The most expensive page of poetry

There it is! As my favorite book-news blog, Moby Lives, reports:

"Five-million dollars is the estimate put on a single illuminated page from the Shahnamah of Shah Tahmasp of Persia [which is up for auction]. The five-hundred-year-old “Book of Kings” is considered the finest illustrated manuscript in existence and the Southeby’s offering one of a handful left in private collections. The page is in pristine condition and depicts vividly the scene 'Faridun In the Guise Of A Dragon Tests His Sons.'"

If you're a Basil Bunting admirer like me, and don't have the five mill, stay tuned for my book, Basil Bunting's Persia, which will be published later this year by Flood Editions. Bunting, as many will know, spent many years translating and adapting parts of the Shahnamah as well as other Persian poems.

His interest in Persian poetry began when he found a French translation of Ferdowsi’s famous epic in a book stall on the harbor quays of Genoa in the early 1930s:

“I found a book—tattered, incomplete—with a newspaper cover on it marked Oriental Tales. I bought it, in French. It turned out to be part of the early 19th century prose translation of Ferdowsi, and it was absolutely fascinating. I got into the middle of the story of the education of Zal and the birth of Rustam—and the story came to an end! It was quite impossible to leave it there, I was desperate to know what happened next. I read it, as far as it went, to Pound and Dorothy Pound, and they were in the same condition. We were yearning to find out, but we could think of no way. The title page was even missing. There seemed nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so, I undertook that. Pound bought me the three volumes of Vullers and somebody, I forget who, bought me Steingass’s dictionary, and I set to work. It didn’t take long. It’s an easy language if it’s only for reading that you want it.”

But Bunting wanted Persian for more than just the reading, and of his efforts he would write to Louis Zukofsky: "It is no boast to say that I am more widely read in Persian than most of the Orientalists in British and European universities.” Indeed, he’d applied for a Guggenheim in 1932 to translate the Shahnameh, which tells the history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to about 628 A.D. in some sixty thousand couplets. Though he didn’t get the fellowship, his diligent fascination only grew—he even eventually named his children for legendary characters in the poem: Roudaba, Bourtai, and Rustam.

I tell the whole story in my intro to the book...

Needless to say, Persian poetry is of contemporary importance here in the West, for reasons I've blogged about previously.

Basil Bunting was surely among the most impoverished of modern poets, so the incredible price tag for this page of poetry leaves one rather heavyhearted. But maybe this news item will draw attention to the poem itself, as well as Bunting's work on it. All that money for one page; the epic itself, of course, has thousands.

Note: Bunting's versions are wonderful, but readers should also be aware of Dick Davis's recently published translation, about which more here.

Poetry, brevity, and the soul of wit

It's not generally remembered that John Berryman was among those who wrote "critical supplements" for Poetry magazine - those separately-published booklets were the forerunner of today's online "discussion guides."

Here's a gem from his contribution to the December 1949 supplement:

The shorter a poem, on the whole, the better it has to be; the best-natured reader can see whatever blunders there are in a quatrain-piece.

(Click on the pic to enlarge it; you'll see some of Berryman's amusing characterizations of Wallace Stevens!)

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Speaking of brevity, Twitter (and Twitter-so-called-poetry) notwithstanding, ours is a verbose age. Scratch every poet and you'll find an itch for some kind of project. And when it comes to poetry readings, well... to wrench a phrase from Samuel Johnson, none ever wished one to be longer than it is. And yet...

Here's a headline from the December 10, 1948, edition of The Harvard Crimson -

Poetess' Brevity Sets New Record

The article, in full, is terribly brief itself:

"More than 200 modern verse enthusiasts crowded into Sever 11 yesterday afternoon to hear poetess Marianne Moore recite four of her lyrics in one of the shortest Morris Gray readings ever held. The whole meeting lasted less than half an hour.

Miss Moore, who prefaced her brief reading with random remarks on the qualities that characterize a good poet, was introduced by Professor F. O. Matthiessen."

As Marsden Hartley put it in Poetry magazine back in 1919, "Brevity of all things demands intensity, or better say tensity."


Re the photo above, David Shapiro writes,"The page alone has the intelligence and sadness of the young poet as god, old poet as tramp."

Basil Bunting is slipping away from us

A letter published in the TLS:

Sir, – I understand why Frances Wilson refers to Basil Bunting as a “Quaker poet” in a review of Geoffrey Durham’s The Spirit of the Quakers (March 11). Bunting carefully cultivated his Quaker image but there isn’t a line or theme in his poetry that could be read as “Quaker”. Not only was he not a “Quaker poet”, he wasn’t even a Quaker. Neither of his parents was a Quaker, although Bunting was sent to Quaker schools for six years. One of his uncles on the Cheesman side was a Quaker but there’s no evidence of his having had any influence on Bunting. He was never a member of the Society of Friends and only ever joined meetings at the Quaker house at Brigflatts in Cumbria as an attender.

This might seem a quibble but it is very important. Bunting was Britain’s greatest Modernist poet (by some way, although admittedly the field isn’t large) and yet he is slipping away from us. One of the main reasons for this is that he deliberately promoted himself as a poet of the North and therefore, by implication, of nowhere else. This has ghettoized Bunting as the most important poet from the North-east of England since Caedmon. It isn’t that this is faint praise. In itself it is a significant achievement to be the best anything anywhere for 1,300 years, but it doesn’t do justice to Bunting’s importance and influence as a giant of literary Modernism. And it gets worse. Bunting didn’t just promote himself as a “poet of the north” but as a Quaker poet of the North. Is it any wonder that hardly anyone cares?

I am writing a Life of Basil Bunting, a project that Bunting himself would have derided. It will be published later this year and I would gratefully welcome any contributions, memories or information, even from Northumbria or, indeed, Quakers. Please send to me c/o 36 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LD.

RICHARD BURTON
36 St Giles, Oxford.

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Tom Pickard wrote to me with the following comment:

He might have some of his ‘facts’ correct (there are others he seems unaware of) re BB’s Quakerism but her certainly doesn’t get it right about how BB saw his Quakerism. His decision to become a conshy in the first world war must have given him lifelong honorary status. That decision was taken after talking to a Quaker headmistress, as I recall him saying, when others tried to persuade him otherwise. Also I know that he went to a meeting of the head guys (in the 70’s?), in London I think, and was given a ‘Godly’ oral examination. He told me that they weren’t too uncomfortable with his notions. To those old codgers he must have appeared a raging scallywag, albeit a 70 year old one. (I remember him in the sixties chastising me for using God in a poem because it was too vague a word to serve any purpose.) Of course to tag him a Quaker poet is silly as is any tag that limits. His notion of ‘Quakerism’ ran its roots back to the wild men and women of the English Revolution, Ebenezer Coppe et al. He wasn’t much of a joiner of anything—which poet has the time to be, without their creative system collapsing about their ears?—but he sincerely identified a chunk of his ‘spiritual system’ with that of Quakers, and of course his formative years which nourished and kicked off his poem Briggflatts, were spent amongst and describes rural Quakers. The girl and boy and her father who is driving the cart. Whether BB could be called a card-carrying Quaker or not doesn’t bother me, but he did take from it some nourishment and found in their quiet contemplation a way to know himself.

All that's missing is the cigarette smoke!

From Media Industry Newsletter:

The most unexpected 2011 winner of the American Society of Magazine Editors' digital National Magazine Award on March 16 was Poetry. Here is a monthly launched in 1912 by Harriet Monroe (1860-1936), an aspiring poet who persuaded 100 Chicagoans to pledge $50 a year for five years to support her venture. They did, and Monroe and Christian Science Monitor founder (1908) Mary Baker Eddy stand out as U.S. media entrepreneurs who were not allowed to vote (19th amendment granting women's suffrage was ratified in 1920).

The 30,000-circulation Poetry has published continuously out of Chicago with financial support for the nonprofit Poetry Foundation coming from the estate of the late Ruth Lilly (1915-2009) a great-granddaughter of pharmaceutical magnate Eli Lilly. This gave editor Christian Wiman the wherewithal to launch a podcast, and the give-and-take between him, senior editor Don Share, and poets published in the magazine is easy and fun listening.

The result was ASME's digital Ellie for podcasting. This is not only Poetry's first National Magazine Award in any discipline, but also its first nomination. The 1.000 batting average puts The New Yorker's .251 to shame (though TNY's 49 Ellies and 195 nominations are as unreachable as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak), but listening to the Poetry podcast is a reminder of TNY's famous "salons" in the 1930s with founder (1925) Harold Ross and such writers as Dorothy Parker and James Thurber talking about their work.

Or, for that matter, a podcast of such Poetry-published greats as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Ezra Pound. All were contemporaries of Monroe, and only the cigarette smoke would have been missing.

Congratulations to National Magazine Award winner Poetry.

We tend to forget that "modern poetry" is a venerable institution.

It is often said that we read so-called “intellectual” poetry for its style rather than its content; anthologists and instructors assure us that Pope’s Essay on Man contains not a single fresh idea; that its saving feature is the vigor and grace with which it expresses old ones. Such a false division between form and content presupposes two boxes, one of which contains old hashed-over idea which everyone assimilated years ago, and from which the poet takes whatever he needs to “stuff” his poem; and the other, brand-new, unthought of ideas, to which the philosopher resorts when seeking inspiration. But there are no new ideas, any more than there are any old ones; there are merely old and new ways of looking at the world. Every new poem is a fresh discovery, and Pope stands acquitted on the charge of commonplace subject matter; “what oft was thought but n’er so well expressed” might as well be what n’er was thought for those who, but for the poet, might have understood the idea but not been able to apply it within their realm of experience.

-- John Ashbery, student paper on W.H. Auden, ca. 1949, quoted in Aidan Wasley’s The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (Princeton University Press, 2011), and blogged about by John Latta here. Latta, in his post,

... recalls Ashbery’s chewing over Auden’s line “poetry makes nothing happen.” Ashbery: “It doesn’t, but its value is precisely the fact that it doesn’t, because that’s the way it does make things happen. The pleasure that you get, if you love poetry, is a pleasure that’s going to cause you to act, it forces you back into life. Poetry is in fact—I was just reading a quotation from Hazlitt—not a branch of literature but life itself . . .” Akin, perhaps, to O’Hara’s cheeky “Personism” line: “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” Double focus’d.

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See the April issue of Poetry for John Ashbery's note on Rimbaud's Illuminations, accompanying his new translations of them, in which he says:

We tend to forget that "modern poetry" is a venerable institution.


Pictured: One of those boxes the poets takes his stuffing from.

On confessional poetry

"We regret to say the printer announces that there are no more I's in the font."

-- Alice Corbin Henderson, Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, May 1916 issue

(See also this post.)