T D Carroll

At a meeting put on by the League of Vermont Writers recently, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Toussaint St. Negritude, a poet now at work in the Northeast Kingdom, arriving by way of Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and other locales. Before leaving the meeting, I got hold of a copy of his book, Mountain Spells, published by Rootstock Publishers, Montpelier, in 2024. At home that evening, I read the poems, which are quietly compelling; and sometime later went to bed. But I awoke in the night, the meeting now attending me! And with Toussaint's poems still calling, my hand made two couplets:

These poems flow,

like breath.

These poems mean,

like bones.

Two sessions were of special interest that day, the yoga workshop and the end-of-day genre session, with two other poets (Toussaint St. Negritude and Liz Gauffreau). The genre group was especially meaningful for me. At one point, we addressed one of the prompts provided by the event organizers: name an influential poem or collection that's remained important or influential. Liz spoke about T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and its continuing influence on her work. She also mentioned writing haiku every day for a year, which I understood was part of a generative poetic practice. I should say that Eliot has been, and remains, a touchstone poet for me. I chose William Carlos Williams's Paterson, adding that in addition to the poetry, Williams's use of contemporary materials, such as newspaper articles and local histories, ground and situate (and deepen) his text, incorporating a vernacular dimension. Toussaint chose Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a poem he hadn't paid much attention to, he said, until he had the experience of reading the poem aloud, while walking across the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend. Toussaint spoke to the significance of Ginsberg's effective use of lists of everyday things in Howl, embedding them into the flow of the poetry. By the way, Ginsberg and Williams were natives of Paterson, my hometown.

Interestingly, each of us chose a foundational text first discovered long ago. Which put me in mind of writing by another dharma poet, Hank Lazer: the closing paragraph from his reflections on The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (edited by Andrew Schelling, published 2005):

As one gets older, the desert island game becomes less fanciful and more exactingly pertinent: if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island, and you could only take three books with you, which three books would you pick? Those of us who have many demands on our time play the game in a less definite way every morning and every day. Increasingly, the mad rush to read and read and see what's new and read it all gives way to a deliberate return to those books, poets, poems that matter most to us. Perhaps fortunately, it is not at all easy to figure out which books these are. That's why we look at our bookshelves and have trouble each morning deciding what to read and why. I wish that the climate for critical prose writing in our time encouraged greater consideration of how and why these few key books matter to us. It is not an easy thing to discuss truthfully.

I like this passage for its evocation of books or poems long held close, but more especially for the enigmatic last sentences. What did Lazer mean? When I think of Eliot, for example, or Yeats, two poets who've meant quite a lot to me, I'm disaffected by the conservatism that overtook them as they aged -- but I continue to benefit from their poetry. Even so, I suspect that this doesn't capture Lazer's meaning. (More on that some other time; meanwhile, find Lazer's essay here.)

Moving on, the workshop titled "Yoga and Creativity: The Art and Practice of Breath, Flow, and Creative Expression" was convened by Joy Cohen, a playwright, who led guided breathing exercises followed by writing prompts, suggesting one-word responses to each prompt. To "Who (or what) would you like to dance with?", I answered, "sky". Thinking it over in the night, one of my recent poems came to mind, also written in response to a writing prompt given at a meeting earlier this year; also featuring yoga -- and sky. My poem was inspired by a longer poem, or rather two linked poems, collectively titled Not Quite Noon, by dharma poet Paul Naylor, reflecting on his experience climbing a challenging mountain, then returning to that mountain twenty years later -- less successfully the second time up. Here's the relevant passage from Naylor's poem:

Calm and agile -- llamas make their way along

the trail with little thought of what they aren't.

Or so I assume. I can be calm, but agile's in my

past. No amount of yoga or tai chi's bringing

that back. It's now about losing ground as

slowly as I can.

My poem initially strove to replicate haiku, though it finally submerged and abandoned that form. I'll note that mine is fundamentally a distillation, and does not engage the rich complexity of Naylor's:

Shoshoni Sky

Gannett Peak

Wind River Range

Shoshoni sky

The poet scrambled up

The poet scrabbled down

Yoga

Tai Chi...

...he did them all

Yet...

Climbing the mountain

Twenty years later

He stumbled

Suwakkawai*

*a Shoshoni word meaning "out of breath"       

Before closing, I find that I have yet another "sky" poem to offer here. This one came while thinking about a poet's oeuvre: the little sheaf, the life's work; enduring; not enduring:

Sky Burial

Riverrun

Reflecting

Beclouding

Poems gather

Sheaving

Concatenating

As lichen will

On stone or tree

Or as condensation will

On glass...

...or sky

I'll close with an excerpt from an interview with poet Richard Siken at The Academy of American Poets website, who responds to a question with a brief discourse on words:

Poetry is how we make meaning. We compare a known thing to an unknown thing and gain insight. We howl or murmur to express ourselves. We have the Socratic method and the scientific method. We also have the associative method. That's what art does. I guess I fell in love with poetry when I realized that I could use the tools of conversation for not-conversation. I guess I fell in love with Gertrude Stein, with the idea of surface delight, that we could evoke instead of mean.

'Evoke instead of mean'. And a couplet:

These poems summon,

like sky

Breath percolates, suffuses.

Bone. Breath. Sky.

Some time ago, most likely during the 1980s, I listened to an interview on the radio with an Englishwoman from Kent, who reported a visit by aliens. I don't recall the details, but I was impressed or otherwise affected, and right away wrote the following poem:

"The Kentish Woman is Visited by Aliens"

the ship came to me as in a dream

the men were green and their eyes

were stars

I rose from my chair like morning

but the night was amber

and the purple eye of the cat

roamed the sill

I tell you

sometimes I think I am the butterfly dreaming

but I shall never cease to turn

my dreams to coin

they were here

they beheld me

then receded like fire into the night

at morning, you know

there was ash in the hearth

and embers winking

For some reason I tend to remember the title of this poem opening with the indefinite article: "A Kentish Woman", rather than "The Kentish Woman". I chose to use the definite article when I wrote the poem to establish her singularity, but whenever I misremember the title I suspect that the difference might be diversely significant but can't say why. No matter; that's not why I opened this post.

Instead, I want to set down a comparison of sorts with a poem by another writer, which strikes me as having an uncanny resemblance to my poem. I don't recall ever reading this other poem, and the likeness is probably more slope than plane. This other poem is by Denise Levertov.

Levertov's poem is titled "Caedmon", and is reprinted in Barbaric Vast and Wild, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman, the fifth volume in the "Poems for the Millenium" series. Here's the part that struck me as akin to my Kentish Woman poem:

The cows

munched or stirred or were still. I

was at home and lonely,

both in good measure. Until

the sudden angel affrighted me -- light effacing

my feeble beam,

a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:

but the cows as before

were calm, and nothing was burning,

nothing but I, as that hand of fire

touched my lips and scorched my tongue

and pulled my voice

into the ring of the dance.

We know Caedmon (7th century CE) through Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (8th century CE), whence Caedmon, who according to Bede was a Northumbrian peasant gifted with poetic speech by God, is generally recognized as the first English language poet whose work has been preserved. Caedmon's Hymn appears in various documents and in varying dialects of Old English, which is largely unintelligible to the contemporary English reader. Levertov's poem is a reimagining of the Caedmon legend, as recorded by Bede.

In their Old English Grammar, Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson argue that Caedmon's significance may lie in his adaptation of the earlier heroic literature to an emergent Christian literary tradition:

Bede's account in his Ecclesiastical History of how the illiterate cattle-herd Caedmon suddenly began singing of Christian subjects in the old heroic measure seems to capture that moment in history when two cultures began to merge. To the Anglo-Saxons, Caedmon's miracle was his instantaneous acquisition of the power of poetic composition through the agency of a divinely inspired dream. Modern readers familiar with the widely documented folk-motif of people suddenly acquiring poetic powers through a dream may dismiss Bede's story as essentially fabulous, but the nine-line Hymn itself attests to a minor miracle of literary history that cannot be denied: in these polished verses Caedmon demonstrated that the ancient heroic style was not incompatible with Christian doctrine and hence was worthy or preservation. (A Guide to Old English, 7th Edition, p. 232)

Back to the future, our two poems, mine and Levertov's, differ in subject matter and details but I think share essential features: Levertov has cows; I have a cat. Caedmon is visited in the night/a dream by an angel; the Kentish Woman is visited in the night/a dream(?) by aliens. Caedmon symbolically joins "the ring of the dance"; the Kentish Woman (symbolically) witnesses the ashes "winking" (dancing). Levertov's poem has fire; my poem has stars. Both Caedmon and the Kentish Woman are alone when inspiration dawns. In Levertov's poem, Caedmon's poetic speech is liberated; the Kentish Woman's speech is broadcast.

In a recent podcast from The London Review of Books, Marina Warner speaking of Franz Kafka says,

Yes, this is why he's philosophically so much of our time, and so important to what turned out to be his future. Because the causality in his fantasy fictions or the causality of the strange occurrences in his fictions is never, as I've just said, never actually identified. Whereas in fairy tales, it's fairies, and in other forms, in religious fables, it's God. And the supernatural is explained in that way. Or it's in science fiction, speculative fantasy of science fiction, it's something scientific. So here we are in a world, an intermediate world, in which the causality is never, never ascribed.

I think this may reflect the hidden dimension of my Kentish Woman poem -- that causality will likely be ambiguous in poetry, and can't be ascribed. Still, both poems feature a subject depicted as aspirational, glorifying God in the one instance, "something scientific" (or supernatural) in the other. Each enmeshed in the seamless web of poetry. 

I'll leave this post unfinished for now. But I might emphasize in closing that any resemblance of my poem to Levertov's poem is unintentional, and most likely serendipitous.  

Since publishing "Is there a poet in the room?" I've identified additional material that may be apposite or relevant there, but hesitate to interpolate new material into that established post. Below is a selection of that material, offered here as a set of interrelated fragments for possible elaboration later.

From an essay in Public Culture by Ryan Boyd: "Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture" (2.11.2025). Boyd's essay is an extended discussion of a book by Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, with reference also to a more recent book (2024) by Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. The reference to "Insta poetry" caught my eye:

More ominously, his conclusions are relevant to fields of cultural production, distribution, and consumption that he doesn't have space for: Why is short, anti-intellectual Insta poetry most marketable now? Don't ask critics or poets—ask Wall Street and what Kornbluh calls "algorithmic culture." Kay Ryan is still alive, but most new readers prefer Rupi Kaur. "In the extremity of too late capitalism," Kornbluh observes, "distance evaporates, thought ebbs, intensity gulps. Whatever. Like the meme says: get in, loser.

Bringing Eliot into the discussion is interesting, which for my purposes will resonate with Renee Gladsmith's "brown fog", and more generally with the underlying argument of the previous post:

Reading Derivative Media's account of the popular-art industries, now subject to finance instead of Fordism, I kept thinking about T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which had its centenary three years ago. Part of this pertains to Eliot's subject matter: Published in 1922 amid endless wars and just after a brutal pandemic, his modernist assemblage of allusions and texts imagines the West as a hellish necropolis, where civilization lies in fragments: "Unreal city, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many."

Boyd winds his essay down with notes toward possible solutions, as identified by deWaard:

Derivative Media concludes with a bold-faced set of pragmatic, social-democratic ways to break the grip of finance. We could, for example, tax billionaires more, or fight like hell for unionization, or close the "carried interest" loophole that only benefits hedge-fund and private-equity managers, or actually enforce antitrust legislation that is already on the books. (Indeed, under the Biden administration, Lina Khan was doing that at the Federal Trade Commission.) We could, deWaard writes, have "a less capitalist, more democratic organization of society [that] could be modeled in how we collectively allocate culture, in both how we access media and the labor that goes into making it."

This discussion touches on recent writing on the heretofore largely unexamined valorization of economic over social priorities in late capitalist society and culture, or as Michael Hofmann has written:

In the 1980s we were just through being told that life was impossible. We were beginning to worry about ecology and overpopulation. There was a working class, but that went by "middle," or "lower-middle," and it was threatened by the coming of automation and robots (which in another language means "work"). The word "society" had just been withdrawn and replaced in general use by the word "economy." Unions of all sorts had fallen into disrepute…Television – the media – was proliferating, well, like frog spawn, and our overexposed rhetorics of persuasion and introspection were looking distinctly shopworn.

(Hofman's piece was published in the New York Review of Books, a version of the introduction to his new translation of Markus Werner's The Frog in the Throat.)

In closing, returning to Gladman and my discussion of color in the previous post, there's a striking passage from Mountainish, an experimental fiction by Zsuzsanna Gahse (recently translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire). Gahse's book is made of a series of brief numbered passages, 515 passages altogether, reaching 160 pages:

111

I recently heard about a yellow world.

Sour-lemon world and honey-yellow sunrise through fog, acrid yellow all around the world.

112

Four people in the fog, on a wide road, all of them little more than shadows. They are standing fairly far apart, three of them barely moving; the fourth, at the front right of the picture, strides slowly towards the viewer and transforms into a dark-red rectangle, or in fact is immersed in dark red, while the other three are contained in an unsettlingly foggy yellow-red. At the back this yellow-red, at the front dark red.

Has Ghase been reading Gladman? Or Gladman, Ghase? Or would synchronicity or zeitgeist or possibly even the fragmentarium be at work here? (on the latter see my October 13. 2024 post)

Meanwhile, more on yellow-red...at some other time.

Is there a poet in the room?

I've been 'reading' Renee Gladman's Prose Architectures recently, a book I've found increasingly interesting, and absorbing. Gladman produced the word drawings in the book during the time she was working on her series of Ravicka novels, which comprises four books to date. I have those books on my shelf, have read the first one, and have begun reading the second book, called Houses of Ravicka. My reading has stimulated some thinking, focusing initially on Gladman's deployment of the color yellow in Event Factory, the first book in the series, where the air is yellow, and where the ecosystem itself has been conditioned or deeply affected by that color. The novel begins as a stranger arrives in the city:

From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka. Yet, I arrived; I met many people. The city was large, yellow, and tender.

And later:

The yellow air of the city when its sun is at its highest point in the center of the sky and all residents have retreated for what they call their "wrapaway" -- an hour-long meal followed by an hour-long nap -- this air vibrates around the foreigner in the street.

The city is besieged, however, by an unnamed, scarcely identified threat:

A city should not glow this strange brown. The man wanted to talk to me, but I could not stop for him. There was no air. And taking in his glassy eyes and dirty apron --well, it was not a horror film I was living. I walked until I found a clearing, a space in the sky that was yellow.

Yellow.

Taking leave of Renee Gladman for the moment, my reading of Event Factory, that first Ravicka book, coincided with my reading Pierre Michon's 'novella', 'The Life of Joseph Roulin'. Roulin's portrait (along with all Roulin's family members) was painted by Vincent Van Gogh, Michon touching on Van Gogh's use of color, especially yellow in its various iterations with side glances at the artist striving to capture and reproduce Pissarro's yellow, an elusive goal, unattained or unattainable, it seems. A detour: there's also the use of color pigments among the California Paiute, which may be apposite in some way. In Earth Pigments and Paint of the California Indians, Paul Douglas Campbell discusses the relationship of yellow and red pigments among the Paiute, who sometimes derive the latter by subjecting yellow pigments to fire. Yellow -- and red -- that relationship is interesting here. Back to Van Gogh, then, hoping to understand his varying usage of reds and yellows. Interestingly, according to Wassily Kandinsky in his classic Concerning the Spiritual in Art,

Yellow is the typical earthly colour. It can never have profound meaning. An intermixture of blue makes it a sickly colour. It may be paralleled in human nature, with madness, not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania, but rather with violent raving lunacy.

Van Gogh struggled; he sacrificed an ear; he took his own life. Van Gogh had passed from the scene by the time Kandinsky wrote his seminal essay in 1914, though his impact on the generation of artists who succeeded him -- Kandinsky among them -- was profound. The Roulin novella appears in Masters and Servants, Michon's gathering of stories about several notable artists -- Van Gogh, Antoine Watteau, Francisco Goya, and others -- ascending to a meditation on forms of engagement with art (which I believe is Gladman's purpose as well). In the story about Lorentino D'Angelo, Michon evokes that painter's lost masterpiece, a rendering of the legend of St. Martin:

Who can know what it looked like. But it was a masterpiece, since Lorentino had given the best he had to give, had devoted himself as one should, just as each of us, doing the best we can, devoting ourselves as best we can, doubtless makes a masterpiece.

Several years ago I attended monthly meetings of a writers' group, but the emphasis on memoir among those writers blunted my interest, so I opted out. When I mentioned the group to an acquaintance, a working poet, they said they'd gone to one or two of those meetings too and had quit -- for much the same reason I had. They quipped that those writers may not have been up to the job of writing a good memoir and had turned to writing poetry instead. That's an arresting thought! Had they? Maybe so. Whatever the literary value of memoir as a whole or from writer to writer, I think my acquaintance was adumbrating a trend among (some) writers nowadays, who lean into personal narrative as a foil against the demanding work of literary engagement. As Paul Celan noted, "Art makes for distance from the I. Art requires that we travel a certain space in a certain direction, on a certain road." This resonates alongside my view: a superfluity of unpromising poetry written/spoken nowadays – arguably precipitating (in some cases) from the memoirist impulse in contemporary culture. That impulse may be waning, but the long view is unavailable just now.

The recent issue of PNR (Poetry Nation Review #280, November-December 2024), features a piece by Andy Croft, who more pointedly generalizes what I have in mind here, via a sort of in memoriam for Smokestack Books, the now-defunct small press that was shuttered last year. Croft notes that,

In the last twenty years the poetry-reading circuit has collapsed into a culture of slams and open mics. Adult education writing workshops have been replaced by higher education Creative Writing programmes. Local poetry festivals have been swallowed by corporate book festivals. Kaleidoscope by Front Row. Poets who used to work in community-writing residencies have disappeared onto university campuses. Yesterday's elitists are today's populists. In place of the critical culture of small magazines and poetry presses, we have life-style profiles of poets in the weeklies. Although these days the Guardian reviews new poetry only sporadically, in the last ten years the paper has published over seventy reviews, features and interviews with Kate/Kae Tempest. And every poet must have a prize.

Oh yes; every poet must have a prize! Croft notes that Smokestack Books was modeled on Curbstone Books in the US, and Le Temps des Cerises in France, the latter, significantly, were "publishers of 'la poésie d'utilité publique'".

PNR printed an important piece several years ago on this same subject – also a critique of the contemporary British 'poetry scene' (though resonating stateside too). Written by Rebecca Watts (issue #239, Volume 44 Number 3, January - February 2018), the piece is titled 'The Cult of the Noble Amateur'. Watts wonders,

WHY IS THE POETRY WORLD pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their 'honesty' and 'accessibility' – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work. The short answer is that artless poetry sells.

This complaint appears relatively widespread across the community of engaged poets, and much of what Croft reveals about the British poetry scene would, I believe, be applicable here. To that end I'll indulge yet another example, from Golden Handcuffs Review 32, a conversation between Habib Tengour, Charles Bernstein, and Pierre Joris, to resituate the discussion within a US context. To Tengour's question, "Is there today a major trend in poetry writing in the US, or are there multiple paths being drawn?", Joris replies:

Several paths, no doubt, but with one major tendency which is that of the creative writing programs and departments on our university campuses – these in the main rather sad-sack and reactionary because essentially based on the little lyrical musick of the individual expressing ("self-expression" being the impoverished aim) his/her fears, angst, etc. It is also the professionalization of poetry: you end up with a degree in writing & you go on to teach the same thing, creative writing, in another factory producing "poets."

Joris goes on, however, to offer a glimpse of a countervailing trend:

Now in the big cities, but also in the great plains, in the mountains, there is massive actual lived experience & many poets who work on a poetry deeply connected to the outside world & not just to their bruised egos.

Aligned with these trends is a concurrent superfluity of 'poets'. PNR 279 featured an interview with Stanley Moss, who was about to turn 100 at the time of the interview (see my November 11, 2024 post on this website for more on this interview). Moss was citing an elder poet he knew. My recollection of that exchange exposes my predilection, I suppose, since that recollection was faulty. I thought Moss had reported the elder poet saying that back when whenever it was there'd be just one poet in the room; nowadays there's only one person in the room who's not a poet!

Ok, then, here's what Stanley Moss actually said:

One of the problems with much contemporary poetry is that they have MFA classes throughout the United States, and they've got a few hundred thousand people who think they're poets. In San Francisco, I think, out of all the people who registered to vote (I don't know the number) something like fourteen thousand of them registered as a poet. I remember Kunitz saying: 'There's only one poet in the room'.

I'll move toward closing with something from Tiffany Atkinson's essay in Against Storytelling, a recent collection from a symposium on the subject (which includes essays by Charles Bernstein and Amit Chaudhuri among others):

Nonetheless, I can see, obviously, the value and merit in storytelling, so my take against storytelling here is not really so much antagonism or direct opposition...but more a kind of leaning against, an askance-ness, a benign friction or pressure that at least tries to assert the value of alternative notions of language-use. The idea of a benign friction is something that interests me now because it's how I would describe embarrassment, and recently I've been trying to follow through a hunch that more than any other literary genre, poetry is a field prickly with embarrassment, despite the best efforts of literary theory or creative writing teaching (which are aspects of my day job) to behave otherwise. This may just be making virtue of necessity since poetry has always felt like the embarrassing other of my critical work, and the predicament of actually being a poet can be just embarrassing all around.

Atkinson's essay helpfully recasts the question, although there's much more to her argument vis a vis embarrassment (and shame) among poets than I want to engage with here. For discussion, perhaps, at some other time.

Meanwhile, I'll leave the last word to Hank Lazar, his small poem dedicated to Donald Revell, from that same issue of Golden Handcuffs Review*:

I don't know

for whom poetry

remains

of interest

this space

of being

to which

i have given

my life

all to sense

a hidden

rhythm

 *According to editor Lou Rowan, Golden Handcuffs Review will cease publication with the current issue, #35.