Up at dawn. Kant. Hegel. Spot of Sanskrit. Translate a couple of poems by Klopstock. Dog appears at the door of the study, tail rotating through 360 degrees. Dole him out some of his active terrier grub. Why not food to put the buggers asleep? Valium and rice, e.g.. To the kitchen to put on toast. When it pops up the dog bounds over, delirious with excitement, headbutting my knee. We share our toast, the kitchen alive with the sound of companionable chomping. Back to the study to compose some lyrics. More Sanskrit then off for multiple lengths of the local pool. Meet X in the gym and commiserate with him on the awful reviews of his new play. Oh joy. Home again for more intense labour. Working now on the proofs of selected text messages, due out in November. Amazing wt u cn do w th 4rm.

What is it about diaries? We live, of course, in an age of disclosure and the diary is the form of the age. And poets seem to be embracing the form as never before. Rather than reaching for the moleskin notebook or the Daler Rowney unlined sketchpad, today's poets are more likely to sit down at the end of the day with a mug of cocoa in front of the PC and confide their thoughts to an instantly published blog, to be read by idlers like the Flat Cap the minute they appear, or over his sausages the next morning. The calculated privacies of diaries were always intended for eventual consumption, but never before has the diary so instantly entered the public domain. One of the effects of the internet has been precisely this blurring of public and private, so that whatever is intimate and private has to validate itself by public utterance. We talk to ourselves from the rooftops. Of late the Flat Cap has taken to dropping into the minds of poets. He called in on George Szirtes dot com the other day, having idled away the afternoon on the FA Cup Final, and was gratified to read the following:

21.05.05: THERE'S A BREATHLESS HUSH IN THE CLOSE TONIGHT... Just watched the Cup Final: we lost but we were beautiful. It was why I fell in love with United in the first place. My heart is positively singing. As for the result? Cruel world, sure, and I know everyone says it is all about winning, but that's just the thick, self-obsessed zeitgeist. You have to dedicate yourself to winning, but shrug when you don't. The best things are in this order:

1) Winning while playing well
2) Losing while playing superbly
3) Winning an even game by a stroke of luck
    or any other means
4) Scraping through and winning when you
    don't deserve to.

I know... What planet am I living on? Not an altogether bad one.

Some poets see the diary or blog as an opportunity to flex the manifesto muscle and set the world straight on what's in and what's out. Ron Silliman's weblog 'focused on contemporary poetry and poetics' is a good example. His site carries links to some 530 other poetry blogs, in case you have a free moment, and he suspects that there might be as many as 10,000 currently active poetry bloggers, a fact that makes the Flat Cap nervous. Some of these bloggers are at it for less than pure motives. In a recent entry Silliman muses on the strategic usefulness of blogging:

Life is so full of questions when you're the permanently curious type, as am I. For example, I suspect, but can't prove, that a number of the younger or less widely published poets from outside of New York City appear in Hat because they're known, or at least more widely known, as a result of blogging. Jonathan Mayhew is a case in point, but so are James Meetze & Tony Tost & CA Conrad.

In the not so distant future poets will be required to be preceded by their opinions before daring to submit, perhaps even to august journals like PIR. The Flat Cap confesses to mental exhaustion after reading a few of these blogs, though he does treasure the following anecdote from Ron Silliman:

The last time I saw Gregory Corso was in a liquor store at the corner of Columbus & Union in San Francisco. He and the clerk behind the counter were engaged in a furious tug-of-war over a credit card, which the clerk was attempting to wrest from Corso's hands in order to cut it up. 'I am Norman!' thundered Corso, to no avail. The clerk got the card & snipped it in twain to Corso's howls. I exited quietly so as not to have to venture the words, 'Hello, Gregory.'
Little events like that have a lot to do with why there isn't more reasoned discourse about Corso's poetry. Or like the time when, having been told at Naropa that he should teach what he knew, Corso offered a workshop on stealing valium.

One reader who saw this remembered how Corso 'once attended a Buddhist leader's speech in which the Buddhist talked about how important it was to share and share alike. Corso moved into the man's house and helped himself to his food and bed for the summer.' The joys of literalism....

                                                *

Since we're in the realm of disclosure the Flat Cap draws his reader's attention to Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991, edited by William Corbett (Turtle Point Press, New York 2004). Unlike diaries or blogs, letters – does anyone write them any more? – are sociable creatures, they acknowledge the existence of other people in the world. Schuyler's letters, written 'for the most civilised of reasons, to inform and entertain: amount to a lively portrait of Schuyler himself but also of the New York and literary worlds over forty years, from 1951 to his death in 1991 – the letters are written almost exclusively to poet and painter friends such as John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Donald Allen and Harry Mathews. The letters are as witty and illuminating, and as cunningly composed, as the poems.

                                                *

'Are you on that computher again? Do you ever open a book at all?' The Flat Cap does in fact open several books a day but it is true that he is spending far too much time with his head in the ether. And yet the number of really useful poetry websites keeps growing. As far as poetry goes, one of the important functions of the web is its ability to make archives available to anyone with a computer, a decent connection and a private income. (Needless to say, for all the guff about our technological prowess, Ireland still lags well behind in broadband provision). The Flat Cap is currently enjoying the poetry web casts on the Library of Congress site (www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/index.php). A recent webcast featured Ted Kooser, the current US Poet Laureate (TFC, who isn't much given to laureateship, prefers the old tide, 'Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress'), in thoughtful conversation with the songwriter John Prine. There are dozens of other poetry webcasts in the series with, for example, Louise Glück, Stanley Kunitz, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov. Robert Pinsky gave the first webcast, on American poetry and memory, during his term as laureate and he also initiated the 'Favo(u)rite Poem Project', dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting the role of poetry in Americans' lives. During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favourite poems and a number of collections resulted, including fifty short video documentaries in which individual Americans read and speak personally about poems that appeal to them and which are a permanent part of the Library of Congress archive of recorded poetry and literature.

                                                *

The difficulties of the art. The low pay. The long hours. The anxieties of influence. There you are, minding your own business in your study late at night, and you come up with the lines: 'We dreamed with the worms / under a Braille of stars, / under the ploughed lawn...' The poem is duly published in the Guardian Review. Two weeks later you pick up the Review, where you find the following letter:

    POETIC ECHOES

    I like Simon Armitage's poetry. Nice to know the admiration is mutual.
    'May 8 1945' (Review, 7 May 2005): 'under a Braille of stars'.
    '1941: Fire-Watching' (History: the Home Movie, 1994): 'Bombers above
    and the braille of stars.' Invoice in the post.

    Only kidding.
    Craig Raine
    Oxford

The Flat Cap is currently googling all his new images in case other poets have already got their mitts on them. And what of these lines, by CJ Marecic:

    I venture forth,
    fickle dreams clutched to my breast, along
    a sightless path
    between the sun and the moon
    grasping stars
    the braille of stars
    the flesh of my perdition
    as signposts.

Invoice in the post to Mr Marecic...? Only kidding.

Poetry Ireland Review

Editor: Peter Sirr
Assistant Editor: Paul Lenehan,
with the assistance of Kelsi Loos

© Poetry Ireland, Ltd. 2005
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

---

Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Peter Sirr:
Nonetheless — Paperback

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: