[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

It is rainy and depressing and awful here for those who like to go outside or look out windows. Has been for a week. It’s cold, too. I’m frustrated with my senses. I don’t know how cold. If I practice, say listening to music in a formal teaching setting, I suspect I’d know a C from an A from a C flat soon enough. I’ve been on this Earth for decades and still have to check a thermostat to see how cold it is. I know it’s cold, but if I say it’s in the forties it may well be in the fifties. What a weak and imprecise sensory apparatus we wear. Defective.

I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, either. But if it’s nice out, go enjoy it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Friday afternoons are fun if you’re free.

First. A little verse.

***

“But first, a historical fragment, a digression: early in the century, Pound, poet of unsurpassable ear, declared war on the iamb. What followed, and indeed surrounded this act, was a period of enormous and profound linguistic discovery, not all of it directly related to Pound’s imperative, but all of it in some manner a shucking of constraints, all confident authority and easy bravura, as though the past were being dared to stop this inspired future. And certain of the tastes of the present moment can be traced to what we now call the Moderns, with that ominous upper case, principally our bias toward the incomplete, a taste that seems to treat the grammatical sentence as Pound treated the iamb: a soporific, a constriction, dangerously automatic and therefore unexamined.”

– Louise Glück, “Ersatz Thought,” American Originality: Essays on Poetry

I’m not a huge fan of Louise Glück’s poetry. If she were alive, I doubt she’d care one whit. People who give out the Pulitzer, the Bollinger, the Nobel, and name US Poet Laureates have already come down on her side of the taste equation. I should add that on this site I’ve held her up as a prominent practitioner of dreaded poets voice and managed not to detail any dreams resulting from Glück reading-induced narcolepsy.

That aside, I genuinely respect the woman as a poet and theorist. Her essays are brilliant, ranging things. She treats bits of process laity realizes as essential when brought up, hovered on the edge of should-have-know before. I went to the library wanting theories on American poetry: what defines it, what the rebels and revolutionaries like Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens were rebelling against. I have my own thoughts, but I wanted confirmations and challenges. My favorite librarian was off, but a new and yet unranked librarian suggested the above American Originality, by Glück. Strong debut for the new librarian.