Straight from the Horse's Mouth: Huuklyeand Cinquor on Why Valéry Is Still Valid

One thing is clear 
In your work, dude— 
This insistence on purity 

Validates absolutely nothing, 
For nothing is pure 
And it’s certainly not 

Unadulterated horseshit. 


Moderator’s comments: "Hi-ho, Cinquor away!"


 

Huuklyeand Cinquor on The Poetry Conundrum Factor

What do you expect to gain 
When you ask yourself what 
It is with this game when 
You’re at a loss for words 
Save the riddle that remains. 


Moderator’s comments: ?

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Poetic Ambivalence

Poetry had a soft spot in my heart hard 
To explain once I let it enter my brain. 


Moderator’s comments: Judging from his extended absence from this humble podium, Cinquor seems to have followed the advice put forward in another one of his memorable two-liners from the past, to wit:

Conceptual Prestidigitation

You look to have that precious gift of sleight; a present 
Better prized and appreciated when kept out of sight. 


We shall see.

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Lives of the Poets

Who toil 
Throwing out lines jammed 
With flotsam and jetsam 

Day-after-day making their craft 
Trim, secure and lasting, 
Ending up perfect 

Shipwrecks that won’t go away. 


Moderator’s comments: I can think of no better example of the time-tested, found to be sound conceit “sink or swim” than this sparkling pearl of wisdom fished out of the murky poetic waters by our trusty trawling seafarer and sounding board, Huuklyeand Cinquor. And to think that his too, too long absence had me seriously considering abandoning all hope of ever hearing from him again. 

Oracular

—for Huuklyeand Cinquor 
  il miglior fabbro. 


Convoluted his verse and so 
Vatic the meaning mind

 
You have to divine 
Which way it’s going by

 
The manner in which 
His feet and mouth perhaps

 
Even his entrails are twisted so

Haplessly entwined. 

 

 

In the Throes of Postmodern Delusion, Huuklyeand Cinquor Fancies Himself Addressing One of the Icons of 20th Century Poetry

My dearest Sylvia--
(May I call you that?)
 
Forgive me but I think 
It's high time you knew

Your pure peerless line
Of pears fattening keeps on

Thriving as never before,
Being ravenously consumed

By bookish little Buddha inchworms
Contemplating their navels

All the way down to a rotten core. 



Moderator's comments: I see no signs of any delusion in this missive but then again, too much language-oriented omphaloskepsis on my part makes it difficult for me to distinguish my umbilicus from my belly button.

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Gnomic Verse

Savants who should know better 
Keep telling me it’s best 
To let things go; the next thing 
You know they’ll be underground 
Just like me, wishing they’d held on 
To whatever they cherished 
A wee bit more. 


Moderator’s comments: 
 “Less is more”— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Shelley's "Poets are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World"

Gentlemen, have we all gone mad? 
In the Muse’s name, let us 
Proceed with all due haste! 
Clearly there are other things 
More crucial to our material 
And spiritual well-being, 
With examples so bountiful that 
Many of our disillusioned 
Noble riders believe 
Such romanticisms should be 
Summarily dismissed as being 
Inconsequential and irrelevant 
To the nightmarish issue that keeps 
Rearing its ugly head before us, to wit: 

Do we have a quorum? 
Or more to the point, 
Have we ever had one? 



Moderator’s comments: I think it’s high time Huuk dismounted his high horse and went to pasture. With the exception of the plague of stable boys and girls who keep grooming Pegasus for the next running of the MFA Perennial Win Place and Show Poetry Sweepstakes, who gives a flying Phaeton fuckaroo about poetry, anyway?

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Confrontational Vanguard Poetics

Are you reading this? Well,
Nailed to the wall of the derelict 
Latrine next to the yellowed stool, 
A rusty spike holds all 
The news from the rearguard 
That’s shit to print, you fool.


Moderator’s comments: A close reading of this poem reveals Cinquor’s forte, namely his en garde rapier-like wit deceptively hiding under the surface but always ready to leap forth and revel in exposing the foibles of contemporary verse theory. All well and welcome, of course, but permit me to have my reservations about the intentions behind his pressing yellow attacks on such an  august postmodern body of verse learning. A bit more to the point: Scuttlebutt on the blogosphere has it he’s preparing a tome of his apophthegmata and planning to use this blog as a launching pad. If this is indeed the case, I must impress on him the fact that copyright law dictates I be paid in full, if and when his coprolalia eventually hits the fan. 

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Poets Coming Clean with their Craft

I thought if I washed out my mouth with lots 
Of soap and water, my speech 
Would henceforth spume forth 
A fountainhead 

Of pure verse shining 
And smelling like a million bucks— 
But all that came up reeked 
Of a foul, wishy-washy tongue all 

Fucked up and too utterly bankrupt 
To strive towards any semblance of upkeep. 


Moderator’s comment: Huuk certainly knows his way around the poetic blogosphere— who would have thought he’d latch on to a catchy phrase from Conrad DiDiodato’s comment on a post over at ursprache and work it into a telling commentary on the modern poet’s coming to terms with his/her language predicament—whatever that may be.

NB:

In the event the ursprache link is broken, here’s Conrad’s comment on a Seferis quote (“Unimaginable how much patience is needed to see the simplest things. How much patience I need to write a single verse.”):

Borrowing phraseology from C.S.Lewis, I'd say you can start by wanting to write good verse (for which much patience is required) and in the end you may get Poetry; however, beginning with the "soap and water" of much contemporary poetry will get you nothing at all. Of that you can be certain

Huuklyeand Cinquor on the Postmodern Phenomenon Known as "The 'It' Poem"

Should be 
What it was before 
It was but don’t ask me 
Once I get my hands on it 
What it was like. 


Moderator’s comments: I know Huuk’s not going to believe it but I liked it before I saw it.

Huuklyeand Cinquor on the Polemics of Poetics

It was said that because he had been blessed 
With an impersonal peaceful nature, he had nothing 
To do with launching personal attacks demeaning 
Any fellow poetic character; that he preferred 
To remain on neutral ground, a strange sort 
Of angelic no man’s land where the twilight was 
So ambiguous you could not make out where 
The next deadly round was coming from. 


Moderator’s comments: Toeing the postmodernist line to near faultless perfection, Cinquor craftily avoids any hint of (dis)closure here but the poet in question must surely be a practitioner of blank verse, right? 

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Burning Poetic Temperaments as Fuel

I do fear I keep 
Repeating myself but when 

Will the candidates poised 
For undying posthumous fame ever stop 

Feeding entries into their infernal 
Recycling machines? 


Moderator’s comments: I have no idea, Huuk, but I can venture a wild guess: As soon as a fire-breathing, flying white horse powered by an insatiable lust for the likes of hubris-driven, never-say-die flamboyant and fiery poetry hacks arrives on the scene? 

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Poets Sounding Out Their Voice

No, no, you’re doing fine 
Mates, plumb no deeper— 

You’ll find that buoyant 
Voice you’re looking for bobbing 

Right here near the surface, not 
Sinking at the end 

Of one last desperate line. 


Moderator’s comments: Cinquor twitching like a catastomid on the end of a gaffe(sic)—this guy doesn’t know Trout Fishing in America from The Compleat Angler. Why he presumes to be such an authority on the murky current state of American poetry is anybody’s guess, but there’s a strong possibility it might have something to do with his piscine-sounding name.

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Satiated Corpuses

[…the poet’s] entire body promises to satisfy our every whim and fancy

while we wait for his creative juices to start flowing once that first course arrives.*

You say

This fare is a bookworm’s

Unforgettable delight

Easily digested, my friend—

If so, why then

At the end the taste

Of gritty grubs ruminating

On tips of tumescent tongues?

*Blurb by one Randall Cann Standall on back cover of the Complete Poetical Works of X.S. Wasserbildj-Vandersluis, publisher unspecified.

Moderator’s comments: I don’t know about you guys but I’ve just about had my fill of Cinquor’s tasteless and tiresome efforts. The next time he sends me something like this, I’m going to return it to him with the following instructions (in block letters) on the envelope:  DROP DEAD, WRITE LATER.

 

Huuklyeand Cinquor on A. Figwitt Cye-Cophant's Introspection: Examining a Postmodern Mythopoetic (in Blank Verse)*

*The Laistrygonian Press, Homer Loomis, Idaho, 2012.


Let us marvel at how 
A. Figwitt Cye-Cophant created 

An incredible myth by doing nothing 
But gazing at his navel: 

No people, 
No tradition, 
No story, 
No history, 
No world view, 
No explanation, 
No wonder 

His lackeys are lapping it up— 
It’s unbelievable, lacking all imagination.
 

Moderator’s comments: It would have helped immensely if Cinquor had quoted some lines from Mr. Cye-Cophant’s book of poems to give us an idea of just how he was able to create a myth without incorporating any of the ingredients that make up one; as it is, Huuk’s throwaway middle stanza does nothing but summarize what’s missing and we are left to fill in the empty spaces of Figwitt’s waste land with the detritus left behind in the wake of his “earth-shaking” effort. Nor does the reference to Mr. Cye-Cophant’s omphaloskepsis assist us in delving further into the recesses of what Cinquor describes as the poet’s non-imagination. Huuk knows better than to leave us dangling like this—the least he could have done was throw us an umbilical cord. Unfortunately, it remains but a shallow effort leading us to re-examine the criteria for permitting him to use this platform as a sounding line. 

NB: Huuk’s reference to Cye-Cophant’s lack of a “world view” reminds me of what George Seferis once said in an interview in The Paris Review #50: ” . . .I have no idea about philosophical positions and world views. You know, whenever world views begin interfering with writing—I don’t know. I prefer world views in the sort of dry, repulsive, and (I don’t know how to put it) prosaic way. I don’t like people who try to express world views in writing poetry. I remember once I had a reading in Thessalonike, and a philosopher stood up and asked: ‘But what, after all, Mr. Seferis, is your world view?’ And I said: ‘My dear friend, I’m sorry to say that I have no world view. I have to make this public confession to you that I am writing without having any world view. I don’t know, perhaps you find that scandalous, sir, but may I ask you to tell me what Homer’s world view is?’ And I didn’t get an answer.” 

NBB: Also in that issue, right after the Seferis interview, there is a long excerpt from Jim Carroll’s manuscript-in-progress of his book The Basketball Diaries and I don’t have to tell you who the poetry editor of The Paris Review was back then, do I?

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Keeping One's Word

My gray-haired mentor used to urge me 
When you write, write one word at a time 
But keep it under your hat, boy! 
I was a tyro and thought it strange advice 
Indeed but kept my word out of respect, 
Which is why years later I have so many 
Of his bloody little louses sucking 
My gray matter dry. 

Moderator's comments: I suspect the inspiration for this "poem" is fragment 92 of Heraclitus, to wit:

All men are equally mystified by unaccountable evidence, even Homer, wisest of the Greeks. He was mystified by children catching lice. He heard them say, What we have found and caught we throw away, what we have not found and caught we still have. 

(translated by Guy Davenport)

Huuklyeand Cinquor's Take on Revisionist Poetics

All you visionaries hell-bent on taking 
Off after a vision, take this— 

A poem can take you anywhere 
You want but it won’t take you there 

If you put it down right from the start. 



Moderator’s comments: After some seven or eight months of silence on his part, I was beginning to think that Huuk was revising the soundness of his decision to send me his “poetry” at intermittent intervals, but it looks like I was a bit hasty with my assumption. So, after a long wait, let us revel once more in observing him at his short, didactic best (or worse, depending on how bad your myopia is) by focusing in on the poem’s intention to wit, what exactly is he trying to teach us here? That a poem cannot be “visionary” if it is written straightaway the first time without any revision whatsoever? Or is he assuming the role of the reader and admonishing us to give the poem the benefit of the doubt and not to dis it from the start? Maybe he’s trying to hook both poet and reader with his version of how to cast off all poetic illusions. Whatever the case, I certainly don’t want to prejudice any poets and/or readers out there by being picayune about his “effort” but I have to admit I’m having trouble following where he’s going with this, but then again, I’m not called “The Squint-eyed Kid” for nothing.

Aram Saroyan on Huuklyeand Cinquor's Sucker Fishing in America

BLUREBS

Huuklyeand Cinquor on the MO of Underground Poets

Surreptitiously 

Erase each step, better 

Still, don’t move at all. 

Moderator’s comment: The Apotheosis of the Absurd? At first glance, it might appear so to readers unfamiliar with Cinquor’s modus operandi and who might be thinking he’s being a bit facetious here; on the contrary, if we dig a bit deeper, we’ll see he’s earnestly but very carefully exploring new levels of meaning vis-à-vis the creative urge underlying the so-called school of Underground Poetry. 

Unlike his archaeologically pioneering European antipode Heinrich Schliemann—who, in his great haste to find Ancient Troy, dug right through it without realizing it—Cinquor here posits a daring New World approach in which he proposes that poets who wish to explore ancient subterranean passages leading to Hades, and who wish to do so without the fear of being detected and therefore ratted on by weasels or moles, should do nothing but stand perfectly still—a quintessential move on Cinquor’s part, if you ask me.