BAWER ON GÜNTER GRASS

10 Apr

Gabriel Thy |  April 10th,2012 | Critique, Literature, Poetics, War |  No Comments »

Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass

The only surprising thing about the anti-Semitic “poem” that Günter Grass published last week, and that has created an international firestorm, is that he waited so long to write such a thing. Anti-Semitism, after all, is all the rage these days among left-wing European literary intellectuals (excuse the multiple redundancy), and Grass has always prided himself on being in the forefront of these trends, not being a Johann-come-lately.

Who is Günter Grass, you ask? For decades after the 1959 publication of his first and most famous (and highly overrated) novel, The Tin Drum, he was described by admirers as the conscience of postwar Germany. His detractors had other words for him: smug, arrogant, obnoxious. Even Richard Gilman, a writer for the left-wing The Nation whom one might have expected to celebrate the guy, complained in 1982 about his “lofty, hectoring tone,” stating:

“Today there is no writer more swollen with self-importance…than Günter Grass, who has begun to think of himself as identical with the fates of German literature, German politics, and German mores.” John Updike, for his part, saw Grass as a “cautionary case” for politically engaged writers: “he can’t be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches…from the front lines of his engagement.”

Read it all…

Article by Bruce Bawer.

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WAR IS HELL

22 Feb

Gabriel Thy |  February 22nd,2012 | Poetry, War, Washington |  No Comments »

But then, I am no military expert. As the facts
peel back to my core, it can be said
this man know very little about
almost anything I aim
to declare.

Just ask the silence…

[1998, Washington DC ]

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BORN SOMEWHERE NEAR A SIGN

14 Feb

Gabriel Thy |  February 14th,2012 | Heavy Metaphors, History, Poetry, Washington |  No Comments »

Born somewhere near a sign,
torn number one son to pegged number one daughter,
born unbriefed, debriefed, fed, ouervre fed, fancy links to pattern I would keep,
fumbling first business day after Chief Ike sinks his chancy putt to leap…

The old fairway general defends 27 rounds the calibrating duffer,

posting benign Denver nod to his card, no man tougher,
friend to George S. Patton, president’s heart fails again
this time no secret, at the house of Doud,
modest home to modest Mamie’s parents,
after the minks go cold. Ike an ill man,
brilliant soldier to doddling ruined nations,
quiet eagle, his brilliant aptitude
not unlike golden creeds, nary an omen
(for what have I to do with Denver
or Friday afternoon presidents)
too soon, now long buried—
newly pleasured speeds,
first fully automated breeds,
blanketed by unpatriotic screeds,
(this was the Fifties, after all)
enumerating the longest season…

Stock exchange sheds 14 billion dollars following Monday,
don’t need to be broker or a baker in a two story bunker
to realize then and sometimes now that’s still a lot of dough
oblivious to the shredding of September shillings,
free range missiles, vitamin rich, sticky placenta
cool as an old school biker poet’s hacienda
that same day…

Market recovery proved this tumble nothing more,
one of those classic singular events out for the score. Firm
smiling all white Air Force nurses surely the neatest,
most of the manners were breeding not training,
chickens and eggs the plural oasis, fairest of keen creatures
(I’m no more sorry you don’t understand than you are in expecting me to stop
policing your trash with that other snippet I found, latest flash crop)
melting into sand castles, cocoa buttered glasses, West Palm Beach mysteries
in surly 1955 panoply, unbuckling to meet jolly ad campaign standards
lost in sudden surprises reworked for our sunbelt tomorrow…

Liberty’s seen evidence that someone snapped a picture,
but publicity was mum,
awkward tenor of the times,
but I Like Ike was ailing. Hard. First feeble steps
negotiated (forget the Russians) a whole month later,
and verily, verily, plumb Dick Nixon unexpectedly
now a prime number,

a quick bitter decade still in progress,
critical Left Bank unified as an evergreen,
like a barrel-chested barstool transmogrified
into national traitor,

but Ike warned us clearly, Watch Out!
scorn that double blind M-I-C clout,
quadrennial flowers on stage, minimum wage,
competing with well-prepared lies, worthless pap,
announcing this primal rebellion of New America.

Heard enough fad fantasies of freedom to clock her fade,
seen enough mad soldiers choking on poverty to crack no grenade,
‘coz the proof I sought, the proof I fought, the proof I ought
to have earned at birth found me dissatified
the same hour I died on the page.

[2012, Washington DC ]

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REFLEXIONS ON THE FLOOR

27 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 27th,2011 | Critique, Heavy Metaphors, Literature, Objectivist Poets, Poetics, Science |  No Comments »

Too Ugly To Prostitute

Rename a thing to the best advantage of the opinion programmer's interest.

HERE ARE A FEW ACTUALITY PRISMS that make a Fictive Reality possible:

Hurdling – When the facts of an event come under dispute, the viewer is forced to spend time finding and verifying the facts for himself. This is almost never done by viewers, so they settle on a triangulation around the opinion programmer claims based on the presentation made by each side. In other words, they guess. The more the guesswork goes up, the more malleable the reality becomes.

Fuzzing – Framing reports with the set of facts best suited to the opinion programmer’s interests, and ignoring other salient facts. It is frequently asserted in public by opinion programmers that the science is settled on carbon dioxide and anthropogenic global warming, when this would any objective viewer with the time and energy to find out would demand to know why if that’s true why does the geologic record show evidence that contradicts the theory on its face.

Naming – Rename a thing to the best advantage of the opinion programmer’s interest. The MSM’s use of undocumented workers instead of illegal aliens is an example of this. Per McLuhan, names can take on cold resonation to the viewer, in this example making the event of an illegal alien seem less illegal, even though everybody acknowledges the law is violated, but that’s a matter of paperwork, so it’s cool, not hot. There are also insurgent vs Jihadi, conservative vs lawful, and of course that venerated classic racist vs constitutional.

Urging – A technique increasingly popular among opinion programmers is the old short deadline trick. The closer the deadline, the less the facts can be established, the higher the risk of stupid national behaviors and decisions. Properly executed, a deadline decision will be very hot, which can send the body politic into a steamy sauna, where figures are fuzzy and unclear in the fog.

—Alarmed Pig Farmer

Thanks for this solid piece of writing, APF, now destined to be seen by a few additional interpretive minds than are found at our usual play pen.

We can certainly attest to the fact that all aggressive ideologies seek to command the language, the manner of communication, the information circuitry. We saw this throughout the 20th century, and the preceding imperial eras, each dynasty or cultural strain eager to deploy the tactics of domination.

So yes, we see it despicably advanced in fundamental Islam; we can still see the last gasps of it in Christianity fundamentalism.

Peerlessly, the ragin’ Left and to a lesser degree the conservative Right tongue wrestle for every monkey wrench in the toolbox in an embarrassing effort to control the terms in describing life as they each insist it is, must be, and always shall remain the better path, no matter what fluctuating human or other jurisdictional energies support. Every strike for a better way of temporal living falls short and is shortlived, dying out due to either lawlessness or the failures of impure government, that is to say, government failure through tactics of domination and its supporting structures. Doesn’t the post image above prove our point…

[2011, Washington DC ]

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ALL SO LOVELY AND FINE

25 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 25th,2011 | Atlanta, Literature, Poetics, Washington |  No Comments »

HEY LIV. BROADCASTING FROM WASHINGTON, DC. Cute, colorful, and as complex as a single flower in the sun, Olivia Pantelidis is the name I immediately loved, and loving with the prattling passion of history, I presumed it to be Greek in nature. Perhaps I am wrong. Yes, Olivia Pantelidis, I just had to write it again, the other names are all so lovely and fine, Liv and Okimikko (Japanese-flavor I note), but it was your whole given name which drew first blood. Thanks for writing back. Despite those terse beginnings, we have materialized much fun playing among the words.

Meanwhile, to answer your question, I live in Washington, DC, a block away from the stadium where the REDSKINS footballers used to play until moving to a new expensive facility in the suburbs last year. Good riddance I say, but I’d really love to see a baseball team play there for many reasons which I will spare you for now.

[pullquote align=left]…like a whisper among the rapids. I write many words on many pages and build my websites one page at a time. Desperation is the poet’s business. And my poems rot because I haven’t put very many online yet, but the space is allotted, and some poems are planted there.[/pullquote]There’s also a public hospital, a large highschool, a single small Ma & Pa grocery store, and the National Guard facility in my immediate neigborhood. Nothing else but old rowhouses, many in slum condition, offer my life much urban immediacy. Litter and glass plague these neighborhood streets and alleys. Gunshots are not so rare. Graffitti slang, not EVEN artistic, is sprayed wildcat upon this wall or that building. Wearing my social engineering cap, I lust for new business sections to open up down here, in well-designed heavy commerce worthy of a vibrant city just bursting to emerge from this neighborhood. My property is about half a mile from the River Anacostia flowing just the other side of the stadium. We are prime commercial, but alas, the city suffers and rages and dies, arguing poorly for residential nothingness. There are few wise men here. A city of imposters and ugly metaphors. Fakes and spastic manipulators. Tyrants and suit salad liars. The city is withering on the vine of potential growth. Down here they call it a race issue. It’s really an ego issue. Meanwhile, we wither no differently than the ivy on the pole.

It’s no secret I too curl up among my words and the books that publish them. My own few favorites are scattered around my website. You can visit the Scenewash Project 20003 and click to THE LITERARY CHIP. Still not a whole lot there yet, but I aim to establish a little here, a little there, and take heed that I am slowly bringing it all together. This is practically all I do in my miserable life among the mobs of malcontention, but that might be exaggerating ever slightly, like a whisper among the rapids. I write many words on many pages and build my websites one page at a time. Desperation is the poet’s business. And my poems rot because I haven’t put very many online yet, but the space is allotted, and some poems are planted there. Check around. Be my Australian friend. I don’t have one yet.

It seems like we’ve damned near established some sort of literary correspondence, and while I get really busy sometimes, I do appreciate an interesting correspondence. I freelance, and work several current clients on a sporadic basis. I work and take great peace and ponderance in my garden, and am enlisted in the minds that matter to fight back all the garbage entropy and grime have a way of bringing to my attention . . .

[pullquote align=left]She’s a 63 year old junior at Oglethorpre University in Atlanta, down in the state of Georgia, so go figure. She loves school, and has never been happier in her life! She studied Nietzsche this past quarter and now feels driven to discuss a poem with me…[/pullquote]I do all this from home, and in fact, rarely leave the Dollhouse & Grill [our pet names for the house & yard], and am somewhat agoraphobic in that way. I live here with two others. Peter and Sue. You can read about them on the website as well. I’m currently trying to finish Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. You really should read this book, without question. It is a rare instant classic, much better than (Gunter) Grass‘s The Rat, which I only mildly found amusing or interesting. In fact I was disappointed, I must say. Perhaps the title was not indicative of Gunter’s other work, but it reminded me of Thomas Pynchon‘s Vineland, and although I love Pynchon’s earlier work, Vineland and this latest book, Mason and Dixon (a much difficult read, and I have read very little of it frankly.) leave a lot to be desired. Vineland kicked its own ashes down the road as far as I am concerned, a pale shimmer of past literary glory, this book. Mason and Dixon is something altogether different. Written in Olde Englische, I don’t know if it’s worth the read or not. But for now it remains on my shelf, a gift from Sue, barely opened.

Don’t use Netscape, eh? Which browser DO you use? Tell me about your computer, if you’ve a mind to go there. I work from a Power Macintosh, of course, an 8500/120, but I hope to upgrade to a G-3 soon. Anywaze, it’s been fun chatting widja . . . keep it cool, and we’ll just play this mystery, word by word. As some unknown poet wrote some time ago, twig by twig we build a language. That reminds me, my mother wants to discuss a poem I just had published, but one I had written a while ago. She’s a 63 year old junior at Oglethorpre University in Atlanta, down in the state of Georgia, so go figure. She loves school, and has never been happier in her life! She studied Nietzsche this past quarter and now feels driven to discuss a poem with me, so I suppose I must oblige her. I’ve got to write her now, so tiddly widdly, until the next time we meet, Olivia, just call me…

[1998, Washington DC ]

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BEFORE THE MOVE

27 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 27th,2010 | Poetry, Science |  No Comments »

This growl the fatherland we first stalked,
this scowl the mother lode we first imagined…
solid day duties hurried past gene-spotted nights.
            We did not invent this theme.

Film on the fives. Ancient mutterings slow to neutralize.

Hearing the herd, my dear, splashing past muddled urges. But death
in sacred surges singing its skilled and perfect pitch
the cold seize of an extinct sturgeon’s Adriatic strain
spoiling the forgotten flesh inked in drama,
this drama of Bolington’s stream.

Spoiled ugly miner’s eye growing green, slowly gone…
The poet choked. The painting dried.

Against the gray ash folded hills his Virginia sky grew black,
chasing spit, there was nothing that lived that night that caught
that’s it, so much as a breath of slack.

We reconcile the concept of withering time
racing faster in toil than we ever swore it to be,
against the yellow years of a faster tomorrow
no relic found can improve lost liberty.

[2010, Lovettsville, VA ]

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LOUIS ZUKOFSKY, POET

24 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 24th,2010 | Literature, Objectivist Poets, Poetry |  No Comments »

Zukofsky

Poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978)

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY IS AN important American poet. Why? Because I said, so, naturally, and even though the bulk of this essay is snitched from other sources, I have split my sandwiches with this poet in question on many a toil. His book, A, dominated my thought back in the late 1980s, when I was chasing a reason to be poet until I rode a sling shot straight into punk rock, fickle women, and cheap booze, and friends who never knew where I was coming from much less where I was aiming to sink a mark, if any.

The son of immigrant Russian Jews, he was born into the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1904. What a headstart he had. I was raised by intelligent but socially illiterate, lingusitically stunted, financially crippled parents with little historical awareness of places and predicaments in a tiny town in SE Georgia, and I don’t mean the Caucasion state in Asia. Zukofsky’s conception of himself as a poet was indebted to Kaballistic Judaism, with both its emphasis on the magically transforming power of language and its division of the world into a tiny circle of initiates and a great mass of ignorant outsiders.

If Zukofsky was a New York Jewish poet, responsive to the cacophonous voice of the cosmopolitan city and determined to find a place for himself in the world beyond the ghetto, I was the epitome of plain white bread sandwich Tom Sawyer—with the crusted edges still attached. Zukofsky’s route out of his festering ghetto was poetry. Mine was the result of that ever diminishing highschool diploma and the vital scream for liberty and exile I found in the wet sack and subsequent scattering of seed called making my way into the world without a clue. Leaving home within a month following a pirate’s blue and gold graduation, I soon married a woman twice my age, with three kids nearly my own age, and a religion I was never built to suffer. But suffer I did for three years almost to the day under the yoke of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, once removed, and a family I was ill-prepared to feed, clothe, or diminish that ridiculous notion that shibboleth shell games was all that mattered in a book so heavily translated and re-translated that no pretty monkey could ever come clean with ambition again. Anxious for something else altogether, I hungered after something of a higher or lower caliber, it didn’t matter, so Jehovah God (her phrasing) and I parted company for those three years as I sunk into a calculated misery with an initial declination of 180.

In his brief Autobiography Zukofsky reported how he began to appropriate the heritage of Western literature, first in Yiddish and then in English: “My first exposure to letters at the age of four was thru the Yiddish theaters…. By the age of nine I had seen a good deal of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Tolstoy performed—all in Yiddish. Even Longfellow’s Hiawatha was to begin with read by me in Yiddish, as was Aeschylus‘ Prometheus Bound…. By eleven I was writing poetry in English, as yet not ‘American English.’”

At age sixteen, Zukofsky entered Columbia University, where he wrote for and helped edit various student literary magazines. He identified with the literary avant garde (as represented especially by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot) that saw itself as an elite committed to a revolutionary assault upon a dead bourgeois culture.

Rather the objectivists wanted, as Zukofsky declared in his Poetry essay “Sincerity and Objectification,” to see the “poem as object,” calling attention to itself by, for example, deliberate syntactic fragmentation and by line breaks that disrupt normal speech rhythm.[/pullquote]Zukofsky’s first major poetic work, “Poem Beginning ‘The,’” written in 1926 and published in Exile in 1928, demonstrates his commitment to a modernist poetic. “The poem’s obvious predecessor,” said Barry Ahearn in Zukofsky’s “A”: An Introduction, “is T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’ In an attempt to surpass Eliot, Zukofsky pushes formal details to an excessive, but liberating, limit.” “Poem Beginning ‘The’” cultivates a tone of Eliot-like irony, as the poet tries to mediate between the insistently alien, Jewish particulars of his experience and an aspiration toward a broader American, “English,” vaguely Christian culture.

poet

Zukofsky, as usual

If “Poem Beginning ‘The’” resonates with echoes of Eliot, Zukofsky soon abandoned Eliot for Ezra Pound, who was at once more approachable and more overpowering. Pound’s warm response to “Poem Beginning ‘The’” led to a flurry of letters between the two men, and Zukofsky eventually visited Pound at his home in Rapallo, Italy. Pound gave Zukofsky’s poetic career an important boost by urging Poetry editor Harriet Monroe to appoint the young New Yorker as guest editor of a special issue devoted to new English and American poets.

For this Poetry issue Zukofsky invented the name “objectivists” to describe himself and the other poets—including Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting—whose work he liked. (Zukofsky, however, never used the term “objectivism” and never claimed to be the leader of a movement named “objectivism.”) Most of these objectivists also appeared in Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology, where they were joined by Pound and even Eliot.

The core group of Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Bunting, Oppen, Rakosi, and Niedecker eventually cohered into something approaching a movement, with Zukofsky established as both the principal theorist and—until World War II—the most diligent critic of and advocate for the poetry of his friends.

Objectivist verse owed a great deal to imagism. Indeed, in his preface to An “Objectivists” Anthology Zukofsky quoted Pound’s 1912 Imagist credo: “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.” But in two respects objectivist poetry went beyond imagism. First, unlike such imagists as Amy Lowell, most of the objectivists were unwilling to treat the poem simply as a transparent window through which one could perceive the objects of the world.

Rather the objectivists wanted, as Zukofsky declared in his Poetry essay “Sincerity and Objectification,” to see the “poem as object,” calling attention to itself by, for example, deliberate syntactic fragmentation and by line breaks that disrupt normal speech rhythm.

Second, following Pound’s poetic practice of the 1920s, the objectivist poets were at least as much interested in historic particulars as they were in immediate sensory images. All the objectivists shared Pound’s aspiration to create a “poem containing history”; and Pound’s incorporation into his Cantos of various historic documents showed these poets a way of incorporating history into their poems without violating the principle of objectivity.

Read it all.

[toc]

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A CENTRIST YARN #3736B

24 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 24th,2010 | birth myth, DIY, Heavy Metaphors, History, Punk |  No Comments »

You bellow peace. I whisper war. You spit war. I mumble
peace. Is there REALLY any difference between your interpretation
of life, and mine?

This transmission is/was/will be interrupted
by Augustine’s phlegm-covered book hurling
across the fuzzy horizon from where we stood,
starving, naked, hysterical, corner to corner,
nose to nose, sexual chunks in our well-picked pockets,
and I’m sure we lost a freckle or two banking the surprise
sunrise coasting along the tallest of the Yankee isles,
no man’s land to thee.

I believe I believe I think
this is the perilous spot, the one drop
where I lost him, or he lost me. Getting tossed
in the pronouns especially during a bumper crop
is such a sad waste of preventative vocabulary. All
the world’s taking medicine to the next level,
or back to the previous stage. I knew better
before I knew good and well

what was the very best for the rest of us…

Communism versus Capitalism: haven’t my wife
and I risked the bounty all so many times before,
given to charity in the darkest of times, worked
like the most generous of slaves when required
and where required to snap the chains off ourselves
and others, and still, after the waters rose,
they receded like tsunami, and while we struggle
gently just to manifest a simple life
without fear of collapse, I swoon,
my nervous system frazzled
right done to the skin,
my skin electric,
dry, unsuitable for pickin’
cotton or wearin’ it.

There should be enough cheese and chocolate to go around.

Whom am I to pick winners and losers? Why should there
even be losers if there are no winners? I have
known many losers. Most have forgotten the sweat of the brow,
but few have ever worn a suit and tie for more than a day or two
in succession. Am I racist, sexist, populist, taking a job
from someone less qualified, less able, more needy,
half as lily but not nearly as dark as I am,
and is there any crossover effect
when I simply walk away and refuse
to take some pitiful but hardworking
wage slave’s slot, and keep to myself
my own vision of things created
but unreceived?

Who owns the goddamned money and how do I win some,
just enough, not a dime more, a zero sum
game between God, the chastiser and myself? How do I win
without making a loser out of someone else? How do I lose
and thus transcend myself, a winner,
as the Nazarene put it,
thus finally
attaining…

the greatest of statures.

Haven’t I have considered the philosopher’s stone
long enough? Don’t we all require a piece
of the rock? Don’t we all have to
stand in line in some faraway plan
before this bloody game is over?

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WHITE HAT WAY

24 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 24th,2010 | Heavy Metaphors, History |  No Comments »

MY AGILE FRIEND IN OUR nascent anti-jihad resistance, young Chris Logan, made this churlish but spot on remark, “America, arming the Islamic world. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Saudis, Turkey and Uzbekistan. At one time or another we have given, or are still giving these countries military aid. There are probably many more, but this is all being done on the hope that the “moderate” Islamic world rises up. We are led by fools.”

True, but perhaps this is their white hat way of one day fighting a fair fight. Remember the old west movies where a gunslinger would toss a pistol at his next victim saying he could never shoot an unarmed man. Not that I agree with this policy of arming the whole damned world, Chris, just making a sarcastic joke.

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THE PREMISE

24 Oct

Gabriel Thy |  October 24th,2010 | Literature, Poetry |  No Comments »

Project Scenewash has been heard to decree
the awful battleground where art and politics plea,
beat and battered each other up, none to agree,
and few are they who seemed the wiser…

Painting the fabric civilization vain
must wear to spare itself the critical pain
crude slavery unjust must follow
profane, the closed closet eye
torn against brash sky too soon
no rain, this wrecking ball
heart next to nix high noon
a vanishing dead stain,
the wretched call sign
of the blood red moon…

and that, of course,
is a course made plain,
fussy labors in vain no single man
can change, by every account his plan
suffers the curse, his hopes lost too,
to the shallow gray range.

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