In the expansive and marvelous new conversation between Valerie Witte & Aidan Semmens (now complete), Witte’s first poem is witty and tense, putting minor and major disasters, including the threat of flood, alongside one another in the form of a missive. In his response, Semmens introduces 18th-Century natural philosopher Allesandro Volta into the conversation (whose experiments into muscle contraction in response to electric currents led to the invention of the battery – see picture courtesy of Wikipedia above).

Semmens’ short, latinate lines are then expanded to a paragraph by Witte, who spins them into a speaker’s reminiscences. “An Experiment in Galvanism” could be a disaster itself (lightning strike?), a religious experience, sex…all of which becomes, in Semmens’ response, Likestarlings’ first sestina, if I’m not mistaken, and a brilliant one. It is a form appropriate to the overlaying of repeated elements, which are now video games, muscle memory and the still-present natural disasters. The poem draws together virtual realities, learnt behaviours and violence.

Witte’s response mirrors Semmens’ poem in its stanzas, but discards the repeated words. And again, the poem turns to the personal, to memory, but in a way which seems to me uncannily consonant with the impulse of Semmens’ poem. It is wonderful when poets seem to have got under each other’s skin – each seeing into what the other is doing and extending it, making it their own.

Current events appear to seep into Semmens’ final poem, which ends in just as unsettled a place as Witte started them off. But this is somewhere neither poet could have got to without the other. These lines, from “The age of insecurity”, might apply just as well to the process by which poems are transformed in the back and forth, too:

blurring the continuities
we take one element for another,
water for breathing, plutonium for fire,
catastrophism as a way of life

Following on from Caleb’s last blog post, I’m inclined to agree that ‘impulse’ and ‘theme’ or concerns are probably more profound ways to root out poetic kinship than measures of formality or how ‘experimental’ someone appears.

It does seem that recently there has been a great deal of discussion regarding poetic schools, locales, groupings and styles though – and the obvious distinctions, value-judgements and schisms that such taxonomization entails. Not to make light of the intentions behind (sometimes crucial, sometimes pointless) conceptual ordering of poetry. As Caleb says, we need to have critical apparatus to grasp what’s going on of course, but the lasting quality of various items can be a much trickier thing. Vitriolic denouncements and supercilious dismissals of other styles or approaches seem like a waste of energy. In light of this, what sort of debates are actually progressive and useful – in the broadest sense? On what sort of debates ought we to be spending our limited energies?

At the same time, contemporary poetry is broader and more diffuse than ever. Perhaps it is an anxiety over this breadth that leads to such impassioned attack and defense positioning. It sometimes feels as if Poiesis is conceived as some great mother ship, with opposing factions grappling over its controls.

Hierarchization of living literature is a tricky and uncomfortable thing, and can be very divisive. So many decisions are instinctive – this is art after all. Within the poetic ecosystem, there ought to be space for many variants, adaptations, specializations. Naturally there will be experimentation because experimentation is both inevitable and essential in an ever-changing world. I’m wary of pushing the ecological analogy too far though – some things that are certainly wondrous and beautiful fail to survive.

Here at Likestarlings, we believe that good, urgent, vital writing can happen within many categories, can look and sound radically different, and can be apparently ’simple’ or ‘difficult’ on first examination. This might sound idealistic, or even naïve, but we reckon it’s as perfectly possible to have an eclectic taste in poetry as it is in music, films or condiments. And we think many people share this view. This isn’t to say that poets don’t have ancestry and heritage both selected and ineluctable, but new unities can be found regardless or in light of these things. We continue to be excited by poetry coming from and heading in many different directions, at many different heights and velocities. Fundamental to the Likestarlings project is getting these differences to talk to each other, and make something new out of that meeting.

Over the coming months, watch this fluxious space as we pair poets from across divides, physical and conceptual, real or imagined, and see what happens as they converse in their chosen medium.

Firstly, I wondered why we’d divide up poetry at all. I suppose the most obvious reason is that it tells a reader what assumptions they should bring to a poem – their reading kit. It must help readers choose what to read in the first place. If we can place poems in certain traditions, it might allow us to make connections which help explain how they have come about and which other writers and ideas they are talking to. Lastly, like political parties – or the idea of them – categories might allow us to have meaningful debates without having to reiterate our premises and beliefs all the time.

Since vers libre appeared there has been a seemingly straightforward way to divide all poetry up: metred and unmetred (assuming that as the least controversial definition of never-quite-totally-free verse). This, though, is a rather limited binary, since it only describes one aspect of the verse (even if we include other formal properties in the metred category). And description always seems to slip into evaluation. For many on one side, metred means conservative; for many on the other, free verse means unthoughtful, too easy even. Poets seem consciously or unconsciously to be aligning themselves with others when they write with or without certain structuring devices – but this seems often not the best indicator of the most important things about a poem or poet.

Recently I’ve come across a couple of lineage poems – one by WS Merwin (in The River Sound) listing poets that have meant a lot to him who have died in his lifetime, the other by Seamus Heaney (in Landing Light). Both place the poet in relation to a range of poets across the formal divide. This literary kinship, as a friend put it, seems to be the way many poets think about what they are doing. They think of themselves as participating in a conversation or shared endeavour with others from theirs and other ages. The exact nature of what is kindred here only comes through from triangulation between writers, and probably never very easy to pin down. But it is often, I sense, more to do with the impulse rather than the line breaks.

Another large basis for categorisation I can see is theme. As someone – I forget who, if I ever knew – said: ‘a poem is about something as a cat is about a house’. They’re usually shifty and diffuse, not expository. Having said that, with the necessary caveats we can, I think, usefully say certain poems and poets have similar concerns. This gets mixed in with characterization by certain common gestures and movements: the anecdote-leading-into-statement poem, the chain-of-linked-images poem, the free-association poem, the updating-mythical-figure poem. (These off the top of my head; I wonder if you recognise them as types – and what others you might add?)

Finally, there are the categories which usually only come retrospectively, although occasionally they are defined by practitioners in manifestoes (often more hopefully than accurately). These are the schools. I wonder which, if any, of these, are still alive. I’ve heard several poets suggest that in both the US and US, there is no solid and coherent enough living tradition in poetry for an avant-garde to define itself in opposition or at a tangent to.

Can we talk about a Cambridge school; martianists; post-postmodernists; new-new formalists; an avant-garde; others? Would we want to?

I’m very much in agreement with your last week’s post. I guess when writing I just hope that someone will read it – but who that person is I don’t really know. Of course you want there to be some form of engagement, otherwise it’s elliptical or solipsistic. So I always have an ‘audience’ in mind, but, as I say, their faces are obscure – as in a dream! Perhaps these ideas become clearer over time (or if people are actually reading your work!) Perhaps other people have a much clearer idea… and without needing a specific social cause/ coterie or such. What about you? It strikes me that poetry concerned with ecology ought to be trying to speak to everyone, somehow, anyway.

I suppose one of the problems with audience is that with most poetry which can broadly, vexedly, be termed ‘experimental’ or ‘progressive’ or something it seems likely that the audience is going to be almost solely other poets. This issue was dealt with rather grimly on the Poetry Foundation recently. Mind you, elsewhere they provide more detail about who is in fact reading the stuff, in America at least.

Basically I concur that you just can’t worry too much about it, but should try to keep some awareness. And absolutely to write with ‘the widest possible empathy’, as you say, is surely a noble aim, and the best thing we can do. And to write as clearly as possible, using just the right words to further one’s ends i.e. taking risks where you have to, and not hedging. All this sounds very obvious and Coleridge, but it’s never that simple.

In the quest of better elucidation and in order to swing things back more to our original discussion on ecopoetics I turned to something which had heartened me before: the final chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, entitled ‘What are poets for?’ He characterizes poets as sort of earth-links who can speak from/through/within the earth, at their best when not describing, not giving narratives, but ’saying’ the things that are – rather like the Sami tradition of Yoiking. He also offers us a way out of didacticism (as discussed before): ‘…Ecopoetics should begin not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics must first concern itself with consciousness.’

The argument is complex but the poet is seen as ‘the guardian, the treasurer, the primary maker of language’. The role is crucial, and the societal space is both necessary and allotted; poets are ‘imagination-workers’. This is a big job, and its takes me back to what I said in the first instalment of this conversation that it will a ‘failure of the imagination’ that scuppers us as much as anything.

But in the course of all this it’s occurred to me again that the vast majority of poets are naturally and unavoidably amateurs – in the etymological sense, and in the sense of being non-professional. This puts us in a very privileged position: we can say anything. But with that realisation comes huge responsibility of course.

Can we answer, simply, that poetry is talking to anyone who’ll listen? Of course, there will always be layers of understanding. Poetry has a long tradition and knowing something of it will likely deepen a reader’s engagement. There may be allusions; poems might be having conversations that many, even avid, readers will miss. But we have to imagine, when we write, even with a certain didacticism, that we are writing for people, all of them; why not. This is not to indulge a delusion that everyone is reading poetry; we’re often reminded that they’re not. When we advocate poetry because we think it’s a good and noble thing, we should know who is coming into contact with it, and what their experience is like, but we shouldn’t obsess over it. If we write out of a depression over who is reading, what good does that do us? We have to write with the widest possible empathy, don’t we? And all writing which truly reaches for something is a provocation: to see more clearly, to understand in a different way, to feel…I realise that, once again, I am writing as if to rectify assertions you have not, in fact, made. I’m interested in how poets think of their ‘audience’. Do you have a definite sense of people in mind when you write?

The new conversation we’re really pleased to welcome to the site, between Brandon Krieg & T Zachary Cotler, is germane with reference to such questions. The first two poems are, I think, powerful, finely-made pieces which embrace complexity without obfuscation. They reach across time to first causes with seriousness and delight. Any poem which rhymes ‘Derrida’ and ‘esoterica’ is going to take some reading; but it is inclusive in the broader sense of letting as much life as possible into its scope.

I’ll leave it to them to continue with that investigation. And to you to make some more sense of all of this, as ever.

CK

That’s very much what I meant, yes. It is difficult this thing of being overtly ‘direct’ in poetry. It so often blurs into a seeming or definite didacticism. And it explains why so much of what we find is oblique or incomprehensible. Adding a layer of artifice (and this is not to denigrate the intention) allows the writer to step back into the joy of poiesis, a joy (not the same as happiness) that having a surefire agenda displaces very easily. Any lyric impulse is innately troubled by the need to take make an ideology or value-system so explicit and naked as this.

Troubled, I would say, whether we realise it or not. And it’s out of this tension – the tension between the undeniable poetic instinct and a sense of that instinct being hijacked by something ineluctable like an emergency (in this case the ecological ‘crisis’) – that some of the best work seems to emerge. It appears throughout Peter Reading’s work, for example, but particularly in Faunal (2002). Although the lyric desire there to celebrate the natural world is ironized and sophisticated a step further by a dry, semi-scientific tone and the juxtapositions in the text. Perhaps because he recognises this tension more acutely than most. As in ‘Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas’ where the narrator describes ‘Mexican Free-tailed Bats,/ Tadaria brasiliensis (mexicana)‘ emerging from a roost as ‘One of the most spectacular/ phenomena I have ever been privileged to witness.’ But goes on to explain how he got banged up for ‘Public Intoxication’ after throwing his binoculars into a river.

But while the tension is there, Reading is so clearly didactic that it almost blasts through the issue altogether. You’re probably right, in that we should worry less about whether or not someone is being didactic per se but rather about what they’re saying and how well they’re saying it. But the unsettling thing in didacticism is the idea of certainty it relays/attempts to relay. As you say, it feels ‘predetermined and boring’. Poetry, I always thought, was supposed to inhabit that doubtful stretch, where slippage happens, to walk into the fog without a map and come back some funny mineral off the mountainside or something. Not dictate terms. I need to consider your closing questions for longer. However, I agree that some sort of provocation is vital – because that moves us forward, whereas the timelessly poetic objective of evocation might just have us looking back or standing still. The elegiac mode will come through whatever, but doesn’t serve our purpose now. Inherent in all this ‘-vocation’ there seems to be a target, an audience; but who, exactly, are we trying to provoke?

The other day I was discussing Jorie Graham’s Sea Change and someone said that they were put off by its didacticism. The judgement surprised me because, as a collection of poems handling climate change, I had thought of it as trying to keep open some space which is usually closed (on both sides of the ‘debate’), as conversation falls into well-dug furrows (denial/apocalypse). Another person had no trouble with the collection being didactic, but was offended, to the point of feeling unable to read it, despite being a big Graham fan, by the apparent arbitrariness of her line breaks (alternating very long/very short lines). I wondered whether the two things were connected. Is it a self-consciousness about entering into a contentious discourse which led Graham to impose such an obvious constraint on herself? Are the frankly obtuse – but regularly so – line bre-/-aks a protective mask when saying something, as a poet, somebody else might disagree with?

I wonder whether we (I’ll speak for the air) have got rather too worried about didacticism. Or, more precisely, that it is only lazy didacticism that is a problem. That is, if a poem is written as if it knows everything, it is likely to feel predetermined and boring. If a poem asserts the poet’s view as inherently better than everyone else’s it’s likely to be boring and troubling. But a being-didactic which assumes that any poem is in conversation with the world, which asks for a response, but which asserts a moral position which it is not afraid of being disagreed with over, that seems productive. Peter Reading, who you mention, tells his readers off in -273.15: they should have listened to him more carefully; Milton was certainly trying to instruct…

The possibility of disagreement asks for some other useful attributes too – someone must be able to be let into a poem to disagree with it (even if it’s difficult). This doesn’t mean that all poetry must be reducible to argument – yuk – but it does mean that we are in the business of communicating. Of taking seriously the collaborative part of ’reality, our great collaboration’, as you put it so well.

It may be that this is not at all what you meant by didacticism, so apologies if that’s so. What were you thinking?

Also – what part can provocation play in this collaboration? What does a risky poem look like now? What about a shocking poem? Perhaps this is to miss the point. I’m often shocked simply by a brilliant line-break, or a moment of glorious concision. Difficult to think, though, when I’ve been morally challenged by a poem recently…you?

CK

This is another transatlantic pairing and we’re really pleased to welcome both poets to the site.

Poems will be added as they come…

In 2010, we are not planning on any radical (or, indeed, any) changes to the formula. But there are things from 2009 I’d love to see more of…

More transformations

My favourite so far is an exquisite flip along a homonym axis by Jeremey Over, who took Tim Atkins’ Italian father of the sonnet, ‘Petrarch #5’, and made him ‘Petroc Trelawny’, the presenter of the proms on Radio 3 and BBC4. Their conversation continues to probe the Romantic inheritance, parenthood and bees.

More investigation of the anthropocene

The conversation between Jared Stanley & Siddhartha Bose is exciting not only for its use of prose poems, rare on the site, but also the explicit, but by no means straightforward concern with anthropogenic climate change. Bose has taken Stanley’s compelling post-pastoral landscape firmly into an urban context and I’m looking forward to seeing how he responds. In their elegant but turbulent back and forth, Fergus Allen & Stephanie Bolster also worked with a palette of ‘creatures/Eternally eating and being eaten’ (Allen). Bolster’s poems, I think, have a wonderful sound play: ‘A cricket does what crickets do and the air quickens’.

Which reminds me: More transatlantic (and other more distant) connections

Because interesting things seem to happen when languages meet.

More explorations across the screen

Simon Smith & Ryan Murphy are involved in a conversation which breathes in and out with each poem, Smith exploding into clouds, and Murphy contracting. There is a very careful attention to formal echoes between these two, where ‘i/Phone’ becomes ‘i-/Solation’. Still going, it feels like this has the energy to run and run: as Smith’s poem has it, ‘And it doesn’t stop.    None of it/stops, ever’.

More pictures

Because so far we’ve had only a tantalizing glimpse of what’s possible.

More contact

We love to hear from people who are visiting the site, as well as our poets. Do let us know what you’re up to. On that note, congratulations to George Ttooulli, whose collection ‘Static Exile’ came out late last year and is a treat.

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg specializes in interspecies communication. Currently sailing as part of the Arctic Circle project, here he answers some questions on the nature of process and inspiration.

Likestarlings: As a jazz musician and composer you were obviously familiar with making ensemble sounds. But what first alerted you to the possibility and potential of communication/ collaboration with species other than our own?

David Rothenberg: You know I think it started in high school when I heard that Paul Winter was playing with whale and wolf sounds. He had a lot of influence on me back then. After a while I started to think that he would bend natural sounds into his own very sweet and beautiful music, while I wanted my music to be more changed by the encounters with other species’ worlds of sound.

Ls: What was the feeling (if you can articulate such a thing in words) when you first KNEW you had a response, a musical response?

DR: I write about this in the beginning of Why Birds Sing and the end of Thousand Mile Song. At these rare moments, with some birds and some whales (though not MOST of them!), I feel as if I reach beyond my species’ lines, to communicate where words cannot. I don’t KNOW if it is happening, and don’t want to make myself the hero of any kind of grand story, but there are these humbling moments when it is possible reach just a tiny bit the edges of human understanding to make music with other creatures.

Ls: These sorts of communications of course require a special kind of listening. To those interested in jamming with whales you say: ‘One piece of advice I would offer is: listen more than you play. If you can’t hear the whale, you’re playin’ too much.’ How does listening with a view to forming your own response inform the way you listen?

DR: It’s always important not to play too much, especially as an improviser. I imagine I’ve entered into a world of musical interaction where each of us is trying to contribute something…

Ls: And have there been any times when you’ve been silenced?

DR: Sure. By the moment. By people complaining. By the sheer fact that nature’s music is fine as it is, that it doesn’t need us!

Ls: The Peruvian singer Yma Sumac is, perhaps fancifully, supposed to have learnt to sing in response to the birds. What have you learnt musically from these sorts of collaborations?

DR: Well, Yma Sumac could do anything! Plenty of human musicians have learned from birds, and in my book I argue that as the human sense of music becomes more open to new rhythms, tones, and scales, it is better able to make musical sense of nature.

Ls: It’s great to read you on English poet John Clare and his close listening to and interpretation of birdsong. Have any of your own compositions been directly inspired by your unusual interlocutors?

DR: So many of them! Both Why Birds Sing and Whale Music are my CDs most inspired by encounters with these creatures.

Ls: There seems to be something profound about the fractal nature of some birdsong and of whalesong, its seeming endlessness, with minute and infinite variations. It’s both ephemeral and enduring…

DR: I’m glad you think so! How much fractals can help explain music is an open question, but they may help. I’ll have to ask Mandelbrot about it next time I see him at the Cornelia St. Café…

Ls: Finally, what’s blossoming in your brain as the next possible collaborative project?

DR: My next book BEAUTY SECRET: How Art Informs Evolution, begins with the puzzle of why is it that if you speed up a humpback whale song it sounds like a nightingale. Are there certain patterns in nature that have been produced by evolution to be simply beautiful, with no real adaptive purpose? Darwin thought so, and that’s how he came up with idea of sexual selection. But are sexually selected traits RANDOM, arbitrary, or might they reveal certain rhythms at the root of nature itself? More of a big concept book.
After that I think I’ll do something with the music of insects, their trance-like qualities, the way different species listen to each other in some great hive-mind kind of way…

David Rothenberg [felicitously pictured there with a starling] is the author of Why Birds Sing, also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg has also written Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand’s End, and Always the Mountains. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Kyoto Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and Sierra. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has seven CDs out under his own name, including On the Cliffs of the Heart, named one of the top ten CDs by Jazziz Magazine in 1995. His latest book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. His first CD on ECM Records, with pianist Marilyn Crispell, will be released in 2010. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

www.thousandmilesong.com
www.whybirdssing.com