction..

I am always so surprised
how little, how very little
the world has made itself known
inside the contemporary poet..

Kirby,
you are small.
small and dank.

Ron,
you are scared,
scared and puce.

World,
you are trickling,
vane and tickling.

whatever man.

The concept of the Singularity
will take ALL COMERS

AND LAY THEM LOW!

LO!

POETRY IS!

September 18, 2008


Andy Gricevich said...
I think that Warhol is truly awful.

But that's off the subject. I think "Rain Delay" puts it well. I don't find the poem unsettling at all--just (as Mark says) tame. Boring. In fact, it's the way a line like "he breaks her spine with a hammer," which I do find unsettling, can be part of a poem that isn't, that bugs me about it. The mechanics of the possibility of that divide are worth investigating, exposing, analyzing and criticizing, but I don't think the poem does that.

September 18, 2008


Curtis Faville said...
Johannes:

Think of what a defense of Kinnell's The Bear would lead you to.

Kinnell's poems are addressed to a shared audience of committed feeling(s), through specific, unambiguous levels of statement. Narrative with vivid imagistic observation leading to a "cathartic" conclusion.

Take a poet like Donne. Could you say that his poems are either simple or condescending? It is very possible to feel deeply about a subject without either over-dressing it or dumbing it down.

I'm not sure what you're saying about Jorie Graham. To my mind, she's either a fake experimentalist or a failed one. I read her work, thinking: This is trying so hard to seem brave and exploratory, but it just seems vague and scattered.

I'm not your apologist for Ron's avant.

September 18, 2008


Meg said...
Leave it to Ron Silliman to choose some bad poetry and give it to the SoQ.

Right on!

So expected. So usual.

September 19, 2008


John Gallaher said...
I think it should be noted that, outside of this discussion of the "intentions" of this poem, the post also said that 80-85% of this book is very well done.

September 19, 2008


Curtis Faville said...
"Give it to the SoQ."

?

No one who read Ron's post and understood it would say anything that naive.

Your sarcasm's irrelevant.

September 19, 2008


chippens said...
Ron, in this case it appears you attempted to go out clipped-wing quail hunting but instead shot one of your own in the face.

If something seems so grossly out of place from a professional poet, it would serve you well to at least investigate all possible reasons why before firing your birdshot.

September 19, 2008


James said...
Related to this type of single satirical poem in a mass of other poems in Wenderoth's book, as a little dig at 20th C. Pleasures, I thought of Kenneth Koch's poem regarding Williams's poems:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!


Go here for the proper formatting:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/poem191.html

September 19, 2008


Matt said...
But James, the difference is, Koch's poem is funny.

September 21, 2008


James said...
Wenderoth's satire is aiming for a bit more than an easy laugh. Koch took a different route.

September 22, 2008


Matt said...
But how are you supposed to know it's satire if it's not funny?


And here's my comment and reading of the poem, which got zapped....

William sez....

I like the hotly-contested poem. I didn't like the other short poems nearly as much. I like Wenderoth's work in general because his poetry doesn't fit any pre-fab aesthetic model (like 99.94218% of poetry) and it forces me to argue with its constructions of the world (which are often conflicting and/or contradictory).

I do think the poem is very funny in a very dark way.

It strikes me as a very American poem. I can't imagine a poet of any other nationality writing that poem.

I read the poem as a critique of various historical and contemporary models of (possibly poetic but not necessarily only that) expression (all of the ones you are arguing about). I also think the poem is very much about the intentional fallacy; I think it's about the poem seen from outside.

And it's "about" what it says it's "about" too. The horrible story is probably literally true.

The poem reminds me of Wittgenstein talking about objectivity, and how funny it really is...the presumption that such a thing is possible.

Even the most dire acts remain ambiguous.

The puddle of blood meataphor (I say meataphor instead of metaphor because that's rather raw!) pretty much says it perfectly when it comes to these arguments about whose writing is more "real." It plays with the insult that is lobbed at writing that is seen to have lost the world, somehow...what we call (in the cliche) "bloodless."

Is the poem merely playing with language--a common accusation used against the avant-garde forms of writing--or is it "expressing itself" in a "deep" way--the probably philosophically indefensible forms of "authenticity" some people valorize.

I think the Wenderoth poem pretty much contains all of the conversation taking place here.

Because the world is a bloody mess, and we are all playing here on that blood-soaked floor, and people are watching each other in this blood, very concerned about what each person's intentions for the poem are.

Are you merely playing in the poet's blood in that hominid way, or are you trying to save art with your strange gesticulations....insisting he made a bloody mess of "your" art...

I imagine a pre-formed question for a textbook containing this poem would say:

"Is Wenderoth (the author) merely playing in the poem's puddle of blood? Or is he articulating a 'semiotic of blood?'

And a good answer to this on a quiz might be: "I don't know. The man is strange and invites argument. Like his poetry."


postscript: I didn't write this at the time, but I think William Carlos William would really recognize a descendant in Joe Wenderoth. They are both radical Americans, distinctly American, and speaking to all of us. I say that last sentence not in a jingoistic way...think more like a curse of blood...curse and gift...sort of like being born Antigone. You're Antigone, but you're fucked. Because you're Antigone. Now what you gonna do?

And I have the strongest suspicion that those people comparing Wenderoth to Reznikoff negatively would be bashing a poem like "The Children" or many of the Testimony poems if they were offered up here as contemporary writing with their naked austerity, their horrible literal truth. But once an author has been "taken up," they follow the Alpha male dead oh so obediently.

In case you didn't notice it, I like Joe quite a bit.

He also makes awesome videos for his poems, and often makes great music. Check him out on YouTube.