I'm open this week to discussions here, of poetry in general and on Slate.

Hardy and Keats, darkling thrush and nightingale, comparison, imitation, homage . . . ? I'm wondering about the kind of "anxiety of influence" Don Hall experienced in the early versions of "Mr. Wakefield on Interstate 90" which concluded "The only mystery is the mystery of the ordinary." Hall dropped the line from subsequent versions but did not realize why until asked: at some level he had realized that his line was modeled on Wallace Stevens's emperor of ice cream, an unconscious imitation, ironically unconsciously corrected! My question is, how often do poets experience this uneasy realization of association, how close is too close, and have you abandoned lines for this reason? (Copying the poem in I realized that I should point out that Hall also changed the poem's title so that it now is "Mr. Wakeville," rather than "Mr. Wakefield," obscuring the allusion to the Hawthorne short story.

Mr. Wakefield on Interstate 90

by Donald Hall

“Now I will abandon the route of my life

as my shadowy wives abandon me, taking my children.

I will stop. I will park in a summer street

where the days tick like metal in the stillness.

Then I will rent the room over Bert’s Modern Barbershop

where the TO LET sign leans in the plateglass window;

or I will buy the brown BUNGALOW FOR SALE.

“I will work forty hours a week clerking at the paintstore.

On Fridays I will cash my paycheck at Six Rivers Bank

and stop at Harvey’s Market and talk with Harvey.

Walking on Maple Street I will speak to everyone.

At basketball games I will cheer for my neighbors’ sons.

I will watch my neighbors’ daughters grow up, marry,

raise children. The joints of my fingers will stiffen.

“There will be no room inside me for other places.

I will attend funerals regularly and weddings.

I will chat with the mailman when he comes on Saturdays.

I will shake my head when I hear of the florist

who drops dead in the greenhouse over a flat of pansies;

I spoke with her only yesterday . . .

When lawyer elopes with babysitter I will shake my head.

“When Harvey’s boy enlists in the Navy

I will wave goodbye at the Trailways Depot with the others.

I will applaud the valedictorian at graduation,

and wish her well, as she goes away to the University,

and weep, as she goes away. I will live in a steady joy;

I will exult in the ecstasy of my concealment.

The only mystery is the mystery of the ordinary.”

What are the odds of you posting work by poets who represent contemporary poet in more open forms, such as Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout , and Bob Perelman? I realize they are, perhaps, not your style nor taste, but it would seem to me you'd find something worth posting for us to remark upon.

for example?

Jim Powell:

for example?

This:

TREES
by Bob Perelman

A melody composed of solid obstacles
Dictates itself onto paper. The sky adjusts
Automatically. The most popular prison
For sight is imagery. Light separated

From matter shines on a parking space,
A lane change. I think
That I shall never see without
Nameless grasses whispering generalities

Inside the object code which colors
Once removed at various distances
Spray onto my retinas. The proper
Study of trees is trees. A live-oak leaf
Lands upside down on a madrone branch.

Inside the curve of an ear
Each point contains all lines
Drawn through it by the insistence
Of a complete world of days. Any word

Flowers in the face of the climate's
Ornamental attacks. Moving parts
Produce the voice, the airplane,
The frenchfry. The baby on film
Wants to play with the camera.

And this:

Prayers
by Rae Armantrout

1.

We pray
and the resurrection happens.

Here are the young
again,

sniping and giggling,

tingly
as ringing phones.

2.

All we ask
is that our thinking

sustain momentum,
identify targets.

The pressure
in my lower back

rising to be recognized
as pain.

The blue triangles
on the rug
repeating.

Coming up,
a discussion
on the uses
of torture.

The fear
that all this
will end.

The fear
that it won’t.

Responding to David and Ted, in that order:

My rule of thumb is that the one poet you won't inadvertently echo is whoever you are reading at the time: if you are reading Stevens or Dickinson, you are not going to ape their phrases because you recognize them immediately. But if it's a few years since you have read Dickinson (or Yeats, or Eliot, or Robert Hayden, or whoever-- Hardy maybe!) then you might write out one of Dickinson's (or whoever's) with little or no variation. If Donald Hall had been reading Stevens in general or "The Emperor of Ice Cream" on the day he was working on "Mr. Wakeville," presumably he wouldn't have written the echo.

Different cultures look on echoes differently: as in folk music of blues (and maybe in Chinese painting or calligraphy?) originality can come in fine degrees. Some people think of the Homeric epics as developed by collaborations vertical in time. As a couple of threads on this week's poem not, Hardy pretty likely has Keats and his nightingale in mind, with the word "darkling" a nod of the head or tip of the hat of the kind a jazz tenor player might do-- Dexter Gordon alluding to Lester Young for a bar or two, or Coltrane kidding Sonny Rollins on "Tenor Madness."

And in our own culture, poets like doing a certain degree of this-- as Frost (more than Stevens) in Hall, E.A. Robinson in Frost, and the English19th century in Robinson. Not an Oedipal drama, but part of the art. (As cultures vary, within them so do artists one to another, or an artist varying in degree or kind of echo at different points in a career.)

I wonder if there are analogies to this in the world of software design, group or collaborative creation and refinement vertical in time or horizontal in space?

Ted, your general point is well taken: the less narrow or provincial, the better. (Though my own judgment, as in writing itself, in the end, and after trying to keep an open mind, has to be the supreme compass for what I decide.)

I hope I'm at least a little beyond obvious categories, especially the academic or journalistic categories, in my taste as in my own writing. The notion of "schools" or categories or isms is alien to me. I believe that poets as different as Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, C.D.Wright, Ron Padgett, Louise Gluck, Derek Walcott, Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips have appeared in SLATE.

I don't think Bob Perelman or the others you cite have sent poems to SLATE. There's a lot of self-selection in the little world of poetry magazines, I think especially for online magazines. Some poets, especially but not only older ones, don't feel comfortable with online publication. (There have been poets published here who had to ask a young friend to help them read their own poem when it is posted!) If a poet is not especially prolific, he or she may want poems to appear in familiar places. And believe it or not, in some instances the Fray makes my job harder: rough treatment there actually makes some poets shy to publish in SLATE. (Other times, of course, the Fray makes my job easier: poets are delighted by the response, and sometimes take part in the discussion.)

Robert asks, "I wonder if there are analogies to this in the world of software design, group or collaborative creation and refinement vertical in time or horizontal in space?"

Open source poetry producing the killer app. poem! Maybe the Linuxiad.

One does ponder the influence of individual genius, the artistic equivalent of Great Man historiography. Many tales, one Homer, many stories, one Shakespeare.

" as Frost (more than Stevens) in Hall, E.A. Robinson in Frost, and the English19th century in Robinson."

I was startled recently to discover (probably common knowledge among poets) Whittier in Eliot.

And thanks for generously hosting this discussion--I know how onerous and time-devouring online responding can be.

I'm not sure you'll see this, but I wanted to put it in a relatively quiet place because it isn't a post about poetry.

There have been various requests for greater organization. I've responded to a couple in individual threads, but as you think about it, I wanted to show you a couple of things that have been tried in other threads.

First of all, I think your participation (and, as importantly, your willingness to drum up participation) in this Fray is incredibly effective, stimulating, and welcome. I don't know that I've seen such extensive, focused discussions. This level of conversation and participation is a real triumph, thank you.

You said you would give some thought to bringing greater focus to discussions (which I take to mean making it somehow easier to get a view of what has been said previously). The software used on the Fray makes this goal a little difficult to achieve. As you still seem to be finding your way, I wanted to give you a couple of examples of what I mean.

I find very long individual threads are difficult to read. In the past, Poems Fray has rarely had to deal with such length, but here is a (somewhat literary) example from another fray. Over time, it becomes difficult to tell who is responding to whom.

One thing that can help is switching from "flat" view to "threaded" view. "Threaded" is more like the Fray used to be, in which you can see the titles of all the responses, and it is easier to tell how the conversation has been constructed. (The toggle between flat and threaded is near the top of the screen. It says "View" and then you click on "flat" or "threaded". If, however, a conversation gets too extended, the threaded screen won't hold it all That happened in this post (side note -- it's not a very interesting thread to read, I'm just posting the link so that you can see what I'm talking about. The top-poster, Brewmeister, is, however, an interesting guy -- he used to post a lot on Poems fray.)

It's that technical issue that makes me think that, although having a lot of top-posts is unwieldy, it's probably better than the alternatives when you have such a flood of responses.

Will Saletan tried a different model for a while (one that might work well). When he posted an article, he would at the same time create a post in the Fray saying "Discussion of ___ here." People could post elsewhere, but if you responded to Saletan, you would know that he saw it. Often he responded. He hasn't done this for about a year, but of all the Slate writers, he remains by far the most involved with the Fray, so he might be the best person to contact for suggestions.

Another thing to know is that the software allows readers to set what posts they want to see. For example, I can view all posts in the order that they were posted (the usual, default way), or I can order it by "most active", meaning that whichever post has the most, or most recent, responses is at the top of the list. I can also set the software so I only see posts that received checkmarks, or only posts related to a particular article, and so on. That means that not everybody necessarily sees quite what you see when they show up on Poems Fray.

There are other things that are pretty easy to do that I think people will understand if they hang around long enough. Creating hyperlinks is pretty straightforward. (You've already learned to paste a URL into a post. You can also highlight a word you've already typed, then click on the little thing that looks like a individual link of a chain. There will be a pop up, and you can paste the URL on the top line. Ignore the second line. Click "okay", and you get links like the ones I gave above).

I think that participation on internet message boards in general, and the Fray in particular, is its own genre. Good posts are as different from regular conversation or from published writing as poems are from fiction or from op-eds. One peculiarity is that lots of people can speak at once. The result is necessarily a bit chaotic. My own opinion (speaking only for myself, I claim no special authority -- I wouldn't even qualify as a "regular") is that there is a great deal of value in that chaos even though it can make things hard to navigate.

Anyway, I hope that is helpful. I'm attached to the Fray in part because of a sense of community I feel with particular posters, but also because I think its highs more than make up for its many lows. The recent set of poetry discussions have surpassed most of the highs I remember. Thanks again for such wonderful conversations, which would not have been possible had you not intervened.

I chime in to merely second what august has said (and Mary Ann in her own way too in another thread) - August has been far more thorough in explication here than I would have managed (to which we owe thanks to mrs. august for special dispensation, correct, august? :-) ...

Another way of saying it is that, from my pov, this week's "chaos" has worked maximally well just as it was. I can't see (given the logistics august has characterized and that we regulars all know the limits of all too well) how it could possibly have been "managed" any better - than to just let it happen. Another advantage of multiple threads is that it means multiple headers (posters rarely think to change headers within threads) and a reader can get a better idea of where the array of emphases across threads might lead them with multiple headers - and if some are initially overlapping, any reader/poster interested enough in dialogue will notice the concurrence and find his/her way to similar-interest topic threads.

augustlein is asleep in my lap: mrs august thus magnanimous

If I have time next week, I'd like to write up some suggestions for newbies, including some of the ideas you two have mentioned. I'll post a draft for you and others to comment on.

MA

Dear August, Zinya, Mary Ann,

Thanks. You have pretty much convinced me that most of the structural improvement we need is a matter of educating the likes of me and my friends. August, your patient explanation is helpful. I suspect that for many of MaryAnn's "Cheeses," the Flat look is more inviting than the Threaded, though possibly they can get used to it. (Since I've been at Slate since The Year One, I am fairly comfortable with both modes.)

If you three, working from MaryAnn's draft, come up with a compact, clear set of instructions for newcomers, I'll try to help disseminate them. (By the way, I think I recognize only about half of the newcomer-names Artemisia lists in her recent post. I certainly primed the pump with invitations, but many of these people, including some of the better-known ones, simply heard about it somehow.)

The point you all make, and that august makes very specifically in relation to the online genre or mode: I get it. I'll be trying to maintain some of the new participation-- maybe extending it to my weekly poem and as MaryAnn suggests to the OPP, while preserving what is already good. Within my strictly rationed time and energy!

I welcome anything you have to say about the complaints about the Slate discussion software made in some of the comments on MetaFilter. (http://www.metafilter.com/779­22/written-on-terrestrial-thin­gs.)

You should know, also, that the Slate technical people have been extremely helpful, sympathetic, ready to apply their skills.

Sincerely yours,

Robert

I welcome anything you have to say about the complaints about the Slate discussion software made in some of the comments on MetaFilter.

I read the comments, but since those people only "lurk" at Slate (read w/o actually posting), I don't know how valid their opinions are. However, perhaps they'll feel more comfortable about actually posting after we come up with some helpful hints for newbies.

You should know, also, that the Slate technical people have been extremely helpful, sympathetic, ready to apply their skills.

Robert, you are the only Slate poster I've ever heard describe the Slate techies that way.

One of the problems, I think, is that Slate is an extremely busy website -- millions of hits per month? -- and thus its discussion board computer programs are not as flexible as some posters would like. For what it's worth, the techies "improved" the Fray format a few years ago. We all complained for months aftewards, but to no avail.

Frankly, I'm just happy it works at all. None of the other discussion board websites I've looked at is as multi-faceted and interesting as Slate's is.

Mary Ann

You don't want me to get started on my complaints. Basically I agree that the software is not intuitive, but an awful lot of people have figured out how to use it, and it seems to crash much less often than earlier versions of the Fray.

I think for all concerned, time on the Fray is stolen from something else (one reason I've been commenting less on weekly poem for the past year or so is that I never feel I can give it more than a quick read). I appreciate anybody who manages to find time to show up and say something substantial.

I am listening, must soon retreat for a while to meet other demands.

But more to come, and I will pay attention regarding Hints For Newbies, and other matters.