It was similar but not identical to the first one. There was no acknowledgment of my unenthusiastic response to his first message. I'm not sure if the poems he is sending me now are different or the same from the mediocre ones he sent me last time. It kind of feels like a joke or an AI thing. I'm not sure even if this person exists. Probably he or it is sending these messages to many people. Some new kind of spam?
So this time I won't respond at all.
I was walking near some docks, and the memory came to me of having worked there. I remembered some nasty union officials and company bosses, and co-workers who nicknamed me "college boy" or "college." I was skeptical because it didn't fit in with anything I remembered or with my self-image.
As I woke up I thought about other situations in which the dream world had a kind of self-consistency, as though it were a world that existed. One in which there was some kind of summer work and a particular bus to take to get to a coastal resort.
Alice Notley notes that when she was writing poems about being pregnant and then a young mother and taking care of kids, etc... that that kind of poetry, based on that experience, had never been written before. I'm not going to dispute that because what matters is her perception of this. She is probably right, and any counter example would be the exception that proves the rule.
I mentioned that Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill is the first poem ever about the death of a pop culture celebrity. I can't prove that either, and if someone has an earlier example I would stand corrected.
Another first might be Keats' "This living hand, now capable of earnest grasping...." This is the first poem I know that has that quality of emotional rawness to it. It's not even in other Keats poems.
Of course, once you see that, you can go back and find precursors to any thing that seems to be a "first," like Borges's precursors of Kafka. Kafka is a first: there is not that particular feeling in literature before that.
That would seem to be the important thing, because all the archetypes have always existed, the narrative structures of quest or homecoming, the particular rhythms of plots with up and down movements, problems being posed and resolved. You can't be original with that, but new kinds of feeling can come into being. You can have the -esque of Kafkaesque. (And I don't mean the Kafka cliché, but the feeling one gets from it.).
What are some other firsts? I associate this with writers who "cut through" and identify new forms of feeling, make them recognizable.
I was looking at this report:
https://worldhumanitiesreport.org/report/
The humanities are a resource of critical analysis and interpretation. At the same time, this report reveals a tension between the humanities understood as core practices of national identity formation, imperialism, and dominance, and the humanities understood as the critical global humanities: resources through which nationalism, imperialism, and dominance have been questioned, analyzed, dissected, and displaced."
What's wrong with this?
I have a Monk project. consisting of learning as many tunes as possible. I know Bemsha Swing very well, and have learned Friday the 13th as well. I purchased the Monk fake book and am working from there but listening to records as well. My next tune is North of the Sunset, a blues in Bb. A lot of the tunes are not in difficult keys.
I will learn a ballad, Ruby my Dear, always one of my favorites.
The nice thing about Friday the 13th is that is seems almost impossible to play wrong notes when improvising over it. Yes, I can play "wrong notes," but I almost have to try to play things that won't fit. I tried the method of soloing over it with one note, using all twelve possible notes. Some notes are more difficult to use, some easier, but it is a spectrum, not an absolute dichotomy.
I use different methods of improvisation. For example, a chorus of only very short phrases. Another of long phrases, then one mixing long and short. Play only quarter notes, only quarter note triplets, only half notes, etc... Solo using only two notes, only three notes. Use only the notes of the chord. Use mostly scalar movement, use mostly arpeggios. Start every phrase on the and of 1.
The goal of this project? This will be revealed to me later. Aside from the obvious purpose: to spend time with Monk and make friends and influence people.
My friend came back from Cody, Wyoming and we were talking about Buffalo Bill in the car. Her flight came in near midnight. I thought of the poem, "Buffalo Bill's / defunct." I have it memorized, not surprisingly. I remember explaining the poem to my father when I was a teenager. He wanted to know why Cummings wrote out the word "Mister" rather than using "Mr." I explained this to him. Now BB died in 1917. Tulips & Chimneys, where the Cummings poem appeared, came out in 1923. In 1917 EEC had published some poems in a volume called 8 Harvard Poets, with a mixture of late Victorian style poems and some modernist ones. He might have written the first draft of the poem in 1917, after Buffalo Bill's death. I don't know the exact date of the poem, but it feels occasional. Clearly he had begun the modernist style already, as evidenced by the Harvard poems. He was about 23 years old, a bit younger than Williams, Pound, H.D, Marianne Moore, Eliot. (The other modernist American poets.)
I don't know poems that early that talk about the death of a pop culture celebrity in colloquial, even profane language (Jesus / he was a handsome man). It's almost like a Frank O'Hara poem. Buffalo Bill was a showman, using his status as Western hero to put on spectacles for the public, "breaking onetwothreefourfive pigeons just like that." The poem is an homage, but with an ironic edge too.
Cummings never became a better poet than he was with his first book. It is all there from the beginning, the humor and sentimentality, the typography. This poem is among his best.
Someone sent me their poems from Spain in an email, with a very flowery email message asking me to do something, I'm not sure what, exactly. There was some talk of my "magisterio" which made me laugh a bit. It was an odd combination of a very pretentious explanation of what the poet was trying to do (think the "dreaded artist statement") and poems that did not line up at all with what the dreaded artist statement would lead one to expect. I begged off as politely as I could, and put it in an email response that will be sent a bit later today.
Everyone that know me knows I hate that kind of pretentiousness. Mediocre poetry bolstered by pretentious explanations is even worse, because it isn't allowed to be what it actually is, a modest display of one's own literary persona.
