“Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”

I have been previewing Facebook’s upcoming Timeline feature. It turns one’s profile into a scrapbook-style autobiography, arranging multimedia posts in a chronology from birth to present. It is part of a larger strategy to promote information sharing that has been intelligently criticized in general terms. But it was a specific moment in my exploration of Timeline that pulled me up short. Clicking on the small heart icon for “Relationships”, up popped a menu item for marking one’s timeline with “Lost a Loved One.”

Though we have memorialised our son in many ways, the thought of posting his photo on Facebook beneath the small flower icon to make it part of this music-video-all-about-me of a web application struck me as painfully absurd. He is deeply and irrevocably part of my life. But a biography is not a life, much less an online profile. We have become a society obsessed with crafting our image–so much so that we almost believe, and sometimes attempt to inhabit, these spun self-tales.

The antidote to the future we now inhabit, wherein everyone has their own Wikipedia page for fifteen minutes, is art. Mark Twain called biographies “the clothes and buttons of a man,” deciding, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But something approaching what it feels like to be a man can come across in the literary arts, and especially poetry. Poetry is the anti-wiki, striving for truths that need no citation, encompassing contradictions rather than devolving into fact-slinging “flame wars.”

And so, when it is released next month, I will use Timeline. But for matters that transcend time, and excavate the inmost reality, I’m sticking with poems.

Mark Burnhope

The two poets mentioned in this collection–Wallace Stevens and Zbignew Herbert–are both poets of rich imagination and lyrical intensity. The former generally relates to more abstract thoughts and feelings, whereas the latter treats difficult personal topics such as the Nazi occupation of Poland. What do you see as the role of personally difficult subject matter in your own work? How does this inhibit or fuel your creative power?

That’s a fantastic observation, that thoughts and feelings / topics and issues paradox. I am interested in what happens when thoughts and feelings, beliefs and doctrines (which are abstract and elusive, however much we argue about it) bump into authentic, concrete experience; how faith or religion helps and hinders social change, and how the desire for change sometimes necessitate a revision of personal belief systems.

To take one hot potato for example, homosexuality and homophobia: there was a point when I decided, “Stuff all this in-fighting, I’m tired of being part of a religion which fails to recognise and offer love wherever it finds it. God doesn’t exclude, he welcomes.” I’ve always identified with the ways the LGBT community has been maligned in the Church, because a lot of disabled people experience the same thing; for me, it finds its crux in talk of ‘healing the sick’. A lot of people want to heal us, believing that God made us this way by accident, or that we’re the handiwork of Satan. Even in completely secular contexts, there are feelings of pity and the desire to see us fit a more able-bodied norm in order to be accepted. Inclusiveness and equality are essential values to my faith, and that finds its way into my poems.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. I’m hoping I depersonalise it, make some of these received notions less romantic (and Romantic, even though I quite like the Romantics).

I quite like the Romantics, too. Who are some of the poets who influenced you early on? Who are a few more recent favourites?

Early on, I’d read and enjoyed things by Keats and Coleridge. I was fourteen when Wordsworth and Blake grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. It’s difficult to remember what I thought of them then, but Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is something that all of us who wrote poetry as teenagers know too well (and which “Romanticism” has sadly been reduced to, sometimes). Wordsworth qualified it by saying that poets should think long and hard to ‘earn’ the right to pour out feelings. I liked that, and wanted to have a go at it. Blake attracted me because he was full of irony. The Romantics revelled in irony. Even their name is ironic, because, far from being fluffy, they had balls: a social and public vision. They wanted revolution. But they knew that revolution begins in the heart, and the pen. Songs of Innocence and of Experience was children’s nursery rhymes for grown-ups. That musicality and magic was offset by harsh social criticism, anger, and corrective satire.

Most of my reading-for-pleasure has probably fallen into the metaphysical or ‘religious’ (whatever that might mean), pastoral / landscape / nature, the ‘anti-poetries’ which are either slightly experimental, or deal with difficult personal and public subjects, satire. I’m generally quite flummoxed by the separation of ‘mainstream’ from anything else. So, I love Ted Hughes, Heaney, McCaig, the Thomases. Recently, I’ve been inspired by Mick Imlah, Peter Didsbury, Alice Oswald, Andrew Philip, Luke Kennard, Lisa Jarnot, Tony Williams, A.B. Jackson, Angela Topping, Michael Symmons Roberts. Experimental writers such as Tim Atkins and Ira Lightman, and various things coming out of The Knives Forks and Spoons Press: Steven Nelson, Bobby Parker, Joshua Jones. Disability seems quiet in contemporary poetry, and I’ve found few poets writing from it. But Laurie Clements Lambeth’s brilliant Veil and Burn encouraged me that it’s out there.

Lastly, he’s not exactly contemporary, but Larry Eigner, a Black Mountain poet, is a recent discovery. He had Cerebral Palsy, and although his poems rarely mentioned it, they were filled with his particular physicality in the way they were shaped and formed. That’s exciting, to me.

You mentioned Confessional poetry. What are some of the challenges of this mode, and how do you navigate them?

Confessionalism is rife with hazards, so I’m careful to make it one of several streams I draw from, rather than a focus. Disability and faith are big themes in this pamphlet. Both are potentially fraught with personal therapy and soul-searching, or political soap-boxing, and that’s all well and good, but poetry fails if it’s only that. Plath has inspired diary-scribbling teenagers everywhere, and I love that. I want to deal with suffering and difficult feeling – poetry which avoids suffering can be less than human – but this is poetry; it has to draw me in and keep me because it inspires reflection, needs mulling over, not because it forces an agenda down my throat.

If I flirt with confession or argument, I might temper it with irony and humour. The most emotionally honest poems might be ‘The Snowboy’ and ‘Shinglehenge’. Even they have their own ways of restraining their feelings. Some say that irony removes emotion, but actually it can serve it, I think. It’s true in life, isn’t it; making light of things is comforting for us. And if we make jokes, others can feel we’re hiding things, but that can be when our pain seems most palpable. I once read this advice, on writing fiction, but I think it’s still relevant: ‘If your character cries, your reader doesn’t have to.’ I’ve always been mindful of that.

There is a massive tendency to see Confession as autobiography. It’s a fallacy that Confessional poetry is necessarily about the poet, though, even if it explores the self. Plath and Sexton often situated themselves in landscapes, imagined and real; made mythical figures of themselves, or others. Lowell felt free to draw from experiences not his own in order to get to the emotional truth of the matter. Ai, who you might call Confessional, spoke with invented characters’ voices to create angry, painfully difficult poems. So when I use material from life, it’s often fabricated, exaggerated, made mythical in a slightly irreverent way. One or two poems are based on dreams. I’m not shy about my disability but use it inadvertently, because it ‘just is’, it’s not ammo for an agenda. Similarly, if religious poetry only cuts the mustard for religious readers, it hasn’t worked.

Why poetry? Of the myriad ways one could express oneself, why this one? What drew you to it? What keeps you coming back?

I always did various other creative things: painting and drawing, playing drums in bands. I was with a rock band for ten years or so. But I seem to have settled on poetry as the major preoccupation. It’s got multi-sensory effect: imagery, sound. Poems are made things, and I love their sculptural quality. They’re an almost three-dimensional ‘landscape’ the reader can live in for a while, eventually getting to those feelings, thoughts and ideas between the cracks, underneath the layers. There are rudiments, techniques, a need to have subtlety and tightness in a similar way to drumming. Poets are in control of several creative activities at the same time. They’re one man bands, sound technicians.

I’ve never fully trusted prose, or my ability to write it. I like R.S. Thomas’ ideas of poetry as sacrament, vessel for incarnation, because words fail me. I can’t fully expect them to ‘express’ anything, and I find the concept of poetry as self-expression fairly problematic for that reason; it seems rather arrogant to think that I can imagine it, and get it down exactly. So I like the idea of language as pliable; that words can be manipulated, set next to and against one another, juxtaposed. They can contradict and disagree.

I’m not a big novel reader. A poetry collection gives depth, but allows me to view a kaleidoscope of themes and ideas. I’m not confined to a definite number of threads. Poems are as absorbing as songs. I still remember my favourite poems from years ago, and still visit them time and again. Two or three collections are beside my bed because I’m still reading them, years later. They allow skim-reading, but also beg to be given sustained attention.

Personally though, poetry has been central to my emotional life, intellectual and spiritual life. I’ve lived in it. I have one of your books here, Robert, and in it you say that poetry has been your ‘lifeline’ in everything you have been through. I completely relate to that; poetry has centred me, kept me sane, even at times when I couldn’t stomach religious faith, it was too painful. So I want to try and pay that forward in poems or critical writing about poetry. I hope to overcome my reluctance with prose, one day.

Mark, this exchange has been a pleasure. Any parting thoughts?

Thank you for having me on the blog, the pleasure was all mine; and thanks for your interest in The Snowboy. I should have a wise or pithy comment to leave you with here, but I don’t, so I’m going to use this old chestnut, which possibly touches on a few things we’ve spoken about: “Before you criticise someone, try to walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them you’ll be a mile away, and you’ll be wearing their shoes.”

I have also been remiss in my role as a “sideshow barker” for the excellent Big Tent Poetry project. So here is a contribution to that ongoing poetic circus–a list of sneaky ways to keep the plates of poetry spinning.

Get inspired. Prime the pump before writing by reading poems you love by poets you love. Transcribe them. Memorize them. Carry them inside you.

Trigger yourself. Smells, sights, sounds, textures. Let your eyes and your mind wander. Memories, fantasies, reflections. Start anywhere. Just go.

Keep going. Try pushing past where you think the ending occurs. Write a “Part II.”

Use constraints. Use word groups, poetic forms, made-up assignments from friends. Constraints spark creative freedom.

Read and listen. Read your own work aloud, get others to read it back to you. Listen to the music. Tune it up.

Focus on language and lines. Read the poem bottom-up, focus on each line. Does it stand alone on its merits?

Play. Cut poems up. Scribble and doodle. Swap lines around, swap stanzas around. Make up zany titles. Play!

Break the rules. Be prepared to break the rules to make the poem better. Constraints are there to get you free. It’s the freedom, and the poem, that counts.

Write bad. Try to write a “bad” poem. It gets you wild and free. Sometimes the harder you try to be bad, the better it gets.

Imitate. Write in the style of a favorite poet (or even one who simply provokes you.) You’ll be imitating your perceptions of them, which are original and entirely your own.

There’s more. Take the attitude that “There’s more where that came from.” If you do, you’ll be right.

Write briefly and often. Robert Hass said, “You can do your life’s work in forty minutes per day.” Write often enough to stay “in the game,” usually several times per week. Set a time limit. You can go over if needed.

Anywhere, anytime. Write when you don’t feel like it. Write when uninspired. Interesting language makes for better poetry than lofty, preconceived ideas. Trigger yourself, set a time limit, and just go. You’ll surprise yourself.

Keep a scroll. In addition to keeping going on a poem, try keeping one big document of poems and poem-snippets, so you’re never at the beginning, just in the flow. Pick up wherever you last left off, write in the date, and just go.

Swap assignments. Make up assignments (constraints) and swap them with friends. Do them all together in small groups, in person or over email. Do it regularly (e.g. once per month.) Then share the results. Learn from each other. Encourage each other. Keep each other free.

Flow. Marvin Bell said, “The good stuff and the bad stuff is all part of the stuff.” Keep flowing with it. Sometimes you’re just “clearing your throat.” Remember to let yourself “write bad,” and that the “bad” can sometimes transform into something great.

Stay in the game. Writing, reading, attending workshops, reading aloud in various venues (including among family and friends), reviewing books, swapping favorites on email–it all counts. But the best way to learn writing is by writing. Keep marking up the page. Keep clacking away at the keys. Every little bit counts, even if there seems to be no “result” that day. Stay nimble. Stay receptive. Stay in the game.

How else do you keep yourself motivated, creative, and free as a writer?

Neruda is tough to translate well. I imagine similar perils await poets who try to translate Wallace Stevens into another language. Foremost among them is a kind of strangeness that makes linguistic, but not literal, sense. Many of the versions I found were over-literal in places where they should have favored more adherence to tone and theme from line to line. Also, given a Spanish word that resembled an English word, first-language-English translators almost always chose that English word, even if it did not carry the most precise shade of meaning across from its Spanish cousin. This reliance on word-by-word mapping actually introduces more and inappropriate strangeness into the poem, not the least through awkward syntax.

And so, I set out to preserve more of the fluidity and atmosphere of the poem in rendering my own translation.

Walking Around
by Pablo Neruda

As it happens, I am tired of being a man.
As it happens, I go to the tailor and to the cinema
shriveled, impervious, like a swan made of felt
flowing on the waters of origin and ash.

The smell of the barber shop makes me sob.
I want a break from stone and wool.
I want to stop seeing institutions and gardens,
commodities, eyeglasses, elevators.

As it happens, I am tired of my feet and my nails,
my hair and my shadow.
As it happens, I am tired of being a man.

Nonetheless, it would be delicious
to frighten a notary with a fresh-cut lily,
or mortify a nun with a smack on the ear.
It would be lovely
to roam the streets with a green knife
yelling until I froze to death.

I do not want to go on like a root in the dark,
wavering, stretched out, shivering with a dream,
down, into the moist guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, consuming daily.

I do not want such misfortunes.
I do not want to continue rooting to the tomb,
alone underground with a cellar full of corpses
frozen solid, killing me with sorrow.

This is why Monday burns like gasoline
when I show up with my jailbird face,
and howls on its way like a wounded wheel
and takes hot-blooded steps into the night.

It pushes me to familiar corners, damp houses,
hospitals where the bones fly out the windows,
to cobbler shops that smell of vinegar,
terrible, cavernous streets.

There are sulfur-colored birds, and foul intestines
hanging over the doors of these houses,
false teeth misplaced in a cafeteria,
there are mirrors
that should be crying with shame and horror,
everywhere umbrellas, poisons, umbilical cords.

I walk calmly, with eyes, shoes,
rage and oblivion,
step through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards where washing hangs from the line:
underwear, towels, and shirts that weep
slow filthy tears.

Subscribe now for great poetry of place

I am excited to announce that I have accepted the position of Senior Poetry Editor for Silk Road Review, a publication of Pacific University. I will be editing content for two volumes of this excellent literary journal in the 2010-2011 academic year, taking over from Abby Murray. Hers are big shoes to fill; platform shoes with glitter and plastic sunflowers on them, if I know Abby. I only hope I can bring half as much style to the job.

In all seriousness, it is an honor to accept responsibility for continuing this publication’s tradition of both celebrating established poets and introducing new, up-and-coming voices into the ongoing conversation of poetry. The magazine focuses on place as a touchstone for the work it solicits and features. My poem “How Can a Boy Hate Fishing?,” for example, featured in Vol. 4 last year, is set in the desert farming community on the U.S.-Mexico border where I grew up. The current issue takes you to an inherited condo in Florida, a jeepney in the Philippines, a house trailer in rural Michigan, a fire escape in New York, and the Chinese Himalayas. By subscribing now, you will receive both this issue, and the next issue, which will be assembled under my editorship.

I look forward to writing about my experience on the other side of the publication process, as I sift through poems with a talented team of cohorts, panning for those nuggets of earned transcendence. Submissions are currently being accepted through the journal’s online submission manager. Here’s to a year of saying “yes” to great poetry.

The Mission in 1876

I had a wonderful time reading poems alongside Barry Spacks and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer this afternoon as part of the Mission Poetry Series. The series is a collaborative labor of love between Sr. Susan Blomstad, osf and Paul Fericano, who provide gorgeous free broadsides, homemade snacks, and a magnificently serene setting to unite poets and poetry-lovers in “Clare‘s Place,” the library nestled in the heart of the Mission.

Rosemerry is a force to reckon with, effortlessly interspersing a cappella folk songs with dramatic poems spoken from memory. Barry was the first poet laureate of the city of Santa Barbara and is a much-loved teacher. He is avuncular and charming, savoring poems that dance between whimsy and pathos, encouraging us all to look forward to our seventies. (“It was a good decade for me,” he twinkled.) I was filled to overflowing with admiration for them both.

Yet having, in essence, bared my soul, then witnessed two other fine poets do the same, I found myself somewhat disoriented when audience members approached me after the reading. Readings in this way sometimes feel like a double life. Though a musician can pour herself into a piece, the audience does not necessarily come away knowing much more about her as a person. And although the speaker in a poem should not be conflated with the author of the piece, audiences often assume that the person who steps away from the podium is going to at least be very similar to the person who just read poems. It is understandable.

Yet for all that I may come alive with the joy of words when reading, I am an introvert. Combined with the sometimes dizzying effect of giving my all into the microphone, I usually end up at a loss for words when people approach me after a reading. Hopefully “thank you,” said from the depths of my disarmed heart, is sufficient to let them know how much I appreciate knowing I reached them with my work. Hopefully it will suffice now as well–to Rosemerry and Barry, Paul and Sister Susan–for the generosity and courage that brings me to my knees before the power of a poem well read. Thank you.

The implications of this technology for poetry, however, remain to be seen. I was contacted at the start of this month by Laura Often, Public Relations for Text Flows, the company that partnered with The Academy of American Poets to bring Poem Flow to life. She was interested in having me blog about their project. I’m not sure if she found me as a former technology blogger or a current poetry blogger, but nonetheless I took a look. Unfortunately, at that time, I could only see a brief Flash-based demonstration on their web site.

Holding my iPod Touch in my hands while it runs this application is a different experience. The font is lovely. The transitions between lines (and parts of lines) are thoughtful and well-executed. In fact, the deliberate slow-down of the reading experience seems to be one of the few actual enhancements I’ve seen technology make to literature–perhaps the only enhancement in this regard, since mostly when it comes to reading, technology encourages us to speed up.

So why do I feel hesitant to herald this as the great game-changer for poetry? I suppose some curmudgeonly part of me still remains of the opinion that literature, and poetry specifically, doesn’t need smartening up through gadgetry. And yet, such gadgetry does, indeed, hold our eyeballs hostage–in some cases for most of our waking day. So perhaps I should be happy that poetry has a chance to greet those eyeballs.

Text Flows has certainly done a nice job. Ultimately, as a word-artist, the reading experience is paramount to me. And as much as I love the feel of turning a crisp page, Poem Flow does bring something new to my reading experience. Time will tell if this “new” will become the norm.

For now, you can see for yourself. iPhone and iPod touch users (and soon, no doubt, iPad users too) can download Poem Flow from the iPhone App Store. You can also demo the application in any Flash-enabled web browser on the Poem Flow site.

As many readers know, I have been a Twitter agnostic for years. Which are centuries in Internet time.

And yet, slowly, I have come around. It started with Goodreads, then Facebook. And today, I discovered enough interesting poets on Twitter (via a reprint of a list originally compiled by Collin Kelley) to reach a tipping point.

There’s not too much difference between Twitter and the IRC chatrooms I frequented in the early ’90s, except that Twitter takes advantage of two new developments: hypertext and mobile devices. But the concept of short, syndicated conversations is basically the same.

I am a different person now than when I was an adolescent trying on virtual personae through clever quips and emoticons. So, why Twitter now? I suppose I re-joined Twitter for the same reason I read and write poetry, and the same reason I started this blog: to be a part of the conversation–about poetry, and life, and what makes us human.

Can a medium so inherently distractable provide such insight? Can we get the news from Twitter, if not from poetry? Will the signal-to-noise ratio prove worthwhile? There is only one way to find out. Commence Twitter experiment number two.

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

“Every evening / words /–not stars–light the sky. // No rest in life / like life itself.”

“I hear that the axe has flowered, / I hear that the place can’t be named, // I hear that the bread which looks at him / heals the hanged man, / the bread baked for him by his wife, // I hear that they call life / our only refuge.”

I find myself drawn to poets who survived The Second World War. This, in combination with frequently watching the remarkable BBC series Foyle’s War in the evening, as well as, on a more personal note, the recent passing of my wife’s uncle, Sven–a Marine who was at Normandy, and a man of whom I was fond–has got me thinking about the profound and continuing impact of WWII. Even as Czeslaw Milosz says that Communism was the only possible response to the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, so, too, it occurs to me that Postmodernism may well be a kind of understandable, almost logical response to the atrocities of WWII.

Part of my thinking has been fueled by researching Seamus Heaney, including a number of essays in The Art Of Seamus Heaney wherein various critics attempt to place him, as an accessible, intelligent, lyric poet, within the context of the Twentieth century, and the decline of centrality, gentility, and structure. These abstract thoughts have gained specificity through reading selected works of Paul Celan and Umberto Saba. Both men, in the face of profoundly difficult personal circumstances, heightened their attention to language in their poems. Yet in the case of Celan, the attention presses ever more inward, into a symbolic and even cryptogrammic relationship to German; whereas with Saba, his Italian becomes more specific and spare in a way that promotes universal resonance.

Celan’s poems, which he called “messages in a bottle,” represent a disdain and almost fear of the explicit–the disdain of a learned man for superstition. Responding to Bertolt Brecht’s famous observation about the Twentieth century, Celan wrote in parody, “what times are these / when a conversation / is almost a crime / because it includes / so much made explicit?” (trans. Michael Hamburger). All poetry deals with the ineffable, with what happens beyond the explicit significance of language. In Celan’s case, however, there seems to be increasing deconstruction in the progression of his work, and with it a slipping grasp on what one might call faith in language and, perhaps, even faith in humanity and life itself.

With Umberto Saba, however, even in an early work such as “The Goat,” we see evidence of what Saba calls in his later poem, “Ulysses,” “a heavyhearted love of life” (trans. Stephen Sartarelli). His poetry also progresses toward an increasing attention to language, but at the same time is backed by a willingness to admit beauty and hope into his troubled life and work.

In considering the work of these two poets, both of whom suffered almost incomprehensible difficulty during the Holocaust, as well as obviously deep psychological conflicts, I see them manifesting different responses to the psychosocial crisis of Erikson’s final stage of development: integrity (the integration of one’s life experience and coming to terms with such experience) versus despair. Due to such profound external and internal circumstances, both men seem to have confronted the death instinct. In this, they face many of the same challenges throughout their life and work as someone facing the end of their life. In the case of Saba, he found a means to integrate his human experience through art. Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

I am drawn to these poets, who suffered greatly, because I am fascinated by how they did (or did not) find a means to reconciliation in their art. I also see the horrors of the Second World War in particular as a turning point, not only in the individual lives of those who suffered, but for Western society as a whole. Even as Saba and Celan’s belief in humanity must have been challenged individually, the events of this time, brought to light on a global scale by modern news media as never before, present this same challenge to Western society as a whole. We see it, therefore, reflected in art since that time–a coming to terms with atrocity and beauty, barbarism and refinement, nihilism and hope.

As Marvin Bell has told me on a number of occasions, there are many branches on the tree of poetry, and all of them valid. I agree. Yet to me, the trunk of the tree, perennially unchanged, is poetry that confronts the human condition directly. What, therefore, might post-Postmodernism look like? My belief is that it is time for a reconciliation and integration like that which Saba found in his poems. Our faith in humanity parallels our faith in language, and, most importantly, what might exist beyond language–a poetry that is at once accessible and difficult, personal and universal, both explicit and ineffable, specific and transcendent–encompassing this beautiful, poignant, “heavyhearted love of life.”

Another tactic that sometimes helps me get things flowing again is to revisit an old favorite. Ralph Waldo Emerson is eminently quotable; his essay The Poet reads like a poem in itself. It is remarkable to read some of his thoughts and realize certain conditions in poetry are hardly new or unique. So, I pulled a few excerpts from this 1844 text that seem to be as relevant to contemporary poetry as they were to poetry back then.

Notwithstanding the necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare.

The sign and credentials of a poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold.

For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.

A beauty, not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Every word was once a poem.

This insight, which expresses itself by what I called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.

We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking we say, “That is yours, this is mine;” but the poet knows that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you…

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, “It is in me, and shall out.”

…wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be ale to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares–in the tradition of Howl or The Wasteland–does not so much strike a nerve in the culture (as Eliot and Ginsberg did) as much as it plumbs deep into timeless archetypal motifs of death, madness and the occult. Like Glück’s The Wild Iris, or B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe, Kinnell’s cogent ten-part epic poem serves as an example of a book that holds together as a cohesive and unified work of art. Like Fairchild, Kinnell focuses on a single theme–here, the nightmare realm–and like Glück, he gives this book its staying power by holding to a clear and compelling voice–here, the voice of madness.

By assuming the voice of madness, Kinnell takes us into familiar territory in a strange way. He constantly upsets our sense of balance through moment after moment of poetic strangeness, which compels and propels us forward, a bit like a staggering drunk, into a disturbed and sideways view of the world. Whereas Hoagland believes, “there is truth-telling, and more, in meanness” there is a much older guise through which the truth can evade a reader’s normal defenses: madness. The voice of madness can say what the voice of reason cannot. After all, the speaker is “just crazy” or, as in the case of Shakespeare’s plays, “just the fool.”

Yet it is precisely because this speaker is excused from social constraints that he can deliver a passage as compelling as this one:

(Warning: the passage quoted hereafter contains explicit language.)

In the Twentieth Century of my trespass on earth,
having exterminated one billion heathens,
heretics, Jews, Moslems, witches, mystical seekers,
black men, Asians, and Christian brothers,
every one of them for his own good,

a whole continent of red men for living in unnatural community
and at the same time having relations with the land,
one billion species of animals for being sub-human,
and ready to take on the bloodthirsty creatures form the other planets,
I, Christian man, groan out this testament of my last will.

I give my blood fifty parts polystyrene,
twenty-five parts benzene, twenty-five parts good old gasoline,
to the last bomber pilot aloft, that there shall be one acre
in the dull world where the kissing flower may bloom,
which kisses you so long your bones explode under its lips.

My tongue goes to the Secretary of the Dead
to tell the corpses, “I’m sorry fellows,
the killing was just one of those things
difficult to pre-visualize–like a cow,
say, getting hit by lightning.”

My stomach, which has digested
four hundred treaties giving the Indians
eternal right to their land, I give to the Indians,
I throw in my lungs which have spent four hundred years
sucking in good faith on peace pipes.

My soul I leave to the bee
that he may sting it and die, my brain
to the fly, his back the hysterical green color of slime,
that he may suck on it and die, my flesh to the advertising man,
the anti-prostitute, who loathes human flesh for money.

I assign my crooked backbone
to the dice maker, to chop up into dice,
for casting lots as to who shall see his own blood
on his shirt front and who his brother’s,
for the race isn’t to the swift but to the crooked.

To the last man surviving on earth
I give my eyelids worn out by fear, to wear
in his long nights of radiation and silence,
so that his eyes can’t close, for regret
is like tears seeping through closed eyelids.

I give the emptiness my hand: the pinkie picks no more noses,
slag clings to the black stick of the ring finger,
a bit of flame jets from the tips of the fuck-you finger,
the first finger accuses the heart, which has vanished,
on the thumb stump wisps of smoke ask a ride into the emptiness.

In the Twentieth Century of my nightmare
on earth, I swear on my chromium testicles
to this testament
and last will
of my iron will, my fear of love, my itch for money, and my madness.

(The Book Of Nightmares, Section VI, part 4)

The Christian white man, at the culmination of empire and manifest destiny, delivers his last will and testament while swearing on his “chromium testicles”–a phrase both strange and yet somehow befitting the awfulness of human conquest and exploitation. Furthermore, because Kinnell focuses on the archetypal strangeness of the nightmare realm and tells his story through the voice of madness, passages like this one remain as relevant and chilling today as they were over thirty years ago.

Reputation, like trust, is earned through experience. Observing myself at an open mic reading, I notice my attention ebb and flow. When a poet who has built some reputation with me takes to the microphone, I relax a little. I give them a bit more of my attention. I perk up. I take notice. I listen. As open-minded as I try to be, new faces have to earn my trust.

Poetry is a profoundly intimate art. We demand the full attention of our listeners on something as complex and undecorated as words. No backing music, no other channel to flip to while the commercials are on. We make every word tell because it has to–because with a captive audience comes a lot of responsibility. Just calling a piece of writing a poem ups the ante considerably on both sides.

When a poet I really trust and whose work I really admire starts reading their poems, I take off my skin. I turn up my antennae. And if in that fully exposed state they take advantage of me or worse just let words fall flat, I go away almost wounded. The dial drops a notch on how much I can trust them with my most vulnerable self, the rare and precious commodity of my full attention. This constant unconscious fiddling with rating knobs in our psyche is reputation.

It matters because with so many poems and poets nowadays, all of us seeking the ones we can trust to deliver great art–and all with very different criteria for what that means–an individual accounting of reputation is the only way we can justify letting our attention ride on new poets and poems. Our audience-minds, like professional gamblers, lay down chips, see what happens, and adjust. Of course we’re all rooting for the long-shot, the underdog–because it is also in our nature. In the end, though, we have to feed our creative selves from our winnings–and reputation makes all that possible.