Accommodatingly

So the sestina essay and the book about adolescence in modern poetry (almost there now!) and a barely-begun project about time and pronouns (and the fact that he’s just very, very good) have been prompting me to reread parts of Ashbery I haven’t thought about for a while: today and yesterday and the day before, it’s been Flow Chart, whose admittedly excessive length appears inseparable from its virtues. It even contains appropriate holiday greetings:

“Once, an avalanche of cuties threatened our meeting. Fred bypassed it./ Now the season, ‘a boundless and festive rejoicement,’ is on track. I, too, voted for it.”

Happy New Year, everybuggy. (May our little guy show his face soon.)

Here’s how the Interwebs are supposed to work: we hear from Mrs. Coulter that we should read Wil Wheaton’s piece in Salon about how right-wing talk radio has ruined his family Xmas.

We do. It’s a nice piece– funny and trenchant and sad, and deficient only in failing to mention progressive talk radio, which has been gaining ground. Wil Wheaton describes the piece in his own blog, and readers react.

So do his parents, and Wheaton uses the highest-traffic venue available to blog their reaction, and (sort of) apologize. I don’t mean that he weasels out of apologizing– it’s an apology– but that it’s an apology-plus, an apology mixed in with an explanation, not just of what it feels like to have lots of strangers read about your family, but of how to talk about politics with your more conservative, relatively prosperous relatives, and of what made them conservative.

Wil Wheaton’s mom: “We didn’t raise you to agree with us… I consider myself a moderate, and Dad is to the right of me.”

Wil Wheaton’s dad: “I have a conservative philosophy that’s opposed to the liberal philosophy, and I’m not happy about having to pay more taxes, and I’m not happy — I thought that, under Bush, the government would be made much smaller, but it hasn’t. It’s gotten much larger than it ever has been, and I don’t know how that happened because it runs counter to the conservative ideals. But at the end of the day, I am conservative, and I believe the conservative philosophy more than I do the liberal philosophy.”

Besides making both Wil Wheaton and his parents look pretty good, the piece– which you should go read– explains a lot, not so much about the corrupt, incompetent establishment and their braindead, lapdog media, but about how Reagan Republicans became a working majority:

Middle-class white folks came to feel, during the 1970s and 80s, that the federal government took away more resources from them in taxes than it gave back in social goods and public services, and that the government distributed those resources instead to other, different people, who had not worked for them and didn’t deserve them.

There is an understandable, but ineffective and counterproductive, response to this widespread feeling, which is to call it racist– yes, there’s some element of racial alienation in it, since those “other, different people” were stereotyped as nonwhite, but noticing the racial component won’t help us fix the problem.

A much more useful response to this widespread feeling is to point out that most of what government does benefits all of us– we need good public schools, and good public universities, and safe drinking water, and better transit, all of which help America as a whole. Taxes are the prices we pay for these things, and “welfare” is a miniscule sliver of them: enormous federal deficits and irresponsible tax cuts for the superwealthy endanger the very existence of the goods and services the government makes available, and which Americans take for granted. Modern Republicans love tax cuts not because they want to prevent your taxes from going to “welfare,” but because they hate the very idea of a public good.

The more people think that the government can help everybody, that taxes are not an unjust imposition on the middle class but simply the price we pay for the Army and the Navy and the Smalll Business Administration, for clean(er) drinking water, for roads and schools, the better Dems are going to do.

Thanks to all who have sent comments or emails regarding the sestina epidemic. They have all (so far) proven super-useful.

If you seek not use so much as interest and pleasure (or, if you prefer, disinterest and pleasure) you might want to check out these things, which– in an attempt to put off grading the last batch of exams (having already read and graded all my students’ papers)– I discovered this morning:

The new Tarpaulin Sky. Start with these cool prose poems by Max Winter.

Robert’s blog, currently host to a long debate about (aesthetic) disinterest.

Eric Murphy Selinger, whom I didn’t know had a blog. He wrote a useful, detailed book about American love poems.

Two more blogging poets whose frequent writings are as much journal and all-purpose commentary as they are poetry criticism, but whom I’m going to continue to read with pleasure: Christmasposts at Whimsy’s blog, and general what’s-up-ness from Amy King.

And now, exams. There are durable reasons why the intro-level classes I teach generally feature final exams– if you teach, you can probably guess them, and if you don’t teach, you have better things to do than find out– but gee whiz, they’re no fun to grade. (Student papers, on the other hand, I often enjoy grading: even the very flawed efforts can often teach me something I didn’t know, either about the work on which the student wrote, or about how the student views the world.)

My tummy is twitching, which means that the little guy has the hiccups. Yesterday was hard–dreary, plagued by backache and fatigue. Late pregnancy is difficult, and the fact that it’s been exceptionally gray lately isn’t helping.

Also contributing to my lousy mood is the fact that the holidays came and went without a trip home this year. Yes, there’s always drama. No, we don’t always get along (and this year was no exception, judging by reports I received from my mom and sisters). But it’s a real bummer to not get cuddles from my nieces, to not help my mom with dinner, to not hang out with my sisters. I miss them all so much.

Christmas is something that’s important to me, which tends to get obscured by the overwhelming, family-focused madness of Steve’s family, with its struggles over how Jewish his folks want the kids (and our baby) to be. I put up a tree this year (on the porch, and decorated only with blue and white lights), which made me feel absurdly guilty. Why should I have such issues with my background, my traditions? Is it dominant-culture guilt? I really dig Christmas, in spite of the schmaltz and commercialization of it all. It’s one time out of the year when people at least give lip service to generosity of spirit and action. It’s also a time of bright lights and beauty in the midst of darkness, and now that it’s come and gone for the year, I’m a little blue.

A bright spot this year: having Christmas Eve dinner with our good friend Demetri’s family. Oyster stew, familial warmth, and good conversation. It’s nice to be welcomed into someone else’s traditions when your own aren’t available.

I’m going to use this post to make public, in the way that I’m told people in math and in the natural sciences sometimes make public, the hypothesis for a paper I’m still writing. Please feel free to mail in suggestions, corrections, objections.

So the piece I’ve been working on, or at least thinking about, starts by asking: why are there all these sestinas? And I think will probably argue that we’ve got all these sestinas around these days because:

A. Youngish poets have (correctly) abandoned the wrong ideas about poetry and its value bequeathed to us, and disproven in whole or in part, by older generations. Among those wrong ideas: (1) poetry has value as and when it joins a preexisting tradition (a canon, if you like); (2) poetry has value as and when it replaces religion or manifests deep metaphysical truths; (3) poetry has value as and when it represents an authentic self, which in turn represents either an exemplary struggle towards free adulthood, or an oppressed group’s struggle for political equality; (4) poetry can not only trope or describe, but actually assist, in large-scale struggles for political equality (either by describing such struggles directly, or by, for example, de-commodifying language itself).

B. If (1) (2) (3) and (4) all strike you as wrong, and you still enjoy writing and reading poetry, the easiest way to assert that it has value, to suggest (to yourself and others) that it’s worth the time it takes to learn how to write it, might be to emphasize poetry as a craft, as something which requires not just strong emotion or sensitivity but particular learned verbal skills, intellect, ingenuity.

And the forms which are all over the place right now are forms which emphasize craft, but which don’t require deep acquaintance with pre-modern poetry– they are forms whose difficult requirements don’t include scansion or rhyme. That’s why young poets are (mostly) writing sestinas, pantouns, lipograms, anagrams, alphabetical acrostics, rather than Spenserian stanzas, ottava rima, or rime royal.

Such forms not only allow us to avoid measuring ourselves against Victorians who really knew how to do stuff we haven’t learned (in particular, rhyme); they also make evident (as couplets might not) our sense, or our fear, that poetry is only a craft, that it is a game which takes years to learn, whose devotees understand how hard it is, but which has to struggle to find its fit audience, and which worries at times about whether that audience is large enough to sustain its current ambitions. (See, I can work a WNBA reference into anything!)

The sestinas that seem to be everywhere these days are evidence for my hypothesis, but so are the other quasi-Oulipian forms in use and in popularity: Christian Bök’s lipograms, for example. Latest remarkable evidence: Mike Smith’s Anagrams of America. Read them and startle at his laborious working methods, and at the genuine poems which seem to result.

N.B. yes, Ashbery (the sestinas in Some Trees, the double sestina in Flow Chart, the pantoum in Hotel Lautremont) was there first. Wherever you go, there he is.

Jessie also got me the first season of Veronica Mars, which we are watching right now; by a process of FLTOI (following loose threads on the Interwebs) the gift led me to Mars Investigations, the very model of what a fansite ought to be. Marvel at it. There’s a separate, related site for the music, another for interviews, and so on.

In a related discovery, there is no ZIP code 90909.

Next book of verse I expect to read: Ander Monson’s Vacationland. We’ll see.

Pretty self-explanatory. Send in your own. (The books need not be new.) Reviewing seems driven, too often, by market needs; it assists editors, and promotes reviewers, but doesn’t always help readers find the books they need. These folks might. (Is that 42?)

In the wide world of poetry, there’s good stuff over at Silliman’s this weekend: a prose poem Xmas card from the poet Sheila E. Murphy, with whose work I am otherwise unfamiliar; a long think-piece about the sociology of poetry, including speculation as to “why, in 2005, poetry is flourishing and theory is not”; and amusing hate mail from Mr. Wright, who has probably sent more such poison-pen letters by now than Robert Pollard has written songs.

And that’s not even counting the electronica Rob Pollard, a friend I don’t see enough anymore, whose music is worth checking out.

Speaking of friends we don’t see enough, Jenny has won a major award from Columbia, of the kind that normally go to full professors. Cool beans. Read her work.

And on the even-smaller scale of our household, Jessie and I get to stay home for Xmas, go out for Chinese food, and see a movie, for the first time ever, not because we have abandoned her family, but because we are too pregnant to get on a plane. She gave me, among many other extremely cool and eminently cherishable presents, the softest bathrobe ever, bizarre Southeast Asian candy (no durian fruit, though– not in season, I guess), and this record, and this record, and this record, and other cute things that I’m not going to tell you about, but which were certainly the right things to get me.

Jessie’s mom got me this record, which is also pretty great. How can folks admire the Hold Steady and not dig the Boss’s ’70s recordings? (This reviewer has the same idea.) Jessie’s sister Robin got me the snarky, charming new full-length from Nothing Painted Blue, whose songwriter has ceased blogging as of today.

Jessie also got me a goat. Give a goat yourself. Or a basketball backboard, or mosquito netting, or a fruit tree. Great idea.

Back in the quasi-public sphere, Josh Marshall puts it better than I could: “Merry Christmas, both to those for whom it is a central religious celebration and to those for whom it is a secular holiday of giving and togetherness.” And Happy Hannukah. And who could forget Saturnalia? Happy complete solstice holidays, everyone. And to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere: enjoy your summer break.

UPDATE: left-leaning holiday kittens! I’m told that the kittens in question are neutral between religion and irreligion, which makes them even cuter in my book.

Zach’s book has a cover. And a release date (March). And a new title. I read it in a slightly earlier version. If all American history books were like this one, I’d read a lot more American history books.

More of Zach’s research, as always, here.

I just put two coconut pies in the oven, after making a batch of tartlets. It’s the end of the year, with all of the accompanying holidays and festive food, so I thought I should do a little bit myself since we couldn’t head home to be with my family. While the pies cook, here’s my attempt at summarizing the past year.

2005 started as my first year as a college graduate. I worked for a while at two different magazines: Ruminator Review and Rain Taxi Review of Books. Ruminator has now bit the dust for good (it wasn’t my fault, honest!), but Rain Taxi just celebrated 10 years and will keep going strong for some time to come. I also did quite a bit of reviewing for Publisher’s Weekly, until I got burned out on lousy mystery novels and needed to take a break. I have now officially started my maternity leave and will likely return to Rain Taxi in some capacity in 2006.

Steve had lots of big stuff happen professionally this year, most notably getting tenure and becoming the new chair of the English Department. 2005 also saw the publication of Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, a collection of Jarrell’s lectures on Auden, which Steve edited. Steve is just about finished with his next critical book, and his next book of poetry, Parallel Play, will appear in early 2006.

Also appearing in early 2006, or perhaps very late 2005 if we’re lucky, will be our next joint production, Baby Bennett Burt. Check back for further developments…

After beginning 2005 with a hungover cab ride to JFK following a brief New York City stay, our travels this year included trips to Connecticut and Washington, DC, to visit family (and be showered with baby presents); Madison, WI, to watch the Gophers play the University of Wisconsin; Norfolk to honor the passing of Steve’s grandfather; Indianapolis for the NCAA Women’s Basketball Final Four; an overnight trip to Preston, MN; and two professional trips to Chicago for Steve. Phew! We have lots of travel on the agenda for next year as well, between promoting the new book of poetry and showing off the new little guy.

The pies are almost done, the holiday lights are twinkling, and we’re readying for some oyster stew with the family of our good friends, who have been kind enough to take in a couple of orphans for the evening. We hope you all have wonderful holidays and a fantastic new year.