Not Jaded

I've been reading through the brand-new issue of Paideuma, and enjoying it considerably. It's a journal, you probably already know, of "modern and contemporary poetry and poetics" published by The National Poetry Foundation in Orono, Maine (which publishes the great "Person & Poet" series of books, each one a treasure; and not to be confused with The Poetry Foundation, which publishes, you know, Poetry). The journal was founded by the legendary Burton Hatlen and Carroll F. Terrell, to whom any student of modernist poetry must be deeply indebted.

Paideuma, as the inside cover quotation from Ezra Pound reminds us, is a term used by Frobenius "for the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period.... The Paideuma is not the Zeitgeist, though I have no doubt many people will try to sink it in the latter romantic term.... I shall use Paideuma for the gristly roots of ideas that are in action."

Well, this new issue, Volume 36, has a fascinating look at EP's early poetry as collected in the abandoned "Hilda's Book;" a piece on the difficulty of the late Cantos; a fascinating look at Mary Barnard (known for her translations of Sappho, but interesting in her own right); a poignant investigation into Reznikoff's use of testimony in his documentary poem, Holocaust; a really nice piece on Ed Dorn; a fascinating look at what's in John Wiener's archives by Andrea Brady [with which I have a small quibble, about which more later]; a brief essay on Ted Berrigan's taking speed (!); and a thoughtful linking of Wordsworthian poetics and contemporary American poetry. There are reviews, too (including one of Peter Nicholls' superb book George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, about which I've blogged), and lovely obits for the late Omar Shakespear Pound and other folks who served modern poetry. Now I know that some folks will not find stuff like this as devour-worthy as I do, but hoo boy, it all turns me on!

One of the reviews is by Ron Bush - a great Pound scholar (who also, full disclosure, invited me to speak at Oxford a couple of times), and it's about Ezra Pound: Cantino postumi, edited by Massimo Bacigalupo. The book collects castoff fragments of Pound's Cantos "that have previously appeared in the back pages of Pound scholarship." (Some of which, by the way, appeared in the front pages of Poetry magazine, e.g., this ur-Canto.) The point of presenting these bits that didn't make the final cut is, as Ron explains, "not so much to change our understanding of the Cantos as to present passages of high literary quality," which the book "does in spades."

One specimen that Ron quotes seems to date from the end of February 1942, when EP placed jade on the body of his deceased father; the lines "are associated with Confucian rites for the dead." Here's a snippet, which I can't indent properly on this blogging platform:

To attract the spirits by the beauty of jade
that the music be an announcement to the air between
earth and heaven

and thrice go up to the roof corner to call the departed spirit
and for a woman that they lay out her party clothes
and in her boudoir
and three times call back her shade

As my readers will know, my own father recently passed away, so you can imagine how I felt reading these lines. Pound was always good on departed spirits; I urge everyone to listen to the impossibly moving audio of EP reading Robert Lowell's version of Dante's Inferno XV — “Bruno Latini” that I dug up at Harvard if you never have. I didn't think to leave a piece of jade with my dad, and he wasn't much of an Ezra Pound fan, but that gesture and these lines really made me sit in my chair and stair wistfully out the window. One lives for discoveries like this. And one therefore owes a debt of gratitude to scholars like those named in this post who make it possible for us to increase our critical understanding and appreciation of poetry. This includes folks like the current "editorial collective" at Paideuma who give us a bridge between scholarship and appreciation, when it comes to the modernists: thank you, Carla Billitteri, Steve Evans, Ben Friedlander, and Jennifer Moxley.

I know I'm too much of a poetry geekhead, but this is a kind of little-magazine publishing that just doesn't get recognized often enough.

In these dragon-ridden times

I recently posted a bemused link on my Facebook (tm) page to an article at The New Republic called "Zizek Strikes Again," in which the following exchange, between Slavoj Zizek and a writer for the Times of India, can be found:

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

S.Z.: It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

A lot of people will find it ridiculous to even imagine that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler? Are you serious when you say that?

S.Z.: Yes. Though Gandhi didn’t support killing, his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here. For me, that is a problem.

I guess you have no respect for Gandhi who is a tall figure in this country.

S.Z.: I respect him. But I don’t respect him for his peaceful ways, vegetarianism, etc. I don’t care about that.

...

I was struck that the responses to my posting that link to Kirsch's piece just disparaged Kirsch without addressing Zizek's point. So I wanted to think more about this.

As it happens, the fascinating Letters of Note website has just posted a letter from Gandhi written in 1925 to a correspondent in Kansas City who'd asked Ghandi why he hated the British. Gandhi composed it, the website explains,"just over a year after being released from prison - he had served two years of a six year sentence following his promotion of the Non-cooperation movement." I suppose it serves to bolster Zizek's point:


26th July 1925.

My dear young Friend,

I like your frank and sincere letter for which I thank you.

You seem to have taken it for granted that I hate the British. What makes you think so? I have hundreds of friends among the British people. I cannot love the Mussalmans and for that matter the Hindus if I hate the British. My love is not an exclusive affair. If I hate the British today, I would have to hate the Mohammedans tomorrow and the Hindus the day after. But what I do detest is the system of government that the British have set up in my country. It has almost brought the economic and moral ruin of the people of India. But just as I love my wife and children, in spite of their faults which are many, I love also the British in spite of the bad system for which they have unfortunately made themselves responsible. That love which is blind is no love, that love which shuts its eyes to the faults of loved ones is partial and even dangerous. You must write again if this letter does not satisfy you.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed, 'MKGandhi')

By another coincidence, I just got Michael Wood's new book, Yeats & Violence, which focuses on Yeats's troubled and troubling poem, "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." In this poem, Wood says, "Yeats both dramatizes frightful violence and suggests that violence may alter the world. It could wreck ideals certainly, but just as possibly might open the door to a new order." But Wood is given pause by a comment by his friend Graham Hough, who

... once said that like any sane person he was afraid of violence. I was struck by the phrase because I thought it was bold of him to say it. At that time, around 1968, many of us thought, or thought we thought, that some forms of violence were necessary, and only the fearful bourgeoisie condemned all violence - and even they were pretending, because they didn't condemn violence when it was on their side. [...] Graham Hough certainly knew what he was talking about, having been a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp - a series of camps, no doubt, since he was interned in Malaya and Siam from 1942 to 1945. And he wasn't comfortably condemning violence, just confessing his fear of it. A fear of violence wouldn't save you from violence, it might even throw you into it. It would wouldn't even save you from committing violence, in a rage or for some thought-out moral or political cause. But the fear would remain, whatever else went away. That fear wold be your sanity. If you were not afraid of violence, either you were not sane or you were not really talking about violence at all.

That sounds pretty sane to me. Anyway, Wood refers to, you gussed it, Zizek in his first chapter, "Violent Men" -

We need to recognize the symbolic and systemic violence Slavoj Zizek emphatically points to as well as well the violence he calls subjective, 'violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.' Walter Benjamin writes of 'legal violence," Rechtsgewalt, meaning the violence of the law itself, and even Hannah Arendt speaks of 'state-owned means of violence.

But, Wood argues, there is a problem - not solved by political theory - in tendentiously equating violence and force, as is effected in the word Gewalt. Equating these, even where the language allows for it,

... tends to inculpate authorities; a strong distinction between the two tends to put the blame on rogue individuals or agencies. But even this description evokes only a very broad rule of thumb, and I don't think we can settle the matter by handy definitions, as Arendt nobly tries to do. Language and usage have their own life, and will close and open gaps in all kinds of different ways. However, the fact that words are slippery doesn't mean they don't have meanings. [...] Let me suggest though that all the easier uses of the word 'violence,' whatever place they come from on the political spectrum, and including Yeats' own pronouncements later in his life, lose a great deal by blurring or softening the edginess the word may contain ...

Wood's "Yeats-inspired resistance" to the concept of legal or systemic violence "doesn't have to do with the validity of the idea but with the level of generality at which it operates."

Zizek says (in his book Violence): "there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation" with violence. "A direct verbal confrontation, he means," Wood adds, "and one that, precisely, seeks to demystify." He says:

What I want to suggest - or rather what my reading of Yeats suggests to me - is that there is a moment within violence that is also non-narrative and seemingly prior to the law and the human subject... Violence as Yeats helps us to understand it - whether personal, political, or apocalyptic - is always sudden and surprising, visible, unmistakable, inflicts or promises injury and is fundamentally uncontrollable.

As Wood says: "once days are [to use Yeats's figure from "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"] dragon-ridden, however we explain the arrival of the dragon, neither the past nor the future can be the same." The wreckage of ideals was real for Yeats, Wood says, "and the apocalypse was always just around the corner. Or when it came it turned out not to be the apocalypse. However, he continued, at least through the 1920s, to understand that the promise of violence was inseparable from everything that made you afraid of it."

I've come to no conclusions here, alas. Zizek has rightly called Yeats "arch-conservative," and I've always been repulsed by Yeats (as some kind of authority on violence) even as I have been ravished by his poems. It's haunting that Gandhi's letter and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" were composed at about the same time. We still have to wrestle with the work of each.

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Inspirational quote from the book: "The last thing I really want to see in human history is another uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor..."

Pictured: Dragon on the Ishtar Gate, ca. 600 BC

On John Ashbery's birthday

Here's wishing John Ashbery a very happy birthday!

It's also, however, Gerard Manley Hopkins' happy day, and so in honor of both I present...

THE TOP TEN THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT G.M. HOPKINS!

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1.) His nickname as a teenager at school was “Skin.”

1.a.) He was home schooled until he was about ten, and then almost got expelled from the school he eventually attended.

2.) The Hopkins family motto was Esse quan videri – “To be rather than to seem.”

3.) By the time Hopkins had begun writing poems seriously, the best selling poetry book of the century was John Keble’s The Christian Year, which went through 150 editions and sold 350,000 copies.

4.) When Hopkins saw Tintern Abbey, made famous by Wordsworth, he declared it to be merely “typical English workmanship.” OK, his actual words were “typical English work.”

5.) This is how close in time Hopkins is to us: his sister Katie lived until 1933 and his sister Millicent until 1946; his brother Lionel – an agnostic – lived till 1952, having never understood his brother’s path in life.

6.) Hopkins’ father Manley was also a poet, and dedicated one of his books to his friend, the comic- and picture-poet Thomas Hood.

7.) Hopkins’ father was in the insurance business, a self-made man who lifted himself from poverty to master French, Latin, and Greek on his own.

8.) Hopkins’ family had many ties to… Hawaii!

9.) Hopkins’ maternal grandfather was a doctor who got his medical training in London with Keats.

10.) Hopkins’ first published poem consisted of thirty-two lines in terza rima.


These facts gleaned from Paul Mariani’s biography, Gerard Manley Hopkins, published by Viking. The picture of Hopkins above is a self-portrait.

Hardly Any Versions of Pastoral

I just got back from the country - Sewanee, Tennessee, to be exact. At times, looking out at the gently sloping greenish hills of my native state, I felt far away from city life, which is what I've been used to since leaving the Mid South at the age of 17. Yet even in Sewanee, things are not really what you'd call pastoral. Despite the sparse mountain roads, befogged in the morning and filled with stinging bugs and beat-up cars by mid-day, you don't have to go far to find Interstate highways and their barnacle-like fast food places; Nashville's an hour and a half away by gas-guzzler, and you can fly round the world from the airport there. Even cottages like "Rebel's Rest" on the Sewanee campus (more properly: University of the South) have Wi-Fi now. We're connected almost everywhere!

On my visit, I brought just one book, a small volume by Erik Anderson: The Poetics of Trespass, published by Paul Vangelisti and Guy Bennett's Seismicity Editions (which I adore, as you know). There is no author's note in the book, so I had to surmise things about Anderson, not knowing much about him beforehand. The book itself undulates, is mildly melancholic but not self-advertising. The most direct thing we can tell about Anderson from its pages is that over the course of several weeks during February and March of 2007, he "walked out the letters of the word 'pastoral' across a span of twenty blocks in central Denver." The book contains his reflections of these tracings, and includes tiny maps of his progress. It does not contain what Anderson calls "a second, unwritten text [that] runs parallel to the present one." That unwritten text is actually not a text at all, but a photograph, which depicts the author "lying on a gurney in a busy hallway of what used to be called Denver General Hospital." His face "looks like someone has taken a hammer to it: my nose is off of its axis, pointing down to the left at a 45-degree angle. A large gash runs from the middle of my forehead down into my eye socket, which is nearly swollen shut. I am covered in my own blood. I have been crying." That's as much as we'll know about the incident, except for a very small bit of underreporting that occurs later in the book.

Sound pastoral?

The OED unsurprisingly connects the word with land or country used for pasture; in connection with shepherds and their occupation, the word goes back to the 1400s, making it one of the oldest in English. Even in the sense of literary or musical work pertaining to the shepherd's life it goes back to 1581, with Sidney's verse; amusingly, the first citation they give in this context is his line: "Is it then the Pastorall Poem which is misliked?" I've always disliked the pastoral poem, at least as we're taught it; and have assumed that the pastoral in poetry has been pretty dead since Empson took it on in his famous 1935 book, Some Versions of Pastoral: a difficult and frustrating book, at that. Or maybe dead, in poetry itself, since the "Cold Pastoral!" of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I'd be wrong, though; Northrop Frye in a quote that's older than I am, brings us up to at least the 1950s: "The pastoral of popular modern literature is the Western Story," etc., in his Anatomy of Criticism.

To linger with Empson for a moment: he says some interesting things. Writing of Gray's "Elegy," he says:

Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the "bourgeois" themselves do not like literature to have too much "bourgeois ideology." And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. Any anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement of this is certainly non-political because it is true in any society, and yet nearly all the great poetic statements of it are in a way "bourgeois" like this one; they suggest to many readers, though they do not say, that for the poor man things cannot be improved even in degree.

He goes on to argue that the pastoral is permanent, because, as he shows (you may not be convinced, however) it's not dependent on a system of class exploitation. But it's striking that the pastoral seems to have disappeared from Anglo-American poetry in less than a century's time: since Empson wrote those words. (I also like that "place" is implicitly wrenched away from complacency in this quotation.)

So - what a surprise to discover Anderson's odd poetical project! He says about it:

In no way have I set out to alter the physical landscape - to erase or elide any wounds - only to see whether, in the mind's vistas, corners could curve, city turn to countryside, punishment to pleasure, or whether these dualisms mean anything at all.

I confess I started reading the book feeling dubious: it seemed all-too-conceptual. Picturing a guy walking in p, a, s, t, o, r, a, l shapes through the streets and alleyways of Denver didn't entice me. But I was curious enough to read on, and found the book to be humane, haunting, sweet, humble, and - though discursive, of course - nicely constructed. None of those adjectives convey what the book does, which I'll leave to you to discover.

Some damage is done by extraction, but here's a bit from the letter "r," my favorite (!) in the book.

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As in the last letter of pastor, from the Latin, meaning shepherd.

Walking down the alley today, out of which space I made the spine of my "r," I saw a mattress and box spring set, baby blue, set upright against a dumpster, "Bed Bugs" in huge black spray-painted letters. My legs, psychosomatically, itched. Farther down the alley, a man in a gray Newport Beach t-shirt and light blue eyeglass frames was wielding a pickaxe like a lunatic, hacking the ice in the alley to pieces. Behind the former home of the Swedish Massage & Steam Baths, a man unzipped his pants and began to piss freely on the pavement.

Man, wrote Heidegger, is the shepherd of Being.

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[What I love about this bit is that Anderson says his legs itch, psychosomatically... and then he describes a man who seems to have no legs at all! And how to resist that last line? Here's more.]

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Sanity has long been equated with the country - in part because that's where the asylums are. It's all about a change in perspective, a fundamentally pastoral move...

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[Anderson then talks about As You Like It, pointing out that the characters' escape to the woods is "charming... but insidious." He notices that the "unhappiest part of the play is the pastoral one: the shepherd, Corin, when he meets the asylum-seekers, has nothing to offer them. He himself has nothing to eat."]

So who shepherds the shepherd? Is there asylum from the asylum?

Distance, as Whitman observed, avails not. Sanctuary turns back on itself, refuge refuses to remain inviolate, and any inviolability retains the seeds of our violation.

Writes Williams: "Man alone / is that creature who / cannot escape suffering / by flight."

[Followed by a discussion of James Schuyler's writing in a kind of asylum, the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan! Followed further by a rumination on a painting by Kitaj...]

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[In "t," Anderson argues that "words are inherently a retreat" - and thus "'to be a poet,' as Raymond Williams writes, 'is, ironically, to be a pastoral poet' - one who retreats from the world to its symbols, as though all of language were the field in which, like shepherds singing to their beloveds, the objects of our expressions are to be praised but never touched."]

Francis Ponge's poem, "Notes Toward a Shelfish," begins with a retreat into the form of the shell," which Ponge says he prefers "to the temple at Angkor, Saint-Maclou, or the Pyramids." The shell, he writes, is "more mysterious than these all to incontestable human products." But there's a strange turnabout in the poem: after wishing that people would produce such shells - products more suited to the size of their bodies - Ponge writes that he admires "above all the writers, because their monument is made of the human mollusk's true secretion, the thing best proportioned and adapted to his body, though inconceivably dissimilar in form: I mean LANGUAGE." Writing or speaking, Ponge implies, we're in our most "natural" state: language is always already pastoral.

[...]

Language is such a shell. Distrust it though we may, once lived in - once cared for, cultivated, and loved - it will always bear the marks of our existence. No matter how far we run to hide from our names - our own or of things - our responsibility follows us. Spectral presences stalk us in words as in works. Because there is a kind of spell in a seashell, a stamp left on the made, and we operate under that spell. It is to those presences that our debts - which are our distances - must be paid.

***

[End of quotations.]

I took this lovely book with me to the landlocked and seashell-less country down in Tennessee where, of course, I didn't escape anything, and where, as it happened, I met with people who fool with language to write poems, stories, plays, and essays. This book was excellent and sane company. It will always stay with me. And though I don't find much of the pastoral in contemporary poetry, this book brings it back to life for me in a way no other has.

Anger

American poetry folks can get pretty darn angry: at rejection, at neglect of their work, at each other, at differences in taste, and/or (which may be the same thing) "poetics." All I have to do is mention the old Harriet, and you'll get what I mean. Is this good (poets care!) or bad (they're tantrum-throwers & mudslingers)?

Keith Farnish, in an essay online at Guernica (originally at Chelsea Green) called "Anger Is Good" lucidly points out that "What makes us angry is when the things we value are threatened. This is human nature: it is survival, and without this response we are little more than machines." (I realize that some poets will bridle at the dismissal of machines here, but you get what he means.)

Here's how anger shakes out for him:

Destructive Anger doesn’t achieve anything useful, and can sometimes make things worse than they already are. Interestingly, this means that the vast majority of protest marches, rallies and other symbolic events, if fuelled by anger, are destructive. Constructive Anger, on the other hand, does achieve something useful—even if it may not be exactly what was originally intended.

Of course, you'd have to define "useful," and who'd agree about that? But the distinction he makes is worth thinking about, especially the part about making things "worse than they already are." For this reason, I'm not sure why he says: "When quotes like Seneca’s 'The best cure for anger is delay" ... are seen as a way of reasoning against one of our most powerful instinctive urges, then we clearly have lost sense of what it means to be human." That Seneca quote is considerably more nuanced and mordant than Farnish seems to credit. Anyway, he's really trying to get people to rethink the idea that anger is bad, that we need self-help books to help us get over it, because

angry people understand that there is a better way to live. The angry people are different: they have the potential to change things because they do not meekly accept the circumstances that civilization has forced upon them.

I'd wish for more subtlety, much as I believe this. Just because people don't find ways to change things doesn't mean they "meekly accept" the circumstances that are - as he acknowledges himself - "forced upon them." There are people who are quite powerless; and so others may be obliged to help them, or at least to speak for them. By the same token, however, there can be hubris and arrogance in presuming to speak for somebody else, in judging them to be weak.

As it happens, another piece about anger appeared recently in The New Republic - Ruth Franklin's "You Wouldn't Like Her Angry." How "unusual it is for poets, and women poets in particular," she writes, "to express anger."

To the extent that such things can be generalized about, there is a distinct style of contemporary American poetry that tends not to range dramatically in mood. For the most part it is serious, elegiac, wistful, perhaps with a sideline of dark humor. It coolly offers images and observations; it does not judge or rabble-rouse or incite revolution. This is why the work of Sylvia Plath still feels incendiary today: not only for its brilliance but because its brilliance cannot contain its fury. “I eat men like air”—when was the last time you read a line like that in The New Yorker?

Even, presumably, in Plath's day such lines were rare; and anyway, I'm not sure the New Yorker's in the revolution business (wouldn't go well with the ads), but the better question is the one about gender roles. I wish the piece had explored them more deeply (there's an excursus about Joan Rivers, instead), and not conflated being "cruel" with being angry (which is where Farnish comes in handy), but there you have it.

Anyhow, I find plenty of constructive anger in contemporary poems, which is better than finding destructive anger among poets... and so we come full circle. And yet...

Francis Bacon covered anger nicely a billion years ago; "Be angry," he says, "but sin not." You can read his essay on it here. Montaigne's essay on the subject is worth a look, too: "Saying is a different thing from doing; we are to consider the sermon apart and the preacher apart;" he distinguishes beween anger (the constructive kind) and scolding.

I don't know whether the meek will inherit the earth (let's hope the angry people make sure that planet will be in good enough shape to leave to others, no matter who they are), but perhaps there's also room for the gentle. Another quote Farnish probably wouldn't care for comes from that Bacon essay: "Whosoever is out of patience, is out of possession of his soul." As David Shapiro wrote in his own response - neither quiet, nor meek - to these articles:

when I hear an angry voice I immediately
feel guilty, as if we had gone to Tuscany and left others
'with biology textbooks--
one drop of oil and the animal dies in the arms of Blake


Pictured: The Wrath of Achilles

Raise the bar on our poetic rhetoric!

From an essay by Ange Mlinko, on "The Answer," by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea:

E-mail, texting, IM: thanks to the Internet, we compose messages to each other as spontaneously as our parents picked up the telephone. Among the literate classes of Europe, poetry used to be a kind of social media too. Poetry back then worked in ways similar to ancient Japanese poetry, which, as Sei Shonagon’s 10th-century Pillow Book tells us, involved courtiers “texting” poems to each other, albeit on exquisite paper. Like Japan’s court poetry, English poetry in the early 18th century, the so-called Augustan Age, flourished as a kind of messaging between members of a social circle. But, informed by the rigors of metrical and rhetorical convention, it sparkled in a way that our missives—texts written in haste, or comments dashed off in high dudgeon—often do not. These poems were in the form of “epistolary verse,” or letter-poems, and they were both public and private displays of alliance and conflict. Writing artfully to provide amusement for friends with good taste, the epistolary poets also regarded their high style as a persuasive tactic.

[...]

Without denying the fact that some writers are more talented than others—and without exiling the notions of genius or mastery—it is possible to see the highly networked milieu of English verse at this time as a social practice rather than a spiritual one—a precursor to our own secular, highly networked times.

We might learn something, as well, from the forms these poets’ messages took. Their banter was charged with ironies but always civil; the rules of metrics and the bounds of discourse played their part in defusing hard feelings. [...] But the conventions of Augustan poetry sublimated emotion into a contest of wits, so what could have been a petty complaint resulted in works that have instead lasted centuries. While I’m not suggesting that contemporary flame wars be conducted in epistolary rhyming hexameters, it’s impossible to read the repartee between Finch and Pope and not feel pressed to raise the bar on our own poetic rhetoric.

(Full text here.)

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The wrong reasons to like a poem:

"... because they seem to suit a critic’s ideological predilections or theoretical hobby-horse, say, or because they illustrate (and affirm) something already known by the reader."

-- Adam Phillips (characterizing Christopher Ricks's position; in the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n14/adam-phillips/misgivings )

Taking away the burden

"¡Pobre Miguel Hernández! Otro caso de esos en que uno ha tenido que dar por muerto y resucitar luego a una persona, para acabar en lo peor. Todo idiota, idiota. ¿Por qué había de morir ese muchacho, noblote y generoso, en una cárcel, cruelmente ayudado a morir, por no decir asesinado, por sus prójimos? Te diré que si el franquismo durante la guerra se me hizo odioso más se me está haciendo en la paz. Porque en esa política persecutoria y vindicativa, es fría infamia, mala entraña, nada más. Y ese mequetrefe [Franco] que se titula el general crisitiano, aún anda cortejado y halagado por unos y por otros, en estos meses."

-- Pedro Salinas, on hearing of the death of the poet Miguel Hernández

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Miguel Hernández – whose life began in poverty and ended in tragedy – wrote his best known poetry while serving time in prison for infractions against the Franco-era fascist government. Yet the record may soon be set straight for a poet who is as revered among readers of Spanish poetry as are Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca. More from The Independent:

"Miguel Hernández died at 32 in prison in 1942, after a death sentence for his left-wing sympathies was commuted to 30 years. Now the poet’s family want his supposed crime wiped from the records. In a law suit filed this week in the Spanish Supreme Court they ask for his guilty verdict to be annulled. In March, the family had a posthumous 'declaration of reparation' from the Spanish government. But they are not satisfied. 'We want something more, that they void the death sentence, so we can take away that burden,' his daughter-in-law, Lucía Izquierdo, said. 'That’s why we are asking that justice be served, that they hand down a ruling of innocent.'"

Lucía Izquierdo was very kind to me when I undertook my translations of the poet, and she's remained devoted to his legacy. I hope that the family, and justice, prevail in this, the poet's centennial year.

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I thought of Hernández when I read this lovely recent proclamation by David Shapiro:


you have the right to remain silent
the right to write poetry in any way you want,
gratuitous act, gratuitous melody, the right to be humorous to the end, you have the right to sing as long or longer than 4 minutes 33 seconds, right to build a dream bridge between Deal and Lisbon,
you have the right to a defense attorney even against God, you have the right to
bear your children in your arms,

On CFBs (Comment Field Bullies)

Comment Field Bullies --

you mean the most powerful poets in this country of course? Tell them
there are billions of galaxies and that implies
at least one other style per galaxy, one other kind of music per star, oh
stars with hair! New ways to dance. Black Hole Bullies. Take them
to an planetarium and release them in the dark. And a hundred
billion make cartoons and comics and prefer Gary to Dante. Agreed!
Reading blogs feels like being given to a mad psychoanalyst;
writing blogs is definitely like being a successful theologian.
Eliot of dogmas would find our wars completely legible and significant.
And would have us live work suffer and die in his dogmas. Oh!

-- David Shapiro

Poetry Corner(ed), Bulldog Edition

The Daily Mirror has a regular feature in which each week British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy "selects a verse for women and discusses its meaning." From this week's:

"The horizon charcoals; rain smacks Virgo's lipstick onto the collar of the path till blossom sweeps the deck like the shredded chiffon train of Penelope's Oscar-carpet winning gown - that expensive-looking bath towel which this old 'rest of the year dull' shrub has just let drop."

Read more of this discussion here!

Oh, and get your free copy of the new Prince album 20TEN exclusive with the Daily Mirror on Saturday 10 July; details here.

In other news....

Wordsworth's library had 43 books of poetry... but 79 "books of amusement." Get the low-down here.

A government-watchdog website says the poetry = pork! Full squeal here...

The ten most-used phrases in rejections notes? The Chicago Tribune has the scoop here.

Well-paid executive criticised for writing poem about evils of money; shocking story here.

Check out " The Love Song of J. Alfred Well-Pruned Hedges," aka, Eliot's teenage-years home, right cheer.

Speaking of T.S.E., if you're gonna quote him, it'll cost ya. Full story in, natch, the Wall Street Journal!

NEWS THAT STAYS NEWS:

Via John Latta, Berryman in the April 1949 Partisan Review:

All the ambitious poetry of the last six hundred years is much less “original” than any but a few of its readers ever realize. A staggering quantity of it has direct sources, even verbal sources, in other poetry, history, philosophy, theology, prose of all kinds. Even the word “original” in this sense we find first in Dryden, and the sense was not normalized till the midcentury following. . . . Poetry is a palimpsest. . . . but our literary criticism, if at its best it knows all this well enough, even at its best is inclined to forget it and to act as if originality were not regularly a matter of degree in works where it is worth assessing at all. A difficulty is that modern critics spend much of their time in the perusal of writing that really is more or less original, and negligible.

Pictured: A man who was evidently turned into a statue by reading too much daily news.

Neglectorinos no more!

First and foremost, my hero (and D.S. forebear at Partisan Review), Delmore Schwartz. Audio of him exists, but isn't easy to come by. The Poetry Foundation website now counts him among the Essential American Poets, so... neglectorino no more? Click here for a listen.

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I don't believe in writing groups (just speaking for myself, not you!), but when some years ago my talented pals Daniel Bosch and Jenny Barber started attending one at Harvard - presided over by my Poetry Room predecessor, the legendary Stratis Haviaras -well, I went, anyway. It drove me nuts! But an enduring fascination was its most difficult, infuriating, and brilliant longtime member, Paul Hannigan. I've thought about him lots through the years - he died in 2000 - and often pull out his marvellous book, Laughing. Well, some of us burble about our neglectorinos, but other folks do some actual work on their behalf! And so I'm pleased and astonished to find a comprehensive and thoughtful piece on Hannigan by Adam Golaski, "Absent Friends: This is Not Sad; This is Not Funny," over at Open Letters Monthly; check it out here. A sample of Hannigan's poetry:

PEOPLE, BE GOOD

was Ruskin’s first sermon,
Carlyle preached silence
In forty volumes.

Libraries creek and groan,
The beds where monsters
Are bred. This is the
Bela Bartok Memorial Shopping Center

And this is a whole tongue
Brown and green from the
Dirt and grass it licked and ate.

And here’s a sheep’s head.
Baa. And there, the Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart Barbershop.

People, be good.
Just you try it.
How would you begin?

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Speaking of when I was at Harvard... We had (literally) closets full of poetry-related treasures to sort through. One day back in about 2000 or so, I disgorged a crisp-looking red-jacketed book from a pile of books awaiting their curatorial fate: it was Dunstan Thompson's Poems 1950-1974, inscribed "For Stratis Haviaras, with all good wishes from the author's editor and executor, P.T., 14th February 1986." Intrigued, I found that the poems in the book were unusual, haunted, and haunting. It wasn't easy to find out much about the poet. Nevertheless, some time later, I was able to locate his earlier books, which were, to my mind, even more interesting. Recently, Thompson's work was also discovered by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer, who have now (though the poet did not want his early work reprinted) thoughtfully selected his poems and gathered essays about him in Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master, published in the new Pleiades Press "Unsung Masters" series. Ron Silliman calls it "one of the more important books of 2010." Neglectorino no more!

The book's introduction, by the way, narrates a funny and outrageous feud between Thompson and an editor of Poetry. When he was 22, Thompson along with Harry Brown started up a literary magazine called Vice Versa, which was introduced by a proclamation that "this magazine shall be a means to attack the smugness, the sterility, the death-in-life which disgrace the literary journals of America." The magazine called Berryman "quite competent when it comes to writing four and five stress iambic lines," but condemned William Carlos Williams as a "tireless fake" and Louis MacNeice as a "clever fraud." An attack on Poetry referred to it as "very much like Hamlet's father. It is dead, and yet it walks..." And when Poetry's editor responded angrily, Vice Versa wrote up the experience as "like having a dead maiden aunt stand up in her coffin and do a jig. ... Go back and lie down, maiden aunt. You wouldn't want someone to drive a stake through your heart, would you?"

Well, Thompson's first collection, Poems, came out in 1943, and despite the feuding, Poetry praised it (The Nation, however, called Thompson the author of "some very bad poetry... self indulgent and full of private symbols."). The book, along with a second, Lament for the Sleepwalker, remain fascinating, and indeed have been unjustly neglected. Later in life, for reasons Prufer and Powell's book explains, Thompson renounced these, and only wanted the later red-book poems to represent his work; the first two books remain out of print, but if you act quick, you can still obtain Poems 1950-1974; read the Pleiades collection to find out how!

Hardly anybody escapes Clive James's notice, and I should add that Clive wrote about Thompson for Poetry in our summer double-issue last year - unaware of any plans for a new book; read his piece here.

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Finally: I have not forgotten about Jonathan Price, another neglectorino about whom I've promised to blog. His book, Everything Must Go, is even harder to find than Thompsons' - however, a selection has just appeared in Christopher Ricks's new anthology, Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets British and American, Oxford 2004-2009, which includes poems by yours truly... so I'll hold off a bit on that!

Oh, and here's a major neglectorina: Nelly Sachs.

Aren't we all survivors?

Aren’t we all survivors? A friend’s betrayal? A father’s death? A bad breakup with a lover? Politics, philosophy, human rights can find better spokesmen than poets. There are more appropriate genres for that. Pushkin once said: “Poetry, God, forgive me, must be a little silly. I sign under this phrase with ink, not with blood.”

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Sense of loss, of alienation? Between these two evils lies a battlefield on which we are very much alike. The earlier we poets realize it, the better. As a poet I’m more interested in individual flaws.

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It’s not philosophy, but literature (not only poetry, fiction too) that provides the best language for a conversation about a modern man and modernity in general. It’s the only genre that makes room for and actually benefits from our contradictions and personal flaws.

Contradictions and personal flaws are what make us recognizable, aren’t they?

As a uniformed herd we are pretty boring, but if you pull us by the hair out of our flock and shake us, we can actually surprise. The question is: who is going to take on the task of pulling one? That’s when professional addiction comes in handy.

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I don’t care about translation. Great poetry is untranslatable, and I don’t have the recipe for making a poet globally known. I wish people had the time and means (reading poetry demands certain leisure) to read a poet that lives next door to them.

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When we are young, it’s our passions that take command of us; we follow them fearlessly and sometimes win, because passions know shortcuts. That’s been good enough for many years. Now it’s experience and lots of thinking that I want to guide me and guard me. No more haste. In poetry hastiness is inappropriate. A lyrical poem is a small thing that can travel a long way. I slow myself down; I measure and weigh it in the palm again and again. Here’s my only chance, I tell myself. I have one arrow, so it better be perfect.

-- Katia Kapovich, full text here

Is poetry blogging dead, redux

I don’t even read blogs anymore, really—because when I finish a post that someone took the time to write (maybe it’s not brilliant—maybe it’s too brilliant and I don’t understand a word of it) up pop the CFBs [Comment Field Bullies], trashing the joint like rednecks at a state park: Carving their names into trees, kicking empty beer bottles in the lake, tossing Aquanet cans in the camp fire, and hollering loud enough to scare the animals away. They’re exactly the kind of Yahoos I want to avoid when I have a moment to catch up on the news in Poetryland.

-- Jennifer L. Knox; read full text here.

Pictured: Typical poetry blog comment box

The PLOTUS and Us

I was wondering what Ron Silliman would say about the appointment of W.S. Merwin as PLOTUS, and today you can read it on his blog. He makes some really good points, as you'd expect, viz -

"... if the appointment of the PLOTUS is not about the range of what’s possible in American verse, it still serves a function, the creation of a public advocate for poetry. In this regard, one would have to say that Kay Ryan has been a superb Poet Laureate, perhaps not as great in the role as was Robert Hass, but quite conceivably second only to him. Hass proved an advocate for the environment as well as for poetry and left behind a column in the Washington Post, the most visible public occasion for poetry in a generation, which has only recently disappeared. Since she was yanked out of the relative obscurity of the College of Marin, Ryan has seemed to be everywhere, and has constantly spoken up for poetry without any particular agenda as to what kind. That strikes me as exactly what the laureate should be doing. Kay Ryan got it right."

(Digression: Ron doesn't pretend to care for Merwin's work, and uses Lowell as a bludgeon against it. But blaming Lowell for the SoQ is, in principle, like blaming WCW or Whitman for bad free verse; more importantly, it makes no sense because it assumes resemblances between Lowell's and Merwin's work, which are few. Nor was Merwin in any sense a student of Lowell's. Rather, at the age of 18 he sought out Ezra Pound (as Lowell did, too, as a teenager!), and it was Pound who gave him the first advice about poetry that he took; he studied with John Berryman, who doesn't strike me as SoQ (or is he?). And though I get the knock on formalism, Merwin's a lot less formalistic than, say, Richard Wilbur - and come on, even Lowell famously gave up his line-endings very early on. But that's just my pet peeve... Incidentally, Merwin's committment to the ecological arguably equals or exceeds Hass's.)

Ron's larger point about the aesthetics that govern the choices made for the post seems to me undeniable. As he points out, poets "who have never been named to the post include the late George Oppen, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder..." And he asks us to "imagine, if you will, what this same post might look like in the hands of Juliana Spahr, Linh Dinh, or Charles Bernstein, Bob Holman, Stacy Szymaszek, Rodrigo Toscano, Geof Huth or Camille Dungy. Or if the post was shared, say, by Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy. Or if the laureate had a name like Prageet Sharma, Mytili Jagannathan or K. Silem Mohammad." But would poets such as these even want or accept a ceremonial post?

I really like how Ron contrasts Merwin's translation of The Poem of the Cid against Paul Blackburn’s of the same poem "as evidence as to why & how Blackburn was a great writer." I absolutely agree about Blackburn (actually, the body of his work altogether is better evidence than just the Cid), but the fact that it's impossible to imagine him having been a PLOTUS means something... What?

I've often been struck by the incredible difference between the two poetry best seller lists on the Poetry Foundation website. The "contemporary" list, which consists mostly of trade books, has seldom lacked the names of poets such as Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Robert Hass, Kay Ryan, Charles Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, and yes... W.S. Merwin! Obviously, a lotta people are reading these poets. The other list, though - the "small press" list - looks more familiar to folks who write, read, edit, and blather about poetry day to day. And it's also more diverse, more changing, and less predictable: some names on it just now are John Murillo, Bhanu Kapil, John Beer, Ayane Kawata, Alice Notley (though she's a small press list perennial), Graham Foust, and Elizabeth Arnold. Clearly, there are distinct worlds of American poetry that just don't get through to each other: different audiences, differing ways of thinking about how poetry ought to be written.

(Another digression: I already know what Bill Knott will say about all this - here's an example from the old Harriet:

"... even among the damned there are divisions . . . there are even (and it’s almost unbelievable that they can exist) some poets who want to succeed! who want their poetry to be read! who actually try to write poetry that is accessible and can reach an audience!—

what traitors these are to their class—(jeez, if they didn’t want to be failures, why did they become poets!)—

no wonder all the normal (i.e. unsuccessful) poets hate the Judas Billy Collins and the quisling Mary Oliver . . ."

But for me that's a plate of red herrings, because...)

There are all kinds of poems and all kinds of readers, and nobody's gonna convince me that this is a bad thing. Nor do I think we need to hybridize poetry. Yet maybe we can hybridize readers. When Ron says: "What a distance we still have to travel," I think, in my Pollyanna way, that the distance to travel is for each of us to move in the direction of the other. (And I'm not capitalizing "other," 'cos when you capitalize the other, as Jean Shepherd once pointed out, bad things happen.) I've read work by everybody named in Ron's post and in this one, and it hasn't hurt me one little bit. So maybe a good thing would be for each PLOTUS to use the pulpit to get the word out about the diversity of American poetry, which includes Ron's own substantial body of work. How cool it would be for the PLOTUS at any given moment to turn folks onto the likes of Eigner, Blackburn, Oppen, Armantrout, and Notley as well as, yes, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop? Ron is right and generous to note that Merwin isn't, thankfully, a bully - but maybe we need a PLOTUS to avail him- or herself of the bully pulpit on behalf of the varieties of American poetry. I always get a kick in the pants for espousing the eclectic, but if appreciating and nurturing the many conflicting textures of our poetry isn't consistent with the best dreams we can have for this country overall, then what is?

Pictured: A female American plotus.

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Via rob mclennan's blog:

Sarah Manguso: "Abstract arguments about genre are boring—and what’s more, those arguments reek of eugenics and fear. No pure forms exist. And I wish everyone would stop telling me about the 'new' 'hybrid' writing. Everything is already a hybrid. In any case, I think books belong to their authors, not to genres. Many writers get marketed in more than one genre, but readers just think, Look, here is another book by so-and-so, don’t they?"

(“David Shields in conversation with Sarah Manguso,” The Believer, June 2010)

Lynda Barry on dumb-ass spiders and what poetry smells like!

Click here to watch Lynda Barry sing Emily Dickinson, recite haiku, and explain how poetry smells (video from Poetry)

-&-

Then read Lynda Barry's essay, "Poetry Is a Dumb-Ass Spider" here.

A Sonnet a Minute

A Sonnet a Minute

It seems strange to write or review a book called The Art of the Sonnet without mentioning Raymond Queneau, who, in addition to his other achievements, was the most prolific sonnet-writer ever (LRB, 24 June). The ten sonnets in his Cent mille milliards de poèmes all have the same rhyme scheme and scansion so that lines from any sonnet are interchangeable with the corresponding lines of any of the others. The pages of the Gallimard edition are cut between the lines so that they can be moved to make any of the 10¹⁴ different combinations. Queneau calculated that at a rate of a sonnet a minute (45 seconds to read the sonnet and 15 seconds to move the lines) all day every day, it would take 190,258,751 years (more or less) to read them all.

Mark Etherton
London W2

-- Letter to the Editor, London Review of Books, 8 July 2010

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Speaking of the LRB, here's a stanza from one of two poems by John Ashbery in the issue referenced above:

Would I lie to you? I don’t know what to say to you,
and the season is coming into season just now
with long-awaited words from back when we were
friends and still are, of course, but the tides
pursue their course each day. Perturbing elements
listen in the wings, which are coming apart at the seams.
Is it all doggerel and folderol? A cracked knowledge?
Monkey journalism?