They're just not that into us

Complaints that poetry has lost the ordinary reader stick in my craw. No question, our market share is at an all-time low (an historical situation James Wood recently blamed on “the big fat greedy monster of the novel, which sucks all the vital nutrition away for itself.”) And no doubt, more can be done to persuade intellectually curious folks to take an interest. But the news that poetry’s “diminished stature,” to borrow Dana Gioia’s term, betrays some crackup in poetry itself is now so overpromoted as to become viciously self-harming. It’s all well and good to be upset with our x@#$% condition, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense to do what a lot of us are unable to stop doing: blaming the poets.

Everything would be different if our stuff wasn’t so difficult, or obscure, or highbrow, or introverted, or solipsistic, or autobiographical, or experimental, or academic, or postmodern. Some of these charges may be justified, but as far as the public is concerned, we’re wasting our breath. There is no once-popular style and subject that, if brought back, will stop poetry’s sliding poll numbers. There is no traditional link between poetry and the public that, if repaired, will turn things around. That’s because reestablishing the public’s trust in poetry would be like reestablishing the public’s trust in Latin. Is it crazy to believe that Latin—once the lingua franca of government, church and cultural circles—has a chance in the age of English? Of course it is. Most people would be gobsmacked to learn the language is spoken at all. Similarly, I’d bet many general readers have absolutely no idea that 1) poetry-writing still goes on, 2) since the turn of the 20th century, the public has been tangled up in a lover’s spat with the art form, playing the long-suffering Judy to the poet’s self-absorbed Punch; and 3) after a series of good-faith attempts at reconciliation, Modernism was the last straw: cold-shouldered, readers moved on for good.

This is the perfect example of a story that’s kidding itself. The high-stakes drama is all in our heads, though you can see why such a delusion—with poets cringing guiltily—would take hold. As long as we’re responsible for our predicament, we’re in control of our destiny. But solving one’s escalating irrelevancy is hard enough without being reminded of all the more interesting things winning the reader’s attention: “roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls).” So said e.e. cummings in 1917...

If grownups don’t read poetry, it’s not because they have a bone to pick with poets. The truth is even more intolerable: they prefer not to. How often do we need to get Bartlebyed before we finally admit to ourselves that those Clancy-thumbing dentists and Grisham-toting lawyers aren’t confused or afraid of commitment? They’re just not that into us.

-- Carmine Starnino, from an essay forthcoming in Poetry

On the edge of things

Falling... and rising!

I'm thrilled to see that the New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog today takes up James Dickey and his wild poem, "Falling"!  I recently lamented, in a blog essay you can read here, the apparent "falling" of Dickey's reputation as a poet... but maybe he's in the air again.  Click here to read Jenna Krajewski's ultraswank blog post on him.

Larkin: Missing Link between Baywatch and Bergvall?

1.) Recently discovered letters from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones disclose that the poet became so obsessed with the hit television show Baywatch that he considered writing to the producers and offering his services as their new leading man.

2.) "The fact that poetic and literary cultures in Britain are still resolutely separate from other artforms, unless dealing with theatrical performance, certainly plays an important part in generating this sort of sclerosis between verbal and non-verbal arts." — Caroline Bergvall, October 26, 2009

Read more here! 

&

Will Joanne Kyger’s poetry prove far “more lasting” than that of Robert Frost?  Click here!

Just in time for Halloween: today's pop quiz!

Q: "How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack?" -- Carlin Romano

Rules for Contrarians; and the Law of Frequency of Error

I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.

Viz Nathan Mhyrvold: Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you’re in a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl.

Okay, point one. The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate... -- Daniel Davies

*
I know of scarcely anyt­hing so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the “Law of Frequency of Error.” The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if t­hey had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. -- Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1889), p. 66 -- Click here for the story behind the story

You and your pants

[X]'s enthusiasm for [Y] is of the "kick-in-the-pants-for-art" category.  He fastens on that which is anti-cultural, anti-traditional, anti-intellectual, which subverts form and allows the writer to emerge as the permanent center and concern of all writing - "to hell with characters, look at me, I'm the big thing," etc.

The trouble with this is that it is absolutely no good for advancing advanced writing.  The writer discovers himself, pen in hand, and asks, “Whatever can I be doing with this object?” Which, like all cultivated expressions of naïveté, is a complete falsification. Such writing is in a culture, in a tradition, marked by a preoccupation with a definite class of subjects and objects, and is really no freer from social assumptions and values than the work of any other school. It is one of the worst habits of avant-garde writers to pretend a disdain of literature, and of the critics who are concerned with them to substitute exposition and political admiration for concrete analytical evaluation of literature as such. -- Issac Rosenfeld (ca. 1945)

***
The avant-garde, it seems, lives! But it is the roundtable the next day I want to discuss here. [...] there was a long talk called "Futurists, Fascists, Nazis: Rejecting Democracy in Theory and Practice" by Benjamin Martin. I have heard talks like this one again and again: it turns out that Futurism was nearly equivalent to Fascism and indeed Hitler's name was brought up frequently.

Whose Futurism?  Whose Fascism?  Everything Martin said was true enough if we label as Futurist, Marinetti's writings of the later twenties and thirties, up to his death in 1944.  The speaker assumed that here was Futurism, largely because Marinetti continued to call himself a Futurist and he had a following of now largely unknown poets and artists.  It was indeed an unsavory bunch, and Martin was right to pronounce on Marinetti's distrust of democracy.  The only trouble is that, whatever self-designated label the artists in question adopted, theirs was no longer the Futurism that mattered at all.  In point of fact, when Marinetti was composing the First Manifesto in 1908, Fascism had not yet been heard of; Marinetti was primarily a contrarian - he was a socialist-anarchist AGAINST the Papacy, the State, Parliamentary Democracy - and especially the loss of Italian territories to Austria - for example Trieste.  He was certainly a Nationalist, but one can't quite equate nationalism with Fascism.

Of the Futurist artists of the 1910s, two of the finest - Boccioni and Sant'Elia were killed at the Front in 1916. A third, Carlo Carra, dissociated himself from Futurism by 1918, as did the Russolo of the noise-makers.  Balla and Depero, known for their abstractions, became designers: Depero came to the U.S. and designed Vogue covers and worked on the Campari logos!  By the early 20s, Futurism was all over, the only important hold-out being Marinetti himself, who did indeed become a Fascist - and also an increasingly uninteresting writer.

I wonder then how and why we continue to be treated to the equation Futurism=Fascism, which has hurt the early movement so much that may of its publications are still out of print and its artwork unknown.  I hope others here will explore the following issue:

How long can and does ANY movement last?  Surely not three decades! Think of the Oxford Movement or Zurich Dada, Die Brücke or Lettrisme, Imagism or the New York School of Poets or Language Poetry...  -- Marjorie Perloff (October 20, 2009)

(Additional context re 1909 will be found here.)

What I love about poetry bloggers

You know what I love about poetry bloggers?

I love that they avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and will be known by their tact of omission, by their skilful economy of means, by their selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind.

No, really, that's what I love about poetry bloggers!

*
And whadaya know: speculation abounds that soon [sic] almost EVERYBODY will be a published writer:

"Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.

To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority."

And dig this:

How can you know anything about literature if all you've done is read books?

There used to be, for many years, an ingenious radio personality in Boston, Larry Glick, who always asked (the italics were slyly implicit): “What’s the story behind the story?”  I think it was he who made it a catch phrase.  He wasn’t a journalist, but he did have an inquiring mind, the kind I think good readers and writers always have.  I keep thinking of that little phrase while I read J.C. Hallman’s handy new anthology, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature.  (I love how brazenly and justly that subtitle ignores questions about what constitutes greatness or whether such a thing exists.  Phew!)  Well, I’ve already blogged about Charles D'Ambrosio's essay on Salinger, which gave me a lot to think about, but here are a few more of my favorite things from the book:

Virginia Woolf kicking Hemingway in the pants: “At last we are inclined to cry out with the little girl in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: ‘Would you please please please please please please stop talking?’”

William Gass looking at fiction “in terms of the toenail.”

Vladimir Nabokov, surely the Alfred Hitchcock of literary criticism, retelling with ghoulish and excruciatingly embellished delight (along with diagrams) the whole of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

Seamus Heaney concluding that the poems of T.S. Eliot didn’t help him to write so much as to learn what it means to read.

Factoids in Salman Rushdie’s essay on The Wizard of Oz that even an experienced moviegoer might not know, e.g., that the cloak worn by the Wizard in the film was bought at a second-hand shop… and in fact once belonged to  L. Frank Baum himself, whose name had been stitched into it; or that there weren’t any ruby slippers in the original novel.

A brief but very sharp piece by Hallman himself in which he accuses Edmund Wilson (“you sly old bat”) of murdering Henry James’s Turn of the Screw.

James Wood, lucid and arresting as ever, likening Chekhov’s notebook to “a mattress in which he stuffed his stolen money.”

Michael Chabon writing about “the other James,” M.R. James, whose story “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” begins: “’I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full term is over, Professor,’ said a person not in the story to the Professor on Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James’s College.”

Cynthia Ozick, revisiting Truman Capote’s first book with this chastening observation:

“A century, even a quarter century, dies around a book; and then the book lies there, a shaming thing because it shows us how much worse we once were to have liked it; and something else too: it demonstrates exactly how the world seems to shake off what it does not need, old books, old notions of aesthetics, old mind-forms, our own included.  The world to the eager eye is a tree constantly pruning itself, and writers are the first to be lopped off.” 

And D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick:

“He is warm-blooded, he is loveable.  He is lonely Leviathan, not a Hobbes sort.  Or is he?

But he is warm-blooded and loveable.  The South Sea Islanders, and Polynesians, and Malays, who worship shark, or crocodile, or weave endless frigate-bird distortions, why did they never worship the whale?  So big!”

Geoff Dyer performs an act of deconstruction on a book of "criticism":

"How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at it any more, but I didn't because telling myself to stop always has the effect of egging me on. Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off....Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book. In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it... I burned it in self-defence.  It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.  This is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches....  I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands: how can you know anything about literature if all you've done is read books?"

Pictured:  Leviathan and friends

A picture is worth at least four words

Salinger & others... Welcome to the Second Elizabethan Era!

I've blogged elsewhere about not being an English major and being, of necessity, an auto-didact when it comes to reading and writing poetry.  When I hit the age of thirty, however, I accidentally landed myself two mentors.  One was George Starbuck, about whom I have written and given talks elsewhere; the other was the now-disgraced Derek Walcott.  George was very tough and absolutely unfoolable; I suppose he'd seen it all.  One can complain all day and night about Derek, but it was he who encouraged me to translate Spanish poetry and to admit, in my mind and my writing, that I was from Memphis, something I had suppressed and repressed for a dozen years till he forced me to deal with it.  He also broke my heart by convincing me for too long a time to abandon my study of French poets like Ponge and Apollinaire, whom he thought were too easy to take up as influences.  This caused a certain disintegration of a way I had of thinking about poems which I dearly regret now - but I've recovered, and it was salutary, at least, to have to question my ideals.  He looked at what I was doing and compared it to dribbling a basketball: You're good at this, he said, but stop right now or you'll be doing it the rest of your life without thinking, and it's not a life's work.  A life's work - how that phrase frightened me!  I don't imagine any poet under the age of 50 conceives of such a thing anymore, and I no longer do myself (I'm lucky to have a life and some work, let alone something so dignified as that!) - but again, it was good to be under the spell for a while of someone who had real critical skills, and could teach me the responsibility to have my own.  Anyway, here's something Derek has said:

"We may have arrived at a point where minimalism has become baroque, where despair and its metrically weighed vacuities are the style of our second Elizabethan era; one in which there is an exuberance of emptiness, an enthusiasm for vacuums; where gaps of silence are revered over the articulate.  The trouble is hat this reduction has become as rhetorical as the bombast of the first Elizabethans.

It is the vanity of metropolitan cultures to believe that they alone have the right to pessimism, just as they alone once held the rights to their opposites: elation, delight, conviction and faith.

The idea of vacuity in modern [writing] is like the idea of the existential or the nihilistic: spiritual vanity.  The depth of modern contemplation is of staring into the holes, the emptiest [lyric] 'O' of all.  Such vanity lies in the faith that for the tragic poets, be they absurdists or minimalists, history happens only where it has meaning.  And since for such writers history is now meaningless - at least as morality - where history does happen is the only place where modern tragedy can be played.  Teach it enough silence, increase such silences, deepen their significance of emptiness, of wordlessness and language, then action will evaporate and stasis will admire stasis because we are observing modern history, and if history is meaningless then so is literature and the theatre.

Mallarme headed towards the silence of the white page; Beckett for the silence of the hole; the hole as the whole.  Irony is the furthest point of tragedy in modern theatre.  Not true irony, but sarcasm.  This sarcasm mocks literature, scuttles the articulate, deepens chasms - on the pretext that human beings cannot or do not really communicate.  Therefore poetry is the first victim of this cynicism."

Recently, a squib of mine here about criticism made reference to something J.C. Hallman wrote relating to his wonderful new anthology, The Story about the Story, which documents a kind of "creative criticism," in other words, not the kind that emanates from academia, but from writers who respond to literary stuff from a personal angle.  The death of the reader would logically follow, or even result from, the famed death-of-the-author - but the essays in Hallman's collection bring both startlingly back to life; and if it's possible for me to have yet another favorite book, this is one.

Among its many pleasures for me was something completely unexpected, however.  The book kicks off with an essay by Charles D'Ambrosio on "Salinger and Sobs,"  or more accurately, Salinger and suicide.  Like boatloads of other people, I read The Catcher in the Rye once upon a time: as a kid, I carried it around faithfully while ventilating all kinds of yearning and estrangement, and then grew up.  Frankly, I forgot all about the book, shrugging it off on whatever few occasions arose in which it was mentioned.  I mean, it was the literary equivalent of growing a first beard, and I'd have denied any lasting effects that a shower and shave couldn't wash away.  But D'Ambrosio is a very fucking good writer, which comes from his being "wary of prelapsarian schemes... and leery of conspiracy theories, both of which only seem to describe the limitations, like Hamlet's nutshell, of the holder's mind."  In other words, he is cursed with lucidity - which must not be easy, having lost a brother to suicide and nearly losing another to the same.  This means, too, that D'Ambrosio is not uncritical of Salinger, so his essay is no exercise in hero-worship.

He's very dissatisfied, for instance, with Seymour - an Introduction -- the story of a would-be writer, Buddy Glass, who has lost his brother Seymour to suicide - but from this scrutiny arises a constructive explanation and exploration of the shrinking silence Walcott so astringently derides.  D'Ambrosio writes that the book

"... is like a story in hiding, its prose on the lam, its characters putting on disguises, its ideas concealed.  The whole thing is preambular, it's all excursus, and it's a bad sign that for me the best or more accurate language for describing the story comes from classical rhetoric and oratory.  The sentences spin eloquently over an absence - it's as if progress has stopped, and the last few words are draining out.  Earlier I said that Holden [in Catcher] is making a loud shouted appeal directly to the audience, over the heads of those who don't understand.  The whole story is directed at you, the reader.  In Seymour Buddy Glass speaks directly to the reader too, but now he resorts to the aside, the isolated whispered phrase, safely enclosed in parentheses, addressing the audience in a low voice supposedly inaudible to others nearby."

Consider, D'Ambrosio asks, this passage from Seymour:

"... I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).  I suppose, most unflorally.  I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged - buckle-legged - omens of my state of mind and body at this writing."

The parentheses, D'Ambrosio observes, "sit like Kevlar jackets all through the writing, protecting Buddy's identity from attack, keeping the sentences safe."

(That's some damn good criticism, right there, yes?)

D'Ambrosio has poked around in Salinger's work to find "prodromal clues somehow indicated [that] Salinger's plunge into silence was symptomatic of something."  The empty endless, open-mouthed cavern of the lyric "O" Walcott limns? 

Well, let's see.  Here's another bit from Seymour, about the eponymous dead brother:

"Vocally, he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery - sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch - or he was a non-stop talker."

And here's how Holden Caulfield, a resolute anti-Confessionalist believe it or not, opens up Catcher:

"If you really want to hear about it the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before that had me and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

Oddly enough, the first conversation I had with Walcott consisted of his asking me just these things; he wanted to know the truth about whomever he was speaking to.  Well, here's how Holden brings the novel about him to an end:

"Don't ever tell anybody anything.  If you do, you start missing everybody."

Holden Caulfield had lots of heart, the very thing Derek finds missing in postmodern poetry and drama; I suspect he misses someone, himself.  Anyhow, as D'Ambrosio notes, Holden's instinct proves his conclusion to be right, "proves that the process of writing only creates further problems."

Is it better, then, to say nothing?  After all, the silence "is already there, waiting in the wings of Salinger's most clamorous and fluent book."  Why does a writer choose silence?  For a writer, D'Ambrosio asks, is it tantamount to suicide?

"In some ways it is, I believe, but the question for me is why - why does the writer choose silence?  The deliberate decision to quit clawing at the keyboard is too mechanical to be an answer.  Stopping isn't the real matter, but rather the result of some other prior disturbance that can't be named.  Silence in this sense isn't the equivalent of suicide or death, but of secrecy.  That's what it's about - what is not said."

Flawed as it is, Seymour (I'm repeating the quotation) "is like a story in hiding, its prose on the lam, its characters putting on disguises, its ideas concealed."  And so are our own stories, lines, masks, and ideas.  But I'll hush now, except to say that Hallman's book - which also gathers together the likes of Virginia Woolf on Hemingway, Nabokov on Kafka (find out what bug Gregor Samsa really turns into!), Lawrence on Melville (strange!), Hesse on Dostoevsky, and much more - really does offer up a kind of criticism that is thrillingly alive, and not about advancing a career of some kind.  Woolf says that thanks to the miracle of human credulity, the reader begins to think that critics, "because they call themselves so, must be right.  He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print.  He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics' decrees."

I had buried my own indebtedness to a youthful reading of Salinger out of some kind of snobbery or barnacled, grown-up sophistication.  (Later in the anthology, Walter Kirn recalls how literature courses at Princeton didn't help him deepen his understanding of Catcher; the English Department was, "just then, in a phase of high obscurity, and readable modern American authors such as Salinger weren't part of the syllabus.  Desparate to take on the snobbery of [his] teachers," he "came to regard the old hermit's books as classing young-adult fiction" like say Old Yeller, Black Beauty, and A Separate Peace; the pleasure he took in Holden Caulfield's voice was "Exhibit A in the case against his greatness.")

I'm grateful to Salinger, in the end - and for Hallman's anthology - for restoring to me the power and value of my own silences as a reader, not to mention as a writer who was, in fact, on the verge of stopping.

Pictured: The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul, a translation from the French, by Elizabeth, presented to Catherine Parr in 1544. The embroidered binding with the monogram KP for "Katherin Parr" is believed to have been worked by Elizabeth I.

Ceci n'est pas une reading of Mansfield Park

... there are so many forms of literary criticism. There’s the theoretical approach, where the text is a pretext for whatever theoretical model’s being run past you. The postcolonialist position where you discover, amazingly, that the writer against colonialism is also implicated in colonialism, and only the superior critic can see this. Or deconstruction in its many forms, where you arrive at predetermined indeterminacy. That kind of literary criticism looks like close textual criticism but is often doing what Derrida called ‘working the text, working the passage’: the clever thing in deconstruction is to achieve two polar readings of the same passage. Which is a demonstration that language is inadequate. That’s the given telos — so there is a kind of monotony here. And also a kind of perversity — it’s about working the material until metal fatigue sets into the language. Then there’s historical criticism, which is more interested in anything but literature. Perfectly sensible, intelligent academics are actually bored by literature. They want to get into history, to do philosophy. They’d like to do politics. And obviously you get loads of this — Said’s reading of Mansfield Park, it’s all about the sugar trade, it’s all about slavery. Well, actually, no it isn’t. He’s aware of the element of travesty, of course, he’s a sophisticated man — he’s perfectly aware that he’s bringing something 20^th century into this which isolates, focuses, magnifies … it’s a cropped reading of the novel. It takes a tiny bit, blows it up and says isn’t this interesting? And it is quite interesting, but it’s not a reading of Mansfield Park. 

***

This is another tic of the academy at the moment, that all poems are about poetry, writing poetry. And what amazes me is how these truisms get into circulation and how hard they are to get out of circulation. And then when they are out of circulation, everyone’s thinking — how could anyone ever believe that? Helen Vendler — all poems are about the writing of poetry. No they’re not.

-- Craig Raine

Gnomon

Photo by Don Share, who else?

I think it just supercedes

Q. Did you feel, possibly, that you were writing against something, more than from any model?

A. No, no, no. I don't think one was constantly trying to reject things, but just trying to find out what was right for oneself... I don't think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supercedes. People find a way in which they can say something. "I can't say it that way, what way can I find that will do?". One didn't really bother about the existing modes.

--T.S. Eliot

Masquerades disclose the reality of souls

For everyone we see and who interests us, we should create a biography of their past and future. One of the sage’s mental characteristics is his ability to dress up other people inside himself, giving them the clothes he deems most suitable for however he chooses to dream them.

Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story—about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness . . . . . . who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant. And his crowning glory would be if the whole of that sorrowful life he’d told were, from start to finish, absolutely false. -- Fernando Pessoa

Time abrades talent

Time abrades talent. Some poets don't seem to notice this and continue to make the same ever-thinning sound right on into oblivion. Others lapse into embittered silence. In some, though, the abrasions bloom... -- Christian Wiman, October issue of Poetry

Supposes

Suppose you publish a small book of poems with a legendary small press publisher, say, Jonathan Williams's Jargon Press. Suppose further that W.C. Williams writes the preface, and Alberto Moravia the introduction. Suppose that the cover art is a collage by Pop Art/mail and collage artist Ray Johnson, and the title page has a collage by Jean-Jacques Lebel, whose father was a friend of Duchamp's. And on the back cover, your handsome author photo shows you stripped to the waist, bearded head turned in defiant profile. Suppose further that even the back inside cover is cool, listing books from the same publisher: Irving Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun, Bob Brown's selected poems with a note by Kay Boyle and drawing by Ben Shahn, On My Eyes by Larry Eigner with photos from Harry Callaghan, Robert Creeley's A Form of Women, along with new Maxiums poems by Charles Olson and poems from the Greek and Latin by Kenneth Rexroth. Suppose the book even earns a positive review in Poetry!

I suppose you'd have a pretty cool book there, eh?

Well, not long ago I found myself a copy of Harold Norse's classic book The Roman Sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, as described above. I'm kinda thrilled that it comes complete with a price tag from the St. Marks Bookstore: $4.00. Oh, what fun this book is!

Norse, whose work appeared in Poetry over the course of two decades, died earlier this year. The recent publication of his collected poems, In the Hub of the Fiery Force, occasioned Kevin Killian's remark that "If he lived anywhere else but in America, he would have received the Nobel Prize by now," noting that Norse's work was closer to "poets like Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Reverdy, Ungaretti, Marina Tsvetayeva" than to any particular American poet. You'll have to decide for yourself about all this, but for me, the Roman Sonnets is a book to treasure.

Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Maria Gioachino Raimondo Belli (September 7, 1791 – December 21, 1863) was an Italian poet who faced economic difficulties all through his life but always got by, and who is now remembered for sonnets he composed in Romanesco, a Roman dialect. He wrote well over two thousand of them, each chronicling - by way of satire - nineteenth-century Rome. The poems are often obscene, and unflaggingly satirize the corruptions of the Church as he saw it (though he did not intend to be impious). Consequently he had to keep his poems hidden from public view, though he did read them to his friends Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Nikolai Gogol. D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were big fans, and the posthumously published sonnets eventually made their way into English thanks to a number of devotees including, aside from Norse, Anthony Burgess, Miller Williams, and the deeply ingenious sonneteer Mike Stocks; the latter's versions can be found in one of my favorite books, a beautiful and useful dual-language edition of Belli's sonnets (complete with Scots translations by the poet Robert Garioch!) recently published by Oneworld Classics in the UK.

Here's one of Norse's translations:

Who Goes by Night, Dies by Night

How misfortunes are! Here's the story:
With that open inferno of a night
I was returning from the Broken Head
At three in the morning, not a soul in sight.

Just right there in front of the Doria Palace
I'm about to climb the steps toward St. Mary's,
I slip, and I take myself one Christ of a fall,
And bang, but hard, the back part of my skull.

I was on the ground crying as my life leaked out
When a carriage of a gentleman about
Two feet away passed at a snail's pace.

"Stop!" a servant to the coachman cries;
But from inside the carriage a thin high voice
Ordered: "Go on, allons! who dies, dies."

*

The more personal a poem is, more likely it is to be political, continued

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it's not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change. This is not to say that a poem should be political or ethical instruction, but rather that it might engender a dialogue between the poem itself and the reader/listener, between itself and other poems and texts, and between all of these and a broader public (whatever that might be). I see myself as a poet activist - every time I write a poem, it is an act of resistance to the state, the myriad hierarchies of control, and the human urge to conquer our natural surroundings.

-- John Kinsella, forthcoming essay in Poetry magazine

Monkeys' Moon

Pool Films resulted from the creative collaboration of writers Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) and Imagist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Funded by Bryher's inheritance from a vast family fortune, their projects were fueled by the principals interest in film and artistic experimentation. The three were interested in developing a context in which the young medium of film might be viewed as a fine art as well as interact with other verbal and visual art forms. The Pool Films productions, which were directed by Macpherson and often featured H. D. and Bryher as actors, experimented with narrative forms and explored the use of dramatic lighting and effects such as montage to represent emotional and psychological states.

Monkeys' Moon, a film featuring two of his and Bryher's pet monkeys, was thought to be lost until the Beinecke Library acquired a copy. in 2008. Some eighty years later, this film has been fully restored and digitized. - Film and description from Yale's Beinecke Library: http://bit.ly/xjlqn