Sunday, November 28, 2010

Inside Job

This muckraking movie makes me mad with its shocking analysis.  

People are interviewed  from  Iceland, where banks once regulated and stable were deregulated and drowned in debt, nearly bringing down the government, and laying off thousands of people.  In a country of 300,000 that has a huge impact.  In the United States where deregulation began with the Reagan administration, the continued ripple effect on the global economy resulted in larger layoffs, more recessions, and continues to this day under Obama and what one interview subject called the "Wall Street government."

Money is made on debt that cannot be paid.  The higher the debt, the more leveraged the bank becomes, until eventually, so large (too large to fail), the executive who was supposed to be overseeing this, bails out and gets his package, which includes millions of dollars.  Sometimes these executives, knowing that the company is headed south, sell their shares and take them home with their severance package, and here's the funny thing, their heads held high.

When what you are selling is so complicated that it cannot be explained without a programmable calculator something is wrong.  And it is sinking the financial markets around the world.  Unbridled capitalism bankrupts us all, punishes the poor, and makes the rich make out like bandits.  This movie urges us to take the system back from the criminals.  And to change the way government works.  This movie, though most of its heavy firepower is aimed at the GOP, does not exempt Clinton, sitting very cosily with the biggest of the marauders, or Obama, who has allowed the status quo to continue.

There are some heroes in this film, who speak before and after those caught red handed.  Unlike the Federal Reserve Governor, and the Harvard University economist, and the bankers forced to testify to Congress,  there are  heroes like a consumer advocate who warned Greenspan, and then Bernanke about what was happening to no avail.  There is an executive at the International Monetary Fund whose paper was published criticizing the mathematical model that used derivatives to make money on bad mortgages; he was subsequently shunned.  George Soros says some things about the inequity of executive compensation that sound dead on. 

Eliot Spitzer sits in a large vacant room with miles of windows making us wish he had never gotten in trouble with someone not unlike the madam who was interviewed earlier about what Wall STreet traders like to do after their fifteen hour days on the floor.  Spitzer reminds us how he used to go after the people who were raiding consumers' accounts to line their own pockets.  He says he isn't in a moral position to say much about their morals now. Damn.


Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Howl


Howl with James Franco


The movie begins with a recitation of the poem as it might have been delivered in a dark subterranean coffee shop in San Francisco in 1955, shortly after it was written.  James Franco wears the thick black horn rimmed glasses, the white t shirt under the buttoned down white shirt, just the way that Ginsberg wore these things.  Franco’s voice takes on that raspy incantatory drone  that was Ginsberg’s performance persona.  The voice, and the juicy words that run on and on return us to 1955 – but do these lines speak to us now as they did in 1955?  Perhaps we do not need them now as we did then.
James Franco

The opening titles show glimpses of the animation to come.  Armies of men carry identical brief cases, wear identical hats, march across an unknown grey city.  Photographs of Ginsberg and Orlovsky, his lifelong partner, actual photographs, look a bit scruffier than the cleaned up actors who play their counterparts.  The cold war is represented by missiles pointing ominously toward us the viewers.   In this context, the beat poets were railing against conformity, against war, against restrictions of all kinds.

Franco plays Ginsberg especially well when he is full of longing.  He speaks to an unseen interviewer (the script comes almost entirely from transcripts, interviews, and the poetry itself) about his journey from a young poet wannabe in the shadow of his straight traditional poet father.  His sexuality he hid from his parents.  He was put in an insane asylum when he was 21 ostensibly because of his homosexuality, and was released when he agreed to become straight.  After two years of working in advertising and rejecting his true nature, his therapist encouraged him to do what he wanted, and the rest is history.

Allen Ginsberg
The animations in the movie are distracting.  The images of star bursts that denote orgasms, the explicit sexual couplings, detract from the power of the words.  But this is a movie. I can see why the filmmakers thought so much time with just the words-- staring at the screen, listening to Franco recite, might be boring without some action.  

 How gratifying to hear a poet's words treated with the seriousness of a love affair, or a war, or a heist, or some other common subjects of movies.  I remember when the movie came out about Sylvia Plath.  They had everything in that movie except the poetry.  This movie has the poetry front and center and I am grateful.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Poets Forum on Contemporary Poetry:Wild and Strange Language




Lyn Hejinian
Carl Phillips
Ron Padgett

Kay Ryan


The four poets sat in a row in front of microphones, Lyn Hejinian the language poet,  on the far left.  She began by saying in her high girlish voice, "Here we are in a row, I must be "A".  Kay Ryan piped up quite promptly "And I must be "Z".  Chortles all around.  We knew where the two poets stood on the meaning, or lack of meaning, in poetry, especially when it comes to language.

Hejinian read examples of what she thought of as showing wild and strange language.  (No poet would like to be accused of using tame and ordinary language, she said.)

First came Robert Grenier, from his book "Sentences", available online.

She may or may not have read this:

PAW

he barks at things gone by
two trees

stepping through the water to the rocks

five sound shut doors

LOOKING AT FIRE

ashes to ashes

looking at the fire

at has been added

Hejinian champions  the use of language in an aesthetic sense.

Padgett ruminated on his childhood a bit, thought of how language is enjoyed sometimes without meaning necessarily.  Children like to  repeat sounds over and over again until they are drained of meaning and remembered as something else, something coming in to the ear.  He also enjoyed discovering the concrete poets, the wild poets whose works contain pure sounds and playful shapes on the page.  Later, he pointed out that William Carlos Williams' poems in Spring and All were electrifying.  The red wheelbarrow poem said it so plainly.  Padgett is charming and funny, and full of plain spoken truths, with a childlike simplicity that is seductive.

 Phillips  handed out a leaflet with two poems : on one side from Laura Jensen, "Heavy Snowfall in a Year Gone Past," which ends with the moon looking  down and judging,

not the maze of anger
but the fury
at the wasted years,
at the waste of the tender snow
Wasted, wasted, the birds crackle,
wasted on you.

There was also a deeply erotic beautifully structured poem by John Wieners, "Anniversary".
The diction changes mid line

Cigarette between his lips, would they were mine
by this present moon swear allegiance
if he ever look, see clouds and beaches
in the sky, by stars lend his eyes shine.

Kay Ryan had brought this poem by Robert Frost.  She asked if we received the handout.  When there was an awkward silence, she replied, "I didn't bring one."

A Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

What excited Ryan was how poetry could change a person.  The person in the snow was not in a good place, and as a result of the snow falling on him, had entered a new mood.  Such simplicity, and tight little form has the power to create a feeling.

Hejinian challenged that poetry did not have to do that, that was too restrictive.

"Restrictive!" cried Ryan.

And so Poet A and Poet Z laid out their positions.  It was an argument we could have used more of.  But it was enough for me to understand the difference between Hejinian's point of view about poetry, that it should have as much breadth and range and abstraction and freedom as jazz or a Jackson Pollock painting, and Kay Ryan who wants her poems to have words with meaning.   With no meaning, you have no power, she claims, and I agree.