"Then I found you in the form of a large cold cooked chicken" - Yeats's letters to his wife

I've been reading the letters between W.B. Yeats and his wife George in Ann Saddlemeyer's scrupulous and intelligently edited new edition. I wouldn't say there are too many surprises or revelations to be found, but it's a fun book. I found myself skipping the bits about astrology and automatic writing (and there are lots of dinners and colds to be endured) but notwithstanding those, there were gems to be found, e.g. when WBY writes:

"I am a bad lier - & worst of all on the telephone."

"My work goes well & I am well -- except that I cannot spell."

"I thank you for hair brush. It has made me realise, that all my life I have wanted to scratch my head & never have been able to do so hitherto."

He's on the whole far funnier than I'd have imagined.

On a rare somber note, there's a version of his "Last Will & Testament," dated Dec. 21, 1929, which reads in its entirety:

I bequeath whatever I may die possessed of to my wife Bertha, Georgie Yeats, knowing that she will employ it, according to my known wishes, for the benefit of my children.

William Butler Yeats

[witnessed by]
Dorothy Pound
Basil Bunting

Yeats was seriously ill when he wrote this, though he lived another ten years. That wording will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who's got a wife and kids to provide for. Alas, a lawyer drew up a later will for him in 1934 which was, predictably, more detailed.

And there's this, from Rapallo in 1928:

"... Ezra explains his cantos, & reads me Cavalcanti & we argue about it quite amicably. We have twice dined to get variety at another hotel -- almost under our trees -- where he purloins s[c]raps that he may feed a black & two grey cats who wait for him about fifty yards from the hotel. He has been feeding them for quite a considerable time & brags of there fatness."

More evidence of Pound's legendary generosity! (Click here for a swell later pic of Ez and a gang of cats.)

As some reviewers have noticed, George is generally the superior letter-writer. This is her wry account of an incident that took place in July 1930:

"No newses here but for the thrill of our dustbin being stolen yesterday evening from the pavement between the hours of eightthirty and ten. McCoy was most puzzled this morning when he went out to fetch it in and found nothing to fetch, and filled with vehement righteous indignation when I told him that I had observed on returning home last night at 10.15 that it was not there. He insisted on my telephoning to the police at Lad Lane.... I rather felt that anyone who could pinch a large galvanised iron dustbin filled to the brim with rubbish during the combined light of twilight and street lamp deserved to get that dustbin! I hope the lady or gentleman who snaffled that bin will not be discovered; I should dislike extremely to make my first appearance in the Dublin Police Courts on a matter about which I feel so frivolously, in fact I am not sure that if this horrid eventuality occurred I would not turn Republican and refuse to recognise the Courts. Of course it was only from, out of, or because of, the worst kind of moral cowardice that I telephoned to the police; but there was McCoy, so eloquent, -- if this sort of thing was allowed to pass unnoticed ALL the Dustbins on the Square might be stolen, fortunately there was nothing in 'the doctor's' dustbin so he had not put it out yesterday (I refrained from the obvious retort that 'the doctor's' was an antique no one could covet). 'There's a lot of police regulations that are never enforced' says the police at the other end of the telephone 'but there's a regulation that bins shouldnt be put out as early as that.' 'Do you think the police took it' says I. 'O no' says he 'They wouldnt take it. They'd notify.' Then, 'When they take them they generally empty them out on the pavement, did they empty out yours?' 'They did not' says I. 'They must have had a handcart with them' says he. 'Do you mean the Garda would have emptied it out' says I. 'No, the people who take the dustbins' says he; so it is evidently one of the unregistered occupations like the stealing of doormats, washbaskets and umbrellas."

But the thing that tickled me most in the book was discovering that the Yeatses referred to their guest room as... "the strangers' room." I'll be using that one from now on!

The biggest revelation? In 1931, WBY writes to his wife -

"If you are sending pants (which you need not as I shall be in Dublin on Friday) send pjama trowsers also. I have three pjama jackets & one pair of pjama trowsers. Of course I only use the trowsers as a dressing gown but the maids may not know that & be shocked. I merely record this matter that we may not forget.

Yrs affly
WB Yeats

I have an immense wad of your penny stamps."

But the strangest letter - maybe in all of literary correspondence - is this, from October 1937, on the date of their wedding anniversary (!):

"Last night I had a night mare. I was in a crowded house of horrible people who all said you were dead (I have been anxious about your cold). Then I found you in the form of a large cold cooked chicken. I took you up & then bit by bit you came to life. I woke up very content."


Photo: Walter de la Mare; Bertha Georgie Yeats (née Hyde-Lees); William Butler Yeats; unknown woman, by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Art under Plutocracy

We have to define what we mean by elitist: considerable confusion will arise unless we can get clear in our heads what ‘elitist’ means. If ‘elitist’ means belonging to some threatened hierarchy of the intelligence then I think that the poet has an obligation to attune her poetry in that direction. There is a largely unknown order of human beings who believe in that impossible thing: intrinsic value. One must work as if intrinsic value were a reality, even though I myself know no way of demonstrating its real existence.

*

I would describe myself as a sort of Ruskinian Tory. It is only Ruskinian Tories these days who would sound like old-fashioned Marxists. I read and re-read Ruskin, particularly Fors Clavigera and I am in profound agreement with William Morris’s Art under Plutocracy.

-- Geoffrey Hill

Four varieties of critic that get on our nerves

W.H. Auden's test for the critic:

Do you like, and by like I really mean like, not approve of on principle:

1) Long lists of proper names … ?

2) Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade?

3) Complicated verse forms of great technical difficulty … ?

4) Conscious theatrical exaggeration … ?

Michael Wood, in the LRB, comments:

‘If a critic could truthfully answer “yes” to all four,’ Auden says, ‘then I should trust his judgment implicitly on all literary matters.’ We can imagine taking this test quite literally, and failing it or passing it, or finding it ridiculous. But we could also think of it analogically. Then we would wonder what kind of critical interests were being sought and excluded, and we could look for examples, just as we are invited to describe our own idea of Eden. Again, in another very funny passage Auden evokes four kinds of critic he hopes a poet might not turn into: ‘a prig, a critic’s critic, a romantic novelist or a maniac’. The first is a person ‘for whom no actual poem is good enough’; the second manages ‘to deprive someone who has not yet read [the poem] of all wish to do so; the third finds a ‘happy hunting ground’ in the ‘field of unanswerable questions’, and the fourth has a theory that turns the poem into an endless puzzle. The parable here is a bit like Walter Benjamin’s notion of the story. What it’s asking for is not acceptance but adaptation: we are to find our own four varieties of critic that get on our nerves.

*

W.H.A. on poetry:

I dare not ask you if you bless the poets,
For you do not look as if you ever read them,
Nor can I see a reason why you should.

Yet another installment of... Of Being Quiet

"Quietude" is an admirable word. But one wonders to whom, or to what, it can be applied without hesitation. It would be important to detect this quietude. Even if it turned out to be difficult to learn a lesson from it.

- Pierre-Albert Jourdan


*
What assails you is never more than the irritated specter of the plenitude with which you did not manage to come to terms.

- Ibid.

Gary Sullivan's Ten Years in a Quandary and How Flarf Grew

To this day, wherever I meet Poetry readers they want to talk to me about flarf and what I think about it. Amazing. Well, Gary Sullivan - who coined the term... and who contributed to our infamous portfolio of flarf and conceptual poetry - wrote in with some meditations on its tenth birthday.

***

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
—Robert Benchley


Today, May 21, 2011, as true-believers all over the world await their final evacuation from Earth in advance of the Great Tribulation, I’m spending the morning sucking down a second cup of Bustelo and scrolling through some old e-mail archives.

Why am I futzing through this electronic effluvia when, clearly, I ought to be repenting? Well, to paraphrase one of my all-time favorite writers, why save for tomorrow what you really shouldn’t be doing at the moment? Plus, while I know it’s a big day for God, it’s an even bigger day for me and my closest pals: Ten years ago today, Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Mitch Highfill, K. Silem Mohammad and I launched the Flarf e-mail listserv.

The first post, my own, was a play in five acts, “Angry at God,” the entire dialog of which was cobbled together from Google results of searches on “Awww” (with varying numbers of Ws) “yeah” and “God.” An excerpt:

BRITNEY: Awwww yeah! Burning Man was insane, esp with the burning. Oh My Fucking God!! OMFG pretty much sums it up—

BARRY: I want to ask you a bunch of questions and I ... [Opens his arms waiting for the giant bosoms.] ... OH MY GOD!!!!

BRITNEY: Some days I’m like God, and others? I am just plain better ... awww yeah … my DVD movies … Hey God, remember when I said I love you? Forget it to hell! Heh heh whatever! [Applies eyeliner.] HOORAY for me!

SURFER: That shit fuckin’ rocks!

… and so on. In response, Katie posted “Go Grant Day,” written entirely using anagrams of “Angry at God” and then Drew posted a longish poem, “x Denise-isms” (“so i had to find the P-Uter train so I could get to/ Boston cause there was nooo/ way I was driving to Boston cause that would be insane!”).

One would not imagine that, from such humble beginnings, a whole movement would emerge; but somehow, as activity on the list accumulated in ebbs and flows, others started taking notice, fueling our desire to further upset them.

In 10 years, the 30-odd people who wound up coming and going on the list published dozens of books and chapbooks, held a number of festivals in New York, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore and elsewhere, and put on high-profile readings at the Denver Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney (with our rivals and closest peers, the Conceptual Writers). Collections of flarf appeared in the online magazine, Jacket, and—scandalously—in Poetry magazine, our second and last appearance with the Conceptual Writers before their attempted hostile takeover. We were written about in numerous alt weekly papers, as well as in Poets & Writers and the Wall Street Journal. The BBC, Wired and NPR covered our activities—as well as the anger our very existence seemed to incite.

There are, it’s said, two kinds of people in the world: Those who hate flarf and those who’ve never heard of it. For reasons that were never clear to me, the people who were blissfully ignorant of what we were doing never once rose to our defense; in just about every “trend” piece written about us, at least a third of column space or airtime was devoted to our detractors. (I have at least a chapbook’s worth of pretty rockin’ poems using some of the more colorful things they’ve said.)

These days, having blown our mainstream media coverage wad, things have quieted down dramatically. A few grumpy old poet-bloggers occasionally point a thin stream of piss our way, but the most recent of the 90,000 Google returns for “flarf” involve blog posts by undergrads who’ve apparently been asked to create some of their own, or submission guidelines from various journals and presses.

Looking back at what these friends of mine have wrought, I have to say, despite all of the controversy and the ridiculously elevated claims—positive as well as negative—they’ve left what I think will be an enduring mark on contemporary poetry. A number of their books are, in my admittedly not-very-humble opinion, among the most engaging, inventive, politically on-target—and often funny—full-length collections of poetry published in the last decade. A short list:

Ben Friedlander’s Citizen Cain; Katie Degentesh’s The Anger Scale; Drew Gardner’s Petroleum Hat; Nada Gordon’s Folly; Rodney Koeneke’s Musee Mechanique; Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson; Sharon Mesmer’s Annoying Diabetic Bitch; and K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation.

And that doesn’t even include chapbooks by Stan Apps, Mitch Highfill, Rod Smith and others, Brandon Downing’s films, recordings of Drew’s flash orchestra, or neo-benshi by a number of people on the list.

So you see, my scrolling through the flarflist archives on this most sacred of days is not, it turns out, an act of procrastination or avoidance, after all. Because in doing so, I realize that, in a funny way, over the last 10 years, I’ve managed to more than quadruple my own pathetic output, simply by making believe, along with all of you, that something called “flarf” existed and that I had anything—only God knows what—to do with it. [Applies eyeliner.] HOORAY for me!


***
Drew Gardner kindly supplies these additional sources of information:

Village Voice: http://t.co/bKjnQMR, Poets & Writers: http://t.co/SrxX6Zl, NPR: http://t.co/IZCsunk

On Omar Khayyam's birthday

As Moby Lives once put it -

"On this day in 1048 the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam was born in Nayshapur, Iran. A brilliant polymath, Khayyam was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician and poet. Most renowned during his lifetime as a mathematician, Khayyam wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which, according to this Wikipedia entry, 'laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Persian Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. In particular, he derived general methods for solving cubic equations and even some higher orders.'”

Of course, most English-language poetry readers know Omar through Edward FitzGerald's version of his Rubaiyat - a long poem composed in one thousand quatrains — that is, rubais. Well, who can resist quoting these famous, albeit jiggered, lines:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now.

Khayyam is especially interesting to those of us who love Basil Bunting, as he is the subject of his 1935 typescript essay, "The Lion and the Lizard" in which Bunting remarks that Omar is (how I love this!) "the astronomer in a world that has no ears except for quacks."

Omar turns up in Bunting's long poem, The Spoils, including what Barbara Lesch calls "... an allusion to an incident that has been used as evidence that Khayyam believed in metempsychosis. Khayyam was walking with a group of students at an old college which was undergoing repairs. He encountered a donkey, being used to haul bricks, who would not enter the college grounds. Khayyam supposedly went up to the donkey and recited a quatrain to it extemporaneously, after which the donkey entered. Khayyam's students demanded an explanation. 'He replied, "The spirit which has now attached itself to the body of his ass [formerly] inhabited the body of a lecturer in this college, therefore it would not come in until now, when, perceiving that its colleagues had recognized it, it was obliged to step inside.'"

Take that, you debaters on the subject of poets who teach!

(The quatrain was: "O lost and now returned 'yet more astray,' / Thy name from man's remembrance passed away, / Thy nails have now combined to form thy hoofs, / Thy tail's a beard turned round the other way!")

A letter from Bunting to Louis Zukofsky (30 August 1933) included a transliterated and untranslated version of a rubai by Omar Khayyam - may their correspondence someday be published! - and in his introduction to Omar Pound's Arabic & Persian Poems in English, Bunting wrote:

"Persian poetry has suffered badly, Arabic rather less, from neoplatonic dons determined to find an arbitrary mysticism in everything. You would think there was nothing else in Moslem [sic] poetry than nightingales which are not birds, roses which are not flowers, and pretty boys who are God in disguise. An anthology of English verse selected exclusively from George Herbert, Charles Wesley, and Father Hopkins, plus 'Lead, kindly light' and 'The Hound of Heaven,' would be as representative as the usual samples of Persian poetry. FitzGerald's Khayyam is the only serious exception."

Indeed, Bunting felt that FitzGerald's version was "splendid and inadequate" - limited by "certain shortcomings of English poetry in general" - and called him a great adapter of a greater poet."

In one of his uncollected "Odes," Bunting wrote these lines -

Omar observed: 'Sobriety is unworthy
of anything that has life.' Supplemented
that proposition: 'Turf's pretty till
our grave's turf's pretty.'

Before the day is done, I'll be raising a glass of wine in Omar's honor, and then another in Bunting's.

My two favorite editions of FitzGerald's famous adaptation are the one by Daniel Karlin in the Oxford World Classics, and the critical edition by Christopher Decker.

LOPING-O HAS HIT THE TRAIL

LOPING-O HAS HIT THE TRAIL

Blow up the house. Clear away the debris. Drive salt deep into the soil covering every inch of the tract. Cover that with alternating layers of heavy sand and small stones. Place a couple policemen in uniform there to move everyone along. People will still think of it as a sacred place. If you build anything on the spot other than an imposing shrine they will blow it up and cut all your heads off as well as those of your wives and children. But maybe after a while millions of years let's say it will have disappeared by becoming the memory of something else. Something that never happened. Better yet.

-Ray DiPalma

"Why are white editors so mean?”

Craig Santos Perez sez:

“White editors aren’t mean, it’s just very hard for them to publish writers like us. It’s hard and often unrewarding work being an editor.”

He responded: “But you’re an editor, Professor Craig. And you’re not mean.”

It’s true.

So I reflected: is there something essential about being a white editor that makes them mean? Something inherently mean about whiteness?

Later, I reflected into a mirror: What makes editors of color, like myself, and writers of color in general, such nice people?

Have you ever noticed that even though writers of color are rarely published in mainstream journals, rarely receive major prizes or awards, rarely reviewed in major venues—and moreover all we write about are our difficult and traumatic histories, our oppressed cultures, our forgotten stories—yet we are such jolly people.

Have you ever been to an Asian-American, African-American, Latino, or Native American poetry reading? The poems are fucking depressing and people sometimes cry during the reading. Yet before and after the reading is a party! Everyone’s so happy, so friendly—there’s sometimes singing and dancing too!

Have you ever been to a Pacific Islander reading—the most underrepresented group in American poetry--? We always have a ton of food at our readings, and we spend more time talking story and laughing around the food than we do actually reading our depressing poems!

Perhaps if we can understand why writers of colors are so happy, then we can understand why white editors are so mean.

Despite everything we’ve been through, writers of color are happy for one reason, and one reason only: anthological loving. The word, “anthology,” comes from the Greek “anthos,” meaning “group hug.”

That’s right, every month a new anthology for writers of color is published: New Latino Writing, African American Nature, Queer Native American, Diasporic Pacific Islander, Asian American Women, South Asian American, Old Latino Writing, Experimental African American, Global Indigenous, Midwest Latinos, New Generations, Next Generations, Emerging Generations, etc, etc, etc.

Every time one of these anthologies is published, a historic publication gets its wings. We gather, celebrate (with lots of food), and embrace. We finally arrive. Or arrive, in a different way. Again and again.

We love the Anthology (to the point of fetish), and the anthology loves us back.

And the anthologies sell like tortillas, like frybread, like dumplings, like Spam.

Now, let’s return to our question: Why are white editors so mean? They are so mean because there has never been an anthology of White-American Poetry. Think about that: white poets have never had an anthology to call their own. They have never experienced the unconditional love of an anthology that is just for them. This sad exclusion has made them bitter and mean to the point of displacing their feelings of exclusion onto writers of color.

White-American poets, hear me: you have come a long way since your barbaric yawps and mystic circumferences. Through my education, I’ve watched you evolve over the last century and develop your craft. It’s time. You’re ready.

Today, I call upon you to submit to Manifest Destiny: The First Anthology of White-American Poetry.

Just like in the formation of other emerging literatures, the first anthology needs to be edited by a cultural outsider (me) and a cultural insider. Don Share, I invite you to co-edit this historic anthology with me!

I believe this anthology will settle upon the canon and breed other anthologies of White-American poetries and, over time, white poets and editors will feel more loved, more included, more celebrated—and thus less mean.

And they will sell, like white bread.

Now, let us anthos.

Read Craig's full article here! (Additional commentary here.)

Four Monologues

Mock-up of new Aram Saroyan book, Four Monologues, which I am printing/publishing thanks to and with Clifton Meador, Steve Woodall, and their brilliant students at Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book & Paper Arts.

Stay tuned for details.

I am at the mercy of maxims.

I've just been looking at a new book from Chelsea Editions, The Straw Sandals: Selected Prose and Poetry of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, edited, introduced, and translated by John Taylor. The back cover copy says:

"Pierre-Albert Jourdan (1924-1981) has long been one of the best-kept secrets of French literature."

And this is true. Have you ever heard of him? Bet not (unless you're a reader of Bitter Oleander, which recently published an excerpt from the book). Heck, he doesn't even have an entry in Wikipedia. Nevertheless, as the bookcover attests, Jourdan has been admired by the likes of Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Réda. So I figured I'd read it.

And here's part of a brief section of the book titled, "At the Mercy of Maxims." The title comes from La Rochefoucauld:

I am at the mercy of the maxims that you have roused to disturb my rest.


***

When La Rochefoucauld says that "silence is the safest course of action for a man who distrusts himself," he suddenly pops up alongside us in our age of logorrhea. Here he is, plucking our sleeves, beckoning us to turn inward and be frank, to clarify ourselves by means of silence. If we listen to silence, it will always speak more willingly, and profoundly, than this word screen that only masks us.

The pauses or blank spaces between fragments, maxims, or notes whose words form, to recall Yves Bonnefoy's phrase, "the ridgeline of a silence": you could say that these silent blank spaces expand your lungs (as when you breathe in again) and are thus necessary. Without them, that is without the emptiness, you could not read and understand the words. Nor would life be possible. This is one of Joubert's main preoccupations. Letting writing breathe, spacing it out, bringing the space inside oneself. "A spacious man."

Lapidary inscriptions. Runes. Indeed, the whisperings of these stones for fording the torrent without too much damage. That they wobble proves that they are mere words: the words of a man stoned to death.
Something sharpened not by style by rather by alarm at how life is carried on - by oneself and others.

Aiming for correctness is not a masochistic impulse; it is a desperate cry.

What remains open and, because of this, does not link up. What counters rules. What makes of fragmentation ("sonorous scraps," Rozanov called them) a ruin that remains standing alongside dramatic collapses. There is nothing ghostly about the presence of a La Rochefoucauld, a Chamfort, a Joubert.

Fragments: what shows on the surface. Yet it is permissible to suppose that what shows on the surface comes from deeper down.

Fragment, like a bit of the unknown that is meant for you.

Whenever I spot a maxim, an aphorism, a note, a fragment or the like, I rush over to it ("You have given me that malady of maxims," remarked Madame de Sablé to La Rochefoucauld), convinced that I will find flashes of lightning that will illuminate the darkest night. Such exist. Our weakness is an inability to keep them inside ourselves longer, so that their effect on us (the light they cast) is transformed into a flickering candle flame.

Yet we must not forget that a tree, a hill, or a flower can offer us equally intense maxims.
You need to consent to them in order to avoid, perhaps, the confinement and disfigurement that threaten us.

* * *

(Oddly, the lack of spacing between some paragraphs resembles a similar technique in some of Fanny Howe's recent prose meditations, published in Poetry. I'm sorry that it doesn't come over very well on a blog.)

I suppose we've had more than enough of fragments, and yet... Well, this is very French, to be sure. I think here of Ponge above all...

And dare I say it, of the logorrhea of social networking, and indeed, of the much-foretold death of poetry blogging. This writing is perfectly... limpid.

There's not much taste for limpidity in these brutal times, to be sure. So you can smirk, I suppose, at the bit about consenting to a tree, hill, or a flower and their supposed maxims. I was rather inclined to do so myself.

Yet not long ago, an immense and ancient tree was ignominiously removed from a spot just outside my window by the town in which I live. Jourdan (his name sounds as if it might mean "garden," but of course it doesn't) writes:

"The disappearance of any tree can be felt as a lessening, a sinking, of spiritual élan. This is typical of our time, which devotes itself so lightheartedly to drastic cuts."

And so I was hooked.

Lest you think he was merely ethereal, some of the sharpest writing in the book relates to the suffering he experienced when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and wrote from a hospital. He had a cat named Mao. He was not a mystic. He died, standing up, in his son's arms.