I went again to try to see the Lichtenstein exhibit, but I once I got there I saw that it begins on June 29. Which is the Tuesday. Before I leave. And the museum is closed on Tuesday. So why do they announce that the exhibit begins on June 29. Where is the question mark on this keyboard. I´ll have to conclude that the period is the new question mark.

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So Marjorie Perloff cannot recognize iambic pentameter. (Mike Snider) Neither can Charles Berstein. This disqualifies Language Poetry. Yet I was the one who first put these examples up on my blog (at least the Berstein one, I don´t remember if I put the Perloff example up, although I had noticed it myself). And I love language poetry. So obviously things are not so simple. I´m sure Marjorie does ¨know¨ that the example she gives is not in iambic pentameter. It´s called a ¨mistake.¨ Yes, a very embarrassing mistake, but does that mean we have to throw out her entire critical opus. No more than we should disqualify Timothy Steele for writing some incompetent poems. Maybe Steele is a competent critic, a lousy poet. Although from what I´ve seen he´s neither.

Bernstein´s mistake is more serious, because his argument (in that particular section of his essay) depends on it. What is more remarkable is that his essay was given orally to several audiences, and appeared in print more than once, without anyone noticing. So the editors of Harvard University Press don´t know their iambic pentameter either. When someone is making a critical argument, noone really focusses on the examples. It is as though that shift of attention from the critical argument to the text being examined were too difficult to make. That´s not to excuse Bernstein (or Perloff) but just to say that such mistakes can be hard to catch once they are made.

Ok. Here I am blogging from Spain. All I had was a one euro coin, which gave me 45 minutes on the internet, much longer than I needed to check email and read a few Jim Behrle cartoons.

I saw the Almodovar movie La mala educacion last night. Very intricately plotted tale of clerical sexual abuse and consquent revenge. There are some deliberate nods to Hitchcock. I walked down to see the Lichtenstein exhibition at the Reina Sofia, only to discover that it is closed on Tuesdays. I saw a woman walking down the street with a tightfitting Lichtenstein sun dress. The effect was quite striking and taught me something about the painter I wouldn´t have learned from the exhibition alone.

Bemsha Swing is going on vacation while I am in España the rest fo the month. I'll be back at the beginning of July. Wish me buen viaje. While I will have internet access, I don't intend to spend a lot of time on the computer.

Raindrops on a Briar

I, a writer at one time hipped on
painting, did not consider
the effects, painting,
for that reason, static, on

the contrary the stillness of
the objects--the flowers, the gloves--
freed them precisely by that
from a necessity merely to move

in space as if they had been--
not children! but the thinking male
or the charged and deliver-
ing female frantic with ecstasies;

served rather to present, for me,
a more pregnant notion: a
series of varying leaves
clinging still, let us say, to

the cat-briar after last night's
storm, its waterdrops
ranged upon the arching stem
irregularly as an accompaniment.

There is much to be learned from a less well-known poem by a famous poet, in this case William Carlos Williams. This one is buried in the Collected Later Poems.

It might be one of the earliest uses in American poetry of the word "hipped" in this slang sense, at least in a White poet. The poem is almost Creeleyesque in its semi-articulate groping after an idea. The first idea, "the stillness... freed them from a necessity to move" is quite striking, but seems needlessly complicated by the next few lines. I don't get the sexual metaphor here. And the visual example given at the end,--why is it seen as a contrast to this first idea, "served rather to present..." and not an example of this idea? The argumentative structure of the poem is confused, phrases like "for that reason," "on the contrary," "let us say," are used awkwardly. Stanze 3-4 are difficult to get through. All this is fairly obvious. Yet there is something salvageable, perhaps, in the halting movement of the lines and in the final visual image. Certainly any attempt at revision, at making the poem ostensibly better, would destroy whatever value there is in this text, which is not among Williams' 100 best short poems.

What I'm trying to say, in a way only slightly more articulate than the poem itself, is that being able to see why this poem "kicks ass," despite its flaws, is more crucial for me today than pointing out these flaws. Any good reader could come up with reasons to dismiss this poem. But it still offers more than most poems published by American poets in 1948. (I hope that doesn't sound too Sillimanesque).

There are poems devoid of obvious flaws that are also devoid of interest. I'm constantly reading a book of poetry that seems "pretty good" as I read it, but has no staying power, no resonance in the memory.

The Unquiet Grave. The Thinking Man's Zukofsky

No offense, Tony, but wouldn't "the thinking man's Zukofsky" be, um... Zukofsky himself? Unless I am misunderstanding the logic of this particular "snow-clone." Doesn't it imply that people who think don't normally go in for Zukofsky? Forgive me if I'm missing the joke.

"Koethe" and "street cred" do not belong in the same sentence either. This is as absurd as the recent claim that Bill Knott is some kind of poetic "rebel." (Bill wrote me, by the way, to say that he in fact belongs squarely within the "School of Quietude." This might be one of the first times anyone has made this claim about his or her self.) Koethe, whose poetry I don't at all dislike, basically imitates a single facet of Ashbery's more complex work in a skillful but ultimately, to my mind, limited way. Next we'll be talking about Albert Goldbarths' "street cred"! The term used about any poet, in fact, is ridiculous.

Language Log: Under God an Idiom?: "It seems to me that there are only two possibilities here. One is that under God is compositional and has one of the several meanings in which it presupposes the existence of a single deity. In this case, it is unconstitutional. The alternative is that it is an idiom, created at the time it was added to the Pledge, whose meaning we really don't know. I find that highly implausible, because it means either that the people who proposed the addition and the legislators who voted for it didn't know what it meant or that they knew but have somehow failed to pass this information on to us. Furthermore, it's hard to believe that so many people would care so much about retaining it if it had no meaning. Indeed, if its meaning is really unknown, given that the campaign to insert it was led by the Knights of Columbus, we wouldn't expect such strong support from evangelical Protestants for retaining it. Instead, I would expect indifference from some and support for removing it from others, who would see it as a Papist plot, probably with a Satanic meaning. In any case, if it really is an idiom of unknown meaning, it may not be unconstitional, but it has no place in the Pledge because it is meaningless."

Suppose the Iranian Constitution contained the phrases "One nation, under Allah." Would anyone be arguing about what that meant? Nunberg's argument that it is an idiom or a phrase of indeterminate meaning seems implausible on its face, so I agree with post by Bill Poser from which I just quoted.

The Drummer's Brain

Although I still can't draw well at all, my ability to visualize has increased: images I see with my eyes closed are much sharper, visual memory is much better (subjectively judged). It is very similar to what happened to me when I began to play the drums a few years back. The mature brain can actually be rewired, can expand its capacity, suggests recent research.

I've spent my whole professional career devoted to the study of elite culture. I owe my position and my livelihood to my knowledge of this culture, to my "cultural capital" if you'd like. Yet the official position of "The Profession" is that this cultural capital is something to be ashamed of. It gets you the jobs, the prestige, but an investment in it is supposed to be a bad thing, because it is, by its very nature, "elitist." "The Profession" is deeply ambivalent, then. It depends on a knowledge and a power that it wants to disavow.

Equanimity - if not a poetics, then what? "It separates partisans of 'almost successfully' from those of 'but be' like nothing else in Tennessee."

Now that would be a good crossword puzzle clue.

I'm teaching myself to draw this summer. I enjoy making obvious beginner mistakes. That's the fun thing about learning something like scratch. I can draw Dick Tracy's square jaw and jus realized that if you round it off and add some wrinkles you get Ronald Reagan. I can draw a Magritte Bowler Hat pretty well too. A copy of a drawing of a Japanese poet I did a few months ago is pretty good, but for some reason I cannot even come close to that any more. I remember I worked on it quite a while with eraser fixing everything that was wrong. I shouldn't expect to do as well when I don't put in that kind of effort. At least now I sort of know what it is I am trying to learn. My early idea of learning to draw was quite vague. I'm still not sure what I want to do with it once I learn. I'm vaguely intuiting a book of poem-pictures.

Nick notices summer slump too. Please check his always excellent blog if you are still stuck at your desk.

The summer slump in stats might be due to the academic component of readership. I'm averaging 70 hits a day for June, down from my normal 90-100 during the Academic Year. Attacks on Formalism can get me temporarily up to 80, if I can sucker someone into responding. Did you see that poem that Wilbur wrote for Hecht's 80th birthday on the Formalist website? It's embarrassing. But seriously, it's good that people have something better to do during the summer than sit at desk and read Bemsha Swing. I'm certainly not going to be spending my time in Spain next week reading people's blogs.

My plan to get in shape has been derailed by a resurgence of asthma. I usually just ignore symptoms, but after sweeping out my garage of debris after a recent flood I could not catch my breath. I assumed I would recuperate in a few days, but the wheezing has persisted. I finally saw the doctor today. According to the peak flow meter I have the lung capacity of a 75-year old, 5-foot tall man. Not good.

A window: a time when you can actually see the possibility of getting something accomplished, rather than merely puttering around at the edges of various projects.