Hitchens on Poetry

It depresses me beyond measure that most people I meet cannot even recite, much less compose, this gem-like form. Nor can any student in any of my English classes produce a single sonnet of Shakespeare: not even to get themselves laid (the original purpose of the project).

I worry that by phrasing things in this way I may myself be adding to the general coarsening and deafness. Of course my test isn't the one true test: who can safely say that they have memorized Don Juan, for instance? But then who could you count as reliable who could not manage a stave or two of The Waste Land? The word "Koran" means "the recitation," and it seems that in Arabic its incantation can induce trance by sheer power and beauty. (Auden was wrong, in his valediction for Yeats, to say that "poetry makes nothing happen.") At least this restores the idea of a relationship to the theoretically divine, and to the audience. (Auden also wrote of Yeats that "mad Ireland hurt you into poetry," which at any rate implies the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between poetry and the reality of which Eliot believed that "human kind" could not bear too much.)

Yet very often, late at night, when I am not tired enough for sleep but too tired to carry on with absorbing or apprehending anything "serious" or new, I will walk over to the appropriate shelf and pull out the tried and the true: the ones that never fail me. And then I will always stay up even later than I had intended. And sometimes, in the morning, I really can "do" the whole of "Spain 1937" or "The Road to Mandalay," and can appreciate that writing is not just done by hand.

-- full essay here.

On being criticized for decisions made in editing a poetry anthology

"My anthology continues to sell, & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum - however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . ."

-- W.B. Yeats, from a letter of December 26, 1936 to Dorothy Wellesley

Bunting's Persia

Edited and introduced with notes by Don Share, Bunting's Persia collects Basil Bunting’s translations from Persian poetry by Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri, Sa‘di, Hafiz, and Obaid-e Zakani, including previously unpublished translations. Bunting, who is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century, proved unusual in his deep and abiding interest in Middle Eastern culture. Here, he renders poetry of remarkable tonal and emotional range in characteristically clear and resolute language.

“Reading Bunting’s translations, I am struck again by how fresh and strong they are, how vivid in their feeling, and how he digs into the spirit of the originals—a kind of passionate excavation work.”—Dick Davis, translator of The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

Published by Flood Editions.  

Pre-orders via SPD, Amazon, B&N, Amazon UK, The Book Depository, and elsewhere.

On the beach (beneath the street)

The Situationists were formed over half a century ago - in 1957 - and after fifteen years of acting as provocateurs, disbanded in 1972; the Situationist International, we learn from McKenzie Wark's new book, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, had a total of seventy-two members.

They spoke, as Alex Danchev puts it in a recent TLS review (November 18, 2011), in tongues; he calls their Paris '68 slogans "a crash course in Situationist rhetoric."  Viz -

REVOLUTION CEASES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT---- IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID ---- NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS ---- DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL ---- AFTER ART, GOD IS DEAD ---- DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON'T DIE OF STARVATION HAS PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM ---- CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE'S MISERY ---- DON'T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE ---- NEVER WORK ---- CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED ---- RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU! ---- BE CRUEL ---- THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE ---- LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME ---- INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE ---- PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTH ---- UNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!

That last slogan reads, in French: Sous les pavés, la plage!  Danchev drily remarks: "Allowing for the fact that the beach has since materialized on the banks of the Seine, without so much as a crack in the social order, that slogan is wonderfully apt to the purpose."

The SI's position, as Raoul Vaneigem put it at one of their conferences in 1961, was "that of warriors between two worlds, one which we do not recognize, another which does not yet exist. We must precipitate the crash; hasten the end of the world, the disaster in which the Situationists will recognize their own."  Their "secretary and strategist, their philosopher and disciplinarian, their Lenin with a grin, or at least of sense of humor, as Danchev describes him, was Guy Debord, who in 1958 wrote that they would have "neither Paradise nor the end of history..."  Debord's first wife (and a founder of SI) Michèle Bernstein wrote a novel which, Danchev says, "catches straight-faced the atmosphere at Situ HQ," e.g.


"What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea."

"Reification," he answered.

"It's an important job," I added.

"Yes, it is," he said.

"I see," Carole observed with admiration. "Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers."

"No," said Gilles. "I walk. Mainly I walk."


Americans are big walkers in their cities, but the French (among others) seem always to have been better at drifting, in the sense of the dérive, than we.  I wonder why.  But maybe that's changing, with the occupy movements.  Wark himself recently appeared at the Occupy Washington Square Park Teach In, where he said:

Those who talk about the 99% without talking about what they really love, what they really desire, what everyday life is a struggle about—they are speaking with a corpse in their mouth. The struggle to live unites us all—in all our differences.

Our ideas are on everybody's minds. Be impossible, demand the realistic. There is tenderness only in the crudest demands. Nobody should go hungry. Nobody should go homeless. Or be crushed by debt.

Both his book and Danchev's review are very much worth reading; the book, by the way, includes a "graphic essay" about the SI which tries to "détourn" Situationist thinking itself by using comics; you can read about that here.  And archaeologists of literary culture can delve into the SI archives at SI online.

(One of my own fave Situationists is Alexander Trocchi, about whom I blogged here.)

Uniting us all in our differences; as Empson said, "The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own."  There's a sorely-needed justice in that realization that's well worth struggling for.

Further info, including an interview with Wark at Berfrois.

Pictured: Self-explanatory object, available from Crazydog T-shirts. 

If poetry editors aren’t editing, what are they doing?

“Conceptualism”	Poetry Editing
Concept	Taste Idea
Material sourced from [whatever]	Material sourced from contributors
Art as analytic proposition	Editorial work as analytic proposition
Seriality	Ditto
The death of the author	Anthologies

Full exposition of this chart can be found here.

Very much on the attack

Via Zachary Bos's blog: A report on Geoffrey Hill's most recent turn at the lectern as Oxford Professor of Poetry.

According to the audience member Peter McDonald, the lecture was as much jeremiad as learned allocution.

Here's a slightly edited version of the account McDonald submitted to the Geoffrey Hill Exchange [Facebook group]:

Very much on the attack (which with Hill is often something done under the cover of defense): on the values of 'oligarchical' consumerist politics and culture. The Poet Laureate was accorded respect (at least her office was) before a pitiless exposure of the vacuousness of her publicly angled notions of poetry, and of 'texting' as a model for a supposedly -- and Hill implied, fraudulently -- 'democratic' model of modern poetry. Contemporary lit-biz was roundly deplored, especially bookfests, poetry prizes, 'flourishing' poetry lists etc. None 'scaped whipping - not least the University of Oxford, and its association with the deplorable tawdry bookselling festival antics of the Oxford Literary Festival. ... Fascinating reflections on August's riots as profoundly traditional occasions, conditioned by the values of very society they only seem to challenge. Overall a real -- rather scary, funny but when you think about it not funny at all -- call for head-on confrontation with the shambles of contemporary literary and political culture. Hill explicitly endorsed obscenity as a literary weapon in this, and it was no surprise to hear his praise of Swift in that context. As ever, he spoke with the bravery and conviction that punches a hole through the complacencies of 'professional' dealers in literature. Was it my imagination, or did one or two of them, usually so impervious to criticism, seem to shift a little uncomfortably in their comfortable seats -- or should I say chairs? No, I was imagining it: they know (as H. acknowledges) where the real power lies.

*

A new video of the maestro in action can be viewed on The Economist website, of all places.  BBC's Newsnight even sent someone out to see what makes the great man tick; video here.

Podcasts of his Oxford lectures are/will be archived here.


Pictured: Chairs suitable for shifting in; Geoffrey Hill and the Oxford logo.