On overspending cultural capital

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Lorin Stein:

"There is a tendency for the big institutions to try to evangelize and give big prizes to under-known writers or to use prizes to bring writers into the public view. And I think that’s often a mistake because they may be overspending their cultural capital."

Pictured: The remnants of a big institution

Muthologos: Charles Olson and the Paris Review interviews

For many days now, social networkers have been applauding Lorin Stein and the new regime of The Paris Review for making all of the famed PR interviews, generated by previous incarnations of the journal, available for free online.  I imagine most people realize the way in which these interviews were constructed; they are not straightforward sit-down, real-time interviews. As Mr. Stein recently explained the process:

"In the first place, the method is slow. My interview with Jonathan Lethem took a couple of weeks, with reading assignments before each session. Joshua Pashman's interview with Norman Rush, coming out in the September issue, took three years, eight sessions, and 500 pages of transcript. (Later boiled down to 33 pages in print.)

In the second place, the interviews are collaborative. After our interns type up the transcripts, the interviewer and subject sit down and edit them—together. Often they rewrite the questions and answers completely. When Frederick Seidel interviewed Robert Lowell, the tape recorder didn't work: Fred wrote up the whole thing from memory, then gave it to Lowell to revise."

The interviews are terrific, as far as such things go (see here for my reservations about interviews, generally) but I suppose we're obliged to take them with a few grains of salt.  Mr. Stein explains that "When writers have total control, George [Plimpton] realized, they feel safe. And when they feel safe they open up."  But there's another, fascinating, side of that coin.

Talonbooks has just issued a new and completely revised edition of Charles Olson's Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, edited by famed Olson scholar, Ralph Maud - picking up where the book's standard-setting earlier editor, George Butterick, left off.  The book includes Olson's extremely peculiar Paris Review interview, conducted by Gerard Malanga, which can be read in its first-published form here.  As it appeared in the magazine, it makes for uncomfortable reading.  But here's what Maud says of it in a note to the version he prints in the new collection:

"It was very gratifying to be able to get a proper version of this interview, or kitchen discussion, into print in Muthologos.  The original attempt published in the Paris Review 40 (1970) was totally unsatisfactory (there is nothing at all to recommend it).  Unfortunately, that version with all its flaws has been included in the Paris Review omnibus volume, Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library, 1999), extending to a new readership this old defamation of the poet.

The [original] Muthologos version was made possible by my receiving four tapes through the good offices of Jeremy Prynne.  Two of the participants, Harvey Brown and Gerrit Lansing, listened through the tapes with me and elucidated many difficulties.  Many remained, and the Muthologos version chose to pass them silently by rather than burden the reader with too many uncertainties.  More digging has been done since then over the years, so the present transcription is much augmented.  In addition, in 1992, Charles Watts of the Simon Fraser Contemporary Literation [sic] Collection became alerted to the fact that a fifth tape had been deposited by Malanga at Texas; he made a trip there and transcribed the tale for the Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 2 (June 1993).  His text appears [in this new edition of Muthologos] edited to conform to the format of the rest of the volume."

The interview - more a long chat session - as transcribed in Muthologos remains a strange and challenging read.  But we can be thankful for the editorial work done here to make restorations and corrections to the transcript.  This new edition is lovely, essential for anybody interested in Olson; and especially revealing to read in juxtaposition with the Paris Review interviews now available online.

*

MALANGA: You can't want to see the future on this tape.

OLSON: Oh yes, I can, because I can talk right to the tape right now, because, like that sleeper, I'm very fresh, I just woke up.

[snippet of deleted part of interview]

Pictured: Olson's Poetry magazine author photo, ca. 1962

Lucky Strikes and other explanations

I recently blogged about Richard Sieburth's superb New Selected Poems and Translations of Ezra Pound, just out from New Directions. It hit the stores this week, and so to celebrate, here's my favorite fun fact about EP, which I gleaned from it: Pound's editor at Farrar and Rinehart in 1933 was, of all people, Ogden Nash! Alas, sales were lousy, so Pound didn't last long there.

Sieburth is EP's most diligent editor, and among this volume's many virtues is the inclusion of John Berryman's rejected introduction to ND's 1949 Selected Poems; as Sieburth explains -

Berryman was primarily responsible for the choice of the shorter poems, which emphasized Pound's early lyrics and dramatic monologues. [...] Pound objected to Berryman's initial selections from the Pisan Cantos as "hash" and "just a mess of snippets" - which [James] Laughlin rectified by "adding some fat on the sides of the bones." But the long and scholarly introduction that Berryman had written for the volume (in which he argued that all of Pound's poetry was essentially autobiographical in inspiration, comparing the Cantos to Wordsworth's Prelude) was immediately rejected by both publisher and poet: the former felt that it was too specifically aimed at a "special high brow audience," while the latter dismissed Berryman's piece as "a lot of damn argument mostly with 2nd/rate critics," certainly "NOT a preface," and certainly "NOT whetting anyone's appetite for the text." The introduction was discreetly relegated by Berryman to the pages of Partisan Review.

Who did EP suggest as a replacement? None other than Rolfe Humphries, who'd praised the Pisan cantos in The Nation. (I suppose most today know him as a translator of Ovid.)  But, as Sieburth continues the tale -

This too fell upon Pound's disfavor, Humphries having insisted on making it clear in his otherwise very laudatory and accessible introduction that while he admired Pound's poetry, he could in no way condone "the anti-Semitic remarks that can be found, if not in this selection, here and there in the Cantos."

Humphries tried to soften his intro somewhat - while refusing to remove the term "anti-Semitic" - but failed to please either Laughlin or Pound, who was incited to parody as well as self-parody: "I believe E.P. to be a complete skunk when not writing poetry, I believe all his historico political ideas to be utter hog-wash, but I have not read a line of his writings on these subjects, all of which bore me to death, and I have no intention of doing so."  To Laughlin, Pound wrote, "there will be no allusion to jews or to mental condition or the whole deal is off."

In the end, Pound got Laughlin to kill this intro, too, and the rest is history, of a delusional sort, you might say; the earlier edition of the ND selected, in print for many years, appeared with no further annotation than EP's one-page "autobiography," which Sieburth aptly describes as "part curriculum vitae, part legal brief for the defense he was never allowed to mount [against charges of treason] because judged non compos mentis."

We don't get Humphries's intro, but we do get T.S. Eliot's, used in the Faber selected, a typically fascinating and slightly perverse document in its own right, and, as I mentioned, Berryman's. Here's JB's opening salvo, classic Berryman:

Since Pound has been for several generations now one of the most famous of living poets, it may occasion surprise that an introduction to his poetry [...] should be thought necessary at all. It may, but I doubt that it will. Not much candour is wanted for the observation that, though he is famous and his poetry is famous, his poetry is not familiar, that serious readers as a class have relinquished even the imperfect hold they had upon it fifteen years ago and regard it at present either with hostility or with indifference. The situation is awkward for the critic. Commonly, when the object of criticism is at once celebrated, unfamiliar, and odious, it is also remote in time; the inquiry touches no current or recent passion. Our case is as different as possible from the enviable condition.

. . . In a few years no one will remember the buffo.
No one will remember the trivial parts of me,
The comic detail will be absent.

After thirty-five years neither comic nor tragic detail is absent. Whatever the critic may wish to say of the poetry runs the risk of being misunderstood as of the poet; one encounters eager preconceptions; and no disclaimer is likely to have effect. I make, however, no disclaimer yet. Let us only proceed slowly - remembering that it is the business of criticism to offer explanations - toward the matter of hostility, beginning with the matter of indifference.

You can almost see Pound's face turning purple on reading such a document as this!

Though Berryman's piece was reprinted in The Freedom of the Poet, I've seldom encountered any mention of it; as for the Humphries, it is reproduced by Hugh Witemeyer in a must-read essay about the making of the selected poems, and as Witemeyer says, Humphries's introduction runs the gamut from Nietzsche to a Lucky Strike ad.

As ever with EP, neither comic nor tragic detail is far from his reader's mind. Sieburth's selection is wonderful and illuminating. It'll be fun to see what reevaluations ensue.

Pictured: One of the sheets of toilet paper on which Pound started the Pisan cantos

It's an ill wind that blows no ill!

If you're going to be a moralist, keep in mind that the business of moralizing leads, by logical extension, to the renunciation of poetry. The brilliant queen of renunciation in poetry was Laura (Riding) Jackson. In the extrapolated version of her unfinished opus, The Failure of Poetry, there's a great and extremely provocative dismissal of Lowell. Keenly prefiguring Adam Kirsch's revaluation of R.T.S.L.'s Day by Day ("If Lowell had lived longer, "Day by Day" might now look like a modest, transitional work, a prelude rather than a conclusion. As it is, Lowell's last book stands as the last word in his achievement--but not the last word on it."), and comprehending more acutely than he does the implications of poetic preludes, she remarks, "His poetic turn-out is a flow of formalized loquacity. Each example suggests that no one doubt that there will be more, and more..." (209)

More importantly, she observes that everyone "in" poetry is in "the business of vanity," vanity in our time becoming the "norm for poetic literary performance," with "literary performance of the individual self as the universal cause." She says that this kind of performance - producing things that are "rhetorically identifiable as poems" (210) - is "a phenomenon of the dissipation of moral sensibility--in its making, and in its standing as something intellectually, literarily, and, even, spiritually notable." This is so because it means that by extension "human beings are not creatures unto themselves except by self-depravement." We use poetry, and nothing, to paraphrase her, disturbs our aplomb. She quotes Lowell on Berryman and himself: "We both used the language as if we made it." But: "No one can use the language as if he made it: what he does in treating it as his creation is to make what is a common possession an instrument of vanity." (211)

All is, as the words we've inherited us tell us, vanity...

*

Speaking of moralizing -

"Causistry justifies everything, but what can one do in the case when no one pays attention to a poet unless there is a scandal. Maritain observes that to refuse to use force, as of Gandhi, is to deny the fact that one has a body. The same kind of justification probably works for an editor, who prints insufficient work for the sake of all that is sufficient and is going to be so."

- Delmore Schwartz to John Berryman, May 29, 1939, from Partisan Review on deciding to print a poem of JB's that he found "vulgar" but accepted, anyway.

Pictured: Philippe Derome's "Cherry tart vanitas" 1978, oil on canvas

[Addendum-de-dum: Henry Gould responded: "Milton, Chaucer, Langland, Donne, Herbert, Spenser, Dante, the Psalmist et al. might disagree..." To which I riposted disingenuously: "There are some real renunciations in that bunch, notwithstanding which one could locate a tongue in a cheek, were one to seek it. One could also weed out the would-be moralizers/poetasters from the poets, though Riding is surely right about their hubris and fallibilty."

archypoetics

Poetry Is...

Poetry is the chinking of a couple of unexpected coins in the shabby pocket of life.

Poetry is a young deity who used to shake dice with Kit Marlowe to see who should pay for the next round.

Poetry is a rather giddy young blighter Rudyard Kipling used to know.

i could tell you what
poetry is but
why should i stir up
feeling yours for
vers d'archibald

-- archy

Poetry is a cast shoe from one of Apollo's stallions. Societies and organizations pick it up and are just as likely to nail it onto a cow as onto a horse.

[Don Marquis]

Writing through Imagism

Writing through Imagism: A Discussion of H.D.'s "Sea Poppies" and Jen Scappettone's "Vase Poppies.”

Hosted by Al Filreis and featuring Don Share, Judith Goldman, and David Pavelich.

Here's H.D.'s "Sea Poppies" (1916):

Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

And here is Jennifer Scappettone's "Vase Poppies" (2002):

Lavenderish dusk
strapped for stays,
pomegranates under the rubberband
chucked for a glass Oz,

letdown
splayed by the pillar-shelves
to page upon the ottoman:

his talk has wrought suit
amid citrus gapes
and pall dunked in the bowl
and grated sage
or cleaved clear paleo-pines.

Postgeist, upcast
California upon weed,
what banker yields
so fragrant a cant
as this vagrant cant?

Al Filreis:

Scappettone wrote through H.D.'s poem, substituting words but always keeping to parts of speech. She echoes the original at certain moments, creating some rhymes and in a few cases what amounts to a homonymic ("husk"/"dusk") and quasi-synonymic translation ("sought root"/"wrought suit"). The poem is a meta-commentary on imagism, a way of decorating or over-elaborating H.D. whose imagistic lines convey a "piety that veers into preciosity" (the poet's phrase).** Conch-shells become paleo-pines. "Fire on leaf" becomes "California upon weed."

"Vase" can rhyme with "maze" or with "Oz," depending on your class. (Scappettone has introduced the poem at readings sometimes by mentioning this valence, seeming to contribute to the notion that it is a commentary on imagism's social preciousness.)

Click on the link above for this Poem Talk episode, which includes a discussion, and Scappetone reading her poem.

Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress

Click to enlarge; and click here for more info on The Equalizer. As seen on HTML Giant!

Don't try this at home!

So here's the dear child under land,
will not reflect her beauty and
besides the Great, no alter dark,
the pure ray, fronts elected mark.

-- A stanza from Essai monographique sur les Dianthus des Pyrénées françaises by Edouard Timbal-Lagrave and Eugène Bucquoy, translated into English as a pair of couplets in iambic tetrameter... by one of Google's computers!

The last of the Ovidians & the larger scheme of things

I wasn't an English major, but back when I was in college, the rap on Ezra Pound was that his hyperallusiveness was a form of coercion consistent with his legendary Fascism. "At least the quatrains ran on time," we joked. No doubt a great many readers of The Cantos have been, will be resistant to Pound's including and rewriting history so relentlessly. Yet as Richard Sieburth explains in the note to his forthcoming edition of EP's New Selected Poems and Translations, one of Pound's "signal contributions" to twentieth-century poetics "was of course to have erased any easy distinction between 'primary' composition and 'secondary' translation." Sieburth makes the case as follows:

Perhaps the last major poet in the Ovidian tradition, Pound sees the "magic moment" of metamorphosis as defining the mystery at the core of all metaphor and all translation - the elusive persistence of identity within change. The French critic Antoine Berman memorably defined translation as l'épreuve de l'étranger - that trial or ordeal or test of the foreign through which a language must pass before returning to itself at once renewed and estranged. Cast as a translation of Book XI of the Odyssey (the so-called nekuia or "descent" episode), Pound's opening Canto enacts precisely this kind of transformative encounter with the other. As the wandering Odysseus meets with the prophet Tiresias in the kingdom of the dead to receive instructions as to how to accomplish his nostos or return home, he is visited by a procession of eloquent shades from the archaic Greek past. The prosody of Canto I is similarly haunted by the revenants of tradition- Homer's pulsing hexameters, Andreas Divus's streamlined Renaissance Latin translation, the alliterative Anglo-Saxon drum-beat of "The Seafarer" - all now returning as spectral echoes within the modernist soundscape of Pound's own epic-to-come.

In our current age of triumphant Anglo-American monolingualism, this willingness to welcome the foreign into his English remains Pound's most attractive legacy. His first-time readers may be annoyed or intimidated by all the "tags" or quotations from the Greek, Latin, Provençal, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese that float like some much mnemonic flotsam and jetsam upon the textual surface of the Cantos, but Pound was optimistically convinced that they could easily be navigated. "Skip anything you don't understand and go on till you pick it up again," he wrote a young correspondent in 1934. "All [this] tosh about foreign languages making it difficult. The quotes are all either explained at once by repeat or they are definitely of the things indicated. If the reader don't know what an elefant is, then the word is obscure. [...] There is no intentional obscurity. There is condensation to maximum attainable. It is impossible to make the deep as quickly comprehensible as the shallow."

[...]

In the end, after all the dust settled, Pound hoped that his poetry would simply be judged by the fineness of its ear. In a rare late interview, he broke his silence to observe to Pier Paolo Pasolini: "They say the Cantos are a hodge-podge; not so: it's music."

***

Pound's optimism goes hand in hand with Eliot's notion that poetry can communicate before it's understood - though it's worth noting that Eliot omitted Homage to Sextus Propertius from his 1928 selection of Pound's poems - now so wonderfully updated by Sieburth - on the grounds that it was "not enough a translation" and "too much a translation" to be intelligible to the average reader!

There's naturally, inevitably, lots of push-back against Modernism these days, almost enough to overtake the fashion of being revulsed by the so-called confessional poets and/or the ghost of Robert Lowell (not the same thing). Yet permutations of EP's methods are still powerfully in use. I've already noted the phenomenon of letting source materials make the poetry; yet I wonder, too, the extent to which the salutary burgeoning of bi- or multi-lingual poetry can be seen as a live and heartening extrapolation, too, viz Kristin Naca's wonderful Bird Eating Bird, among many others.

But only heartening only to a point. Though our native tongues may be vibrant in our homes and in our poems, they are under attack in the schools. For years, bilingual education in the primary school curriculum has been opposed. And now, our institutions of higher education are cutting departments of foreign and classical languages, as has most recently been the case at SUNY Buffalo. As Michael Hoffman put it over the summer:

"Schools and schoolchildren ditch languages like there's no tomorrow. Just as we've become adept at finding the shortest and the quickest and the most economical, so we can sniff out anything that's not a doss. 'Grammar? Pronunciation? Different alphabet? Spelling? Accents? Umlauts? Ooh, no thanks – don't fancy that.' The 'fascination of what's difficult' may be Yeats, but it's a long time since it's had much pull as an idea. Modern languages have become, in the awful semi-euphemism 'twilight subjects' – you study them on your own, after school's out."

In a sense, the defects and virtues alike of Pound's poetry and way of thinking owe something to his studying on his own. And if studying on our own is going to replace great chunks of the deteriorating curricula in our educational institutions, we'd better start weighing the costs and benefits of auto-didactic learning.

Let's face it - ours is the age of the average (or less-than average) reader. Yet as I was falling asleep over the Aeneid last night, I heard some folks on the CBC radio program Ideas talking about how we now, by necessity, live in a time of incrementalism: big movements in politics have failed us - which, on the other hand, means that there's an opening for individual people - reading... thinking... acting... learning other languages and cultures - to accomplish powerful things on a small scale; if so, this, too, will have risks and benefits in the larger scheme of things.

Not just your average cute YouTube video: A poet visits her local bookseller

On Gender and Publishing

“On Gender and Publishing”: A Panel Moderated by Carmen Giménez Smith

"I hope that every writer will be as persistent as her resources and circumstances permit, and that despair, however much it impinges, will never defeat any writer who has talent and devotion."