Keith Olbermann on Health Care

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Ravi Shankar and the World We Live In

A post over at the Northshire Bookstore blog about Ravi Shankar’s recent arrest.

Final Puppy Flowers

The 11th and final issue ever of Puppy Flowers is now up, featuring excellent work from Buck Downs, Jason Morris, Corina Copp, Anselm Berrigan, Mike Hauser, C.A. Conrad, Dorothea Lasky, Andrew Hughes, Matthew Zapruder, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and so much more. Kudos to Chris Martin for an incredible run.

CUE Online

CUE is now online, just in time for Independence Day. Morgan Schuldt is one of the great editors of our time and he consistently publishes interesting work in CUE, and now that it’s online, it’ll be even easier to take in the wonderful writers that he gathers together. But wait: you get even more bang for your non-buck in this premiere as Mark Horosky, himself no slouch in the taste department, has guest-edited this issue. What are you waiting for?

Tight 5

Tight 5 is now available for purchase from the Northshire Bookstore

Samuel Amadon
Stephanie Anderson
Nathan Austin
Charles Bernstein
Anne Boyer
John Coletti
Justin Courter
Barbara Cully
Katherine Factor
John Gallaher
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Shannon Jonas
Katy Lederer
Andrew Lundwall
Carl Martin
K. Silem Mohammad
Charles North
Boyer Rickel
Christopher Rizzo
Ravi Shankar
Prageeta Sharma
Lytton Smith
Paul Violi
Dana Ward
Eve Zukor

from “New England Reformers”

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them, that it is just as wonderful, that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

from “New England Reformers”

Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his insufficiency to all men’s eyes.

from “New England Reformers”

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connexion with a higher life, with the man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, when we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else, the word justice would have no meaning: they believe that the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not after the design of the agent. ‘Work,’ it saith to man, ‘in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter, how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.’

from “New England Reformers”

These and the like experiences intimate, that man stands in strict connexion with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over and behind us, and we are the channels of its communications. We seek to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits, which contradicts what we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We exclaim, ‘There’s a traitor in the house!’ but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question, What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time we converse, we seek to translate it into speech, but whether we hit, or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

from “New England Reformers”

I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hindrance operates as a concentration of his force.

from “New England Reformers”

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to the state, so he is equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men are superficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his brother, apprizes each of their radical unity.

from “New England Reformers”

It only needs, that a just man should walk in our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel.

from “New England Reformers”

I remember standing at the polls one day, when the anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side looking on the people, remarked, “I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to vote right.” I suppose, considerate observers looking at the masses of men, in their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.

from “New England Reformers”

. . . we hold on to our little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us, although we confess, that our being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great, we desire to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race, understand well, that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with a belief that you have a secret, which it would highliest advantage us to learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison, or to worse extremity.

from “New England Reformers”

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness, than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

from “New England Reformers”

Dear to us are those who love us, the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery they enlarge our life;—but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

from “New England Reformers”

All that he has, will he give for an erect demeanor in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profession; naval and military honor, a general's commission, a marshal’s baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit, have this lustre for each candidate, that they enable him to walk erect and unashamed, in the presence of some persons, before whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised himself to this rank, having established his equality with class after class, of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others, before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition pure? then, will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him, and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all things, will tell none.

from “New England Reformers”

Men in all ways are better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them, and speaking to them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms.

from “New England Reformers”

Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue,—and feel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

from “New England Reformers”

Let those admire who will. With silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done, all which human hands have ever done.

from “New England Reformers”

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the master casts behind him.

from “New England Reformers”

The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence.

from “New England Reformers”

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education, and of our educated men. I do not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two classes.

from “New England Reformers”

It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise men, whether really the happiness and probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in those disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily, too, the doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience, the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane person, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, and not to his own sustenance and growth.

from “New England Reformers”

The disease with which the human mind now labors, is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; “that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.” I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, “If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.”

from “New England Reformers”

I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and communicate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and without sense of weight. But this union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use. The union is only perfect, when all the uniters are isolated. It is the union of friends who live in different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism.

from “New England Reformers”

But concert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for the first time possible, because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two, where there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual but is dual; when his thoughts look one way, and his actions another; when his faith is traversed by his habits; when his will, enlightened by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows, and with the other backs water, what concert can be?

Turntable & Blue Light

Two more poems from the misty Green Mountains are now up at the excellent Turntable & Blue Light: “The Hermit’s Valentine to His California Ghost Bride” and “Sometime in the Gegenschein Your Name is Late Eternity.”

from “New England Reformers”

Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic object: yes, excellent; but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.

from “New England Reformers”

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and in another,—wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth, it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind.

from “New England Reformers”

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? the street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.

Raleigh Quarterly

A new poem, dedicated to the President, “The Preacher & the Goat,” is now up at Raleigh Quarterly, along with new work from John Gallaher and Jennifer Bartlett.

from “New England Reformers”

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any other part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with those; in the institution of property, as well as out of it. Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, and property will be universality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the institution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes no difference what you say: you must make me feel that you are aloof from it; by your natural and super-natural advantages, do easily see to the end of it,—do see how man can do without it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea, is against property, as we hold it.

from “New England Reformers”

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication of growing trust in the private, self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy: and that it is feeling its own profound truth, and is reaching forward at this very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two, or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.

from “New England Reformers”

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms.

from “New England Reformers”

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter, and woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not a wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

from “New England Reformers”

I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns, “The world is governed too much.” So the country is frequently affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights; nay, who have reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk of court, that they do not know the State; and embarrass the courts of law, by non-juring, and the commander-in-chief of the militia, by non-resistance.

from “New England Reformers”

The country is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let there be no control and no interference in the administration of the affairs of this kingdom of me.

from “New England Reformers”

Every project in the history of reform, no matter how violent and surprising, is good, when it is the dictate of a man's genius and constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another.

from “New England Reformers”

But in each of these movements emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the private man.

from “New England Reformers”

One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another, that no man should buy or sell: that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself an universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns, and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground, and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony!

from “Nominalist and Realist”

We hide this universality, if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful, by the energy and heart with which she does them, and seeing this, we admire and love her and them, and say, “Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated, or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!” insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech;—All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion;—Things are, and are not, at the same time;—and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin history.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Nature keeps herself whole, and her representation complete in the experience of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that all things subsist, and do not die, but only retire a little from sight, and afterwards return again. Whatever does not concern us, is concealed from us.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread, until we have found his regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why so impatient to baptise them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before, than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner; and as having degrees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a public assembly, he sees that men have very different manners from his own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth, he has had many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of his own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious circumstance, it seems the only talent: he is delighted with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking-house, into a mechanic’s shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an idiot: other talents take place, and rule the hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.

Maddened With Envy After Discovering Divine Musical Gifts

A new poem, “Maddened With Envy After Discovering Divine Musical Gifts,” is up at the Raleigh Quarterly, along with new poems from Sarah Bartlett and John Gallaher. Check back next week for yet another poem from the manuscript-in-progress, Green Mountains, dedicated to President Obama.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

She loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse: for she is full of work, and these are her hands.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of nature that we should live by general views.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part; and it were partial not to see it.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

All things show us, that on every side we are very near to the best. It seems not worth while to execute with too much pains some one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older, they respect the argument.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself.

Black Magic Spews From the Mouth of the Sunflower When She Moans

A new poem, “Black Magic Spews From the Mouth of the Sunflower When She Moans,” along with poems from Sarah Barlett and John Gallaher.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man.

Books on the Nightstand Podcast

Greetings to listeners of the Books on the Nightstand National Poetry Month podcast. Here’s a list of the poets and anthologies I mentioned in my interview with Michael Kindness. I’ve included links to some of the representative books, or books that I particularly enjoy, for the individual poets. Many of these are selected or collected poems, which I would encourage starting with, then tracking down individual volumes if that particular poet does it for you. If there is a Library of America volume (as there is for the likes of Ashbery and Stevens), those are always nice to have around:

A.R. Ammons - Sphere: The Form of a Motion

John Ashbery - Selected Poems; Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Aaron Belz - The Bird Hoverer

John Berryman - The Dream Songs

Shanna Compton - For Girls (& Others)

Douglas Crase - The Revisionist; AMERIFIL.TXT

Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Peter Gizzi - The Outernationale

Matt Hart - Who’s Who Vivid

Josephine Jacobsen - In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems

Jennifer L. Knox - Drunk By Noon

Kenneth Koch - The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

John Koethe - North Point North: New and Selected Poems

Chris Martin - American Music

Joseph Massey - Areas of Fog

Marianne Moore - The Poems of Marianne Moore

Harryette Mullen - Recyclopedia

Charles North - Cadenza; Complete Lineups

Frank O’Hara - Selected Poems

Patiann Rogers - Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems

Steve Scafidi - For Love of Common Words

James Schuyler - Selected Poems

Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass: 150th Anniversary Edition

William Carlos Williams - Pictures From Brueghel

Jay Wright - Polynomials and Pollen

The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (Donald Allen, Editor)

The Oxford Book of American Poetry (David Lehman, Editor)

American Hybrid (Cole Swenson and David St. John, Editors)

Tight 3 (Andrew Hughes and Michael Schiavo, Editors) featuring work by Nora Almeida, Aaron Belz, David Berman, Sommer Browning, Michael Carr, Shanna Compton, Buck Downs, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Gabriel Gudding, Matt Hart, Mike Hauser, Katy Henriksen, Mark Horosky, David Huddle, Lisa Jarnot, Robert Kelly, Evan Kennedy, John Koethe, Maurice Manning, Chris Martin, Joseph Massey, James Meetze, Andrew Mister, Ryan Murphy, Jess Mynes, Daniel Nester, Cate Peebles, Arlo Quint, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Sandra Simonds, Ed Skoog, Kathleen Winter, and Charles Wright.

Tight 4 (Andrew Hughes and Michael Schiavo, Editors) featuring work by Jeffery Beam, April Bernard, Edmund Berrigan, Jackie Clark, Peter Davis, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Matthew Henriksen, Susan Ingersoll, Jennifer L. Knox, Mark Lamoureux, Dora Malech, Tom Meyer, Mary Millsap, Paul Muldoon, Constance Onorato, Matt Reeck, Aaron Tieger, Eric Unger, Karen Weiser, Mac Wellman, Dustin Williamson, Terence Winch, and Sara Wintz.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and has realized its thought.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should not find, if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the playhouse, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men,—many old women,—and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise, and more slight in its performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real, that perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations, a single individual who corresponded with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force, is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments, which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

A personal influence is an ignis fatuus.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for the needles.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particular excellences; as we grow older, we value total powers and effects, as, the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man,—it is his system: we do not try a solitary word or act, but his habit.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad enough, that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society, who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing, as he best can, his incapacity for useful association, but they want either love or self-reliance.

Sixth Finch

The spring issue of Sixth Finch has been released featuring poems from Clay Matthews, Matthew Rohrer, Sampson Starkweather, Christian Ward, and a great many, many great others, as well as artwork from Rosemarie Fiore, Brock Davis, and Branislav Kropilak. Two of my poems “Hop Inside My Stimulation Coffin Dark-White Devil” and “There Are Many Secrets Hidden Behind Her Garden Gate” also appear.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

I observe a person who makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of his private character, on which this is based; but he has no private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future.

Books on the Nightstand Podcast

Michael Kindness interviews me from the Northshire Bookstore (my list of recommended poets will be coming soon) and, thanks to Ann Kingman, you get this:

from “Nominalist and Realist”

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force, or a generosity of affection, I believe, here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery, that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends, than his companions; because the power which drew my respect, is not supported by the total symphony of his talents.

Lytton Smith Reading in Ann Arbor

Tuesday, March 24 at 7:00 p.m. at Shaman Drum. Go support a great poet as well as a great independent bookstore. Lytton expounds upon the civic reasons why you should do so over at his blog.

from “Nominalist and Realist”

The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character, which no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes, that on seeing the smallest arc, we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn, than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our construction of each other’s faculty and promise.

from “Politics”

A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end.

from “Politics”

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected.

from “Politics”

Hence, the less government we have, the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy,—he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

from “Politics”

All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

from “Politics”

Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men.

from “Politics”

It makes no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is equal to action.

from “Politics”

Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying, “that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”

from “Politics”

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation.

from “Politics”

Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, obeying personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of points, nowise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle . . .

DIY

Shanna Compton links to my Lytton Smith interview on her DIY Poetry blog. If you don't know about this blog, you should.

from “Politics”

Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders.

Lytton Smith Interview, Part 2

Part 2 of the my interview with Lytton Smith is now up. Part 1 can be found here.

from “Politics”

But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.

from “Politics”

In this country, we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity,—and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us.

Lytton Smith Interview, Part 1

Part 1 of the my interview with Lytton Smith is up right now at this blog. Part 2 goes up on Friday.

On Modern Liberalism

By virtue of its openness to science (understood as the study of nature), transcendentalism avoids divorcing itself from the mainstream of modern science and technology. But it affirms that “not he is great who can alter matter, but who can alter my state of mind.” Some say that modern liberalism is without a soul. Transcendentalism in general and Emersonian idealism in particular offer an alternative to utilitarian liberalism, to leader worship, and to collectivism. Transcendentalism’s commitment to the individual and to the principle of individuation is a commitment to the soul or spirit that each person possesses in common with all other human beings. It is the ambition, if it has not yet been the fate, of transcendentalism to provide a soul for modern liberalism and thereby to enlarge the possibilities of modern life.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

The New Left

My Tight co-conspirator, er, -editor, Andrew Hughes, has a blog now. Oh yes.

from “Politics”

The law may in a mad freak say, that all shall have power except the owners of property: they shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every statute that respects property.

from “Politics”

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.

Lytton Smith on The Mad Song

Lytton Smith gives an excellent assessment of reviewing (both positive and negative) and The Mad Song over at his blog. Look for Part 1 of my interview on Wednesday.

from “Politics”

Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons.

from “Politics”

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws, to property, and such a structure given to our usages, as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly, because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly, the only interest for the consideration of the State, is persons: that property will always follow persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men: and if men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvement, and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.

from “Politics”

. . . on the Spartan principle of “calling that which is just, equal; not that which is equal, just.”

from “Politics”

But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who do not create it.

from “Politics”

Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This interest, of course, with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county.

The Anti-Whitman or Out of Many, Me, Me, Me: Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem

With the Emerson excerpts nearing an end, I had hoped to start posting reviews of recent poetry collections that I love, that deserve a wider audience. Charles North’s Cadenza is at the top of the list, and Chris Martin’s American Music, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook, and many, many others—mainly from a younger generation of poets—follow close behind.

And I will get to them in time. The phenomenon of the Dickman twins, Matthew and Michael, and specifically Matthew’s first book, All-American Poem, is too powerful to ignore. The collection is so very bad and the method by which the Dickmans have foisted themselves upon the American poetry establishment—and, in turn, by which the poetry establishment has foisted them upon the American public—should be looked at closely.

Name-checking the states of the Republic does not make your poetry Whitmanic. Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s. Using the phrase “cock ring” or alluding to the seduction of a friend’s wife does not fill your poetry with edgy, erotic energy. The words arranged in All-American Poem are simulacra of the vital American poetries introduced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” and running through and beyond the appearance of Donald Allen’s landmark anthology of 1960. These are poems written by a personality, not a person. They are Reality TV poems that demand you love them simply for being written down. Everything about All-American Poem is insulting and self-centered, from the content of the work to its (lack of) style or perspective to the very manner by which it was brought into the world.

It’s difficult to reckon the numerous literary awards bestowed upon him with the work contained between the covers of All-American Poem. To date, Dickman has been awarded fellowships from the James Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Vermont Studio Center in “Johnsonville,” Vermont, Oregon Literary Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Prize for Poetry, and the $10,000 Kate Tufts Award. That’s a lot of encouragement for very little pay-off.

The Dickman brothers have skated far into the poetry world on the novelty of being twins, the fact that they appeared in a Tom Cruise movie (he gave them a fruit basket), their “rough-and-tumble” background (I don’t count being teased because of your name as anything above and beyond what every single kid goes through), and by being so very in love with poetry. How wonderful. It’s nice to be nice, isn’t it? It’s too bad Matthew is so ungrateful to those who have helped him reach this point that he can’t even correctly name the village in Vermont where he spent a month, free of charge, writing some of these poems. (The current cost to attend VSC for a month is $3,750.) This sort of carelessness pervades his book, and is symbolic of the fact that he views America not as a living thing but as a MacGuffin he can’t even be bothered to fully investigate, except that it should promote his own self-interests.

But: to the poems. I regret that due to Blogger and my limited HTML skills, it’s been difficult to render, in a few instances, the poems as they appear on the page. I have tried to provide links to the poems if they are online. I encourage you to stop by your local independent bookstore and read the book for yourself.

Tony Hoagland, in his introduction, writes: “All-American Poem is a heroic and generous collection of poetry.” Which makes me believe that Mr. Hoagland either read an entirely different manuscript, written by a different person, or it was Opposite Day when he typed these words. For the work is indeed the opposite: it is cowardly and selfish. It gives nothing to the reader and asks everything in return. It tells, it does not show. The poems present people as concepts, if they even get that close. Mr. Hoagland calls the poems “unself-conscious,” and they are, in that they’re not aware of themselves in any way, on any level—romantic, pragmatic, linguistic, musical, spiritual, logical, psychological, historical, social—I could go on—nor of the tradition upon which they propose to add. For poems that are purportedly “not enlisted in the army of irony,” that are supposed to be “big, wacky, and humane,” they are certainly filled with their share of snide ridicule.

It would indeed be one thing if these poems were trying to be consciously ironic. Then the rips in logic they display would be part of their fabric. But they’re not trying to be ironic at all, nor surreal (nor are they wittily sincere). They are, however, desperately trying to be “accessible,” in the same way the instructions to heat your Spaghetti-Os must be accessible. In the early poem “Slow Dance,” Dickman attempts to conjure the ghost of O’Hara with “contemporary” references:

Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes.

Especially here. “Unchained Melody” contains no power chords and “Stairway” only features them at the end of the song. If Dickman had a grasp on syntax he wouldn’t conflate these notions. He piles on these shifts in a sloppy way. At one point, the poet is dancing with a lover, then he’s dancing with his brother, which, rather than coming off as fraternal, just comes off as weird. The similes in “Slow Dance” are painful: people dance like buoys, insomnia pours across the floor like bathwater. The poem grows with an unearned cosmic savvy. It’s so neat.

These poems are precious and affected—that is, artificial, pretentious, and designed to impress—vague as a fortune cookie or horoscope composed to please the reader without making any connection with him. Again, in “Slow Dance,” Dickman writes, “It’s all kindness like children / before they turn three.” What? Anyone who has dealt with a human being going through his terrible twos knows this to be false. Just because a poetry is supposedly free of irony doesn’t mean it is free from the responsibility to be truthful.

“At Night My Hat” exhibits the first signs of narcissism

At night my hat disappears.
And then my coat, scarf, gloves, my watch with the time inside it
bravely marching forward. I wish I had a dog to walk.
I wish I had an animal to feed and clean up after. Something
to make a noise when I get home, to see the shadow
of my hat and wag its tail in acceptance.

as well as misogyny

The hat resting softly with its complex history of masculine principles:
helmets and berets, stocking caps, Stetsons. Ten-gallon
Texans and Australian straws.

The search for what it means to be a man looms over these poems, as well it might for a poet who grew up without a father. But to go so far as to suggest headgear is purely a symbol of the “complex history of masculine principles” is to be denser than a black hole. Start here: ask any Iranian woman if she dare walk the streets of Tehran without a hijab.

Growing up in a single-mother household should’ve made Dickman more empathetic to the opposite sex but it’s quite the contrary. The majority of the women or ex-girlfriends in these poems are simply names, if they’re given names at all. They’re never fleshed out in any human or humane detail. Instead, the sexual peccadilloes and conquests of Matthew Dickman are meditated upon over and over again. They serve no purpose, it seems, other than to show off how much tail he’s gotten. How generous. From “The Black Album”:

Black like licorice used to be
and black like the lace bra Susan wore
beneath a baby-blue t-shirt
and how I would take her to the mat like a wrestler
and how she would keep her black boots on
so that now when I think of black boots I am no longer thinking
of Neo Nazis or soldiers but bedrooms and bedposts.
She had a black pair of handcuffs with black feathers
so that it looked like a black bird of submission.

How badly does the pronoun “it” play in this oh-so-sincere poem?

Putting that aside—and the fact that licorice is still black—if this observation had any psychic weight or maturity the conflation of sexual excitement and Neo-Nazis might be excused or reconsidered. If the “erotic” passages like this didn’t try to Eddie Haskell you into the sack, you might note their attempt at “cleverness.” But these half-assed seductions are framed so amateurishly, the feeling they elicit is like as when you hear of a serial killer reveling in the tokens collected from his victims because it’s the only way he can get off or understand women. From “Love”:

I was living with a girl who loved to say the word
shuttlecock. She would call
me at work and whisper shuttlecock
into my ear which loved it! The blastoff
of the first word sending the penis into space.
Not that I ever imagined
my cock being a spaceship,
though sometimes men are like astronauts, orbiting
the hot planets of women,
amazed that they have traveled so far, wanting
to land, wanting to document the first walk,
the first moan,
but never truly understanding what
has moved them.

These are not Sharon Olds’s bold examinations of sexual ordeal (though the line breaks and meter-making argument are just as slipshod as Ms. Olds’s, who is, not coincidentally, the Dickmans’ aunt). They are abusive, and turn the spotlight onto Dickman’s own deficiencies, not as self-deprecating insights but to hold them up as psychotically cheeky, like Heath Ledger’s Joker and the imaginary stories he tells about his own suffering while pressing a blade to his quarry’s mouth. Men have always sung about the woes that the opposite sex bring—as well as the wonder—and women have done the same. The occasions in Dickman’s poetry give no thought to the workings of these relationships, either on a personal or universal level, except to revel in their own sexual superciliousness.

As O’Hara famously wrote: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” Take away the humor and irony in O’Hara’s poems and there’s a lot of campy bitchiness. Not that they want to, of course, but Dickman’s poems couldn’t be ironic if they tried, for they’re written by an immature mind that ends up with sarcasm instead. Dickman has taken O’Hara’s mock manifesto at face value and has not only turned around to brag but is opening wide his arms, believing he can charm away his insufficient grasp of the English language. The poet’s not going on his own nerve or even what he thinks is nerve but what he thinks O’Hara thinks is nerve. It’s an imitation of an imitation of a wrong impression. There is no self-reliance here.

O’Hara is not the only iconic American voice that Dickman misapprehends. Mr. Hoagland writes of the poems in the book: “They are telling a thousand stories which Whitman called ‘the myriad peacock speculation of the world.’” He has the peacock part correct. The poems preen about the page screeching an almost-human sound, asking to be noticed but never justifying their existence via language. Names—brand names, proper names, all sorts of names—and places are thrown in as if their mere presence bequeaths some sort of significance to them and to the work, as if Starbucks and Wal-Mart are the pinnacle of the American ideal. Like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” these poems reel off historic markers and pop culture figures to fill the lines and waste your time. The poet doesn’t know what else to do to keep your attention. These poems don’t elevate “the trannys of South Dakota” to anything but a sideshow attraction in order to convince us of the poet’s unearned egalitarianism. They certainly don’t help to disabuse other cultures—let alone our own—of the notion that we are nothing but an insular community of children unwilling and, worse, unable to face our responsibilities.

Dickman wishes to comment on our apathy (never his) in the title poem:

This is the Fourth of July
and she looks like the end of summer. She’s a wind
moving through the trees. She’s the best thing
about high school assemblies. We are a country at war
and she’s passing a note to you in class, your book open
to the chapter on dissecting frogs. How to keep the brain intact
when removing it from the small skull. The note says
why were you holding Clare’s hand after lunch?
We are a country at war but it’s not really happening
here.

No, it’s certainly not happening here, not in these poems, not with this poet. The female passes the note while the male chides her. She is concerned with triviality while he is a man of learning. She’s nothing but a variation on a Patrick Swayze song. Dickman’s critique of the American public’s non-engagement with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan avoids engagement itself, ends up proving he’s as guilty of the attitude as the people he wants to lift up. Or condescend to. It’s unclear. When he writes

Give us a kiss Hawaii. Who says we’re not an Empire? Fuck ’em,
they need Jesus. They need the Holy Ghost.
Right Kansas? Kansas! My yellow brick road of intelligent design. We are not
monkeys. They’re all in prison, right Texas?

the lines drip with such disdain, are so eager to promote stereotypes rather than break them, are so ethnocentric and demeaning, that any hope of irony—which, remember, is not what Dickman’s about—is buried in the gold mine before it gets a chance to prove out. In this poem and elsewhere, Buddhists, Times Square, President Kennedy, women who listen to the Indigo Girls, a twelve-year-old Taiwanese child, the states of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Vermont (which contains only “maple trees and bears and log cabins”), and pretty much everything/one in between is talked down to so Dickman can impress girls and boys whom he believes don’t know a thing about poetry or America, except, it seems, like the poet himself, through the History Channel. No nuance exists in Dickman’s United States. Everybody comes home from work and opens a beer, every guy wants to get over, and every girl is there to be objectified and diddled.

Such is the case in “Poem for the Night Emily Opened Her Beer with a Bic Lighter.” The object of the poem (not the subject, for Matthew Dickman is the subject of every poem in this book), Emily

. . . opened her beer with a Bic lighter. Sitting there
I could hear the river
and it made me feel important. More important, I imagine,
than Emily felt when she finally finessed
the right amount of pressure
between the cap of the beer and the chewed-up
end of the lighter, popping the cap
into her lap, the river, moving in its one direction,
made me feel as if I was living
the same way, with the same purpose, and by proxy
had the same power, the same
hydro-ecstatic-willingness not to be exhausted
by my own body.

Yet we are exhausted by the time we get through this sentence. Once again, we have the female doing the pedestrian while the male has grand pseudo-Transcendental revelations into nature so he can get laid, without irony or satire. Even then, the run-on sentence shifts and we’re clobbered by the language with “understanding,” meaning both faked empathy but also an attempt to make the reader comprehend what’s going on and why. Too bad we can’t, and don’t even want to by the time it’s over. This is, anyway, all we know of Emily until we get a smarmy catalog of her body parts that Dickman “likes” before he comes to this considerate pronouncement: “Tenderness and beer go well together.”

It’s hard to pick the most patronizing poem in this book, but “Amigos” is certainly a candidate. In the context of this poem, it’s a word whose tone is eerily similar to John McCain’s forced campaign refrain of “My friends . . .” Dickman plays the faux-poet by going deep down, name-dropping Robert Lowell as well as Barnes & Noble—which has treated small presses and independent authors so well—and imagines himself related to “the woman whose left arm has blossomed into skulls and roses” as well as the client of a man in a business suit who’s on the other end of a cell phone. That’s it. We’re either painted ladies or stuffed shirts to the poet, and we don’t know any better than to shop at strip malls and the big boxes. Dickman claims to have gone through 40 drafts of this poem. He should have redoubled his efforts.

The only time I cracked a smile while reading All-American Poem was at the beginning of “Chick Corea is Alive and Well!”:

Which makes the elegy I wrote for him seem a little distasteful.
Let me tell you, just because you see someone in a black
and white photograph doesn’t mean he’s dead.

Dickman is full of shit for a poet who is supposed to be such a straight shooter. He cites a Chick Corea album cover where the pianist is “smoking an unfiltered cigarette” and, on the LP itself, his “poor dead fingers” are “flying / like ghosts over IT DON’T MEAN A THING / IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING.” According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork, neither is the experimental jazz musician known for his Duke Ellington covers but his fusion work with Miles Davis and his own band, Return to Forever. I won’t even bother with the necrophilic ending. This is not Whitman containing multitudes that contradict nor New York School abstraction of logic or language. This is just a bad poet writing about a subject with which he has no connection. It gives him the chance to use another pop culture reference he’s vaguely aware of so he can demonstrate how in tune he is with “the people.” He gives negative capability a bad name.

Where is the good-hearted and unironic nature in “Thanksgiving Poem,” that belittles, via Allen Ginsberg, President Lincoln and the Union soldiers who died to free a people from slavery

A few days after the smoke cleared in the South
and the muskets were hung
in the dining rooms of the North,
President Lincoln announced a National Day
of Thanksgiving. So that every god-fearing citizen
of these United States could sit down, leave the past
for the dead, and have dinner.
To think of a simpler time full of beads, corn, peace-pipes,
and the magical largesse of Plymouth Rock:
Them Indians and them Pilgrims and them Indians, what a meal!

revels in neo-nativist anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic rhetoric

Weird but somehow exactly as I always
imagined Thanksgiving to be. Something beyond yams.
And it was. My ninety-three-year-old grandmother
ate almost four desserts. My mother looked about to cry.
My sister looked like she was going to ignite. The family
sitting next to us were talking loudly
about the Mormons, whom they thought
were a cult that worshipped space aliens.
But they were Catholics and believed in eating flesh,
drinking blood, and a magical zombie
who walks out of a cave after being dead for three days.

and ham-handedly insists lovemaking is not unlike an ad for Nescafé?

I miss you, you live so far away. Thanks
to the coffee beans and coffee, the warm
smell of steamed milk and people putting
cappuccinos to their mouths
so that there is a moment
like lovemaking when their mouths are covered in cream.

Dickman claims to have spent “. . . many hours, sitting / on the toilet, reading books by incredible people / like Mark Twain and Truman / Capote . . .” (“American Standard”). If indeed he has—which at this point is highly suspect—he obviously didn’t absorb lesson one in wit from these writers. Does he believe that by mentioning these figures—Shazam!—he’ll be equated with them, and with the character of America? It’s caricature that Dickman ends up with in these poems.

I am forced to admit that the highly unpleasant title poem does indeed live up to its name: it’s the captain of this cheerleading squad, calling out innocuous commands to a disinterested crowd. There are Cubans and Jews in Florida, don’t you know, and the only place to get “hitched” and see Elvis is in Nevada, of course. I wonder if Dickman’s keen vision allows him to see Russia from his house. His imitation patriotism is what allowed George W. Bush his eight years in the White House, is the shadow that lurks behind “Freedom Fries” and the “War on Terror,” is the thing that labels any attempt to help our neighbor as Socialism. Empty phrases meant to sound like something fierce but in fact are more ephemeral than steam from a sewer grate. We’re meant to believe that the poet is somehow reclaiming these horrible ideas and showing them to us in a new light, but, without irony, Dickman’s poetry is nothing but mean-spirited.

Dickman’s poetry is anti-Whitman. Whitman had empathy for the people he wrote about. He had sympathy for the new country and spiritual forces he knew could be conjured in a nation where people are free. He moved amongst the people. Dickman stands aloof, constantly bewildered by America. As well he should be. To know it would mean to give of himself but, because he’s a child, he refuses to do that.

“We can sit quietly on a blanket,” he writes in the title poem, “watching the transcendentalists come and go, talking / of Henry David Thoreau.” He co-opts one of the most famous passages in English-language poetry (written by a British citizen), not to show his affection for one of the most well-known native philosophical movements in this country but to illustrate, as he repeatedly does throughout the title poem and others, how mysterious and far away his America is, how disconnected he and everyone else is from the nation. But instead of proposing alternatives or answers, paths by which we might reclaim the spirit, he abandons us. How does this lift up a people? How does this shatter the mold? How does this transform the soul? Again and again though, it doesn’t matter if we can’t enter the poems or find anything new in them. All that matters is that Matthew Dickman has written them and that he mentions a lot of things. He observes but never engages.

In that they are a confidence game, yes, these poems are very American. But even then, Dickman lacks the invention to keep the dupe’s (reader’s) attention like a true bunko artist should. He bores you by the end of the first poem and by the end of the first section, you get the idea. Dickman admits his deceitful ways in an interview when he describes how he and his twin tried to scam Dorianne Laux to get into the University of Oregon: “‘We called her and pretended we wanted to apply to grad school,’ he said. ‘We met in her office and within 20 minutes, tops, she knew we were full of it. She could see we were kind of hustlers but we loved poetry.’” It’s one thing to love poetry; it’s another to be able to write it. The key word, though, is pretend: pretending to be interested in others, pretending to be poets.

All-American Poem is neither a barbaric yawp nor a howl, but a spiel. It’s Emo-lite: twee poems for broken-hearted navel-gazers that say, “You too can write ‘poetry’ (and get laid).” No wonder people are excited about this book. If you saw that someone got paid $3,000 to defecate on a piece of paper, you’d be a sucker if you didn’t stock up on Benefiber.

I’ve spoken about the poetry, given numerous examples of how inadequate it is (you can open up to any page and find similar or worse passages), but you now ask: Why bring up the personal aspects of the poet? This is out of bounds. Should we not judge the poetry on its quality alone? Yes. And while it is our fervent wish that bad poetry will bury itself under the weight of its own practiced sincerity, we must have counter-voices to those who promote this kind of work, which is: simplistic argument delivered by a monotonous, inconsistent voice that gives no attention to the details of language, image, tone, or emotion.

And in this very particular case, we must talk about the personal, the how-the-book-came-to-be, for the Dickman twins have put their life story, not their poetry, front and center, have made that the reason you should find them interesting. I will say now that I have not read Michael Dickman’s first book, The End of the West, but I have read some of the poems it contains. Michael seems to know how to break a line and use the page better than his brother but what kind of praise is this? Like saying of a basketball player: “He sure knows how to dribble.”

You can’t stop a person from putting down his private thoughts in a notebook. But you can certainly discourage him from inflicting them on the public. Perhaps more galling than the fact that Matthew Dickman was encouraged with so much time and money to write such bad poetry is that Tony Hoagland—who judged the APR/Honickman contest and wrote the book’s introduction—and Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, and Major Jackson—who give the back cover blurbs—are all established poets who should recognize from the first few lines that Dickman’s poetry is not just incompetently crafted but is juvenile in all other respects as well. Really: these are people who teach PhD students at the University of Houston, edit poetry at the Harvard Review, and instruct undergraduate and graduate poetry students at the University of Vermont, Bennington, North Carolina State, Warren Wilson, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and NYU.

Poetry progresses on the master-apprentice relationship, on finding contemporaries with whom you have rapport, as all arts do and should. Master artists see in apprentices the gift to advance the craft and they help them to do this through their own instruction as well as their advocacy to entities, both public and private, that support artists who will contribute to their field.

Let me be clear: If Dickman’s poetry was even close to good or interesting, even in failure, I’d have no quarrel with it. The publication of this collection is a blatant example not only of cronyism at its most farcical—I’m surprised none of the blurbs contain the phrase “Dickie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job!”—but of the poetry industry’s need, like every industry, to push out product no matter how defective or useless, product they feel must be as facile as a Fox News sound byte.

Mr. Hoagland would have us believe that Dickman is the wise child pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when it’s in fact Dickman who’s the pompous monarch. Despite its laudatory tone, Mr. Hoagland’s introduction to All-American Poem is boilerplate enough to make me believe he was simply fulfilling his contractual obligation. I’m not sure what excuses Ms. Laux, Ms. Howe, and Mr. Jackson can offer. Still, one wishes that Mr. Hoagland reserved the right to not choose a winner for the 2008 APR/Honickman Prize if this book was the best of the bunch. Copper Canyon and the American Poetry Review decided to go for shtick over substance. Every entity associated with this book, with Dickman’s career trajectory up to this point, has been taken for a ride, and should ask for its money back.

When I find sycophants like Matthew Lippman posting reviews as poorly written as Dickman’s poetry, I know the train’s gone off the track. Mr. Lippman compares All-American Poem not only to the canonical work of Ginsberg and Whitman, but to essential rock albums like The Wall, Some Girls, Tusk, and My Aim is True. Mr. Lippman can’t be bothered to do a simple Internet search to be reminded that The Wall came out in 1979, not 1980, and he certainly can’t be bothered with making a cogent argument as to why Dickman’s poetry is high-quality. He merely spews praise like a second-grader on pixie sticks who’s just returned from a Jonas Brothers concert. The only time Mr. Lippman gets anything right is when he inadvertently exposes Dickman for the fraud he is: “There is a messy freedom in his language, the kind of mess that you might find if you walked into an art room created exclusively for four year olds.” He claims he must quote such long passages from the book because “Dickman’s poetry is about breadth.” It’s certainly not about depth. He must cast such a wide net in order to glean even partial phrases that might sound fresh. Mr. Lippman then writes, “His cadence is as much a part of his form as his formlessness as there is a kind of capricious chaos neither capricious nor chaotic.” This could be an excerpt from a Donald Rumsfeld press conference. Then, at the end: “You have an experience with it [All-American Poem]—with this voice, with these poems, with Matthew Dickman’s music and spirit—and then you run like hell, away from it, so you can tell the rest of the world as quickly as possible.” Yes: to not purchase it, please, for the love of all that is holy in poetry. This book is not Exile on Main Street as Mr. Lippman would have you believe. It’s not Robert Johnson nor Little Richard nor Jay-Z. It’s Pat Boone: an imitation and white-wash of America’s soulful roots.

If you’re brazen enough to put the word “America,” or any variation thereof in the title of your book or poem, you better bring to bear all the intelligence of spirit that the word evokes, whether to retrieve from ourselves the greatness of our nation or to point out its horrifying transgressions and correct them. This has always been true but it is exceptionally so in 2009, in the gathering darkness we face from within and without, when we now, more than ever, need to recognize ourselves and our abilities, not to elevate stereotypes over archetypes. Dickman has reduced the idea of liberty to an erectile dysfunction commercial. There is a populist streak in his work that veers frighteningly near the attitude of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, that foments apathy of duty to the art and an eager anti-intellectualism that is not spiritual or natural but vicious and parochial. It is an affront not only to the art of poetry but to the Union.

Chris Martin’s American Music, Shanna Compton’s For Girls (& Others), Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, Aaron Belz’s The Bird-Hoverer, Sabrina Orah Mark’s The Babies, Richard Siken’s Crush, Alex Lemon’s Hallelujah Blackout, Anne Boyer’s The Romance of Happy Workers, Daniel Nester’s God Save My Queen volumes, Ryan Murphy’s Down With the Ship, Jennifer L. Knox’s Drunk By Noon, Matt Hart’s Who’s Who Vivid, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Harlot, Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride, Steve Scafidi’s For Love of Common Words, Morgan Lucas Schuldt’s Verge, Prageeta Sharma’s The Opening Question, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s The Maverick Room, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Green and Gray, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook—these are but a few recent collections by young American poets writing wildly interesting, vital work, who address the concerns of their country and of their generation in a myriad of intelligent and advanced styles. They have studied their poetic loves, have apprenticed for years, and have galloped into the frontier on their own, with only their native wit for a shield. They but do their work, and we know them.

Matthew Dickman has arrived on the scene with some barely-readable prose chopped haphazardly into lines, a “Mission Accomplished” banner streaming from his wagon, and wants people to accept him as a poet simply because he said so. He’s earned nothing, given nothing back, and his work shows no interest either in its predecessors or its contemporaries unless they appear in The New Yorker or the Norton Anthology, the only two sources of poetry that seem to exist in Dickman’s world.

“Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds,” wrote Emerson in “The Poet.” Well, then send in the clowns. Dickman, along with his twin brother, will no doubt be appearing soon at a poetry venue near you, courtesy of Alison Granucci and Blue Flower Arts—who also represents—oh, interesting—Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, and Major Jackson. He will be touted as the next great American poet in the introduction and the audience will go along with the claim because, after all, Dickman has now been officially sanctioned. He might even get a job teaching in an MFA program and will then be responsible for instructing would-be poets who know even less than he does. I shudder when I imagine the dreck that will emerge from his writing workshops. The confidence game continues.

David Orr’s recent essay addressed the “problem” of determining greatness in poetry. Greatness comes from the poet who is in tune with his world, his moment. He may write big or small, be comic or serious, or the billion tones between, but the veracity of his poetry will be tested when—if I may flip Whitman—he absorbs his country as well as his country absorbs him. If we as readers don’t demand greatness from our poets, why would careerists such as Dickman even attempt to give us anything magnificent if they can take the bank with far less?

How, in a country founded on the poetry of the Declaration and the Constitution—founded on words—can we promote a poet who thinks so little of us? How, in a nation that is both a physical place and a still-radical idea, can we consent to such lame attempts at depicting pain, longing, joy, and love? How, in this new American era, with a President who not only cares about the sanctity of words, who holds them as dear as the Founders did—after eight grinding years of a man who did nothing for the American people, let alone its language, and everything for himself and his legacy—can we settle for a poet who regards words as nothing more than the means to continue his swindle?

We must not swoon in desperation, willing to fall into bed with the first lover who shows us the slightest hint of false affection, who whispers sweet nothings as he flashes a rhinestone smile. Not for love of anything but himself does Matthew Dickman write poetry.

Dickman said in a 2006 interview, “I want poetry to be part of my life, but I don’t want poetry to be my life.”

Don’t worry, Matthew. It’s not. As Townes Van Zandt said: “There’s two kinds of music: the blues and ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’”

Mr. Bluebird is perched firmly on the shoulder of All-American Poem.

from “Politics”

Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority, by the pertest of her sons: and as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

from “Politics”

. . . the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

from “Politics”

But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law.

from “Politics”

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institution are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres . . .

from “Nature”

Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.

from “Nature”

Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated.

from “Nature”

Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.

from “Nature”

The reality is more excellent than the report.

from “Nature”

We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism, your sallad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,—of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy sallads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.

from “Nature”

It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he.

from “Nature”

It is an odd jealousy: but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere.

from “Nature”

There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape.