There is something to be had with being chintzy with the number of words one puts on the page as one attempts a compact and powerful expression of an idea that might other wise be talked to death. "Less is more", in the words of architect Mies van der Rohe's explanation for his spartan designs. In the builder's sense of the phrase, form follows function , with the aesthetic of the structure shaped by the functions the building is required to fulfill; the idea was to disabuse urban populations of the decorated and sickly festooned traditions of bourgeoisie that have gone before and introduce a new set of relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit.

The modernist poet, inclined to the terse and abrupt phrase, the broken image, the ellipticized sensibility, wanted to use words as if they were objects to be arranged to achieve a specific effect; the aim in turn was to discard several generations of accumulated rhetoric , not the least being the argumentative digressions of the Metaphysical Poets and the shammed-up personas presented by the most drippingly egocentric of the Romantics, and give us all, rather, a direct treatment of The Image. A reader was to be made aware that what they were bringing to the poem were associations that are already contained in their head; the poem, the hard expression of the perception , stripped of the adjectives and qualifiers usually the poet's ready, is meant to be seen in itself, in isolation. One is supposed to examine the conditions of their own response and realize that is they, the reader, who completes the poem upon reading.

All this is fine as long as it works , which is to say in each case that as long as the buildings are reasonably attractive or have intriguing shapes in the city blocks where they've displaced older buildings, and as long as the poem is , on it's own terms, making use of a language, sparse as it might be, that gives one the phrase, the trope, the image, the spark that will make the reader's mind enage the cultivated intuition which makes poetry worth reading (and writing) in the first place.

But too often enough, less is less, and this is what poet Kevin Young has brought us, again, with his poem "Act Now and Save". Young is one of those young poets whose work veers between genuine invention and gimmicky application of line breaks and pauses lifted from WC Williams or Archibald McLeish; one wonders when he will stop trying to please his professors and mentors and slip into something more comfortable, such as his own voice. His previous poem here,Elegy, Father's Day by Kevin Young, was nothing less than a low-rise building under construction, bare girders and preliminary piping through which a stiff wind blows. That's the point, I suppose, a creaky construction of unmoored signifiers requiring brick, mortar, lumber, wiring , the placement of windows so it can finally resemble something useful. It was so bare that one might as well have been gazing at lone, gnarled steel rods sprouting from the compact dirt at construction sites as they wait for the rest of the building to appear, one rivet, welding spot and steel beam at a time. There are better ways to make the mind do interesting things.

Act Now and Save has the same problem, a sequence pared back so far that there remains only a gutted root of a poem. It's a sequence of unfinished sentences, declarations that are choked off before the mind can convince the voice to finish the sentiment and commit to a knowledge that the situation of the speaker's life has changed. That ambivalence might be interesting had the verbal chunks themselves, the smashed syntax, been interesting enough to have us imagine , that is to say, finish the scenario , and alternative scenarios as well.

It's a wonder the world
keeps its whirling—

How I've waited
without a word—

Staring where
the sun's no longer—

You gone
into ether, wherever

You want
to call it. Soon

Sun won't fight
off the cold

But today warm
even in the rain.

Whatever the well
you want me

To fall down I will—

Meet me by the deepest
part of the river

And we'll drown together
wading out past

All care, beyond even
the shore's hollers.

I can't for a moment find sympathy for this depressed person who is standing by the river talking to another who is present only in memory; "river", "drown", "rain" "sun" come off as ready made words one selects from a write-your-own-free verse-poem list, terms in themselves that when properly placed give us automatic evocations of loss and the feeling that world is too complex and mean spirited to continue to live in now that a certain someone is gone. Not that there is anything wrong with these words as such, just as there is nothing wrong with the notes one hears in a glutted guitar solo on a classic rock station. Context is everything, a suitable melody for the guitar notes, and sharply drawn particulars, details, in the case of Young's poem. It sounds hackneyed to say this, but Young didn't make me care about this mumbling; one hears this stuff on public transportation all the time , but the beleaguered there are not being paid four hundred dollars by Slate. The limits of empathy are tested and exhausted everyday until the next morning, and a professional like Young should give us more than this dress rehearsal. It's opening night here, and his fly is open.

Young's crappy poem aside, Ted, I take issue with two of your statements.

1. Modernist poets like W C Williams did not invent minimalist poetry -- they rediscovered it, thanks to Pound and his "translations" of 6th century Chinese poets.

2. The high priest of High Modernism, TS Eliot, was directly in the tradition of Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He was not, IMO, a minimalist.

MA

Surprisingly I agree with MA on both points. Traditionalists in haiku were the original minimalists. Today you see that even in minimalist furniture inspired by the Asian sense of style. And of course, the "feng shei" (sp?) bullshit.

Eliot was never a minimalist. (Did he even write any poems shorter than an essay? lol). He loved too much the sound of his own voice. Same goes for Pound, though he tried harder to adhere to imagism. Other than "In the Station of the Metro" I don't know any other minimalist poems by Pound.

Cutter

The lamest thing about Young's poem is its corny title. Why would any woman want to save such a wuss? Also, why does he want to be saved? He says he wants to drown WITH her. How does that constitute saving?

These lines are strong:

It's a wonder the world
keeps its whirling—

and are the first two lines of a much better poem. Unfortunately they are weakened by the weak poem that follows them.

CM

1. Modernist poets like W C Williams did not invent minimalist poetry -- they rediscovered it, thanks to Pound and his "translations" of 6th century Chinese poets.

I didn’t say that WC Williams invented minimalism. What I wrote was this:

“Young is one of those young poets whose work veers between genuine invention and gimmicky application of line breaks and pauses lifted from WC Williams or Archibald McLeish; one wonders when he will stop trying to please his professors and mentors and slip into something more comfortable, such as his own voice.”

That’s a long way from claiming that Williams or other modernists “invented” the minimalist approach to poems. I remarked that Young at his worst sounds like he’s still trying to prove himself to his elders that he’s an inventive poet, but that in so doing he sounds contrive, derivative; the style he borrows from isn’t that of 6th century Chinese poets , but from Williams, McLeish, Shapiro, even Dickens. My essential point didn’t require a thorough outlay of the trends in modernist poetry since the Jazz Age, since that would have been padding. I spoke to those facets of modernism that are the models Young sees himself in line with.

2. the high priest of High Modernism, TS Eliot, was directly in the tradition of Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He was not, IMO, a minimalist

You might have noticed that I mentioned Williams and minimalism, which is a good fit and an apt comparison for what Kevin Young is up to here, and that I mentioned Eliot not at all for the obvious reason that Eliot and his revamping of the Metaphysical Poet’s habit of poeticizing their philosophical arguments weren’t principle sources of Young’s anxiety of influence. It’s Williams, with his notion that poetry needs to be in the vernacular and that the thing in itself is its own adequate symbol, whom Young has gone to school on and is influenced by. You of all those here should know that not every poet gathered in this generation of geniuses had the same view as to what poetry and language must do. It has been said that there are as many types of modernisms as there are modernists.

Personally I enjoy good minimalist poetry. Unfortunately, Kevin Young has failed in this effort with this offering. When ever I think of good minimalist poetry, I consider . . .

"The Red Wheelbarrow"
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<o>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>­

"Fog"
by Carl Sandburg


The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

d;-)

OK, Ted, I stand corrected on my first point. You are right; you did not say modernists invented minimalism. However, on my second point, I was referring to the following sentence by you, which did not seem to make a distinction between modernists like Eliot and modenists like Williams.

The modernist poet, inclined to the terse and abrupt phrase, the broken image, the ellipticized sensibility, wanted to use words as if they were objects to be arranged to achieve a specific effect; the aim in turn was to discard several generations of accumulated rhetoric , not the least being the argumentative digressions of the Metaphysical Poets and the shammed-up personas presented by the most drippingly egocentric of the Romantics, and give us all, rather, a direct treatment of The Image.

However, in retrospect, I should have worded my original post differently, since I know you ordinarily would not conflate modernists like Williams and Eliot. It was an error of writing, not of knowledge. Guess I was too busy thinking about Obama and Huckabee.

MA

The lamest thing about Young's poem is its corny title

Don't know if you read my critique, Cutter, but I'm pretty sure Young is using the language of TV to discuss a failed relationship. So his use of that advertising phrase as a title is deliberate. (See also my toppost titled "Pinsky on Young," where Pinsky does a good job of explaining Young's juxtaposition of the language of a certain culture with a disparate situation. The question I never resolved is whether or not Young is doing that in this particular poem.)

Eeeeks on the mention of haiku, a Japanese poetic form based on Chinese poetic forms devised centuries earlier. (The Chinese invented everything, as they would be the first to tell you.)

MA

Cutter mentioned that feng shui "bullshit." it's not bullshit, Cutter. I hung a windchime outside my house and the birds stopped colliding with the window.

keeping with your architecture analogy, Ted, but moving in a slightly different direction: of the Young poems I've read, he seems to have a fascination with building poems of local materials and synthesizing them with the local landscape. His diurnal, cliche, local TV commercial talkiness produces the predictable usonian mistakes. the usonian architecture produced some handsome walls from the local slate and timber but the rooms themselves are dreary chambers. Young likewises uses lots of local materials to even less success. he collection of talky phrases produces, not cavernous rooms of stanzas, instead little, truncated, useless hallways going nowhere except into themselves.

I'm almost as unthrilled with the excerpts posted from Black Maria,Young's poetic exercise in talkiness of film noir.

four hundred bucks, you say? per poem? i love Slate. where else can you trade in a short stack of crappy poems and walk away with a mortgage payment?

Hey, waltz n capsize, I'm going to hide my political ditty under your Young post, 'cause the ditty's not worth a toppost --

Barack Obama
is today's Democratic
red hot mama.
It’s time to
get your gramma
out of her
llama pajammas
and have her
vote Obama.

Is it worth 400 dollars? How about 400 pennies?

four hundred bucks, yeah.

husband and i were just sitting here thinking in a perfect non-partisan world, the fore-runner would be "HuckaBama." no, wait. he disagrees. he thinks it would be "BarakaBee."

ther is no perfect, non-partisan world. but your poem is as good as any Tuesdayer on PFray.

Perhaps I should have qualified my sentence with the training-wheel phrase of " This sort of modernist poet...",
but I didn't feel the qualifier was needed. The distinct context is clear enough; had I cause to bring up Eliot, I would have broadened the discussion. The argument is sound, though. Williams , Shapiro, McLeish (and Stevens, for that matter) were after, especially in their Imagist experiments, was a clear, hard, material language where the things of this world can be treated directly. This was the principle thrust of Modernism, however divided the schools were in their particular aesthetic--to change the way the world was percieved and, as a result, change the world for the better.The reviews on those efforts have been mixed.