R.C. Bald's Hong Kong Journals

O Deary

2006-12-10T15:43:00.000+08:00

Friends, friends, onea & all, so long has it been & here am I, sunk in the dregs of another fine grenache, my wits quite shattered upon the rocky shoal of drunken logic, & yet I find within me the very fire that burned long ago, unvanquished after so long, preserved in a kind of fromaldehyde of sentiment & logic as a grey mass of brain in a small undergraduate biology fishtank, left for the rubber-gloved hands of inchoate lads & lasses who know no better than to feel in their febrile young fingers the glowing call center of the body electric, yes, yes, the body politic, friends, & who know no better than to judge it paramount when its conversation with the heart is something so much more divine! Yes, yes, like comparing a jarlsburg, say, to a fine cotswald indeed! Ah, but I digress, though feeble have I been, enfeebled, feeblized, enduring feeble-hood, the event of feebleness as dear Quine would have it (oh that rascal of radical indeterminacy! the devil itself!)! But all is well, dear friends, as I will further illuminate, though for the time being I am admittedly entirely inebriate. Dear me! Ah me, Ah my, what have I at my fingertips but drunken nubs!

O Sweet Convolescence

2006-08-07T01:00:00.000+08:00

My dearest chappies, such a good while it has been, & I hope that the time has found you feasting at the banquet table of sweet surfeit, a golden fork in one hand & a delicate pastrie hoisted erstwhile in the other. Your host bids adieu to an unwelcome bout of scurrilous proportions, indeed, yes, a rather formidable hybrid of walking pneumonia, the gout & an irritable digestive tract, the details of which I pledge henceforth to keep hidden under lock & key, for the good of your wellbeing, &, indeed, the very efficacy of the world community. I'll here be brief, but pass along the tidings of my merrymakers, yes, yes, B.W. Dictionary himself, friends, & W.C. Rogers as well, both alive & alert & well. All tidings good!

Cotswald

2006-02-21T05:43:00.000+08:00

The finest double Gloucester, in my humble eye.

O, Anacreon

2005-10-08T00:42:00.000+08:00

Pesky, yes, yes, the little trifles of man upon opening his mouth to speak, upon placing his fingertips upon the charcoal keys, yes, & so absurdly righteous, so rife with passing indignation & a particular breed of intransigence that he will one day surely come to regard as assanine & riddled with youthful folly. O, dear me, friends, but for a draught of cool vintage, yes, yes, so said Keats in a moment of subsuming despair. I think I'll away to madelaines & krumpets, yes, & the oolong which stirs in my blood some forgotten ode of yore. I'll away, friends, & find myself a shore for skipping stones.

Artifacts

2005-07-27T10:07:00.000+08:00

Ah friends betimes in my silence I wondered at these posts like a lazy Oriental wonders at the slow music of the bamboo rushes in the quivering gust. Then, I often refocused my thoughts on the peculiar hue of green found metallic & shimmering on the fly's wing, too.

Tripe

2005-07-08T03:13:00.000+08:00

I am a whale's tooth

The Infinite Regress of the Critic

2005-07-06T21:52:00.000+08:00

Ah friends, yes, yes, it seems the morning is veritably dehiscing with beauty like an orange over-ripe with its acrid juices, yes, yes, like a sow on the verge of birthing friends, only, the sky seems wont to birth merely sunshine, a few cirrus clouds, & a breeze that lightly intermingles with the steam from my white jasmine pear tea like the fingers of hesitant & inchoate lovers. & the smell of fish from the bay, friends, that briny stench of hubris foregone, yes, a lovely tale it tells but for the anosmics, bless them all (for what blessing in the olfactory system!). This morning I choose crticisism of criticism, friends, as an in to my endeavoring, as a means of implicating myself in the struggle. As you may well know, my studies are numerous, my works comprehensive, my critical acumen unchallenged, & yet, there seems a fundamental flaw in the trends of the modern critic. What has been referred to as "editor's syndrome" seems to flush over the profession like a black tunic over a visigoth, yes, only more sardonic in its composition; namely because a tunic, to the extent of my knowledge, is incapable of being sardonic (though the two words may well flush out a sestina one day). At any rate, friends, the critical eye turns with malice & indignation to works which represent easy targets, flawed projects, or unrepentently idiotic explosions of ego smeared across a page, as I'm sure we all have seen. Now, indeed, friends, there is relative ease in tightening one's aperture & zeroing in on incompetence as an entymologist might upon a rare specimen of grasshopper. which is to say, by making that specimen as remote, as distant & as far from yourself as possible. But recognize, friends, the unity, the conectivity of all things, & suddenly, the scientist becomes the study. Just so, the critic must always remain the criticized, lest accountablity & savage politics intervene where scholastic integrity once lived. Here, I say that yes, I may indeed find my reaction to Fence so visceral as to lead me to bang my head against a wall repeatedly, yes, but friends, I must also effect the changes I wish the poems read effected. Namely, if the ego, if the horrid indolence, the lazy gesture, the pomposity, the trite nod to G. Stein, the insistence on surreal manufacturing irritates me, friends, I must redouble my vision & scan my reaction for the presence of that which set it off. Namely, my indignation at horrid verse offends my ego, which, in turn, posits me on the cusp of verbal condescension, where, of a sudden, I am guilty of the very crime I condemn. Thus the critic must remain in the liminal space betwixt two mirrors, friends, the words bouncing back & forth, the vitriol, the praise, the flat assessments, all of it locked up in the chamber of our being. The speaking of a criticism, the expurgation from the physical body, means very little, though much has been said in praise of its cathartic quality. Our words carry the stench of ourselves, friends, & thus, while there be exceptions to every rule, namely in the form of the obstinately if not at all reasonably persistent school of idiocy that governs our modern discourse, perhaps we should consider the weight of our criticisms in the light of their reflections & refractions. What are we saying of ourselves? Well, well, I digress where I mean to regress. On to the champagne!

Thus returned

2005-07-02T02:00:00.000+08:00

Yes, yes, friends, my errant focus has been a matter of some distraction in such timely fashions! But returned I am, indeed, friends, to the topics of the day. A generous portion of my inclination of late seems to want to respond to so many of the issues that float to the surface at poetrysnark.blogspot.com, while the other pull, of course, is the open & honorable discussion of my climes of present & yore, yes, yes, & what they represent in the broader cosmology of poetics, being & that now Lycean princess, or so it would seem, Beauty. Yes, yes, friends, I make no scruples about it, for the pursuit of such a lady as she seems righteous, noble & valiant, even in its utter futility. Recall rilke friends, "beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." & no, dear readers, I seek not a life perpetuated in Wes Craven-like deathscapes with eery crescendoes echoing in semi-dark farm towns, no, no, but I seek an apex, a crest, an acme, a distilled moment in which the ineluctable is secondary & the form is primary. Time, yes, time will sweep our ashes to the rivers, friends, & that Styxian boatman shall take our token with neither smile nor frown, & truth be told once we are bound to Sheol, we are bound, alas, to our imminent forgetting. Thus my friends, it is Beauty that I seek to woo, Beauty that I chase in Apolline blindness, & be she Daphne or Jezebel, her coattails stir behind her like the rhetoric of T. Swift come bellowing out of his anus, only more beautifully, more delicately, less advertantly & more purely. I see two screens in my mind, dear friends, one upon which I see her, yes, yes, pure Beauty drawing water of a well, & in the other I hear the buzzing rancor that attends to the dubious, the idiotic & the tritely self-aggrandizing, & I see in both some merit, friends. A day awakens anew each blessed dawn, & each dawn I choose, Beauty or ballast. Well, friends, where is the world whole like once it seemed, in those remote years decades ago, our life a cicada song, a nightingale's sonorous madrigal? Where now those familiar enchantments, those moments of awe, those acmes I seek & find so devastatingly absent? Where, friends, is the world whole again?

Forgive Me

2005-07-01T00:50:00.000+08:00

Ah dear friends, what is there to do but beg of your forgiveness for yesterday's lysurgic foray? Well, well, a man of my age must proactively encourage the mind's ongoingness, waging against the trumpet of time, dear friends. A swan, I am told, has an average lifespan of 102 years, during which time said bird may float upon the water, take brief flights, catch & consume innumerable small fish & spend the remaining time idly watching the world turn, friends. I am no swan, though advanced in years I may be, I seek the current of the day, friends, yes, yes, & a tab or two, well, a gentleman like myself finds the hearty benefits. That said, I am rather tired this morning as a result of my escapades. I awakened slightly damp from what I believe to be a swift dip in the harbor, wherein, on the calm sheen of the water I recall the stars reflected in perfect symmetry, & like a chthonic or rather aqueous Thales, I dipped my mane in the stars dear friends, thinking the water the very ether of the cosmos. No visions awaited me belowsurface, but the stench of yellowfish, the slow viscous grime of oil & the confouonding shouts of the boardwalk security men. In their pursuit of me I swore them demons come for my eternal soul & thus found my feet flighty & swift. Over my shoulder, yes, yes, as they faded, I thought I saw their bodies merge into one, a silhouetted Chang & Eng, a Platonic starperson, a...well, you understand. Then I tripped, my Nike stuck momentarily in the groove of an empty Chevrolet hubcap left in a vacant lot. The collision with the verdant groundcover & the slight poof of dirt that clouded upon my face brought me to my senses. I walked back to my flat, friends, soiled, damp, my quest come to its empty-handed close. A spot of Irish breakfast & a quick glance over some Blake & here I am, hours later, my head the busted filament of a lightbulb frayed to darkness.

Pancakes & Banshee Wails

2005-06-29T21:48:00.000+08:00

I've just my very last pancake had, friends, yes, yes, its blueberries freckling its pale surface like whaleheads topping the crestfoam of the blue sea, except the inverse, where color is concerned. Sea & land, friends. I've dropped a lot of acid, which, at my age, pushes a gentleman into a realm unforseen, indeed, wherein I believe the howling monkeys that dot the lush trees here have found me, amplified, intransigent, hungry for pancake. Hungry, indeed, for the pancake, gentlemen. Horses winny. Whinny. Anyway, there seems a green snake. I have come to certain conclusions. Anymore. I've a friend in Berlin to call, I've just remembered, but listen, the important part is that the sheen is glossed over, friends, yes, yes, the positions are firmly entrenched but there is nothing at the soldiers' backs, no rounds in their pockets, no helmets on their heads, see? Ultimately they go one by one & nothing connects the one to the next, & here I mean our adversaries, friends, not politically, but poetically, artisticaly, otherwise, see? Each one an island, each one quaking like the golden leaf of an aspen in the chilly gales of early winter, as scared, as recklessly attached to nomenal disappointments. Ah dear, friends, there is such fragility in defense! Such vulnerability in attack, no? Oh, woeful, woeful, a pestilence & a petulance upon the page, friends. Where now that siren song, that Lycean ditty of yore? La di da di dee do da, friends, or so Kouros would have us sing in moments of gentler repose than these, when time seems the fraught, frayed string of some endlessly plummeting yo-yo, friends, & goodness, the momentum. Halt! Yes, yes, friends, pause, give freeze to the antics, & let go the peripheral, & try at an earnest core. The monkeys wail. I think a storm comes, but in gray clouds I fear I see frequencies. My teeth are silver.

Oddly enough

2005-06-28T21:36:00.000+08:00

Yes, yes, friends, you will notice that my attendance herein has lagged of late like child of Bangladesh on strong opiates, his eyelids heavy with some distant revery, for which (my absence) I offer my apologies. I oscillate, dear friends, between two rhetorics, both of which seem oddly futile in the face of the politics of ehe ego these days. It wasn't always such, no, no, friends, for in Hong Kong, yes, in the seventies, that dead horse I flog continuously, my dear friends & I gathered around one passion that was not our own, no, dear reader, we never presumed to possess a poetry, rather, poetry possessed us. Ours was not a dialogue betwixt savage pride & specious critical acumen, no, not a disingenuous beast that flies by the shade of night like an owl fueld by fire, no, it was an earnest conversation, friends, in which our best interests were of little consequence. Perhaps the template of the blog gives itself to such ferocity, for its impunity renders vituperation divorced of consequence. & so it is that I find myself divided, yes, like a hass avocado split squarely through the molish skin, friends, & which half gets the pith, the seed, the core of me? Is it that which takes personal offense at the sophomorically dull-witted or is that which cares for fostering the constructive? Perhaps, friends, there can be peace between the two. Once idiocy is dispelled, friends, the path to truth is clearer. Yes, yes, doubt all you want friends, make a habit of doubt, but one circumnavigable to be sure, for lest you forget old shakespeare, "our doubts are traitors & make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt." There is no certainty to the breadth of doubt, friends. Do not be consumed by it, but consume it yourself, as voraciouosly as you might a blue plate of madelaines & a white cup of oolong or darjeeling, perched upon a terracotta windowsill in the slant of light that touches also your vases of geraniums & hyacinth, your periwinkle bedspread, your cracking tiles. Do you see? It is all touched, friends, the world, by the very same thing.

Blood, Blood, Frost & Blood

2005-06-22T21:39:00.000+08:00

Dearest friends, yes, yes, the stellar jays congregate beside the panelglass this morning in their morning choral whilst elsewhere their absence is heartfelt, I'm sure, for the lack of sonority, indeed. Down the road is an Anglican church where they usually find some respite, but yesterday upon hearing a dreadful sort of screeching I peered quickly from my study window, yes, friends, from my leather tome of Swiftburn, to see a preacher exposing himself to our fine aviary of compadres, & a most gruesome & twisted sight it was to behold that your dear blogger very nearly soggied the nethers. Also of some consequence in terms of the cleanliness of my britches as a result of shock & bewilderment, the gems that Snarky & company have come upon with Todd Swift's Web site. Dear me, it is as if Krishna himself delved too deep into onanism, eight hands spinning around one tired center. The construction of certain monuments to self is befuddling friends, yes, yes, but gives rise to laughter such as I have never heard bellow forth from my formidable waistline. How then to take poetry seriously, if taking it seriously means being Todd Swift? Well, I will not pretend to the answers, dear friends, but I will invite my dear friend B. Blood to discuss it at greater length. His words, as I have seen it, have sparked a sudden bravado in their readership, which, in turn, has promoted just such a musical congregation as I find stirring outside my window or deep in the anals of my being. We wait upon glory, friends, upon a genuine spark of good, & when it ignites, the flames spread over us like the tongue of Clifford. Ah, Blood, your teeth long for Swift's comments section. Go forth my friend, yes, & make clear your intentions.

Ire or Ennui, Friends

2005-06-22T00:03:00.000+08:00

Such a matter halves my thoughts as a split cantaloupe left sweating in the Laes District sun, friends, whilst swarms of horseflies congregate for their miniscule sips. Yes, yes, friends, my head is halved, sloth & venom. No work to be done of it today.

Back in Hong Kong

2005-06-09T22:56:00.000+08:00

Friends, a word of empathy has reulted in my endeavors switching their focus, as it were, as the auspice of cloudless, azurite skies portents a fine day to come. Yes, yes, I feel emerged from a durance vile, friends, wherein bile spilled from me like water shot from a waterbed pierced by any number of small safety pins unhatched from the cargo pants of a disaffected American teenager with a Subhumans tee shirt on, friends. But now, so cleansed, my energies being rid of that oily black odium, yes, yes, friends, again my purer thoughts turn to purer times, as betimes times lend themselves to tide. & specifically here, dear ones, Hong Kong, the seventies, the swirling maelstrom of cultural revolution, the pregnant air of literary invention, the dawning of a new era, friends, as every day proves to be, somewhere apace in the globe. I recall a certain night, sipping a Malaysian darjeeling (very rare, an epicurian's delight friends) with white-tinged leaves, yes, & taking some comfort in the opiates that freckled the Hong Kong streets at the time with my dearest of friends, W.C. Rogers. We sat calmly, none of this brutality spewing from our mouths, friends, but the placid, eery insight of invention (& opium) coarsing through our very veins as a sludge-water in an irrigation ditch running alongside a rural highway in Pa Ning after the monsoons. We sat very still, friends, but something there moved within, be it time or spirit or, dare I say it, the stirring echo of her majesty, dear Beauty? Be it as it may, friends, the night proved electric &... oh dear, I am afraid this must be continued at another time, for it would seem that my oatmeal, rich in fiber & in the affectation of the British, seems to have stirred in me another urgent matter with the very quickness one usually reserves for explaining the ground speed of a cheetah over a plain of wheat. Toodle-oo, friends, until it be morrow.

All, all, alone

2005-06-09T01:36:00.000+08:00

Ah friends, my oolong settles into its tepid dregs even while cirrus clouds settle over the bay in their spotty profusions. Such tender moments of vulnerability, friends, lead one to wonder, is this the fight of one man alone in his head? Be there sympathetic ears & eyes which may, betimes, peruse my words? Friends, I am savage lonely in my blog. Fire needs fanning, yes, yes, & progress dialogue, therefor I pray tell me, where be my passionately dispossed brethren?

JFalleaf

2005-06-07T23:14:00.000+08:00

Above, friends, you will see the name of my new nemesis, for in our brief acquaintence through the www.poets.org forums, my temper, though controlled & executed with all due temerity, has been given rise to flare considerably. The audacity of a man that defines for others what it means to be a poet, yes, dear friends, even as we ourselves wonder what good does it do? I positied, rightly, friends, that such a definition is useless, rendered the more ludicrous when compared with the merit of an actual poem. This notion, far-fetched as it is, I know my friends, was dismissed promptly as "cute," betraying my own lack of "credibility" & my self-contradiction of entering such a debate whilst thinking it profanely idiotic. There is some truth in this last note, to be sure, but when poets gather round to discuss how poetic they are, I find the onanism & self-congratulating revolting to the point of degradation & offense. Such circle jerks, & please forgive the language friends, but red glows my blood, do little for poetry in general other than make a whore of her, make her the doorway to so much nauseating pomp & posture. These egregious little knutes are actually more concerned with defining themselves as poets than they are with writing meaningful work, by this gentleman's own admission. Go & be privvy to his tone, friends, & judge accordingly, for it would seem that his posts represent those few rare instances wherein he pulls his head, however briefly, out of his ass in order to make magniloquent proclamations about everyone else's shortcomings. Oh, friends, I'd so love to read his work. But for now, I will fan the flame. Please, friends, join me, inundate the site with Truth & justice, friends, at all costs.

Such Errant Endeavoring

2005-06-07T00:47:00.000+08:00

Friends, I have recently registered at the Academy Web site in order to infiltrate the forums in hopes of steering them again towards that fading beacon of Meaning. Yes, yes, I visited the site on a capricious little whim, friends, but left in an utter fury, for before me I saw extensive conversations about many meaningless matters, but one in particular struck your dear host as particularly redolent of hogwash. In one forum, friends, & here I dare warn you, brace yourselves for the blow of this stupidity, in one forum there is a rather lengthy discussion of what it means to be a "poet." Dear me! I didn't realize one must expend one's efforts & energies defining oneself in order to construct an esoteric treehouse gang the likes of which can repell instantly those without the secret password! Such dribble & such a waste of precious energy, such a waste of being! People, write a poem, for Cheeve's sake, rather than wax ineloquent about what makes you a poet. I have witnessed in my many years this phenomenon as it pervades & ultimately ruins so many circles. So many in the literary circles toil endlessly at their postures, performing all the rituals of being a writer save one: writing. Yes, yes, friends, it is true, & you al know "writers" in your midst-- those who would be overheard in already loud bars disclaiming Barthes, yes, those with verbal incontenence leaning just-so over their merlot, those disdainfully acquiesing to look at the work of others, yes, friends, those who quietly & privately lead lives of utter sadness & vacuous self-consciousness, yes, the writers, the disaffected, those actually concerned with how to define themselves as a "poet," what it means. Oh dear, & in this present age, it means nothing! Once, it did, friends, in the halcyon days of yore, when the iamb was bedewed with its own newness, yes, & when a page dehisced with Possibility, but now, the page seems bent bodily over the knee of the Idiot, friends, who, rather than rough her up, sits pondering the definability of his character! Such a farce is the matter! Plain self-aggrandizing is complicated interminably when he who would perform such a function has no authentic identity to aggrandize. I am in a huff, here, friends. Help me, assuage me, yes, by joining me in the crusade to bring sense & integrity back to www.poets.org, one comment at a time!

Feeble Host

2005-06-04T00:25:00.000+08:00

Yes, dear friends, as the above caption reads, I am stricken of late with the influenza & its consequent migraines & am thus rendered unable to perform my promised slayings with any kind of relevant force. Suffice it to say ideas are brewing, slowly, friends, but in my present condition, I fear vitriol will only spur the demon, so to speak, friends. Please don't regard me as recreant or vacillating: you have my word, friends, I will lash anew once my health is restored. Until then, let the downy wings of Samothrace be with you, friends, unless you are of the ilk of passion-impoverished artifice-crafters whose toils produce glittery fecal smears upon the page, in which case, a pox upon you & set your pen straight, you vacuous, indolent, culture bemoaning, onanistic, coat-tail-riding, "experimental," offensively self-aggrandizing douchebag.

Anywho

2005-06-01T04:31:00.000+08:00

You will pardon, dear friends, the interruption in the streaming progress of my criticisms, which I intend to make more acute in purpose, if not in allusion. I have just swallowed the last crumbled bits of my Madelines, which I took with a strong Irish breakfast tea with but a hint of honey, & suffice it to say, friends, that in spite of my overarching disposition of late, which admittedly has teetered towards the melancholy, I seem at present reborn, with all due vigor & tack. Perhaps you are familiar with the story of the Ugandan sunflower & the maple syrup? Ah, memories, friends. At any rate, I promised that bit by bit, as it were, I would address certain inadequacies of modern verse, & today, friends, I'd like to implore you all to avoid the petty juxtaposition of phenomenological investigation with this insistence on quotidian banalities. Unpeeling a banana, friends, is not tantamount to pursuing the root of Being. Heidegger did not write cookbooks. Husserl did not pen self-improvement manuals, did he, dear friends. I recently had the opportunity to peruse the contents of the Paris Review, which features the acute eye of richard Howard, I believe, as gatekeeper of the sacred, as the tradition goes. It is hard to say from this distance, as journals in Hong Kong don't seem to bear the same weight that they do abroad, but I am to understand, if I am not mistaken, that it is something of an honor to be chosen in this periodical. Hogwash, I say! The poems, every last one, friends, again wryly related the day's events before tacking on ontological qualifiers, often, & depressingly, in the form of banl & over-used line breaks positing being before negating it with a negative turn. Dear me, the work of children! I ask you this, poets of the present, is not Being a thing of wonder? Have we found all the answers, that our poetry so coolly is able to present questions with all of the livelihood of a buried rock? Dear me, friends, life, effusive, passionate life! How can it be reduced so swiftly & so artlessly? If there were something new in saying that one emptied the dishwasher & gazed out the window & wondered is there more before tidying the cupboards, fine, friends, fine, but this wry, removed, too intelligent for a moving line voice is akin to listening to an anaesthetized hyena grunt out laconically a strident bowel movement. If there is little wonder to you then please kindly refrain from exposing your secrets on the page. Resigning oneself to the tepid artifice of uncaring might best be replaced with setting aside an hour or two a day in which to play with your Playmobiles-- a thing best achieved & executed in solitude, outside of the eye of the public, for the public's sake & for the sake of the preservation of all things meaningful & moving. I dare say, foes of beauty, your artlessness reeks of indolence & nothing more. If you would work on a poem, work through it, you might find something worth the writing. In the meantime, submit your dribble & tripe to Mr. Howard & his facile review. Such unpleasantries must be dispensed of one by one, & as such, perhaps I shall wait until it be morrow before divulging another of my passionate antipathies. Toodle-oo, friends, until then.

The Jig Goes On

2005-05-31T23:04:00.000+08:00

Good morning my dear, dear friends & please accept the apology I make on behalf of my indolence. As it were, friends, I endured a rather saturnine weekend during which time I edited a volume of Leigh Hunt's criticisms while sipping from a seemingly endless draught of a bordeaux reticent with currant & plum undertones. Delightful, yet brooding has its consequences, friends. This morning, as is part of my routine, as you know, along with repast & dark Asian teas, I visited that lovely blog Poetry Snark, linked above this text for your pleasure. In defining the virtues of anonymity in criticism, it would seem that your dear host was accused of employing my monicker as a pseudonym behind which to preserve & protect the core of my true identity. It gives rise to a plethora of questions, yes, friends, just as the spring dew seems to birth a myriad of dazzling new insects, the likes of which could thrill an entymologist to the point of caution, I might think. For instance, do I need anonymity in order to provide the impetus for more vicious attacks? Does it matter? In this format, one in which we shall sadly never cross physical paths, friends, does it matter what appelation I put forth? Would it be a comfort to you to know me by another name? Speak to it, friends, & I shall furnish you with a truer identity. Until then, I am resigned to this life I lead.

At the Bequest

2005-05-25T22:10:00.000+08:00

It would seem dear friends that this morning, as the cerulean pale blue slowly finds itself suffused by that golden flaming disc, that your host in these letters has reached a point somewhere beyond impasse. I am a deliberate fellow, to be sure, whose many years have taught innumerous lessons, indeed. Here, in the twilight of my years, I find my amicable & gentle disposition challenged by my observations & by my recent discourse with that obdurate gentleman, Snark. & so it has come to pass, dear friends, that I envision our dame Poetry laid out upon a sterile table, & no, it is not the Eliotic of which I speak, but that tale of gothic woe & foreboding, Frankenstein. We must reanimate the corpse, friends, & if we must do so with the currents of rancor & vitriol, then so it shall be. If we must do so by coming to blows in the street, so it shall be. If we must do so by ripping asunder pages from certain works of literature & subsequently employing them in the fashion generally reserved for toilet paper, so it shall be. Let me say this, yes, dear friends, my lens has found a focus, & where the ethereal song of the stellar jay once chirped giddily outside my window, where once I sat calmly in repose with my darjeeling & my volumes of yore, now I feel within me the gravity of the present age, the urgency of long overdue criticisms. I will speak, & in speaking, dismiss all that is wayward, artless, specious & wrong. I meant for this to be a forum for the discussion of those lost years of the Hong Kong expatriot scene of which I was so central an instrument, but here, I must instead summon that bygone spirit in hopes of making the corpse dance again! In time I shall unfurl in great detail the basis of my aversions, but for the moment, a few maxims: language poetry is nincompoopery, slam poetry is dribble, surrealism is dead a century, Stein is the most horrid influence on poetry imaginable, no one else is Ashbery, antipathies for poetic music are merely expressions of one's own insufferable lack of talent, the poetics of culture identity are the artifice of otherwise unpublishable tripe-mongers, italics within a poem are indicative of that most unusual & saddening mixture of bravado & total lack of comprehension, politics have no place in poetry, the shocking metaphor is only shocking because of the incompetent & obstinate insistence of the fact that it functions in any generative capacity, a compound does not a Hopkins make, an ego does not a writer make, & a culture of posturing will never, friends, but never guarantee its own efficacy. There you are, friends, a few starting points for you.

A Passage

2005-05-25T03:56:00.000+08:00

"Where neither tenderness nor torture would effect any nomenal change, Herbert removed himself completely of the appaling scenario, leaned against the white kitchen cupboard & poured himself three fingers of scotch. This way, he thought, at least he wouldn't have to care."

The above passage, my dearest friends, is from the short story entitled "Xanadon't" by Eliot Spectacle, & while I will permit, of course, all criticisms of the authorial tone, which to me has all the sonorous quality of an elephant's flatulence, the point, friends, seems pressingly relevant to our discourse, does it not? Spectacle was a little known author whose acquaintence I was fortunate enough to make on a balmy evening when the Hong Kong sky resembled most closely the flaming red asshole of a stray kitten on the verge of dehiscing while swimming laps in poorly tended-to backyard pool. It was twilight, yes, yes, & there glowed about the city an aura as the illuminations of Blake, friends, as mystical, as dubiously profound, as ripe with hope as it was pregnant with stale morals. We sat sipping absinthe & discussing the work of Dictionary & Lowell & Plath at the time, as, of course you must know, Confessionalism seemed all the rage, my friends. Through the tenure of that initial introduction it became abundantly clear to me, friends, that Eliot was a jaded man, one whose eyes had fallen upon some rather horrendous scenes. His cosmology was consequently quite skewed, & yet, in spite of the panic of near sociopathy that his life had produced, there grew, as under the shade of a dying branch, the kernel of acute & cutting wisdom. Spectacle saw before him ennui that would pervade & suffuse certain circles, the kind of self-revelatory comraderie of academia that seemed in years to follow to spread as ajuga over a fresh turf, as wildly, as purple in its prose, to be sure. He saw art detached from the artistic temperment, friends, passion split clean of product. He saw, in short, the very climate in which we now find ourselves, wherein we must resort to hideous shock in order to animate those in our congress. Ours is a placid bay, an untrammeled field, a sloping broad glacier of activity in which the pyrotechnics of caring have long since left the sky a yawning black. I remember that night of our encounter, seeing the reflection of a firework over the water reflected in Eliot's lenses & thinking to myself, oh, R.C., what a thrill to behold is life! Then came Derrida, Barthes, oh dear me, Foucault with his armada of specious soapboxes, friends, Lacan & later Perloff & Vendler & by now, what have we left of poetry but the smoke that we can imagine while peering into the cannon's arm at Antietum? What have we but the hallucination of life belowdecks of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Poetry, friends, true poetry, feeling, thinking, passionate poetry of the artful manner that craves, insatiably, meaning, is it would seem a mere memory, a chimera for the chasing. My life, in service of Her, of dear Psyche & her articulation in lines of delicate craft & substance, seems now the delusion of a madman laboring with tools made of smoke. Spectacle also wrote:

"The wind came rushing out in exhalation like the vaguely colored juice of a split grape, & there, in his silence, with death poised above him like a cirrus cloud over the left wing of an aircraft in that split second before tailspin, he wondered where his days had led him. Then, he died."

Gracious me, friends, how taxing the struggle can be, & yet, I implore you, struggle we must. Struggle we must.

Where Now the Lilacs of Yore?

2005-05-23T23:45:00.000+08:00

Friends, I have busied myself, tossing & turning, as it were, for some time, trying to find poise atop the upturned V of the white fence, where, to my left, stretches the broad expanse of mannered criticism, & to my right, the fiery pit of indignation & vitriol mentioned below. I waver, yes, yes, friends, as a flag in a hurricane, how I waver, the gentleness of my very nature giving way to the old revolutionary flare I felt decades ago, when my very blood seemed aboil with rancor & defensiveness. It is not my own felicity I seek to preserve friends, but that of my beloved, of my mistress, of our own Poetry. Where now the blue-blooded apostles of the golden age? Have they Lethe-wards fled, or worse, friends, do their stony toes dangle over the wharfs of the river Styx? Have we forgotten so much that Ego sits where once fair-haired Apollo conversed with Dionysus? Is our poetry our own? Oh, friends, I am tired, tired from oscillating. I am an old man & I have sought for many years the appropriate answers, & now, like a turnip in an Indian summer, I find all unbedded. Please engage with me here, on these comments, & let us discuss, free of ego, free of the fettering manacles of presupposing identities, let us discuss the path of truth in poetry. Let us find a way to save Her!

Such Vitriol

2005-05-13T22:16:00.000+08:00

Friends, & believe you me, you are just that to your dear host, I feel an odd imbalance lately of a most peculiar nature that seems to be infecting the very marrow of my bones. Yes, yes, the more I wax discursive on the subject of that most beloved figure in the attic Pantheon, yes, friends, I speak of Poetry, the more I feel roused to formidably establish her defense from would-be defilers. I have odd & heretofore foreign compulsions to verbally bludgeon, if you will, those that would make a Jezebel of her. All of this snarking business in which I have lately played such a fervent role seems to be tinting the nature of my critical eye, yes, so much so that where I once saw compassion & the slow & gradual obligation to aid the uninvested towards poetic salvation, I now feel compelled to whip them, to throw the lash of vitriol across their obstinate backs until they break, squawking out not shrieks of pain or indignation, but the angelic lines of our monumental forebearers. Yes, friends, I see the megalomaniacal falter under the cracking whip of a well-parlayed tongue & I hear them echoing "Do I wake or sleep?" & "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment" & "To leave it out would be another, truer way." Oh, friends, the voices of tradition ring out in these fantasies in place of the ego-proclamations so heavily fancied! I would that I could foster in one change, one minute alteration in the fundamental poetic processes of one insipid youth, yes, friends, & then could I find my peace! Oh, dear, my oolong has caught up with me, pardon me!

That Cozy Space 'Twixt Snark & Lambast

2005-05-13T05:00:00.000+08:00

Dear friends, my sincere apologies for my absence this morning, but you see, I was otherwise engaged with the most scrumptious of cranberry blintzes, coupled nicely with a Prince of Wales black tea with the slightest hint of cinammon for ornament's sake. I want briefly to clarify my intentions with my last post, namely in terms of appropriate terminologies. I don't believe, dear friends of Poetry Snark, that I held myself to a strictly "snark" taxonomy of criticism, if at all for that matter. My intention was to desperately, needfully & I admit artfully entice the reader away from grave danger, as a master yielding a snippet of turkey giblet might entice a pup from a vast precipice which might otherwise define in a rather perfunctory manner said canine's demise. Yes, the solemnity of my warning cannot be understated, friends, for the very pusle & thrum of poetry falters like a blackening filament in a tired lightbulb, hung, as it were, in a public urinal of notoriously advanced decrepitude. Yes, yes, I kid you not, dear friends, for the covers of Fence, like the covers of so many modern tomes, seem the very shrouds of meaningfulness, of meaning-making, if you will (& if you won't, a swift slap in your face with a chilled halibut). The poem of today stands above poetry like the decal of a flaming skeleton's head. Things, friends, are dire. I, as you know, am well advanced in years & consequently feeble, tired, unable to press upon my tasks with equal vigor as once I displayed. My will, oh that ghost of Schopenhauer's, is become unto me a thing exhausted, depleted, barely capable some mornings of even brewing tea. But I shall fight unto the very cusp of death this malignance, this pestulance that spreads with the stink of a rat's posterior about the modern page! I will champion simple Beauty! I will not prove docile while around me the very buttresses of my life's passion are one by one defiled like the many virgins of yore! No! I will wear Truth's dear chastity belt for my costume & yield my pen, & maybe a cape for good measure, & I will tirelessly crusade against those that would take poetry upon their laps like Jezebel & leave her savagely denuded of honor! Oh, dear me dear my! Dear friends, unite! This will be our St. Crispin's Day! Now pardon me, for my bowels seem a veritable orchestra of distress!