Great Poems of Our Time: "Auditing the Heart"

    After a half-decade wait we have finally seen the sixth shoe drop:  Tim and Megan Green have published Frank Matagrano's "Auditing the Heart" in the Summer, 2012 edition of "Rattle" magazine.  Of the six 21st century poems we honor here, this is the first written by a {gasp!} male.  Hey, stranger things have happened.

    As with another in our "Great Poems of Our Time" series, "How Aimée remembers Jaguar", Frank's poem was posted on The Alsop Review's Gazebo workshop before being housecleaned away.  Unlike Erin Hopson, who vanished while completing her college degree, this time only the poem dropped out of sight.  Frank Matagrano has remained a presence on Gazebo, Eratosphere and elsewhere.


Auditing The Heart (by Frank Matagrano) from Earl Gray on Vimeo.


     Like our #1 poem, Margaret Ann Griffiths' "Studying Savonarola", "Auditing the Heart" is about romance, distance and time.  It treats the latter theme even better than Maz's masterpiece.  Like "Savonarola", "Auditing the Heart" starts very slowly.  Perhaps too slowly.  It isn't clear what the first three couplets add beyond a missed opportunity to create more ambiguity by using "was" rather than "meant" in S3-L1.

     In terms of sounds and rhythms, "Auditing the Heart" is not the masterpiece that "Studying Savonarola" and "Beans" are but S4 to S6, inclusive, constitute a clinic on remarkable linebreaks.  Teachers and students:  take note!

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Auditing the Heart - Frank Matagrano

One mother who owned
   the sea, one father who walked

on water, and in a row boat,
   one brother who believed

marriage meant becoming
   the roof over a woman's head.

A room for the night with a view
   of the water, the moon a quarter

less than it should have been,
   the shape of my wife drawn

into the empty bed one memory
   at a time.  There were too many

stars to count, a registry
   of old gifts and receipts strewn

across the sky, a mess
   of things that died getting here.

---

    Magnifique!

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1. "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths


2. "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo


3. "Antiblurb" by A. E. Stallings


4. "How Aimée remembers Jaguar" by Erin Hopson


5. "There Are Sunflowers in Italy" by Didi Menendez


6. "Auditing the Heart" by Frank Matagrano

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The Blurbosphere

    "...and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry."

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    Contrary to popular belief, the blurbosphere is not a pejorative term for the blogosphere.  Don't get me wrong;  it is pejorative but no more so than calling an earlier generation "old-fashioned" or "slightly technophobic".  Also, it refers to the most visible aspects of careerism, including but in no way limited to the blogosphere.  It is usually a cynic's view of untenured, publish-or-perish academia and the attendant print world.  When I use the term it describes any professional community or mindset where poetry is not judged but showcased, typically on the basis of the writer rather than the written.  In short, it is a place where actual criticism is pointless, if not verboten.

    Normally, I would just "let the circus keep the tent", as the quaint saying goes.  Recently, though, a Facebook friend of mine asked for interpretations of a poem for a critical article she was writing.  This person is someone I like and admire, more so than the expression "Facebook friend" may suggest.  Nevertheless, she is from the blurbosphere, where "criticism" translates to "interpretation", not [technical] "evaluation".  In that topsy-turvy world "criticism" means its opposite:  "praise".  The fact that one bothers to write an interpretation of a poem is, itself, flattering. It's a cozy, compartmentalised world.  Works by poets unknown to both critic and reader are rarely reviewed.  What would be the point?  (Bear this factoid in mind.  There will be a test later.)

    Unfortunately, the poem in question was completely devoid of artistic merit or coherence at any level.  It was authored by a retired professional but if I told you it was produced by a semiliterate teenager using a dictionary as a dartboard you'd have no cause for doubt.  Call me "old-fashioned" or "squirrelly", but I advocate the notion that bad writing doesn't make good poetry.  Feel free to check my arithmetic:

 Bad grammar + sloppy punctuation + Tamarian syntax + tedium ≠ poetry 

    If my friend were a fellow onliner I could be frank with her.  Both of us would have seen each other critiquing work honestly.  She would know to expect candor and that is what she'd get.  Were the poet--not my critic friend but the author of the underlying piece--to have posted this dreck to a serious critical forum he could expect a response similar to this oft-quoted Usenet classic:

    "Please give me one reason why the aforesaid could be
classified as anything other than badly written, unimaginative
and cliché-festooned. This poem, for lack of a more appropriate
term, seems to represent, to me, everything poetry is not about,
that is: vague references to vaguely traumatic personal events
renumerated listlessly as a piece of abstract journalistic
schlock (with random line breaks to disguise it as poetry)
superimposed on a bland moral-aesthetic grid. Superficial in
every way, and lacking any sort [of] effect."

        - Aidan Tynan (2002-07-17, a.a.p.c., re:  "Facade") 

    How do you deal with this in the blurbosphere, though, where real critique is viewed as catty, if not vicious?  For all we know, someone's job could be at stake.  Remember:  the blurbic language has no word for "shit".  So how do you tell your academic friend that the poem she is about to praise/interpret is, in fact,  unprocessed sewage?

    The answer has to lie in why your friend is suffering from such an acute case of amaurosis poetica.    (I told you there would be a test later.)  There is only one possible explanation.

     Ask your buddy this:  "Do you know this poet personally?" 

    That should get the ball rolling. 

    If not, give up;  it's a lost cause.

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A Brief History of Time Online

     From "Exploding the Groupthink Myth":

     Factoid from Facebook: A group comprised of fewer than 1 in 10,000 living poets has quietly produced, in addition to the bestselling personal poetry collection (not including educational sales), one third of the speakers at the 2012 West Chester convention and all of the last ten¹ Nemerov winners. Who are these poets and what is the source of their mojo? Do they have a secret handshake?

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Dennis Hammes (1945-2008)

     If your exposure to e-poetry is limited to a few webzines and the blogosphere you probably think of "online poetry" as...well, poetry that is online:  ditties on Facebook, collections on vanity pages or the blogosphere, or quality works on e-zines (e.g. TheHyperTexts, The Pedestal, etc.) and e-versions of magazines (e.g. Rattle, Poetry, etc.).

     Those who have been part of the online poetry community for more than a few years use the expression to describe someone whose aesthetics were, in whole or in part, developed and/or shared in online workshops.

     If this group were to have a motto it might be:  "Be teachable.  We can work with the clueless but not the clueproof."  More succinct is Scavella's Mantra:  "You aren't as good as you think you are."

     The core difference between the print and pixel mindset is the immutable versus the improvable.  This is reflected in the media themselves.  When a number of critics and advisors pointed out errors in a popular textbook the author did a recall and reprint--an awkward process in a hardcover listed at $95.00!  When we bloggers or e-zine editors make mistakes we thank the reader, make the correction without much cost or bother, and move on.  By definition, onliners invite critique;  criticism of printed work is rare and not always welcome.

Seamus Heaney

     It would be hard to imagine Seamus Heaney as an attendee, as opposed to a facilitator, of a live workshop.  Can you envision Derek Walcott posting his drafts to an online critical forum?  No.  Print poets don't want a reader to see the sausage being made.  They want to continue the Mosaic illusion of words coming straight from some divine source onto stone tablets.  Immutable.

     Other poets of their calibre, some of whom may be familiar to you, do present their works-in-progress for constructive critique.  Theirs is an equally simple motivation:  they believe in improvement of poems and poets.

     The preamble to this article hints at the significance of this tiny community.  We might wonder:  how did it come into being and what else has it contributed to the whole?

Origins of Online Information Exchange:

Michael McNeilley (1947-2001)

    The Finger program, written in 1971 by Les Earnest, facilitated access to university databases.  This later morphed into much more sophisticated search engines like Google or Bing.  It was the first major civilian Internet application. 

    Email protocols, standardized in 1973, added a carbon copy feature soon afterwards.  This paved the way for the discussion list:  roughly, people sending out Round Trip Memos.  After Information Technologists and other scientists, English Departments were the third to employ this new technology and the first to expand Internet use to non-academics:  journalists, novelists and poets.

Usenet: 

J. R. Sherman

    Implemented in 1980, Usenet is an online bulletin board service (BBS), divided into "newsgroups".  One of the first of these was rec.arts.poems, joined much later by its echo chamber, alt.arts.poetry.comments.  For 13 years before the World Wide Web a thriving poetry community discussed and analyzed poems online.  Terms describing people and behavior, including "crosspost", "flaming", "kill file", "plonk", "lurk", "postcount", "CABAL" (technically, the group that started Usenet but, more commonly and metaphorically, a term used to aggravate egomaniacal paranoids), "spam", "sockpuppet", and "troll", were popularized on Usenet.  For better or worse, what we now call "chat-speak" began there, highlighting "acronyms" such as  "LMAO", "BTW", "AFAIK", "FWIW", "IIRC" and "IMHO".  Before Usenet, "LOL" meant "Little Old Lady".  Because rec.arts.poems habitues were among the most literate and vociferous Usenetters many, if not most, of these expressions can be attributed directly to them.

     Here is a provocative factoid for you:  had people cared to use the available technology, the rec.arts.poems newsgroup would have been the first venue where all poets in a postliterate society could have been gathered in one location.  If humankind had produced an iconic poem in the half century before Facebook it would probably have happened on Usenet.  It was the only game in town.

     Not counting Dr. Seuss nursery rhymes, would you care to guess the title² of the best known poem among poets in the last three decades? 

Peter John Ross

    If you have learned anything about poetry technique, but especially about scansion, on the Internet there is a good chance that you can credit Peter John Ross, directly or indirectly.  If you are not familiar with this guy you are either not a poet or not a Usenetter.  Author of the satirical "rulez 4 aspiring ~poets~", PJR is a mainframer, linguist, wit, critic and one of the world's leading authorities on matters prosodic.  Unfortunately, along with Gary Gamble, "J.R. Sherman" (aka "The Value Added Savior"), and the late Dennis Hammes, Mr. Ross spent most of his time on unmoderated Usenet forums fighting trolls or TORLLS [sic] (i.e. illiterate trolls).  These reprobates were so odious and numerous that a search engine was developed to track them:  "Kookle". 

     No, really.

World Wide Web:

     The World Wide Web started in 1993 but it wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990s that browsers and public interest developed.  Among the first critical sites was Bela Selendy's "Poetry Free-For-All" or "PFFA", which grew directly out of the need for Usenetters to find a moderated forum, sans trolls.  People who complain about how sharp some of the PFFA critics and moderators can be need do no more than Google "rec.arts.poems" to understand why.  Today, when you see the guidelines of an online workshop you are reading the "don't-crit-the-crit" ethos developed by Usenetters.

Rik Roots

    Along the way we saw the egoless experiment:  two sites where poems and critiques were posted anonymously.  The first of these was "The Lathe", created by English poet and programmer Rik Roots.  On Egoless, poems and critics earned performance ratings.  Among other innovations, the egoless format originated the "thumbs down" and/or "thumbs up" (then called "me too" or "chime") buttons used by social networks and discussion software today.

    What were the lessons we could draw from from the egoless experiment?  Nothing onliners didn't already know, really:

1.  Selfless, informed critiquers like Hannah Craig and Aidan Tynan are gold;


2. very few poets are interested in a careful, objective evaluation of their work, even if rendered politely and received anonymously; and,


3. the social aspect of a workshop is important.

    Today, the egoless format survives in business, scientific and political discourse models.    Among poets, its legacy is in its motto:  "If you don't think your writing is competing against the works of others you're probably right."

Christine Klocek-Lim

    Soon after PFFA came Eratosphere, run by Alex Pepple, and Alsop Review Gazebo, established by the late Jaimes Alsop.  A few years laters we saw the first of two incarnations of the now defunct Poets.org forum, headed by Autumn Sky Poetry head editor Christine Klocek-Lim.  When we speak of the pre-existing World Wide Web community, these are some of the key figures.

     Which of these venues would I recommend to those eager to improve their technique?  Such individuals should join and lurk on all of them, really, but if new to the study of the craft--regardless of how many decades they've been writing or teaching poetry--I'd encourage them to learn the basics before joining in.  Those who know that Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Moriturus" is neither iambic nor free verse should consider Eratosphere.

In Conclusion:

Margaret Ann Griffiths

    The history of online poetry may be obscure to most but it accounts for much of our modern language (mostly tech- and text-speak), a claim that page and stage poets cannot match.  It is a story of struggle against trolls and between aesthetics, often punctuated by brilliant one-liners and rants.  Stay tuned for more on this subject in upcoming posts.

    Let me leave you with one final touchstone.  It doesn't matter if you edit or have been published in a hundred webzines, have run a popular blog for years and have the world's largest poetry newslist.  If you don't know who Margaret Ann Griffiths is you are not an onliner.  Period.  It follows that if you want to understand this community you will find no better starting point.

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Footnotes:

¹ - Make that 11.  Since we posted this, Gail White won her second consecutive Nemerov.  Congrats, Gail!

² - The ultimate filler-and-killer poem, "Hookers", written by Marco Morales in 1995, is familiar to all rec.arts.poems denizens--that is, to everyone who engaged in any open online poetry discussion at that time.

Missing you again
I embrace shallow graves.
Pale faces, doughlike breasts
help me forget.

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    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel

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The Politics of Coincidence

(as seen on Facebook)

      Consider the following bio:

• His mother was a member of the ethnic majority; his father was of the largest ethnic minority.
• He attended school abroad, including the U.S. mainland, earning a degree from Harvard University.
• He excelled in law school and joined the more liberal of the nation's two major parties.
• He was married only once, currently with two children, both of the same gender, from that union.
• His campaign began with controversy over radical past associates and his second name (questioning his loyalties). Rather than duck these issues he confronted them head on and put them to rest.
• A consummate campaigner, speaker and intellect, he was elected his country's leader, largely due to unprecedented levels of participation by excited young voters.
• In his third year of office he battled terrorists, acting decisively and without regard to niceties.

     Who are we talking about here?

     Well, you're probably thinking about this guy:

Barack Obama

If you guessed Barack Obama you have passed the test with a 50% score so far. However, there is another correct answer, a leader who preceded Obama by a generation. Can you divine his name as well for a perfect 100% score?

This elegy to him may serve as a hint: "Once again he has made us accept something better denied: one more rose on his breast before infinite moments alone, one more snowfall to face. It is just as old Rex eulogized: he has gone to his grace, leaving us so much less of our own."

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Once you've made your guess please scroll past this unrelated photo to see the video and annotative notes.

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Un Drapeau pour Trudeau

    Once again he has made us
    accept something better
    denied: one more rose
    on his breast before infinite moments
    alone, one more snowfall to face.
    It is just
    as old Rex
    eulogized:
    he has gone
    to his grace,
    leaving us
    so much less
    of our own.

---

Form: Concrete curginic elegy
Meter: Anapestic pentameter
Rhyme: ABAB
Footnotes: 

L1: In patriating the Constitution, Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau made Canada a nation.
L2: Trudeau's 16 year reign featured many social advancements.
L3-L4: Trudeau's trademark was a red rose in his lapel.
L5: In 1984, Trudeau took a walk in the snow and decided to leave politics. While skiing in November of 1988, his son, Michel, died in an avalanche. It snowed on October 3rd, 2000, the day Pierre Elliott Trudeau was buried.  Winter came early that year.
L6: Before becoming Prime Minister, Trudeau served as Justice Minister. It was he who coined the expression "a just society".
 L7-L13: CBC Commentator Rex Murphy's actual quote was: "He has gone to his grace, and that leaves so much less of ours."

Decurginated:

Once again he has made us accept something better denied:
one more rose on his breast before infinite moments alone,
one last snowfall to face. It is just as old Rex eulogized:
he has gone to his grace, leaving us so much less of our own.

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McPoems

Enough said.

According to Ronald Wallace, a McPoem is a "poem you can count on always to be the same – small, domestic, fun for the whole family." In other words, it is a poem for people who don't read poetry, composed by someone who can't write poetry.  For an example we need look no further than Mr. Wallace's definition itself.

The McPoem should never be confused with Seinfeldian verse, which is poetry about nothing, written by someone with nothing to say.

Salamander Entropy

   "If everyone is thinking alike no one is thinking at all." - Bill Walsh

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    In "Exploding the Groupthink Myth" the point was made that serious criticism expands rather than contracts boundaries.  Speaking more generally, the critic--be it a critiquer before publication or a reviewer afterwards--is the only unambiguous force for originality, diversity and quality.  Since originality is a subset of the other two, let's concentrate on diversity and quality. When it comes to material, design and execution, better is different enough.

     If there is a spate of bad verse the critic won't be shy about saying so, collectively ("Is this the best we can do?") or individually ("Is this the best you can do?").  The critic's standards are not affected by time, personalities or some bizarre pressure to be upbeat while standing in an outhouse basement.

     Unless they have the option of not publishing anything during dry spells, editors will, perforce, lower their standards and give us the best of a bad lot.  No, they're not happy about it;  they'd love to have a steady stream of scintillating, innovative works.  Weak editions are inevitable and there is no reason for an editor to apologize for them.  The best angler can't catch trout in a drought.  Shit happens.

     It follows that, in practice, quality tends to move in lockstep with diversity.  As an extreme example, imagine producing a monthly e-zine featuring sonnets about salamanders.  How many great poems, let alone sonnets, are written on that subject each month?  If the best poem written that month is about newts aren't you oh-so-close but out-of-luck?  Naturally, the more narrow our focus the lower the quantity and quality of submissions and, in turn, the lower the standard for the publication.  Not surprisingly, literary magazines rarely place any limitations on subject matter or styles. 

Rattle's Tim Green

     Or do they?  Not explicitly, but they usually do insist that submitters read not only their guidelines but the underlying periodical itself.  The editor may think the point they're making is "Don't send us junk" but a different message reaches the poet:  "Send us more of same."  Thus, the track record--the mere existence--of a journal will mitigate against diversity which will, by reducing the number of contributions, compromise quality over the long run. 

  Editors are keenly aware of this entropy.  The circumspect ones, among them Timothy Green of "Rattle" on the print side, Mike Burch of "TheHyperTexts", Christine Klocek-Lim of "Autumn Sky Poetry" (currently on hiatus) and O.P.W. Fredricks of "Touch: The Journal of Healing" from the pixel side, take a proactive approach, shaking the bushes for recommendations from critics.  Others watch their options dovetail.

     Speaking as an editor, let me interject that, while no individual outlet does, publishers in toto show at least as much variety as we see in a high end workshop.

Molly Peacock

     Nowhere will we see less range than among winning contest entries.  As an indicator let's use form, if only because it is the most evident and verifiable criterion.  Workshops show the greatest diversity, with metrical poems comprising between 20% and 50%.  That is about twice what we see in literary publications.  Meter is extremely rare in poetry contest short lists.  Citing one example, to my knowledge and despite having been judged by Molly Peacock, not a single line of verse has finished in the winners' circles of the annual CBC Literary Awards.  Free verse doesn't fare much better.  Almost without exception, slice-of-life prose narratives rule the day.  Before investing their time and money participants will read successful entries from previous years and produce "more of same", in some cases without regard to who is judging. 

    Let's flip the perspective.  What if you were to write a unique brilliancy?  The critiquers would, of course, rave about it.  Then what, though?  It's the Watermelon Problem but from an author's perspective:  to which outlet do you send something that is inconsistent with everything that that  particular venue has ever published?  Why even bother?  (Were shyness and humility the only reasons that four of the five most remarkable poems of this century were never submitted over-the-transom by their authors?)

    We can predict what follows.  Sending the masterpiece to a contest would be a complete waste of time;  judges know their decisions will always be seen as controversial but careers and contests can be ruined by choices that are viewed as outlandish.

     Maybe you send your gem to a literary magazine, as T.S. Eliot did.  To no one's surprise, it is summarily rejected, as "Prufrock" was.  End of story...

Ezra Pound

...until and unless the editor is swayed by an Ezra Pound, as Harriet Moore was.  (In this albeit rare and unlikely scenario, the role of Mr. Pound is played by the aforementioned effervescent critics.)

    The rest, as they say, is history.

     Indeed, I have it on good authority that this plot line is about to play out in the upcoming edition of "Rattle" magazine.  You'll know it when you see it.  (Hint:  FM-AtH)

    How's that for a teaser?

Exploding the Groupthink Myth

Factoid from Facebook: A group comprised of fewer than 1 in 10,000 living poets has quietly produced, in addition to the bestselling personal poetry collection (not including educational sales), one third of the speakers at the 2012 West Chester convention and all of the last ten Nemerov winners. Who are these poets and what is the source of their mojo? Do they have a secret handshake?

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To be fair, the Groupthink myth isn't among the silliest things that poets believe. After all, it makes sense at first blush that a workshop filled with people critiquing each other's poems would produce a consensus aesthetic. Indeed, this may be the case in universities where all participants share common traits, most notably the same teachers. That is a function of demographics and education, though; working on their own those new poets would likely exhibit marked similarities in their writing.

The issue, then, is whether or not a mixed congregation of experienced writers will, over time, establish a common style. The major online critical sites provide the perfect testing ground, embracing members of all ages, education levels, styles, backgrounds and locales.

So, does anyone claim that they can tell the difference between poems from Gazebo, Eratosphere, PFFA and/or Poets.org? No, not even if the focus were narrowed to members who don't hop between venues. Can people distinguish individual poems coming out of those outlets from poetry on the same subject and of the same quality and form written in less serious forums or by offliners? No.

What about individuals within these workshops? Do they adopt a "house style"? Erin Hopson, D. P. Kristalo and Margaret A. Griffiths were active contemporaries on Gazebo in the mid-2000s.

1. "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths
   
2. "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo
   
3. "How Aimée remembers Jaguar" by Eric Hopson
   

Are the styles of these poems or, more broadly, these poets even remotely similar? No. In fact, anyone familiar with these and other long term participants is liable to observe how much more disparate the styles are. That's right. The data suggests that, collectively and individually, workshopping expands stylistic and thematic choices. The Groupthink Myth isn't just wrong; it's antipodally so.

"How," you may wonder, "can that be true?"

I'll answer a question with a question: "Which is more likely to produce coalescence: pushing or pulling?"

Outside critical venues stands the blurbosphere. Criticism is largely pointless and rarely appreciated. Commenters "pull" (i.e. root) for poets. They sweet-talk poets, glomming onto them like honey. Why should poets change when every voice is marvelling at their work? Where "never is heard a discouraging word" reviewers politely ignore strangers and foreign styles. Not surprisingly, this supportive and protective environment leads to overuse of the same form (i.e. prose with linebreaks), the same theme (i.e. the poet's navel), the same medium (i.e. text), the same [dispassionate] tone, the same [affected] voice, the same everything. All of this comes before an editor's taste narrows variety even further.

Objective critiquers don't have a quota of poems they need to approve/publish this quarter. Easily bored, they push back against anything they've seen too many times before. They push for variety between poets and poems, thus discouraging bandwagon jumpers and one-trick ponies. They push the writer to improve each word, each line, each poem. Homogeneity is the first thing they notice and the last thing they want to see. Members are more interested in making new poems than new friends. (In my experience, those who kvetch about cliques and the tone of critiques--the wrapping over the gift--are just looking for an excuse to leave.)

It may seem counterintuitive at first but any examination of the results and processes should convince us that open workshopping enhances diversity and originality. Were this not so I'm sure the 1-in-10,000 poets who participate on Gazebo, Eratosphere, PFFA and/or Poets.org would be far less successful than they are.

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