On Marjorie Perloff’s “Reinventing the Lyric”

Whenever I see a new essay from Marjorie Perloff, I get so excited. I think the younger kids call this excitement getting “geeked out.” I geek out to Perloff.

I thoroughly enjoy Perloff’s observations on poetry. She’s so astute that I wonder if she’s a poet. I’ve never seen her poetry, but perhaps I haven’t looked in the right places. Her book The Dance of the Intellect was one of those great books of criticism that significantly affected me. It’s brilliant. Another book that significantly impacted me was a book of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s essays on poetry that I used to read a lot as an undergrad. I felt like stealing if from the SUNY Oneonta Milne Library since it became so important to me and since no one else had ever checked it out since the 1970s. I felt I could ethically and morally appropriate it from the library. Who would know? And who would give the book more love than me? Other important books of criticism to me are Ezra Pound’s The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (which I own), Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (which I own), and Roy Harvey Pearce’s The Continuity of American Poetry (which I own), especially the stuff about T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Those books are huge in my literary growth, and Perloff’s books (which I own) are a big deal in my life. (And now it probably sounds like I’m going to undermine or attack her, but I’m not. If you’re expecting an attack, it won’t happen.)

Her newest essay, “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric,” appears in the Boston Review. In this essay (which you should read else this essay might feel wobbly to you), it’s like Perloff is a curator or tour guide in The Contemporary American Museum (Lyric Branch). In this branch of the museum, she walks around and points out things and comments on them. She starts by pointing to the general gist of today’s poetry:

The poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain . . . .

That seems about right to me. Perloff then moves into Rita Dove‘s new anthology from Penguin Books: Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry. Now, we can all quibble with any anthology of poetry, as Jonas Mekas did: http://jonasmekasfilms.com/diary/?p=1447#. (You really should watch this. It’s delightful.) But in this case, Perloff makes valid and legitimate points:

[. . .] but what about the copyright issue Dove raises at the close of her introduction? Evidently, she wanted to include Allen Ginsberg (Howl gets a prominent mention) and Sylvia Plath, but the reproduction costs were prohibitive. [. . .] Clearly concerned about the omission of these important poets, Dove asks her readers to “cut me some slack” and reminds us that Ginsberg and Plath are readily available “in your local public library.”

[. . .]

But if the anthology is to have any sort of validity as a textbook or a selection for the general reader, this copyright caveat is unacceptable, and the fault is primarily the publisher’s. How could a leading publisher such as Penguin fail to get publication rights for materials so central to a book’s purpose? [. . .]

Indeed, what Penguin’s editorial team seems to be saying is that the value of Dove’s anthology’s depends [. . .] on the prestige of its editor.

That’s true, and it makes me feel really sad for Dove. She probably entered this whole arrangement with the idea that she would put together a significant anthology of poetry. She was going to be the poet, not critic, who was going to frame a whole century’s worth of poetry for later generations to read. This was going to be huge and important to her and us. But she was manipulated by the big bad publisher of profits. I mean, if the publisher was really concerned with creating an anthology, those little costs wouldn’t matter. Those costs can be recouped. But Penguin was going on the cheap and quick. And as a result, Dove’s reputation suffers and Penguin’s profits go up. (Bah. I don’t even like Penguin anyway. I don’t even like the cheap paper they use and the layout of their books is hasty and difficult on the eye. This anthology should have been left to a place like Copper Canyon, Graywolf, BOA, or someone with the love of poetry in them instead of profits. But I digress. I want to get some important items.)

What is the state of the lyric? I think it has almost vanished from the poetry scene, which is why there was the “What Happened to the Lyric” issue 12 of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, which quickly sold out but I’ve made it available online here: http://issuu.com/thelinebreak/docs/redactions_issue_12. First, however, I think we need a definition of lyric poetry. A lot of people think a lyric poem is poem that is musical or sounds good. That is partially right, but it’s not a full definition. All poetry should be musical or sound good, which is something Perloff notes is often missing in today’s poetry. But a lyric poem is more. Before I get to my definition of it, let’s get to the definition of narrative poem and then the definitions of the three other types of poetry. A narrative poem is a poem that moves through time, and it usually moves in a linear, causal fashion. It progresses through time much like a typical story. A lyric poem, however, stands outside of time or is a moment in time. Meditative poetry is similar to lyric poetry, but the poem is inside the poet’s mind and can often be philosophical. And then there’s dramatic poetry, which is like a poetry play or play written as poetry, such as William Butler Yeats’ “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” or Robert Frost’s “The Witch of Coös.” With that in mind, what’s the most prevalent type of poetry in contemporary American poetry? That’s right – narrative poetry. When Perloff says, “the free-verse lyric paradigm (observation – triggering memory – insight) ubiquitous in the Dove anthology” (and elsewhere), I think she means “narrative” instead of “lyric.” If that’s the case, I completely agree with her, especially if she adds “first-person” before narrative. I’ve been noticing this for years. The implication of this is that we need something new. But what is the new thing we need?

One of Perloff’s suggestions is Erasure poetry. In Erasure poetry, you take a big chunk of text, such as a novel or long poem, and then begin erasing words from the text or using Wite Out to paint over words. The words that remain then make for a poem. But you can’t just use any text, as some poets do. No, you need a significant text, and then by erasing words, you find something like a secret meaning to the poem or text your are erasing from or “discover something like poetry hidden within [a] book.” John Cage did this with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but he added a twist. With the unerased words, he made an anagram: ALLEN GINSBERG. (See Perloff’s essay for the example.) As a result:

Without deploying a single word of his own, Cage subtly turns the language of Howl against itself so as to make a plea for restraint and quietude as alternatives to the violence at the heart of Ginsberg’s poem.

So the text you choose is important. Cage’s poem won’t make much sense or will lose most of its experience and meaning if you don’t know he is erasing from Howl. The same will hold true for Srikanth Reddy’s book Voyager, which is an erasure poem from Kurt Waldheim’s In the Eye of the Storm. Voyager, according to Perloff, is “one of the few really notable political poems of recent years.” However, its politics can only exist if you know the primary text or the author of the primary text. Who is Kurt Waldheim? If you know, awesome! I didn’t, so boo. Even Perloff had to point out who he was. Waldheim was:

Secretary-general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 and president of Austria from 1986 to 1992, Waldheim was exposed, in the mid-’80s, as having served in the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War II and quite possibly having committed major war crimes. The president, who had carefully covered his tracks for years, continued to claim he was innocent, and many of his fellow Austrians defended him, even when the evidence became overwhelming. His political and diplomatic success – he was allowed to finish out his term as president – has become a symbol for the hypocrisy and mendacity of the postwar era in an Austria that had strongly supported Hitler in the war years, before it received occupied-nation status in 1945. Avoiding the fate of its Iron Curtain neighbors Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Austria quickly became a prosperous nation.

If you don’t know this information, you lose out on the majority of the meanings and experiences of the poem or poems. This will be the effect of an Erasure poem. The text the poet erases from matters, but if the reader doesn’t know the text, then the resulting poem will fail. And knowing the original text really isn’t enough either. One will have to have read the original text “to get the poem” that arrived from erasing. Erasure poetry, then becomes not only elliptical but exclusive, just like it’s actions in making the poem. It excludes certain words to create a meaning, and it excludes readers not familiar with the original text. (This also assumes that you wouldn’t just erase from some random book or chunk of text, because then what would be the point? You might as well randomly pick words from a dictionary. The text that is being erased from matters.)

Additionally, Erasure poetry has the same feel as an acrostic poem that our Puritan ancestors wrote.

“The Puritan elegist might well believe that in a man’s name God had inserted evidence of his nature and his fate” (Pearce, 31).

As fun as an acrostic is to write, we know the above Purtian elegist’s belief is not true. The secret evidence of a person’s nature or fate can’t be extracted from the person’s name even if laid out as an acrostic. And as fun as it is to create an Erasure poem, as much fun as refrigerator poetry, this is no way to find a new meaning in a text or in an author. It’s just play. And there’s nothing wrong with play. And poetry should be play, but it should be a play that resonates. Play that resonates and impacts. Erasure poetry doesn’t resonate or impact, unless the reader is ”in the know” of the primary text, and even then how much can it resonate or impact? So I don’t think this is the new direction lyric poetry should take.

But it’s this other idea of borrowing or appropriation that is intriguing. This is when the poet, such as Susan Howe in That This, ”combines cited material with her own prose and verse.” (I think Cid Corman was the first, or one of the first, to do this.) I assume that somewhere in Howe’s book there is a “Works Cited” page that indicates where each cited text came from. If not, then she’s appropriating, which has ethical dilemmas . . . but maybe not. (That Swinburne book should be mine!) But for now let’s assume all the works Howe borrows from are cited. This borrowing of other texts seems like a terrific idea to me. I mean, who isn’t just an amalgam of every person they’ve met, every book they’ve read, every song they’ve heard, every movie or concert or play or football game they’ve seen, etc. For instance, I once read so much Emerson with so much intensity that I can no longer separate him from me. I often don’t know if the thoughts I have are mine or if they were originally his. We have become one. So why not use fragments from other texts we have read to help us better express what needs to be expressed? Especially if it follows the associative path of how the poet thinks, as did Howe when reflecting on her husband’s passing when she cites Sarah Edwards (Jonathan Edwards wife):

“O My Very Dear Child. What shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud.” On April 3, 1758, Sarah Edwards wrote this in a letter to her daughter Esther Edwards Burr when she heard of Jonathan’s sudden death in Princeton. For Sarah all works of God are a kind of language or voice to instruct us in things pertaining to calling and confusion. I love to read her husband’s analogies, metaphors, and similes.

What’s wrong with including this if it gets the poet closer to how he or she feels? The mind flows in its own thoughts and is invaded by the thoughts of others and others’ experiences. And if you are believer in Philip Whalen’s “Poetry is a graph of the mind moving,” as I am, then this borrowing seems an appropriate fit, a natural form of expression. Or does it? I’ll get back to this.

What if Howe didn’t cite where the borrowed text came from, which often seems to be the case, though not necessarily with Howe? I’m thinking of Flarf poetry and poets here, at least as I understand Flarf poetry. In this case, the poet appropriates the text and makes it his or hers. Those poets appropriate much in the manner that I wanted to appropriate that Swinburne book from SUNY Oneonta’s Milne Library. That book meant a lot to me, and it didn’t seem relevant to anyone else, at least since the 70s. So why shouldn’t I have it? It’s part of me. I should just steal it. Aha. “Appropriate” is just camouflage for “steal.” And it’s not good stealing like the stealing T. S. Eliot meant. It’s theft of words that aren’t yours, even if they appropriately express what you feel or want to say. But then, if it appropriately expresses what you feel and want to say, then are our your thoughts and feelings original? Original enough for a poem? A new poem? A new lyric poem?

This ties back to Howe borrowing from Sarah Edwards. Is Howe really expressing her grief by borrowing another person’s words? Isn’t the job of a poet to get closer to their own bone of experience? Or is Howe using other text as a trigger and much in the same manner that Perloff and I are bored of: “the free-verse lyric paradigm (observation—triggering memory—insight).” Howe’s observation is the painful passing of her husband, which triggers a memory of Sarah Edward’s words, which then leads to insight. Now, this doesn’t seem so bad does it? Especially if it helps the poet deal with and express his or her grief, which is really the important thing, at least and especially for Howe. The only difference with Howe’s presentation is the memory is of text instead of a physical experience.

So where are we now? What are the differences? What newness has the lyric poem experienced? How is using your own past experiences to lead to an insight better/different/less effective than borrowing from a text? How is bricolage different from the tapestry of your experiences? I don’t see the differences or how one method is more successful than the other.

Still it would be nice to find a new lyrical pattern to weave to help us get closer to the bone of experience we want to express. But I wonder what that pattern is. I’ve been searching now for at least five years. If anyone knows, please share.

Perloff, I’m so glad you wrote this essay. I hope these reinvention attempts continue. I hope every poet also continues to reinvent. Let’s make it new. Let’s get closer to the bone of experience.

//

Works Cited

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poety. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” Boston Review. Boston Review, May/June 2012. Web. 3 May 2012. <http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.3/marjorie_perloff_poetry_lyric_reinvention.php>.

//

Einstein’s Haiku

When I teach poetry to my students, I teach them wholeheartedly what Pound said, “Go in fear of abstractions.” I teach them that the image is always better, especially in the matters in of love. But sometimes it’s not. The below example illustrates this perfectly.

   Einstein's Haiku
     (For Melissa)

   Everything I do
   Means I want to love you squared –
   Come with me and prove

Isn’t that fun. It says I love you. It rhymes in two lines and the title. It’s an acrostic for E=mc². It even has an allusion to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepard to His Love.” There’s so much going on. And it really does say I love you. It’s complicated in a playful way – just like love.

I wrote this after watching I.Q.//

Notes Towards Investigative Poetry (Part One)

Notes Toward an Investigative Poetics

These are my initial notes towards an Investigative Poetics. I am trying to negotiate what this means to me. In this writing, I am drawing exclusively from Ed Sanders Investigative Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights, 1976) (yes, I found and purchased a first edition on abe.com for a very fair price), and I am trying to interpret it or make it mean to me. In the end, I think I will usurp the term, Investigate Poetry, for my own means, but pay high tribute to Mr. Sanders. There is absolutely nothing wrong with his version of Investigative Poetics. It is highly commendable. I just wish to go someplace else with it. Below are the notes.

//

On page 11 of Ed Sanders Investigative Poetry, Sanders writes two important things in regards to defining Investigative Poetry:

History-poesy, or investigative poetry, can thrive in our era because of the implications of a certain poetic insight, that is, in the implications of the line, “Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence,” from Death to Van Gogh’s Ear, a Ginsberg poem from 1958.

and

For this is the era of description of the All.

I’ll get to the first quote in a moment, but the last one, man, is that ever true today with the internet and its Google with so much information at hand. All the information we have today is not only overly readily available and abundant, but it has lent the way to very, very detailed people. In the States, we over analyze everything, in part, because of all the data we have. All this data provides us with the information we need to describe the All, or as I would say, “connect the All.”

With our imagination and its ability to leap and associate and with all this information, a copulation is at hand. Information inseminates the imagination to make more connections. It’s now possible to study, for instance, the history of the crabcake and soon find connections to Baltimore, the Baltimore Ravens, Edgar Allen Poe,  the history of the macabre, the history of literature, an episode of the sit-com Cheers or The Simpsons, and a stunning investigation into American culture, all the way to how our Paleolithic and Neanderthal ancestors hunted and ate food, and how the crab evolved, how through the course of history crab was served, hunted, and was a component of economics, how it affected astrology and the universe, how it affects cancer when improperly connected to on an etymological level as Skeats did in the first few editions of his An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, and how that improperly connected etymology affected James Joyce when he wrote Ulysess, which was banned in America like Ginsberg’s Howl, who is the ancestor of Whitman and who is the contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe, who is from Baltimore where they make delicious crabcakes.

The study of one thing can connect the universe, though I’m not sure this is what Sanders has in mind, but it’s what I have in mind.

As for the first quote, I’m concerned with the “History-poesy” part. I had never though that would be synonymous with Investigative Poetics, but now that I think about, it has to be. How can an investigation occur without a study of history. All investigations will have to go into the past. The past is what defines us. There’s a long tether in humanity and it stretches back to the Neanderthals and to the first amoebas to cosmic background radiation to quantum foam to the big bang and into the future where it will end in fire or ice . . . or Frost.

Example Investigative Poetry texts:

• Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems
• Hart Crane’s The Bridge
• William Carlos Williams Paterson
• Ezra Pound’s Cantos
  
• Sanders says Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but I’m not quite sure why at this point
• T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland
• Jerome Rothenberg’s Poland 1931
• Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger
  
• Many of William Heyen‘s collection of poems
• Any of my collections of poems (I mention not for ego, but because I was doing this before I knew of Investigative Poetry and now I want to study what I’ve been doing.)

Could any of these books have been written without an historical perspective? The Maximus Poems must study the history of Gloucester, The Bridge without a long study into the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge and the events that happened on it during the construction and after couldn’t come to be, nor Paterson without a study of Paterson or even the Genesee River in Rochester, NY, nor the Cantos, which is almost all history, nor The Wasteland, which meanders through history and Eliot’s present, nor Gunslinger without an historical study of the Wild West and philosophy. History, does in fact, seem to be the key. (Joyce’s Ulysess, if it were a poem, would fall into Investigative Poetry, too, and on a number of levels, as he charts Dublin precisely and then writes in each of the main styles of writing through the history of writing, and the whole early Celtic alphabet thing.)

//

Our minds naturally associate, so why does Investigative Poetry seem so foreign to the contemporary poet?

//

In a moment of Olsonian possession and Ginsbergian yawp, Sanders announces:

     The verse of the investigative poet of
     genius will discharge data as if scanning
     eye-brains were passing across a high-energy grid,
     the vectors of verse-froth leaping up from
     the verse-grids at every points. High Energy
     Verse History Grids!

High Energy Verse History Grids. The investigative poem must be a high-energy discharge. The poet must gather the energy of the original source and put it into the poem. The poem is a capacitor. It contains the energy of the investigation. No wonder Sanders says to channel the voice and rhythms of Ginsberg as the means of transferring that energy.

The investigative poem is an extension of Olson’s “Projective Verse.” Investigative Poetry needs the mandates of Olson, which Sanders shares with us:

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

and

Then the poem must, at all points, be a high energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.

(p 21, quoting Olson from “Projective Verse”).

Let me tell you of Investigative Poetry. When you, the Investigative Poet, are doing the research, and you are always doing research as commanded by the muse and demanded by the imagination, you read a lot. Even in the most mundane of research writings you will find moments of passion from the author. Here is where you know something is happening. Here is where you know the author knows something more than the facts are saying. Here is where you, the investigative poet, must be at high alert. Here is your inspiration. Muse be ready. Imagination raise your eyebrows. The investigation is about to begin. But it’s not the passion we study. It’s what precedes the passion. Preceding the passion are the facts. It’s the running start to the passionate leap that the author makes. Where the author transcends the facts. We, the investigative poet, must go back and start running on our own and then make our leap. The author has left us a trail. Can we get to the same place? Will our landing be different? No matter as long as we make a perfect three-point landing like a sky diver landing on solid ground. The muse and imagination will do with the facts as they please, and they will create a great truth as great as the author’s truth but more musical and more readily available to the novice or uneducated in the field. We, the Investigative Poet, break it down. We make it accessible. We make the jump obvious for the reader. We give the reader a bridge, though the reader won’t realize the bridge is there. The Investigative Poet is the interpreter of the universe. And we, as Investigative Poet translators, must follow Pound’s logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia. At bare minimum we translate verbatim and insert line breaks and tidy up the language – logopoeia. At our best, we find the best rhythms and music to give the reader’s legs the energy to run and jump from fact to truth – melopoeia. More often, we lay down a bridge for the reader, though kinda shaky like a rope bridge across a great divide – phanopoeia – but it gets us, the Investigative Poet, the facts, and the reader to the truth.

Indiana Jones is the Investigative Poet of the Big Screen

The Investigative Poet, in the end, is the medium between fact and truth.

Indiana Jones is what Sanders wants the investigative poet to be. Delving into the research. Keeping careful notes. Cross checking. Making leaps from the limited information he has has into the truth. And killing the right-wing Nazis.

//

Just so it is known, Ed Sanders back in 1976 invented emoticons, though he called it them emotion-glyphs.

It seems obvious that the language of poetry may well evolve into 1000 color hieroglyphics utilizing a near infinity of typographies. The availability of colors & photographic images and the 100′s of type faces, even in a good art supply store, foretell the birth of an international hieroglyphics. The upcoming laser hologram revolution – that is, poetry and collage and perspective join to thrill the eye-brain with glowing, animated (“poetry in motion,” the rock-and-roll song so prophetically sang), multi-color, 3-d “memory gardens” or verse-grids. This new hieroglyphic language may well use letterless symbols, emotion-glyphs say, 3-d soundless glyphs or tiny photographs depicting complex emotional states, inserted in the hieroglyphic grids, to augment the poet’s inherited word-horde. (p 33. My bold.)

//

Sanders’ Investigative Poetry is about real investigation, however. Investigating as to expose those right-wing, oppressive cops who spied on Wordsworth and Coleridge and who caused Wordsworth to lose his home, who spied on Shelley until he left the country, that made Dostoevsky complacent, to expose the “FBI-CIA Surrealistic-Complex” (p 23), or:

Victor Jara With Children Supporters

Nor shall we forget how the Chilean poet-singer Victor Jara was leading a group of singers while imprisoned in the soccer stadium following the 1973 CIA-coup in Chile, and the killers chopped off his fingers to silence his guitar, and still he led the singing – till they killed him, another bard butchered because of the U. S. secret police (p 12).

or

Nor shall we forget how the Czar’s secret police hounded Alexandr Pushkin with a nightmare of surveillance and exile. In fact, a brief look at certain aspects of Pushkin’s life is here appropriate, in order to gauge some of the pressures that can force a poet “to become more objective,” or, as the English professor who writes for the CIA-funded magazine might giggle, “to come to terms with the harsh facts of life.” Or to escape into the forgetful symbols (p 12).

Sander’s investigations are more political than mine. Good for him. There should be more political poetry and exposing. An Investigative Poetry that leads to “a genre of Indictment Verse” (p 38). Sanders then expands on how Indictment Verse can sound:

Once again we can reiterate how Howl, with its long-line iambo-anapestic, bacchic and beat dactylic structure, could easily serve as model for blistering indictments and descriptions of your investigations. Read it a few times and see how it fits: invent melodies for sections of it. Chant it with percussion, say, of a tambourine as background; practice singing your investigation grids with its long-breath rhythms. If Sappho’s unique metre could serve as the basis for a whole school of endeavor, why cannot certain modern poems serve in the same way? (p 38)

Man, conviction by poetry. I love it.

"Such meditation would certainly help to center the poet, who, say just last night had gotten roughed up trying to walk past Frank Sinatra's body-guards in Las Vegas to try and ask him a few questions about his buddy Sam Giancana and CIA assassination squads" (p 32).

I can do the political poetry thing, but the way Sanders goes about it is not my way. I’m too shy for that, and he has a whole section explaining why this isn’t for they shy. He gives you tips on what you should do when you go deep the oppressors realm or confront Frank Sinatra.

Nonetheless:

Do not hesitate to write investigative songs (as in Ginsberg’s smash CIA-Calypso song detailing CIA dope-dealing in SE Asia). No one owns the modes. Ahh the modes. Do not hesitate to use every mode that anyone ever devised. The modes of poetry are more powerful than any so-called magic, for they are a proven input. Do not hesitate (p 38).

Some of his investigative styles, however, are useful even to us shy folks. Dig deep in your research and keep good notes and cross references and document.

//

More notes will come. This is just the first round. //

Poems for an Empty Church Book Release Reading and Party

Oh yeah. October is just around the corner, and you know what that means, don’t you? Yup. My girlfriend celebrates her birthday. And it’s time to celebrate Ezra Pound’s birthday.

And the Yankees make the playoffs. And it’s Halloween. And Tom Holmes has a book-release reading and party.

That’s right. I’ll be reading at A Different Path Gallery on Saturday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the wonderful art gallery in downtown Brockport, A Different Path Gallery, located at 27 Market Street.

[To download a printable version of the poster, click Poems for an Empty Church PDF.]

Oh yeah. Good times. Poetry, wine, food, and you. Come for the wine. Stay for the poetry.

Here’s what they are saying about the book:

I’ve had a good time with Poems for an Empty Church, which is a big book, capacious, and surprised me with its often free-flowing and associational aesthetics.  As you want (usually) a cubist perspective(s), and as you say you want your poem/accept your poem as smarter than you are, you hit all sorts of interesting effects.  So, friend, way to go. I peered through the rocks into that eye & land of yours ….

– William Heyen, author of Shoah Train (finalist for the National Book Award)

Of course, no church is ever really empty unless people let ritual and myth lapse into repetition and dogma. Even then it isn’t empty, just empty of awe. That’s when origin stories are most necessary, and that’s what Tom Holmes provides in abundance: Moons create amazement, then stones create reflection, then people come along creating words, aggression, fire, flutes, art, physics, and probably our destruction, everything progressing ’til it returns full circle. Along the way, “statues pry themselves from sides of buildings / and exit the city / clutching their plaques.” Along the way, a lot of fine poems unfold, one containing a curse: “you have succeeded / in being only what you thought / you should be.” It’s a curse because we ought to be more. In a century in need of a giant do-over, Poems for an Empty Church reminds us of that. Even better, it makes a good lever or spark.

– Rob Carney, author of Story Problems, Weather Report, and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts

In Poems for an Empty Church, Tom Holmes writes of birth and death and the life we live in between those two events in beautifully sculpted lines carved into the white space that surrounds them. “I dare say I can hear / muddy angels singing /the lines of God,” he writes in “The Calculus of a Tod Marshall Book of Poems.” There are plenty of angels in Tom Holmes’ poems too, but one must be still enough to hear and appreciate the whisk of wings hovering over these powerful meditations.

– Sarah Freligh, author of Sort of Gone

I think of Charles Olsen when I read Tom Holmes’ poems: open, investigative, prophetic, often with mystical implications. These are the elements of our best modernist poems, and Holmes is a modernist – or a pre-modernist, or a post-pre-modernist. And there lies the real interesting part of his poems, they are hard to fit into anyone anywhere. He sits us in an empty church and says listen. He knows “it was the moons talked first.” He knows the dreams we dream even when “we wheeze / asleep in our boxes of shadows.” In these poems and parables is our collective of fire and nightfall, origins and endings, monochromatics, rivers, and stretch marks. Sappho makes a rare presence, but this is a book more stone-carved than page-written and she too is an ancient muse. As this author’s I is an absent eye, scanning the world of caves and shadows to find clouds who feed themselves, ghosts like alphabets, and men who whittle bones into flutes.

– Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line and Broken Hallelujahs

Poems for an Empty Church was officially released September 2, 2011, from Palettes & Quills. Founded in 2002, Palettes & Quills is devoted to the celebration and expansion of the literary and visual arts and offers both commissioned and consulting services. Palettes & Quills works to support beginning and emerging writers and artists to expand their knowledge, improve their skills, and connect to other resources in the community. Further, Palettes & Quills seeks to increase the public’s awareness and appreciation of these arts through education, advocacy, hands-on assistance, and by functioning as a literary press.//