Brian's Stereo World article is out
As readers here may know, Queen guitarist Brian May is a huge stereo photography fan. The BrianMay.com website has a link to his article in Stereo World here.
My father-in-law is an antique bookseller in England, and I have daydreams of him coming up with some vital research information on this photgrapher TR Williams who Brian is writing about here. No dice.
And just what did I mean by a "jazzercize dialectic"?
[This is an (unreadable) lede and some subsequent current day notes from a ill-fated group book review from 2000. I don't think I even got around to talking about any of the books to be reviewed when my brain exploded.]
"Nature," Gertrude Stein once said, "is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting." That so sui generis of a modernist writer would take this tack about anything she was speaking of Charlie Chaplin speaks volumes about the creative process, as much as a stack of Harold Bloom's studies, as much as a thousand cover bands now performing Guns 'n Roses at taverns across this country of ours. As poets, imitation is the only way we really begin to find our own groove. No matter what stripe, ya gotta try on others' clothes.
... the early paintings we see in retrospectives, Kubrick's noir beginnings, all of these histories give the apprentice poet some confidence that she, too, might break from the shackles of stylistic vassaldom...
And what a shibboleth it has become paying the rent of so many writing seminars, workshop lead kind of jazzercize dialectic that keeps poets, so eager to strike the wellspring of originality, showing up to their local Chautauqua, and later even ...
It's this professionalization of imitation, I suspect, is what has driven everyone crazy when criticizing the MFA boom of the last 10-15 years. There's a peculiarly American mindset ... and it makes for even more wonderful a cultural non sequiter, not the least of which is that so many thousands of degree-bearing poets makes for more bad poetry.
[2003 intrusion: All you have to do is go to an open reading at your local coffee house to see what not going to an MFA school will do for ya. And then there's those poets who write like they went to comp lit classes when they baDickinson it out of Dickinsen or Lang...the differences fascinate, like we're all looking for an angle to be simply understood and contextualize. Your average midlist fiction writer would say, quite simply, "That's what press releases are for," and get back to the writing desk.]
...
it's also a reminder that too much of today's poetry isn't indulgent enough. Robert Bly, in his introduction of the 1999 edition of The Best American Poetry, complains about the lack of "heat" in today's poetry, which he blames on his old whipping boys: popular culture, computer screens, language poetry. And while indulgence and Bly's definition of "heat" aren't entirely at odds, the impulse of younger poets to not be afraid of pop culture and how it is at least refracted onto their own personal experience, is often drubbed by, well, a lot of older Ivy league pedigreed poets like Bly who, frankly, just don't get it.
...
[2003 Post script: Just saw Born Rich, an HBO documentary on children of the very rich, and many of the subjects' mannerisms -- their breezy unkempt appearance, self-assured defense mechanisms, the very movement of their eyes -- reminded me of -- you guessed it -- young poets of a certain social set. It was eerie, yo.]
So. Another ground rule. Mimickry counts, too ... to read Williams Carlos Williams' queeny Keatsian turns in his earlier years is to re-enter his new world naked is to an understand the change form genteel to Whitman's desire for an "autochthonic song."
