Jack Kimball on David Orr

was interesting to me. Thanks for pointing me to that Jack, with your blog post of a few days ago.

I read it, and I have to say the only comment I would like to make to Mr. Orr is: sounds like a personal problem to me, buddy.

I have no problem whatsoever with finding greatness in contemporary poetry, among poets who are actually living and breathing.

I'd suggest Mr. Orr is reading the wrong books.

And this paragraph by Mr. Orr:

"What, then, do we assume greatness looks like? There is no one true answer to that question, no neat test or rule, since our unconscious assumptions are by nature unsystematic and occasionally contradictory. Generally speaking, though, the style we have in mind tends to be grand, sober, sweeping — unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical. It’s less likely to involve words like “canary” and “sniffle” and “widget” and more likely to involve words like “nation” and “soul” and “language.” And the persona we associate with greatness is something, you know, exceptional — an aristocrat, a rebel, a statesman, an apostate, a mad-eyed genius who has drunk from the Fountain of Truth and tasted the Fruit of Knowledge and donned the Beret of. . . . Well, anyway, it’s somebody who takes himself very seriously and demands that we do so as well. Greatness implies scale, and a great poet is a big sensibility writing about big things in a big way."

Jack, I think you deconstructed this well, showed the phallocentric (okay whip me for using that word but....!!) quantitative rather than qualitative thinking which is behind sentences like these; to wit, a fetishization of authority, massiveness, publishing tumescence and an equation of these merely historical and temporary things with greatness.

"Canary" and "sniffle" and "widget" would appeal to Frank O'Hara more than the grand abstractions which Orr valorizes as somehow more innately "poetic."

Everybody wants the grand and hates the grandiose.

Didn't Gertrude Stein say somewhere that everybody already knows everything anyway? In some locution or other?

We all know about those grandiose thoughts that failed the world.

Tell us something different.

Wallace Stevens was all about the grandiose thoughts that failed the world.

His poetry was often an eloquent eulogy spoken over those ideas.

Sometimes Stevens was grand and sometimes Stevens was merely grandiose. Sometimes he was both and sometimes he was embarrassingly florid, rubicund with ardor and supergay.

Orr seems to recognize O'Hara as great, but doesn't seem to realize that O'Hara was never a poet of ideas. He had no use for the grand themes Orr valorizes unless he was making fun of them as untenable and merely silly. He understood the various arts and their plasticities and their hearts and could translate these things into the English language, yes.

He could transmute a Franz Kline painting into a love poem.

What was great about O'Hara's writing was its heart, its muddled heart like a snowy New York street with feet pressed down into it. Ashes under feet. He was a mess. His poetry was a mess. He was laughing the whole time.

This is why he "got" Russian poetry. Or the most extravagant Russians like Mayakovsky.

He wrote tilting, lurching, pining, horny, idealistic, depressed, funny, deadly serious poems.

He didn't have Prozac or whatever the latest drug du jour is.

He had alcohol.

He had hook ups.

He had looking at great art and writing about it as his job.

He had good, smart friends and artists around him to feed his mind and to steal from.

Yes, he addressed the nation on segregation and letting your kids discover their sexuality at the movies and everything else. But he didn't do it in that rhetorical way Orr is pining for above.

He just illuminated everything with his insane, Petronian personality.

Here's the real secret of great poets and great poetry that Orr is missing: We need to like you.

For you to be a great poet (and this is so damn unfair!) we need to actually like you as a person.

I need to feel you are with me at some level or on many levels.

Nobody can like Robert Lowell. Not really. Could you have walked into a room and sat in a chair opposite him and had a conversation and not an interview.

No. You couldn't. Stop lying.

Only if you are a mirror image of him and god help you if you are.

Now Anne Sexton. You could have talked to her. She would have laughed at herself and you would have laughed at yourself and you would feel funny when you walked out of the room where she was, as though you had just lost something.

That's what it's all about.

It is a horrible popularity contest after all.

Oh no!

You become popular for a reason. Or you don't. For a reason.

Your poetry has to be useful to my neurosis, my fears about the probable meaninglessness of the universe, my ridiculous sex drive, my fears that I am not as worthy as the person riding next to me on the bus who is much better dressed than I am, my fears that my goldfish is going to die while I'm on vacation, my worries about what language really is and if it really reflects reality in any significant way...whatever lol....

Your poetry has to befriend me.

This is why I no longer read the poetry of Eliot or Pound.

They suck as friends.

This is why I read Lorine Niedecker. Why I read Ted Berrigan. Why I read Eileen Myles. Why I read Wislawa Szymborska.

And if you're having problems finding great living poets, here is a list of poets who match any of those poets Orr is eulogizing and lamenting as lost...

Alice Notley. Adrienne Rich. Anne Carson. Bernadette Mayer. Eileen Myles. Robin Blaser. Rae Armantrout. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Elke Erb. John Taggart. Amiri Baraka. Leslie Scalapino. Clark Coolidge. Lyn Hejinian. Susan Howe. Fanny Howe. Rosmarie Waldrop. Robert Kelly. Louise Gluck. Henri Cole. Wislawa Szymborska. John Yau. Michael Palmer. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Harryette Mullen. Joan Retallack.

These writers are alive to millions of minds. These writers are crossing the borders between nations and between supposedly irreconcilable conceptions of poetry.

Why is Orr living fifty years in the past? Why is he pining?

Did The Times really feel that what we need is another reactionary article, another thinly-disguised, premature lament on "the death of poetry"?

Those articles only signify the death of one reader's interest.

As I wrote above, it sounds like a personal problem.

Is The Times where we are to air our personal problems now? Because if it is, I want to tell them about the water not going down my bathtub as quickly as I would like it to when I remove the plastic thingie.

I have no doubt that many of the poets I listed above will be read for generations, and that their reputations will pull many of them up even with and often past any of the reputations of the twentieth century poets he cites as paragons of poetic greatness in that article.

I like Elizabeth Bishop quite a bit, but I think the plethora of published esteem I encounter of late for her meticulous sort of craftsmanship and the obvious good heart of her poetry is becoming a tad saccharine at this point.

Yes, she's a great poet, Bishop, but if you would pick Bishop over Niedecker, I feel sorry for you. Okay, that was smug. But really. I mean if you like that sort of thing, Frost does it ten times better. Frost and Bishop could be brother and sister really.

Alright enough kvetching.

I am so grateful that I have found the writing of so many great contemporary poets and that their writing lives with me and within me. And that I have new books by these authors to which I can look forward.

Because they are, like, living.

Yeah, I'll read O'Hara and Bishop and (in a blue moon) Ashbery and the rest of the writers whose marble busts Orr burnishes with a tear-soaked chamois.

But think outside the syllabi dude.

The bookstore ain't exactly the veldt, but it's got a helluva lot more interesting wildlife than most universities.

And the net. Why that's even wilder.

Look at all the freaky creatures peeking at you through the pampas grasses around these parts.

It gives me quite a thrill.

It's too soon for hanging the statues with a pall and walking with a candelabrum down the dusty halls of poetic history and rubbing the marble pates of poetic busts.

We got live ones here!

Poke them instead.