Sources we tide from

Like the others I attached no particular value to the idea of a group, much less a school.

. . .

We were all very much concerned with poetic form, and form not merely as texture, but as the shape that makes a poem possible to grasp.  (Would we all have thought that a satisfactory way to put it?)  'Objectivist' meant, not an objective viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object.  Meant form.  Louis' essay discussed sincerity on the one hand and objectification on the other.  And sincerity - very brilliantly, it seems to me - as the epic quality.

Tradition?  I don't remember discussing it.  But who would write poetry if a poem had never been written?  Beyond that, the members of this group had a very strong sense of their own histories.  Rezi's awareness of the Jewish past, Williams' sense of America and its roots, Louis' relation to Bach and other 'sources we tide from,' -----  I am sort of short-winded historically, but not blind.  I remember my father and grandfather: I think of my daughter.  I'm aware that the subways are old (did you notice) and that the Queen Mary is fairly new.  The ground seems very old to me.  I write about nothing else.  But I thought of Eliot as a sort of enemy at the time; I don't remember discussing 'tradition.'  If we had, Williams would have spoken as in The American Grain, Louis might have used the word in a more classic sense, Rezi might have thought we were all talking about the day before yesterday.

And I would have been.  I was twenty-four.

-- George Oppen, letter to Mary Ellen Solt about the Objectivists, February 15, 1961

*

N.B. Cf. this piece, re W.C.W. and "theories, schools, and doctrines..."

Not with a bang but a whisper

- from "The Book From Which Our Literature Springs," by Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012:

If Bloom is right that "a test for great poetry and prose is an aura of inevitability in the phrasing," then the King James Bible passes that test brilliantly, thanks in part to the way it ends most of its verses with emphatic metrical stresses or resounding words, be they nouns, verbs, pronouns, or other parts of speech.  Here are a few samples that I choose more or less at random from Yahweh's series of rhetorical questions to Job in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Job:

Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? (38:8)

Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place? (38:12)

Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat. (38:41)

Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? (39:1)

Canst thou number the months that they fulfill? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth? (39:2)

Compared to the strong lineaments of verses such as these, most of the poetry written in English today shows precious little "inevitability" in its phrasing.  Some of the factors that have contributed to the drastic decline of the art of bringing phrases to closure are clear enough.  They include the wholesale de-formalization of poetry in our time and the consequent premium placed on enjambment; our dogmatic insistence on open-endedness and the bland tones of everyday language; our predilection for understatement and uneasiness about rhetorical display; our aversion to affirmation and our cult of the whisper.

However: see this "Poetry Pairing," featuring Thomas Sayers Ellis, who is quoted therein as saying, “I don’t think the end of the word is more important than the beginning of the word. I don’t think the end of the line is more important than the beginning of the line.”

Pictured: Job Mocked by his Wife, Georges de la Tour

Rules for Poetry Radicals

(with apologies to Saul Alinsky)

Rule #1: Poetry is not only what you have, but what people from other schools of poetry think you have.

Rule #2. Never go outside the expertise of your own poetry people.

Rule #3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your poetry enemies. Look for ways to increase their insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty, e.g., on blogs, Facebook, Twitter.

Rule #4. Make your poetry enemies live up to their own book of rules. You can score points over them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than all that glisters can possibly be gold.

Rule #5. Ridicule is a poetry blogger's or comment box inhabitant’s most potent weapon.

Rule #6. A good style is one that your own poetry people enjoy.

Rule #7. A poetry horse that you flog too long becomes a dead poetry horse.

Rule #8. Keep writing poems.  Never let them think you've quit like, say, Empson or Chatterton.

Rule #9. The internet is usually more terrifying than poetry itself.

Rule #10. If you dislike a kind of poetry long enough, it will push through and become a kind of poetry you grudgingly admire... or even like a whole bunch.

Rule #11. The price of a negative review is a constructive alternative.  Sorry.

Rule #12. Pick your poetry target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. One acts decisively only in the conviction that posterity is on one's side - and that the dustbin of poetry history awaits the other side.

Don't read the other fellows...

From Edward Mendelson's introduction to Volume IV, Prose, 1956-1962 by W.H. Auden:

Auden waited until halfway through his [first Oxford] lecture before he claimed any merit for poets and critics, and when he did so, he claimed mostly the virtues of modesty. "Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it;" furthermore, when reading a poem by another poet, "he would rather it were good than bad," and "the last thing he wants is that it should be like one of his own."  A poet's general statements about poetry are less likely to be valuable than his appreciations of individual poems, but they may be illuminating about the poet who makes them:

I am always interested in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously.  As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete and always one-sided.  Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis.  In unkind moments one is almost tempted to think that all they are really saying is: "Read me.  Don't read the other fellows."  But taken as critical admonitions addressed by his [internal] Censor to the poet himself, there is generally something to be learned from them.

You can read Auden's entertaining essay on Sydney Smith from this book here, thanks to the publisher. Some of Auden's aphorisms on writing are here.

Soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!

Charles Bernstein famously has asked whether art criticism is fifty years behind poetry, concluding that "indeed, pernicious is the cliché that poetry is fifty years behind visual art." 

Yet in a recent review of Alice Goldfarb Marquis's The Pop Revolution, Adam Bresnick says this:

What Pop [Art] had done, to the annoyance of the proponents of Modernism, was to undo the essential European distinction between high and low art.  Whereas for the Romantic tradition, of which Abstract Expressionism is a late variant, works of art were artifacts supposedly in touch with the sublime, Pop artists understood art in an anthropological and commercial sense, as an activity more or less like any other.  Marquis quotes Dave Hickey, who suggests that the real blasphemy of the Pop artists "derives from the crisp analogy they draw between our appetite for 'fine art' and our appetite for food, sex, and glamour."  To paraphrase [Jasper] Johns, Pop artists took objects from daily experience, did something to them, and then did something else to them.

[...]

In the new world of image reproduction, words no longer carried their former prestige, and the great intellectual authorities of yesteryear could no longer pretend to control the discussion of art.

Now, can we not, for the sake of discussion, replace in this quotation "Pop," that half-century-old phenomenon, with "contemporary American poetry?"

If so, what explains our belatedness?

Poetry and the Joy of Community: The Four Monologues Project

Click here for the full story!

On Equity

Equity is a beautiful word, too beautiful for its own good, possibly...

*

Words, generally speaking, are not equitable; even when we try to force them to be so. Words, when skilfully used, appear to hold themselves aloof from mere circumstance; but this is merely an effect. Words, even in the hands of a master, are impregnated by strait and circumstance; even those straits that they preen themselves on having avoided, even those circumstances they appear most gloriously to transcend.

*

I said that equity is a beautiful word; it has a beauty of association. Equities, on the other hand, though it sounds as well, is damned by association. Our fallen minds and sinful hearts are drawn into mere businesslike usage (Locke would have approved) but fail to notice when business-shorthand is transposed into pseudo-rectitude, fake authority, and magical cant. The word equity, I believe, was felt and understood by English religious writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to be a word of particular moral beauty and was used by them in that understanding and to that effect. But: used casuistically; and therefore, to the extent that all casuistry is dramatic, used dramatically.

-- Geoffrey Hill, from a sermon preached October 16, 2011

On translation and squirming through poetry...

If you're interested in the translation of poetry, one thing you hear over and over and over again is that Octavio Paz said that all texts can be thought of as "translations of translations of translations."  He must have written that in Spanish, of course; but what we get in English is this:

On the one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations. 

In his Oxford lecture on Eugenio Montale's poem, "L'anguilla" ("The Eel"), Paul Muldoon explores this - and Montale's poem - wryly and thoroughly, perhaps definitively.  Like everything else he does, it's a tour de force.  As you'd expect, Muldoon starts off by quoting Robert Lowell's infamous introduction to Imitations, and, having presented his own version, wiggles his way through a number of competing English translations of the poem (there must be at least fifty, but Muldoon takes on a selection of the most formidable of them).  My guess is that most American readers read Montale's poems in either Jonathan Galassi's versions or William Arrowsmith's, though Charles Wright's have been a perennial favorite as well.  Galassi's are increasingly becoming the go-to versions in this country, revised versions of which have just been reissued in paperback by his company, F.S.G.

Anyway, it's a funny thing that such a slippery poem as "L'anguilla" should be such a touchstone for this kind of case study.  This peculiar poem has wormed itself into the canon and is so well-known, even in translation, that it must by now produce little anxiety in the average consumer of poetry - no doubt thanks to its having been so relentlessly translated and dissected.  (I was going to say that we're swimming in translations of Montale, but I'll quit joking and add that the compulsive, of which I am one, will also want to consult a handy volume, Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas.)

My post here is occasioned, though, by what appears to be the simultaneous reappearance of the Galassi and now the Arrowsmith translations in comprehensive volumes.  Most folks who will have read to this point have seen the former, but it's quite good news that the Arrowsmith versions - published in separate volumes over the years, some of which are now quite scarce - have been collected for the first time in a single book, edited by Arrowsmith's best student, the diligent and brilliant Rosanna Warren.

It might not have happened.  A 2005 article in the New York Sun called "A Montale Mystery" mentions a note of hers that appears in Arrowsmith's posthumously-published version of Cuttlefish Bones:

When William Arrowsmith died on February 20, 1992, he left in manuscript his translations of every volume of poems by Eugenio Montale arranged by the poet himself, except for "The Storm and Other Things"("La bufera e altro") and "The Occassions" ("Le occassioni"), which had already appeared from Norton in W.A.'s translation. "Altri versi," put together for Montale by Giorgio Zampa and published a few months before the poet's death in 1981, was not included; nor, for obvious reasons, was "Diario postumo," edited by Annalisa Cima and not published in toto until 1996.

The Sun telephoned Warren -

She told us that two Montale collections from Arrowsmith - "Poetic Diary: 1971 and Poetic Diary: 1972" and "Poetic Notebook 1974-77" - have yet to be published.  In 1997, she put aside the remaining manuscripts and returned to her own work, which she'd been neglecting. Our inquiry, eerily, came just as she'd been thinking again about the remaining translations. "I have been feeling guilty about the manuscripts, and I am one of his literary executors," she said. "But it's a considerable job and has to be done by someone who knows the work."

These manuscripts lack Arrowsmith's end notes, which are among the very best writing on Montale in English and one of the things that makes his other versions of Montale so valuable. They need an editor who can work with Arrowsmith's translations and compile good annotations. "There's a lot of scholarship on Montale," Ms. Warren said. "To do it responsibly, the editor of these books should know that scholarship."

Ms. Warren was Arrowsmith's student at Johns Hopkins University and his colleague at Boston University. They shared a love for Montale, and he had been showing her his translations for years. "Montale is an enduring poet, and I'm confident that I'll find someone who'd like to take on the task - or that I'd come to a point in my work where I'd like to take on the task," she said.

Well, the task was indeed undertaken, and the book has now been published beautifully by Norton as The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977.

I mention all this because I am deeply indebted to both Warren and Arrowsmith.  Rosanna was my mentor in all things relating to translation and editing; I'd not have translated Miguel Hernández, nor learned how literary magazines work, except for her guidance over a great many years.  As for William Arrowsmith, I was one of his very last students, in graduate school.  He had to stop teaching in the middle of the semester in which I was taking his class, "T. S. Eliot and the Mind of Europe."  Out of breath and fumbling repeatedly for a plastic water bottle he carried with him in a flight bag, Arrowsmith - clearly quite ill - smiled as if teaching could make no man happier.

Arrowsmith suffered no fools and was intimidating; he could be blunt, and he was always sharp.  But we hung on his every word, little knowing that his words were, sadly, in very limited supply.  Early in the semester, I gathered up enough nerve to go see him in his office.  He'd put some material for the course on reserve in the library, and when I went to retrieve them I found things in German, French, and Italian.  I shuffled around the library shelves for translated versions; there were none.  When I mentioned this to Arrowsmith he looked amazed.  "You have to read them in the original," he said flatly.  Unless, he proposed, I wasn't up to it.  The hair on the back of my neck bristled: it was an eerie moment for me.  Once before, when I was in college, I had made the same mistake.  A comp lit professor of considerable talent sent me off to read some Wagner, and though I had taken just enough German to read it, I found myself wanting to get by with some English translations.  "Why?" the prof asked me - "it's beautiful in the German, isn't it?"  But Arrowsmith did not dismiss me as a lazy or ignorant neer-do-well which, in fact, I was.  He simply pointed out that yes, these works were beautiful in the original, and that as we were talking about the likes of Dante and Eliot, it could scarcely be too much trouble to do as much work as they had, if I'd any real interest in poetry.

He was not being pedantic.  I don't know when it was that poets decided they didn't need to know as much as, say, Dante or Eliot, that they could skate by on their own vocabularies and experience and the translations at hand.  But that's how most of us are now.  Arrowsmith and Warren sternly and generously sent me packing off in a different direction, and I never have been able to thank them enough.

What I remember most vividly about Arrowsmith, however, was a translation talk he gave in which he discussed his translations of Montale.  This was many years before Muldoon became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, needless to say.  And Arrowsmith dissected and demolished other translations of Montale including, you guessed it, "L'anguille," except his own.  I especially remember his discussion of the strange poem, "Xenia I," for Montale's lover, later his wife, whom the poet nicknamed "Mosca" - Arrowsmith clarified it for us with great joy and, well, love, relating the housefly, which is what mosca means, to Donne's erotic poem ''The Flea'' (which Montale had read with another lover), to the mosca in Dante's Inferno and the spiritual itch that must be scratched ("let them scratch wherever is the itch," to translate Dante).  He made his case exquisitely, dramatically, at times even venomously, reading from his own published notes to the poem.  (These are among the principle pleasures of his work on Montale, by the way.)   He waved books and papers in the air.  I think he was even sweating; it was a smotheringly hot room.  At first, we all kind of giggled.  But we stopped that pretty quick.  By the time he was done, I could see eels swimming like thick floaters in the water of my own eyes.  I was frightened, exhilarated, inspired.

It is hard to express how much, in moments like those, I loved my teachers, loved languages, loved poetry.  This has all seemed like a very long time ago to me (it was back in the 80s, after all), but the publication of William Arrowsmith's Montale brings it all back, resurrects a poet and his translator, and revivifies poetry itself.  If gratitude is the grandest virtue, somehow, of all literature, then I have been amazingly lucky, and remain intensely grateful to so many others.  And now readers can be grateful, too, for such a teacher as Arrowsmith... and for all the translations of Montale...  and, of course, for the texts of which the translations are translations.

Pictured: An aalstecher.  You can read a little of what Rosanna has to say about Montale here.

Hitchens on Poetry

It depresses me beyond measure that most people I meet cannot even recite, much less compose, this gem-like form. Nor can any student in any of my English classes produce a single sonnet of Shakespeare: not even to get themselves laid (the original purpose of the project).

I worry that by phrasing things in this way I may myself be adding to the general coarsening and deafness. Of course my test isn't the one true test: who can safely say that they have memorized Don Juan, for instance? But then who could you count as reliable who could not manage a stave or two of The Waste Land? The word "Koran" means "the recitation," and it seems that in Arabic its incantation can induce trance by sheer power and beauty. (Auden was wrong, in his valediction for Yeats, to say that "poetry makes nothing happen.") At least this restores the idea of a relationship to the theoretically divine, and to the audience. (Auden also wrote of Yeats that "mad Ireland hurt you into poetry," which at any rate implies the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between poetry and the reality of which Eliot believed that "human kind" could not bear too much.)

Yet very often, late at night, when I am not tired enough for sleep but too tired to carry on with absorbing or apprehending anything "serious" or new, I will walk over to the appropriate shelf and pull out the tried and the true: the ones that never fail me. And then I will always stay up even later than I had intended. And sometimes, in the morning, I really can "do" the whole of "Spain 1937" or "The Road to Mandalay," and can appreciate that writing is not just done by hand.

-- full essay here.