LITTACHUR

LITTACHURLee Sharks
from Pearl and Other Poems

History of small independent presses

printing tiny runs of 100 copies

of nobody gawnna READ it books =

history of the avant-garde =

history of littachur.

You look back at what we call

literary histry last 100

years or so & what you find

a succession of small & mostly

insular groups, people making

a big to-do about each

other’s books—but actually

READING & getting BEHIND

each other’s books around a

shared aesthetic—& into a

COMMUNIY—viz. 1863 in Paris,

Exhibition of Rejected Artists

first technically so-called avant-

garde, the rejects of the

school-run popularity contests

who GOT TOGETHER

& DID something about it—viz.

William Carlos Williams Spring &

ALL—big fresh new book of

American idiom writ by small town

doctor, grew up Puerto Rican

mother Spanish language spoke

@ home—printed 1923 tiny run

of 100 copies not even those

could sell, known to whom? no one

but eZ Pound & co.—now re-released

as stand-alone volume bought

by crowds (in relative terms) almost

a century later—so much depends

upon / a red wheel / barrow—

look back last 100 years literary

histry—littaCHUR—find

succession of “movements”—

after mummery & cheap

parlor tricks of paid academics

pulled away, all that’s left

a handful of rugged individuals

committed to each other’s

WORK—

from Transcendentalism à modernism

à Beat Generation à Language:

What difference between Johnnie

HandBinder in the basement hand-

binding by hand bright pages of

bilge fr summary disposal @

CreatASPACE (r OUTERspace)

& yr regular typical official unofficial

avant-garde MOVEMENT /

future of the littachur CANON?

only DIFFERENCE is

a COMMUNITY writ

as SOCIAL POEM—

a SCHOOL outside the

SCHOOL—he is eZra

POUND who is

eZra POUND in

SPIRIT—

channeling eZ Pound right now—

just finished in my chair tonight

reading General eZ’s Italian Radio

broadcasts—that old fascist sure

was a sorry anti-semite f**K—

I don’t feel a bit sorry for him

that they threw him in a metal box,

Italian war camp, prizner uv

WAR & on to St. Elizabeth’s

mental lockdown charged as

TRAITOR for spouting bile

on public airways while Dachau

plugged away a nation over—serves

him right—but he sure did know a

thing or two about how

kulchur works—

Ol’ eZ knew you need

a community, a structure—

you need yr professors &

students & journalists &

propagandists & biographers &

hooligans & printers & presses

& public relations people—you need

yr littachur historians & web

designers, yr administrators

& philologists—& most times

y’re playing every role yrself—

put all THAT together in

competition w/ the school, &

the school will have to write

you into littachur just to

shut you UP—

easiest to see the mechanics

of it in more recent quote

unquote movements, but since

no one KNOWS anything about

any verse writ after 1945, it’s NOT

so easy to see—

yr general lay reader having

in mind as poetry rhymed

couplets, he a Washington Irving

having gone to SLEEP these

past twelve DECADES—

even those claiming the mantle

POET, what it means most

times, is having read & really

comprehended at most two

or three committed verse-workers

of recent years & accounting

himself an EXPERT—

and sadder still, in practical

& relative terms him BEING

a kind of EXPERT—

What yr typical self-published

author lacks, what separates

him from yr official unofficial

avant-garde, is exactly the

kind of cultural capital

the school guards very closely—

& on the other hand the ones

who have the school’s capital,

why—they’re teaching

in its classrooms & publishing

in its magazines & generally

having HEALTH insurance—

they have their reward in

this life!

an avant-garde is a community

outside the school that perpetuates,

for itself, the kind of

cultural capital the school

protects, a community

that has the form of a school

but isn’t one—

STRATEGICALLY UNPUBLISHABLE—

to comprehend what’s current

as well as what is past, &

what’s current about

the past and past about

the current: & to use

that knowledge to stand against

the current in the kind of way

that shapes it—


(c) 2014 lee sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

What Is Poetry?

from Pearl and Other Poems


If I say it’s a poem, it’s a poem.

If I wanted to be more objective, I might say something like, “If it’s published as a poem, then, historically speaking, it is a poem. If it is widely circulated enough, and if enough people claim loudly enough that it is or is not a poem, then, historically speaking, it will influence our perception of what is and is not a poem.”

And I might go so far as to say that the history of verse is a history of unpoemish innovations that come to be called poetry.

Dickinson comes to mind—we like her so well because she created us out of thin air, crafting unpoemish poems that became central to our definition of what a poem is.

For an earlier example, look @ the way print technology shifted the defining onus of poetry from the aural to the visual, how a piece looks and reads and “sounds” on the page. Dickinson, whose poems are very much poems in this sense—literary rather than musical works—could hardly be termed a poet in this earlier, musical sense, dependent as it is on public performance, vocal talent, instrumental training, &c.

The same people who will cry most loudly that this or that is not a poem—as, for example, is so characteristically true of the response of more pedantic readers to some spoken word or hip hop—are the same who would have told Dickinson that her poems weren’t poems.

There were, maybe, seagulls.

In my experience—and I acknowledge the following as a personal bias that carries little authority into the realm of the objective or even stereotypical—the people who cry “not poem” have tended towards a certain kind of personality and a certain level of skill.

They have been, by and large, individuals with a degree of literacy—institutional, social, cultural, linguistic and otherwise—but not much imagination. (That’s not quite fair—let me at least say, they have not been savants and have had a somewhat restrained sense of vision.) They have also been, I have found, interested less in the substance of rational discourse than its semblance.

A fact that is, to my mind, self-apparent in the relevant claim: “This is not poetry.” This claim tends to be asserted on the basis of a mystical personal authority derived from communion with the universal-historical nature of verse—all while proclaiming itself to be a guardian of objective reason and culture—and is, as far as I can tell, largely impervious to the argumentative force of history, contemporary example, expert opinion, or the dictionary.

(c) 2014 lee sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl