Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123901 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-24
• Released on: 2007-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This short and wonderful second book of prose from poet Revell (A Thief of Strings) begins as an essay on luminous mystical vision and ends as a poetic autobiography, explaining how the poet got from the bitter, involuted verse of his first books to his pellucid, delighted and delightful recent work. In between, Revell argues that poets should translate, with examples from Ezra Pound and Revell's own engagement with Guillaume Apollinaire; he also argues that familiar ideas about imagination, originality, craft and revision have the true poetic process exactly backwards. True poetry, for Revell as for his frequent model Thoreau, flows from openness to whatever awaits us outside the self. That openness is for Revell finally religious (in his case, Christian): it is simply natural, he maintains, that plain attention is a piety and that the unaggressive articulation of attention in poems may be a form of prayer, an instance of worship. This compact book (part of Graywolf's new Art Of series on the craft of writing) seems designed in part for poetry workshops, but Revell's unusual take makes this as much a warmhearted essay on metaphysics as a guidebook, which is likely to make any poetry lover stop and pay attention. (Aug.)
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Review

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Happy Happy Happy Happy
This book is written as if it were to be understood as a performance piece. It has Three Acts and an Intermission. Acts I and II are accompanied by some pastoral, Calvinistic podium lectures which the author calls "Scholium" -- bits of commentary brought up and expanded from the prior Act.

Many of the "Scholium" from the First Act devote themselves to discussions of piety and peace. The ones from the Second Act devote themselves to a kind of self-help psychology for translating.

The First Act is all about the art of being wholly present such that a poem is merely a "plain record," in short duration, of one's "entire presence." Where is the imagination for a poem? In the very present state of things, as they are, answers the author. That's all there is. Seeing is believing, and God is in the details.

In the Second Act, the author writes about the art of translation. Here, the author emphasizes the fun and sense of play to be had in translating a poem from a foreign language into English, regardless of how poor your second language skills are. Translation is an act that frees the mind from old habits, asserts the author, and helps a poet to see with innocent eyes once more. The author benefited a great deal from translating Guillaume Apollinaire.

The Intermission consists of just two pages of writing where the author asserts that poems are written for the express purpose of refreshing the courage of the good.

The Third Act is the longest. It is a combination of poetic criticism, self-analysis, autobiography, and manifesto, altogether focused on a certain method or genre of poetry-writing that the author advocates and terms "avant garde."

The author admits that this writing in the Third Act, largely, is "my testimonial to myself: writing is easy." He is happy to be writing poetry now and he's zealously happy to be zealously happy about being happy, and he is not going to apologize to anyone about it. He's in-your-face happy; deal with it. Just don't put up your fists or start to argue with him; he'll disappear and hide behind the curtains of his Act.

Some really bad and very silly writing was done here.

The first and prior reviewer of this book cited correctly an egregiously selfish bit of deconstructionist obscurantism found in Act Three: "The self-referent I is interrupted in its plangent gesturing by spastic gestures in the prose. Okay. But interruption has a ways to go before it constitutes erasure."

But there are other bits as well: "Velocities ... are what prove our poems true. They are the aspiration of words approaching light-speed...."

And there is also this: "Experiment has nothing to do with obscurity, and neither is it bent upon proving that language is a hoax or heaven a canard," the author asserts while being obscure, unclear, and seemingly bent upon proving language is some kind of fraud perpetrated upon the poetaster.

One long thread in the entire Third Act resembles a river of argument based on idle or baseless assertions about what is true and what is false about poetry, what is misleading and what is objective, all of which comprise the author's avant garde manifesto. Yet the author, contradictorily, insists that "arguments are incoherent, dependent, like Republicans, on discord."

I thought arguments were based on facts and a logical development of reasoning, having nothing to do with party affiliations or "discord," at bottom. I guess things have changed

If you're already acquainted with Mr. Revell's poetry and like it, then this Third Act is definitely worth reading. I made my first encounter with Mr. Revell for the first time through this book, and I found this Third Act to be a huge bog for the mind and spirit, and I was mightily glad when it was over.

For those literary connoisseurs still interested in following up on this work, the author advises the reader read Alfred North Whitehead's book, "Process and Reality," as well as Robert von Hallberg's "American Poetry and Culture."

As the former or first reviewer initially wrote, the writing in this book is nearly totally metaphorical, so it will be a big disappiontment for any would-be poet seeking practical advice. Long live Andre Breton everyone! "Sense travels fast where no meanings intervene," says Donald Revell.

Criticism as Poetry
A book of literary criticism written as if it were poetry. Which meant page after page of metaphoric prose. Meaning was lost in the desire for poetic sound and pages would pass before a shred of the point being made would once again become comprehensible. An example:

"The self-referent I is interrupted in its plagent gesturing by spastic gestures in the prose. Okay. But interruption has a ways to go before it constitutes erasure. And a spasm isn't ectasy, however often the two are confused in our degraded day. I needed to turn my eyes inside out and to use them cleanly. I needed to exteriorize inwardness like the wound it was. I went looking for a new page fresh for poems". (p.132)

One hundred sixty-six pages of that.

Now I think I understand Mr. Revell is out to try something different in this work: to inspire poets to see the world ecstatically and capture that rapture poetically. But I often felt I was reading a memoir of spiritual revelation than a book to inspire writers to write better poetry. And as an agnostic, I didn't leave it a believer.

Even he admits: "Having got out of the habit, outside, of using English sensibly, I used it sensually, for the sake of the game I was playing."(p.151). Inside this book, a little more sense would have been greatly appreciated.

Not Worthy of the Series
I've really enjoyed the "Art of..." series that Graywolf has been putting out lately, which is the main reason I bought this book. My take on this entry, however, is that Revell's personal beliefs (particularly his religious beliefs) get in the way. An example early on in the book that set me on edge involved his reading of a line from Blake's "Vision of the Last Judgement," in which the rising sun is likened first to a coin and then is said to be a "heavenly host." Revell's commentary on this is to say that "At sunrise we may see the sun rising, which is, in fact, a host rejoicing. There you go." He's paraphrasing Blake here, but one gets the sense that he doesn't disagree with the statement himself, and he never questions the glaring assumptions in it. He goes on to say that such poetry is not metaphysical--but how seeing angels in the sun is not metaphysical is beyond me. Basically, he champions poets who see things "as they are," and so, naturally, when Blake sees angels in the rising sun, Revell takes that as a statement of fact, not metaphor. Again and again, his religious beliefs create a peculiar blind spot in his criticism. The book is also full of profound-sounding statements that tend not to hold up on close scrutiny (e.g., "The art of poetry is the abolition of doubt"). Things get better with his discussion of translation later in the book, but too often (for my taste) he focuses on his own growth as a poet and teacher. In the end, I didn't end up learning much about the "art of attention," whereas other books in this series (notably the first, Baxter's "Art of Subtext") really explained something useful about quality writing/reading. So I recommend skipping this one and looking elsewhere in the series.