The early fall '09 Blog (begun: august 31 '09, pale fire)

Pale Fire.
As if I needed more creative thoughts,
direction, scope of vision, one more project;
more memorizing, writing and recording,
when there's so much to do just trying to
get the site to work right, and get filled
all the many notes, semantic holes —
into the gin joint wanders Pale Fire.

Pale Fire is a capturer, seducer;
something that makes the many thoughts I have
about the role of poetry these days;
its use and relevance, its proper place,
its power to entertain, fully concrete.

Pale Fire is the name of 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov.
A curio, a novel in the form of a long narrative poem
with copious eccentric notes that themselves forms a narrative.

Perhaps any attempt at verse since the middle of the twentieth century
can be viewed as an attempt to establish or prove
the relevancy of verse in modern times.
Viewed this way most poems fail.
For how many of our modern poems
attain to any kind of modern currency
and can be said to circulate, even
among a literati, if such a thing exists,
much else a tv drenched generality,
as mere mention or quotation?
Mention and quotation are the acts
that tell us just how deeply poetry,
or a particular verse, affects society.
There is mention, PBS' newhour, its semi-regular poetry segments,
but this is mainly laudable civic duty,
the continuing quixotic journals and reviews,
but not a piece of work that rises on its own power
to prominence and affect in the greater population.
What are our great poems, the memorable lines,
or whole poems even that compel memorization?

Reflection in a Convex Mirror?

To me Skunk Hour rises to this height, but admittedly it's not said or quoted much...

The Idea of Order in Key West is likewise of a higher order,
but not much known among the general population,
and I suppose this shows a long time failure to get traction.
Both Stevens and Lowell can be difficult,
yet they still seem to achieve something affective and memorable.
...

The loosening of both form and semantics in modern poetry
has not achieved, moved, much or many,
in the general population, perhaps not even
among devoted readers. Perhaps it is
that the modern poem aims at more modest effects,
and doesn't mind that much being read and forgotten.

Pale Fire pushes, romantically, against these trends,
by embracing poetic convention, i.e. metric form,
and, perhaps more important, an antic poetic function:
narration, storytelling. And on a large scale.