So I painted our bedroom, and cooked my first meal in our new place: borscht (also borsht, barszcz or borshch), boiled then cooled as the beans (second meal) soaked for our meatless red beans & rice.
And I’ve been reading a lot of/on hybrid poetics lately– the poetic mainsteam as-lately-defined, said to combine avant-garde and traditional, “blending trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration.” Formal, thematic, programmatic crossbreeds: Volkman sonnet-in-fragments; or Wright downhomeisms oracled; or a Shepherd open-form, disjunctive work on a classical subject, say.
Lots of folks are writing such things. And Cole Swensen’s introduction to the American Hybrid anthology (which she co-edited for Norton; 74 authors, 7 pages each) is worth at least $6.50 of the admission. But the poetry lately dearer to my heart lives outside of the experimental/conventional axis.
You know the sort of elusive candid difficult dishwater-reflective poetry I mean, the kind to read when you don’t feel like reading and are plagued by ideas. Mine lately: the scribbled, chiming, branch-thin Blackhawk Island avant-gardist Lorine Niedecker; Seattle’s own goofy paid-genius fountain John Olson; vernacular verse; and poetry by wild-minded children.
I like allusive, difficult art; I also believe in a democratic bone-sense of poetry that’s common to all speakers of a language. The part of us that names and likes a stream named Cripple Creek, that coins an ordinal direction downeast, or coins riddles like
White bird featherless
flew from paradise
perched upon the castle wall
up came Lord John landless
took it up handless
and rode away horseless
to the king’s white hall
(Get it?? Snow, on the wind.)
You feel something once. The second time you feel, you compare. I don’t think it condescends to vernacular or reclusive or off-mainstream-radar poets to come to them for renewal, for a worked-for innocence of emotion. Speaking of renewal, here’s– for something completely on-radar and anthologizeable– Beckett, in “First Love,” as his narrator regards the face of the woman who’s approached him on his bench, and whom he will come to (sort of) marry:
As to whether it was beautiful, the face, or had once been beautiful, or could conceivably become beautiful, I confess I could form no opinion. I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father’s face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and hush, can they be described as objects? I admired in spite of the dark, in spite of my fluster, the way still or scarcely flowing water reaches up, as though athirst, to that falling from the sky. She asked if I would like her to sing something.
