David Graham's POETIC LICENSE 2018 September No. 28
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The Brave, Bold, Boisterous & Bona Fide Biography of Belinda Blurb
 

​Long before I’d ever heard the sonorous names of William Butler Yeats or Edna St. Vincent Millay, much less knew any of their poetry, I could, like many bookish kids, recite the following poem more or less accurately from memory:
 
 
     I never saw a purple cow,
     I never hope to see one;
     But I can tell you, anyhow,
     I'd rather see than be one.
 
 
If that’s not a classic, I don’t know what is. But do you know the name of its author? I sure didn’t, for many, many years; and even today you’ll sometimes see it quoted as anonymous or misattributed to some other poet like Ogden Nash.
 
“The Purple Cow” was in fact written by a once famous writer, artist, and humorist with the quite jazzy name of Gelett Burgess. The poem first appeared in May of 1895 in the inaugural issue of a humor magazine Burgess helped found called The Lark. Its actual title is not “The Purple Cow” but “The Purple Cow's Projected Feast: Reflections on a Mythic Beast, Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least.” I did not know until recently that the poem in its initial appearance was illustrated, and I cannot resist sharing the image with you:

       
The poem was a hit, often reprinted and quoted. A mere two years later, Burgess had already grown thoroughly sick of his silly little rhyme, whose fame threatened to eclipse all his other accomplishments, which indeed is precisely what has happened. He then published an even more wonderful poem, as a sort of tongue-in-cheek retraction:
 
 
     CONFESSION: and a Portrait, Too,
     Upon a Background that I Rue!
 
      Ah, Yes! I Wrote the "Purple Cow" — 
      I'm Sorry, now, I Wrote it!
      But I can Tell you Anyhow,
      I'll Kill you if you Quote it!
 
 
It’s too bad young boys and girls don’t know this one by heart, too. In any case, Gelett Burgess’s cruel fate was sealed. Over a long, multifaceted career he was condemned to be forever known as The Purple Cow guy, even though he published many articles and books on various topics. He was one of the first American journalists to take note of Cubist art, for instance, and he wrote and illustrated a very successful series of children’s books featuring whimsical creatures called The Goops—which I devoured at my grandmother’s house as a boy without ever noting the author’s name. My mother and aunts could quote from the Goop books, as I recall. But these days Burgess is largely a footnote. Well, he did manage to lodge one of his poems, as Frost termed it, where it was hard to get rid of. That’s more than most of us ever do.
 
Burgess also added at least a couple words to our vocabulary, though most folks today  don’t know that, either. In 1906 he published a book titled Are You a Bromide?, thus coining the word “bromide,” which means a person or bit of speech that is dull, conventional, boring, trite. And on the cover of the same book he featured a character he called Belinda Blurb touting the book in over-inflated fashion. Thus was born the concept of a bit of puffery on a book jacket being called a “blurb.”
 
I’m sorry/not sorry for the long introduction. For in fact, this month I mostly wanted to talk a bit about poetry blurbs, but I guess I couldn’t resist a bit of blurbishness myself—in hopes of interesting you in Gelett Burgess.
 
Burgess didn’t invent the concept, just the name we now use for it. Credit for the first blurb may have to go to none other than Walt Whitman, who in the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856, lifted a phrase from a private letter he’d received from Ralph Waldo Emerson and without asking permission plastered it, in gold letters, on the spine of his new edition. “I greet you at the beginning of a long career,” Emerson unwittingly blurbed. Whitman’s promotional chutzpah, along with his then-scandalous tendency to write openly about sexuality, soon soured his relationship with Emerson, which never quite recovered.
 
Thus it’s safe to say we poets have always had a love-hate relationship with blurbs. Many of us profess to hate them and declare that we don’t choose books to read or buy based on them.  And maybe this is true. Yet most poetry books carry them. Publishers clearly feel that blurbs assist in promoting books, or the practice wouldn’t remain pervasive. One thing remains clear, though: many of today’s poetry blurbs are just as over-the-top as Burgess’s Miss Belinda Blurb touting his Are You a Bromide? Here’s just a taste of Belinda’s rhetorical excess:


     We consider that this man Burgess has got Henry James locked into the coal-bin, telephoning
     for “Information.”
 
     We expect to sell 350 copies of this great, grand book. It has gush and go to it, it has
     that Certain Something which makes you want to crawl through thirty miles of dense tropical         jungle and bite somebody in the neck.

 
Of course, Burgess was a humorist, and his Belinda is an extravagant spoof. In fact, at the top of her full page of fulsome praise for the man writing her words, we find the following: “YES, this is a ‘BLURB’! All the Other Publishers commit them. Why Shouldn’t We?” The humor sometimes is omitted these days, though the extravagance remains. For instance, here is the late C. K. Williams touting a book of Gerald Stern’s: “Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it.” Now I am a long-time fan of Gerald Stern, and I think his poetry is the cat’s meow. But really, C.K.? Such hyperbole almost makes me not want to open the book, and I love reading Stern.
 
A little humor does help when you’re trying to describe the indescribable. It’s fun to see Robert Bly, also praising Gerald Stern, remarking that he "has a night personality:  I'd say about a quarter to twelve."  Synchronize your watches, everyone!  
 
Bly has humor, and Williams’s puffery at least has the virtue of reasonable clarity. But sometimes inflated praise becomes untethered, like a hot air balloon slipping its mooring ropes, and rises into the ether, where it vanishes entirely. I give you Donald Revell saying, well, something about the poetry of  Christopher Buckley: "With patience amounting almost to agony, with certainty all the while climbing very real Hills of Paradise, Christopher Buckley has, for a long time now, been the tireless Wayfarer of American Poetry." Maybe you know exactly what kind of poetry a tireless Wayfarer writes, or where the “very real” Hills of Paradise might be located, but I confess they are not in my atlas. 
 
John Ashbery’s poetry was so elusive in tone and subject, and even in pronoun antecedents, that his blurbists often out-did themselves with Ashberian flights of vagueness. One of my favorites is Donald Barthelme’s comment on Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1975: “John Ashbery’s new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been; it is, again, an event in American poetry.” I would agree that Self-Portrait is a powerful, memorable book, one of Ashbery’s very best, but at the same time I would defy you to find any of his books that Barthelme’s comment could not apply to. Furthermore, “it is, again, an event in American poetry” is hilarious, since it could be said of any book without risking specification. For that matter, when you think about it, “astonishing” is the last thing the book was. It was pretty much exactly what we’d come to expect from Ashbery, though perhaps executed more smoothly than some earlier volumes.
 
It’s a given that poetry can’t really be paraphrased or described in logical terms, which is why blurbists often turn to showy metaphor, exaggeration, and gauzy abstraction. Occupational hazard, really. It’s hard to write a blurb that is both accurate and memorable without committing such rhetorical sins. You have to admire Maria Damon for trying to give the flavor of Alan Sondheim’s work, but the result strikes me as absurd, exaggerated, and gauzy indeed. See if you agree:
 
 
     Sondheim’s diasporic spin sends language whirling in cyberspace and on the page:
     his imagination puts us all in a verbal cosmos of exquisite touch and intellect, meta-
     commentary (midrash) and wor(l)d-healing.  Welcome to his world wide web
     mind.
 
 
Man, you gotta watch out for those diasporic spins!  They'll really do a number on you.  Sometimes they even push you into “wor(l)d-healing,” and then it’s time to reach for the air-sickness bags. . . .
 
From the days of Belinda Blurb onward, blurbs have always run the risk of enthusiasm becoming hyperbole. When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel appeared after her tragic suicide, critic A. Alvarez asserted that the poems seem “as though they were written posthumously,” which strikes me as a melodramatic and obvious bit of journalese, as his comment that “poetry of this order is a murderous art,” is rank nonsense.
 
But it may be fair to say that, with the great proliferation of poetry publishing in the past half century or so, blurbs in general have grown steadily more puffed up. It’s not enough anymore for a book to be well crafted, moving, with a pleasing and distinctive style. Young poets are seldom merely “promising” in their first collections; they are dazzling, astonishing, profound, fully achieved in their mature artistry. With literally thousands of fresh books every year clamoring for attention, blurb writers grow ever more fevered in their praise. I like how the late Bill Knott nodded knowingly to this state of affairs even as he contributed to it, in his note on the back of Jennifer L. Knox’s Drunk by Noon, which begins: “Jennifer L. Knox’s A Gringo Like Me is a rarity in that it is almost as good as the blurbs on its back say it is, and her second book is even better . . . .”  That blurb appeared in 2007. A decade earlier he was all shook up by Denise Duhamel’s Kinky, producing the following excitable gush:
 
 
     If there is a better young poet than Denise Duhamel in the U.S.A., don’t tell me.
     I can’t take it, I can barely take her! Frank O’Hara said something about only
     3 American poets being better than the movies, but I think Duhamel would make
     him add a 4th.
 
 
As a matter of fact, I admire Denise Duhamel’s work (and Jennifer L. Knox’s) quite a lot, but to claim that Duhamel is in the U.S.A. Top Four just makes my head explode. My own mental list of best current poets couldn’t be narrowed down to a hundred, much less four. And no one would agree with my ranking. Such statements as Knott’s also have the unfortunate quality of saying nothing, or at least nothing beyond “I really like this book.” Well, that’s a given, since you’re blurbing it! A decent blurb aims to give its reader at least a taste of what’s in it.
 
So part of me longs for the possibly mythical old days, when many blurbs, at least, were more modest in their language and plainly descriptive in their aims. Babette Deutsch on the cover of Louis Simpson’s 1959 A Dream of Governors, limits herself to noting his “fine lyric gift and a strong sense of rhythm.” Robert Lowell introduces Anne Sexton, in her 1960 debut volume To Bedlam and Part Way Back, with “Swift lyrical openness . . . . an almost Russian abundance and accuracy. Her poems stick in my mind. I don’t see how they can fail to make the great stir they deserve.” He was right, of course, and his relatively restrained blurb did not prevent her work from creating the great stir he predicted.
 
Scanning my shelves for books published decades ago, I find many that seem similarly restrained as compared to current standards. An unnamed reviewer from Saturday Review is quoted on the back cover of Robert Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields in 1962 saying simply that “There is a rare and attractive cleanliness to his style.” Bly himself on the cover of Donald Hall’s selected early poems remarks that “When a poem of his is good, it is solid all the way through, and absolutely genuine.” That “when” catches my eye immediately; I wonder when was the last time I spotted such a qualification in a blurb.
 
Likewise, Maxine Kumin took note of Lucille Clifton’s first book Good Times in 1969 by calling her “a lyricist who sings spare and hard songs” and the book “an important contribution to the growing body of black literature.” Even as late as 1981, we find Galway Kinnell plugging Jared Carter’s collection, Work, for the Night Is Coming, with admirable reticence: “It is an agreeable book to read, quite without pretensions and poeticisms. It focuses with loving carefulness on the things and creatures of the world. The poems are unusually well made and perfected.” It’s hard to imagine the word “agreeable” passing muster these days with a publisher. So too with Diane Ackerman’s 1983 collection Lady Faustus, which features Michael J. Bugeja’s summary: “Her voice is versatile; her poetry, genuine; and her book, impressive from start to finish.” It’s sad, in a way, that in 2018 a term like “impressive” can seem like faint praise.
 
Writing a solid blurb is hard, yes, but it can be done. For instance, I admire the delicate care of Richard Wilbur’s note on August Kleinzahler’s 1989 Earthquake Weather:
 
 
     Kleinzahler writes a sinewy free verse with sure, unmistakable rhythms, rhythms
     which convey the jumps, shifts, and pauses of the mind. Like Williams he is a
     poet of extraordinary empathy, observant but not detached. The most dazzling
     thing about Kleinzahler’s writing is the way his diction successfully combines
     slang, highfalutin words, mimicry, technical terms and plain talk, in such as
     ​way as to play the whole instrument of American speech.
 
 
Wilbur’s attention to craft, to the specific workings of diction and rhythm, seem rare in our hyper-inflated contemporary Blurb Land. In contrast, a blurb by John Ashbery that appeared on one of Kleinzahler’s books, notes that “The dank rich smells of everyday life and its silent partner, life, are everywhere in these poems.” That’s a wonderfully evocative line, and it wouldn’t be out of place in one of Ashbery’s own poems. I smiled when I first read it. But, just as with many Ashbery’s poems, I didn’t really comprehend “life and its silent partner, life,” and I don’t think the phrase tells you much about what to expect in Kleinzahler.
 
Wilbur was of course an excellent but unusually humble poet. His blurbs focus always on the work itself, and never fall into the temptation to strut his own skills. Of Barry Spacks’s poems, he wrote that they “have always been exceptionally readable because, even when their subjects are poignant or distressing, the words are at play, rejoicing in their adequacy to life.  Clear, energetic, prodigal, ebullient, human, these poems are good company." I don’t know about you, but I would have given my left arm to have Wilbur call my poems “good company.” And how rarely is a poet actually “readable,” when you think about it.
 
As noted, Bill Knott was quite a distinctive and entertaining blurbist in the hyperbolic mode. But he could also be as modest as Wilbur. My favorite of his may be what he wrote on Aaron Anstett’s Each Place the Body’s in 2007:
 
 
     As this collection shows, Aaron Anstett is writing better poems than I am, so by
     rights he should be doing blurbs for me, not me for him. In truth that's not much
     of a recommendation, so forgive the incongruity when I say to you the potential
     reader that I hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as I ​did.
 
 
Still, I admit that the ghost of Belinda Blurb also calls to me, and I’ve been regularly  tempted by her sort of wild rhetoric as well. The key is humor, of course. There have always been poets who have dealt with the impossibility built into blurbage by resorting to mock-hyperbole, satire, and other forms of humor. Ace blurbist Bill Knott, in The Naomi Poems (1968), his first book, billed himself as already dead, creating the pen name Saint Geraud for himself, but then giving away the game by providing the following logically impossible note for the back jacket: “Of himself the author says, ‘Bill Knott (1940-1966) is a virgin and a suicide.’” Such antics garnered attention, if nothing else.
 
More recently, Mary Ruefle (who, interestingly, does not employ blurbs on her books) teamed up with Dean Young on his 2002 book Skid for a fascinating deadpan two-step. Her blurb for Young announces:  “Several serious mistakes have resulted from Dean Young's absence during the events described in the first chapter of Genesis." In his own acknowledgments, Young provides this highly unusual note:  "'A Poem by Dean Young' was written by Mary Ruefle.  Its companion, 'A Poem by Mary Ruefle' written by Dean Young, may be found among her work." Well, all-righty, then!
 
But for my money the champion heir of Belinda Blurb is the inimitable Mark Halliday, who has been known to feature what might be called anti-blurbs in true Burgess fashion. Here is one from the paperback edition of Selfwolf in 1999:
 
 
     If you took the honesty of D. H. Lawrence, the courage of Robin Hood, the mordant
     incisiveness of William Empson, the ambivalent tension of Dostoevsky, the verve
     of Kenneth Koch, and the pluck of next year's Wimbledon champion, and
     multiplied everything by seven, you might have one-third of the talent displayed
     in Selfwolf. Or you might have something else. Reading Selfwolf is like reading
     the e-mail from Whitman's unknown grandson to Pynchon's missing daughter,
     or vice versa. More readable than Hart Crane, more candid than Jorie Graham,
     and more up-to-date than Alexander Pope, Mark Halliday is either a new colossus
     on the scene of post-contemporary American poetry or an infinitesimal blip of
​     male bourgeois anxiety. You be the judge.
 
 
That blurb is uncredited, but as with Burgess’s Belinda Blurb, the author is not hard to guess. And in a strange way, that spoof of the absurdities of blurbage manages to give a fairly good flavor of the tone, wit, and thematic obsessions of Halliday’s work. The same is even truer of one blurb that appears on 2002’s Jab:
 

     Human, hunger, happiness, hope, heart, and Halliday all start with h, as
     does ham.  Accident?  Maybe!  But seldom have the flour of the humanistic
     and the egg yolk of honesty mixed more swellingly with the yeast of desire
     and the salt of self-doubt--not to mention the olive paste of ambition.  
     Halliday has whacked Death and Mutabilitie before, but this time. . . this
     time he whacks them again.  After this Jab, the world will never be the same.  
     Or at least, a few hundred conversations, here and there, will be somewhat
​     affected.  Roll over Death, and tell Mutabilitie the news.
 
 
In addition, Jab carries some named blurbs in a similar vein. Martha Rhodes comments:
 

     What is this man doing? What is the black trash bag he is carrying? What’s he
     doing now? Is there meaning to this? Should he be arrested? This book’s a
     big deal. If it wasn’t, you think I’d be here with you?
 
 
And a certain Linda Bamber, unknown to me, whose identity I have my own theory about, contributes the following: 
 
 
     These poems are OK, I guess, if you like poems that CANNOT GET OVER how
     the point of life or a good feeling about yourself just WILL NOT stick around
     and then you're left eating your son's leftover pizza crust and dealing with
     such spectacularly mundane interstitial moments of existence that you have
​     to invent new words like drammel and fedge to represent them at all.   
 
 
Halliday is a serious metaphysical comedian, and these riotous blurbs do display something of his spirit, which is one reason I like them. Since they all sound rather like Halliday, even if he didn’t write them all, they succeed in giving a prospective reader some notion of what might be found within the book itself. And they avoid the sort of solemn hype and vagueness and that makes so many contemporary blurbs both untrustworthy and dull—what Belinda Blurb would call bromides, as a matter of fact.