When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
Well, one touchstone for me has been Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness : “Some things must be made opaque to be seen.” Or: “The impossible is the first necessary condition of any faith.” Maybe I just look at title on the cover: The Art of Recklessness. (Though in the book he argues that every chance appearance needs to have a consequence, his emphasis I think is wrong: every chance appearance is a chance appearance: entanglements might or might not ensue.) But in the end, for renewal, I go back to music.
Showing posts with label Brian Henderson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brian Henderson. Show all posts
Monday, 13 January 2020
Monday, 6 January 2020
Brian Henderson : part four
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I’m just, belatedly, picking up James Tate, can you believe it? Viper Jazz, wow, what a great title!
I’m just, belatedly, picking up James Tate, can you believe it? Viper Jazz, wow, what a great title!
Monday, 30 December 2019
Brian Henderson : part three
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
OK so ever since I was a kid I’d been listening to my Dad play his classical records on his home-made hi-fi (as it was in those days) with its huge tower speaker thrust into the corner of our various living rooms over the years. I was so enraptured with that music’s ability to reach some deep core in me that I wanted to write music just like it. The only problem of course was I had no idea how to do that, let alone even play an instrument at that time. But I could write, so that’s how it started: poet free. As it turned out I did very little writing of any kind; poetry, though it has affinities with music, is of course not music – it’s so saddled with expectations of referenciality and representation -- but honestly without some of that it just can’t do the sorts of things music can emotionally. And then I read Dylan Thomas in Grade 11. And that blew the doors off.
WCW made an impact on me with the “No ideas but in things” mantra for sure. Here was an opportunity to side-step grand and sweeping statements about the way things are, for the things that actually are and for opening their expressivities. (Maybe an early incipience of what was to became Speculative Realism?)
Duino Elegies launched me into the possibilities of linguistically inventive meditation. Rilke changed my notion of what both thinking and prayer could be. And Wallace Stevens allowed baroque and mannered language to flourish convincingly inside some of that thinking. And then the huge echoic depth and silence of Paul Celan.
And then along came John Berryman and Sylvia Plath and poetry as the possibility of a writing life-path, where one writes oneself into life and possibly even death.
Also The Drunken Boat and “I is another” which totally made me re-think notions of the self, and how performative it might be, the multiplicities of an “I” and the absences, the voids. How can words witness such things? Better how can they be such things?
And then the Canadians excited me in that wonderful explosion in the 60’s and 70’s: Gwendolyn MacEwan particularly with her deeply lyrical myth psychology was a turning point, and Don McKay’s transformative ecopoetic revelations too.
And in the States: Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, Galway Kinnell, Charles Wright.
And then Hugo Ball, the DADAs and Andre Breton, the Surrealists; Friederike Mayröcker especially, showed how truly electricly freeing language could be.
And the ones I haven’t mentioned: Robert Bly, Robert Hass, CD Wright, Brenda Hillman, Michael Ondaatje, Steve McCaffery, bp nichol, Christopher Dewdney, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Tomas Tranströmer, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbury, Henri Michaux, all of whom have touched my practice in one way or another. It’s an impossible map.
OK so ever since I was a kid I’d been listening to my Dad play his classical records on his home-made hi-fi (as it was in those days) with its huge tower speaker thrust into the corner of our various living rooms over the years. I was so enraptured with that music’s ability to reach some deep core in me that I wanted to write music just like it. The only problem of course was I had no idea how to do that, let alone even play an instrument at that time. But I could write, so that’s how it started: poet free. As it turned out I did very little writing of any kind; poetry, though it has affinities with music, is of course not music – it’s so saddled with expectations of referenciality and representation -- but honestly without some of that it just can’t do the sorts of things music can emotionally. And then I read Dylan Thomas in Grade 11. And that blew the doors off.
WCW made an impact on me with the “No ideas but in things” mantra for sure. Here was an opportunity to side-step grand and sweeping statements about the way things are, for the things that actually are and for opening their expressivities. (Maybe an early incipience of what was to became Speculative Realism?)
Duino Elegies launched me into the possibilities of linguistically inventive meditation. Rilke changed my notion of what both thinking and prayer could be. And Wallace Stevens allowed baroque and mannered language to flourish convincingly inside some of that thinking. And then the huge echoic depth and silence of Paul Celan.
And then along came John Berryman and Sylvia Plath and poetry as the possibility of a writing life-path, where one writes oneself into life and possibly even death.
Also The Drunken Boat and “I is another” which totally made me re-think notions of the self, and how performative it might be, the multiplicities of an “I” and the absences, the voids. How can words witness such things? Better how can they be such things?
And then the Canadians excited me in that wonderful explosion in the 60’s and 70’s: Gwendolyn MacEwan particularly with her deeply lyrical myth psychology was a turning point, and Don McKay’s transformative ecopoetic revelations too.
And in the States: Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, Galway Kinnell, Charles Wright.
And then Hugo Ball, the DADAs and Andre Breton, the Surrealists; Friederike Mayröcker especially, showed how truly electricly freeing language could be.
And the ones I haven’t mentioned: Robert Bly, Robert Hass, CD Wright, Brenda Hillman, Michael Ondaatje, Steve McCaffery, bp nichol, Christopher Dewdney, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Tomas Tranströmer, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbury, Henri Michaux, all of whom have touched my practice in one way or another. It’s an impossible map.
Monday, 23 December 2019
Brian Henderson : part two
Why is poetry important?
Poetry is evocative. I think the things, the extants themselves, of the world, of this earth, are evocations, evocations of themselves that also call us forth and sometimes within language such that poems can sometimes also be this evocation. Poetry is then a place of being and transformation; its calling opens gaps in language and the world. We know what Auden said about making nothing happen, but really it can actually open that void., and that void is one (languaged) place through which attention lives. It can decentre the self; it can put the fun back in the ontological funicular; it loves to disobey, and it loves to open its arms; it’s a place where non-knowledge happens. Shouldn’t the poem be a shelter for the life of the thing that is beyond our conceptualizing and false sense of mastery? Maybe the world is seriously in need of some of that medicine right now.
Poetry is evocative. I think the things, the extants themselves, of the world, of this earth, are evocations, evocations of themselves that also call us forth and sometimes within language such that poems can sometimes also be this evocation. Poetry is then a place of being and transformation; its calling opens gaps in language and the world. We know what Auden said about making nothing happen, but really it can actually open that void., and that void is one (languaged) place through which attention lives. It can decentre the self; it can put the fun back in the ontological funicular; it loves to disobey, and it loves to open its arms; it’s a place where non-knowledge happens. Shouldn’t the poem be a shelter for the life of the thing that is beyond our conceptualizing and false sense of mastery? Maybe the world is seriously in need of some of that medicine right now.
Monday, 16 December 2019
Brian Henderson : part one
He is a co-editor of the Laurier Poetry Series, https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/L/Laurier-Poetry, and lives with his wife, Charlene Winger, in Grey Highlands, Ontario, Canada.
How does a poem begin?
Really, I have no idea. A poem can begin anywhere, and often seemingly out of nothing: I wake up in the middle of the night with a phrase; I’m out for a walk and there’s a rhythm that loops in a few words after a while; an image mirages as a response to something seen, but even the lines that emerge from seemingly nowhere I believe are at heart a responsiveness to something, if nothing more than the process of being. It’s kind of a spontaneous responsiveness if that’s possible, but just as often these little sparks and pools of light will arrive if I’m mulling something over, immersing myself in a memory, a theory, an event, but it’s almost that I want to say it begins with X. There’s the story of Descartes struggling with some problem which was giving him great grief and so he just finally gave up; but in a carriage on his way home from somewhere weeks later, the answer popped into his head. Researchers have been exploring “self-talk” – that continuous inner voice we’re always hearing that tells us who we think we are – annoying as that can sometimes be. They also though, in exploring this inner voice, have pointed to a condensed inner speech which is highly abbreviated and often even ungrammatical and perhaps even wordless, an inner hearing, a voice not our own at the tip of the unconscious. Hmm. Were poets their subjects in these explorations? Anyway, the poem sometime begins, and if it does, it comes as a gift, and the poem itself (if it happens), only after --Cohen called it ashes -- and only if we’re lucky with further gifts engendered by the first; then there’s the writing, with luck, floating flying delving to maybe dream in words.
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