I found out just last week that the poet Carl Thayler died last year.
Thayler is a thorny, difficult poet, committed to the precision and beauty of carefully-chosen words. His poetry is dense, often allusive, and steeped in historical events and figures that many people now are not intimately familiar with--and yet his poems make no concessions to the ignorance of the reader. As a result it's easy to misunderstand or misconstrue his poems.
Add to that Carl's pointed right-wing viewpoint (pro-guns, pro-frontier justice, pro-McCarthy) and it is clear that the man was never destined for fame within the literary establishment. Indeed, Carl died with most of his work still unpublished, although a few new volumes came out in recent years and more work is, apparently, in the pipeline.
I met Carl Thayler only once, but it was enough to make a strong impression. Carl came to dinner at my mom's apartment and spent the evening drinking wine and regaling us with stories. He spent far more time talking than we did, and we were all transfixed by his articulate, genteel, and lively conversation. Interviews with Carl prove that he could talk, and provoke, without incurring rancor. That's not a bad trick for a man whose politics led him to admire Eugene McCarthy, excoriate the ACLU, and celebrate pro-Franco Spain and Capt. NcNelly's Rangers, early white patrollers of the Tex-Mex border.
I don't remember any of that in our conversation. I do remember that he'd recently seen his own heart: He'd had open-heart surgery, and had either watched it, live, on a video monitor, or had been able to watch a videotape of it after he recovered. Either way, it had clearly impressed him -- as it impressed me. To watch your own heart beating: Is there anything more terrifying, or moving? And to watch it without turning away. That's the kind of hard, clear vision that the poetry of Carl Thayler has.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
About the El Camino Review
This will be an occasional online journal with poems, plus perhaps some reviews and notes about the craft of poetry.
More the most part I think this will be a personal poetry blog, not a collective work. The poems and notes here are, unless otherwise noted, by me.
A hypothesis: Poetry is language used with precision.
Another hypothesis: Poetry is what happens when you try to love the language. Poetry is what happens when words break through their own limitations and catch fire, reflect a spark of sunlight, come alive somehow. The words themselves -- apart from any plot, character, setting, or narrative thread.
Neither hypothesis very satisfying.
I am not someone who is comfortable doing things without being able to give an account of what it is I'm doing, or why. I want to go back to first principles: To be able to give reasons, and to back things up. I have never been able to do that for poetry, and that is a big reason why I couldn't write much for nearly a decade.
It doesn't help that poetry is an inherently pretentious activity to engage in. I think there is no way around this: It is virtually impossible to write poetry without being, on some level, pretentious. It is simply too artificial to function effectively as communication, too unpopular to function as entertainment, too indirect and imprecise to function didactically, philosophically, or analytically. To paraphrase Frank O'Hara, if I wanted to say something to you, why would I write a poem instead of a letter?
Combine the artificiality of modern poetry and a complete lack of agreement on first principles, and it is clear why the making and reading of poetry is (or should be) an uncomfortable, even slightly embarrassing experience for an educated person.
I eventually reached a point when I realized it didn't matter. I decided to write, even if it wasn't particularly clear to me what I was doing, or why I was doing it that particular way. I simply had to do it.
I don't have a good reason for this. But there it is. I suspect I'm not the only one in this position.
A third hypothesis: Poetry is a tool for recovering the value of words, for recharging language.
A fourth hypothesis: Poetry is an attribute of language, not a thing in itself. There is no longer "poetry," there are only more or less poetic forms of writing.
Let's just see what develops.
More the most part I think this will be a personal poetry blog, not a collective work. The poems and notes here are, unless otherwise noted, by me.
A hypothesis: Poetry is language used with precision.
Another hypothesis: Poetry is what happens when you try to love the language. Poetry is what happens when words break through their own limitations and catch fire, reflect a spark of sunlight, come alive somehow. The words themselves -- apart from any plot, character, setting, or narrative thread.
Neither hypothesis very satisfying.
I am not someone who is comfortable doing things without being able to give an account of what it is I'm doing, or why. I want to go back to first principles: To be able to give reasons, and to back things up. I have never been able to do that for poetry, and that is a big reason why I couldn't write much for nearly a decade.
It doesn't help that poetry is an inherently pretentious activity to engage in. I think there is no way around this: It is virtually impossible to write poetry without being, on some level, pretentious. It is simply too artificial to function effectively as communication, too unpopular to function as entertainment, too indirect and imprecise to function didactically, philosophically, or analytically. To paraphrase Frank O'Hara, if I wanted to say something to you, why would I write a poem instead of a letter?
Combine the artificiality of modern poetry and a complete lack of agreement on first principles, and it is clear why the making and reading of poetry is (or should be) an uncomfortable, even slightly embarrassing experience for an educated person.
I eventually reached a point when I realized it didn't matter. I decided to write, even if it wasn't particularly clear to me what I was doing, or why I was doing it that particular way. I simply had to do it.
I don't have a good reason for this. But there it is. I suspect I'm not the only one in this position.
A third hypothesis: Poetry is a tool for recovering the value of words, for recharging language.
A fourth hypothesis: Poetry is an attribute of language, not a thing in itself. There is no longer "poetry," there are only more or less poetic forms of writing.
Let's just see what develops.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)