The fortuitous conjunctions and rhymes of reading: the incinerated goldfinches of Australian poet Robert Adamson’s The Goldfinches of Baghdad (2006), and the terrible pathos of the dead goldfinch-in-a-cage near the end of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. From Adamson’s title poem (and here a shout-out to his publisher, Flood Editions, and their wonderful sequence of books): A goldfinch with a slashed throat The body in pain, articulate and inarticulate. From Hardy, the moment late in the novel when Elizabeth-Jane realizes how the bird and cage had come into her home: as an overlooked wedding gift from the benighted hero, her stepfather Henchard, who via the novel’s grinding machinery has been ground almost to the dust he now trudges: “Nobody could tell her how the bird and cage had come there; though that the poor little songster had been starved to death was evident . . . Hardy writing from a position of insistent, almost marmoreal, impassivity. The lighthearted conniver Lucetta (part French, as so often in English novels!) conveniently dies, the long suffering sober and generous Elizabeth-Jane eventually lands her beloved: this no triumph of wish-fulfillment but a resolution in a minor key. Hardy endorsing the wisdom of expecting little. The particular sine-wave of a goldfinch’s flight across a field— Up here in and around Essex, NY—a town on Lake Champlain in the “North Country,” within the Adirondack Park, across the lake from Burlington VT—the air thrums with birdsong, only some of which I can identify: the silvery thrush in the adjoining woods, the phoebe screeching open the morning; the redstarts chattering intermittently, and high on the hill closer to hedges and fields the red-winged blackbirds, their wingbars flashing by. How does it matter where you are? Tom Pickard’s delicate lyric cartography and sonography in The Dark Months of May (Flood, 2004): where to go Poems tracking the fierce, windblown area called Fiend's Fell in the North Pennine Hills on the English-Scottish border— a breeze of rowan lifts Pickard’s taxonomies of wind, his birds, his plaints and rude jokes, his archaeologies of Newcastle; Robert Adamson’s aviary (see above)—the avocet, cockatoo, parrot, mudlark winging through his poems. I have a friend who never tires of announcing, “‘Nature,’ what’s that? It’s all culture!” Another who thrives in LA, exulting in the free-ways, the sprawl, the smog, the concrete, the triumph of glass, steel, signage, the paved and built late modernity—“I’d like to pave over every blade of grass!” Cf Frank O’Hara on grass. The landscape is as made a thing as the skyscraper. A longer durée. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Looking at the lovely fields it is hard to think of enclosure The chiseled green beauty of the Scottish Borders sculpted in part by the expulsion of small farmers, the importation of sheep. And that of the Highlands owing to an even greater devastation, the 18th C. Clearances, after the quashing of the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745: “clearances” (i.e. removal) of the now definitively dominated clan populations of the Highlands. What was Robert Mugabe’s latest monstrous project? “Operation Murambatsvina”—“Clear Away the Trash”: destroying the houses of and forcibly removing the people from a shantytown outside Bulawayo. “Beauty” as an index of alienation. To declaim on such a symptom of distance, ignorance, and privilege. Consider Philip V. Bohlman on music: Music is not beautiful in many cultures: there’s no reason why it should be. Beauty as a condition of music is a construct of modernity, a quality of the exchange value that accrued to it when technologies in the West made it possible to reproduce music as a commodity, a product in which the object, ‘beauty,’ could lodge. As a quality of Western aesthetics, beauty persistently makes its appearance in writings of the eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, not least because of the intervention of Romanticism, beauty’s objectified status had come to permeate aesthetic thought so pervasively that composers were forced to succumb to it or openly reject it. In the twentieth century beauty has proliferated as a component of modernity, extending beyond the West and asserting its presence in the reproductive technologies of cassette culture or export industries that globalize world musics. For Indian classical music and Javanese gamelan repertories to achieve popularity as music in the West and to gain a position in the exchange of goods between Western economies and Indian or Indonesian export systems, it has been necessary to replace function with beauty. We have turned to world music in no short measure because we are able to imagine that it contains beauty. —from “Ontologies of Music” Well then!
“In those cultures in which there is no need for beauty, there is also no open exchange of musical products as commodities.” Yet why was I was both moved and fortified to read of Elizabeth Bishop that she became extremely upset—at some otherwise unremarkable dinner—during an argument about beauty: someone there dismissing it, and she staking her all on its possibility. This anecdote I believe was in Alice Quinn’s notes to her Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox. But I can’t check— I brought only a couple of boxes of books up here this summer, though in the house there are many, allowing for all kinds of foraging: viz. Hardy. And a book on the Etruscans. A volume of selected French poetry. And some years ago, a book on Madame de Pompadour. Mon Francais est contemptible! Today’s pop quiz: A) How can we know the dancer from the dance? Answers: A) When the dance is over; B) Yes; C) No; D) All of the Above; E) Yes; F) Non, je suis americaine. Nominees for this season’s cant words and phrases, excluding the obvious candidates generated by Bush & Co.: “organic,” “community” (again, see Lisa Robertson’s post), “sustainable,” “international community” (see Shahab Ahmed’s remarks last spring at the Harvard Divinity School on the contretemps re: the “Muslim cartoons” in Denmark: we should speak of the “international system,” Ahmed says, not the “international community,” a phantasmatic pseudo-entity). I am becoming positively querulous and cranky! [To] damn braces, [to] bless relaxes. And the punctuation in my little Dover edition supports this: “Damn, braces: Bless relaxes.” Marianne Moore braces: “In Distrust of Merits,” “Marriage,” “The Octopus.” It is not the moon, I tell you. K-POW! The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a Favorite pop lyric encountered 2006: The sounds of the engines and the smell of the grain This album inspires hopes of a renewed civics via song. And before this, Bright Eyes, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. Though the intermittent dreary heroin/Brooklyn chic of the latter does weary. And so to bed. Raspberries ripening some perfected each day and blueberries one beat behind— Strawberries now past; daylilies saluting in orange— Bluebird eggs found in the houses nearby— Katie Peterson writes in from the desert, Deep Springs (see the Comments): “We must begin to touch more all the time all things and refuse not to be touched.” How to touch without appropriating; how to be in contact, in relation; to assess how and when a touch mutates into a blow, a caress— Or to know when the touch wanted is a harsh thing— Robert Creeley, from his last book, moving via thought toward and through touch, its transitivity: When I think of where I’ve come from —to be “fact of” skin; the membrane permeable, rendable; and the subject on both sides of it What first struck me, reading his earlier “The Language” and “The Window”: the micro-attention to syntactic position, breakage, possible ambiguities, tensions created, sustained, dispelled: Locate I
Position is where you “Position is where you/put it”: for sure! Verse is born free but is everywhere in chains: true or false? The amazing palpabilities in Wordsworth: thinking a touching, a making: lending a hand to “Simon Lee,” inviting his sister to touch in “Nutting”— The equally remarkable sensuous contact in James Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life”: The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp Christian Wiman nominated “Hymn to Life” as one of his “poems that should be famous” in his “Canon Fodder” contribution on this site, July 10th— How does Schuyler do it?! The stunning ingathering of this poem, seemingly effortless, its ongoing capacious expanding, the unspooling lines easing open one’s own ribcage— “Hymn to Life” a poem of spring and depression (cf Wordsworth, “The Prelude”: Spring returns, I saw the spring return / when I was dead to deeper hope); of persisting regardless (Wordsworth again, his “Immortality Ode”: We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind); even Schuyler’s daffodils remind one of WW’s—though Schuyler’s are not forced to work so hard:
In the A poetics of sufficiency—of enough—which rejects nothing: extraordinary— —versus the occasional forced-labor-camp quality of Wordsworth’s imagination: in which daffodils, recollected, flash upon that inward eye To see daffodils is not “enough” for Wordsworth; they must participate in the human logic of compensation. I am being grossly unfair to Wordsworth, who is, as they used to say, “of permanent interest,” and I send preemptive apologies to Ann Rowland, Wordsworthian! And to Wordsworth in the great orthodox Anglican beyond— Wordsworth who inspired my Oxford tutor to rouse himself from torpor and declaim: Smack that back at ya! And when pressed to expand further on his notion of “the masculine,” said tutor warmed to his topic: “The masculine is about the thing itself, whereas the feminine is about the attitude or feeling toward the thing.” The thing? But back to Schuyler, less celebrated than WW: Schuyler with the watercolorist’s eye and delicacy of touch, the everyday transformed by simple attending. Schuyler whose letters William Corbett brought out in an edition this past year – bringing us their notational brilliances, sociability, charm, subtle unobtrusive blips of perfection: “just the thing,” Corbett called his book, after one of Schuyler’s own lines I believe. Attune yourself to what is happening So what is happening now? The city is out there, and you Politics of touch, erotics of touch—again thinking along K. Peterson’s lines: actively vibrating lines of thought especially now given an essay I am working on for Boston Review re: battles over sex education and the right-wing uses of same. Sex-ed: the gift that keeps on giving! Insta-hysteria! Just say no etc. I remember in the early 90s going with a group to a school health-and-jobs fair in Chicago; I went with the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, a direct-action sex-ed group that distributed a cheery green pamphlet, “Just Say Yes!”, along with condoms. In the school gym that day they had the Blood Drive, the Fire Department, the ASPCA, etc. and they had us, with our condoms, dental dams, pamphlets and posters. —Like, what’s this? The girl and her friend laughed, lingered, glanced at the pamphlets— And she was—probably five or six months. What impasse, what possibility, here. Materials: Eva Hesse, her latex and fiberglass works: rigidity/opacity/translucency/temporality. Arthur Danto recently quoting Hesse in The Nation: “Endless repetition can be considered erotic.” Thinking of the burkha as a sheath. Had also wondered: is it possible to write blasphemous poetry in the US? Do we, like the British, have residual blasphemy laws? And if not, will we soon? Or rather, do we now: i.e. The Patriot Act and addenda? Sighting: two pileated woodpeckers. Sighting: Governor Pataki strolling down a driveway nearby; he has a summer place up here. Governor, wassup? I really enjoy my same-sex On the dispersion of poetry throughout Virginia Woolf—seeds suddenly blossoming in her prose’s surface: most recently reminded of this in Between the Acts—the scenes of the village play interspersed throughout the novel, typically rendered in brilliant period style, but also poems and bits lodged or mislodged in various characters’ consciousnesses. The heroine, Isa, a secret poet, scribbling poems in a “book bound like an account book in case [her husband] suspected.” The great tense, comic scene in the manor house’s dining room: the presiding old codger of the place Bartholomew Oliver warming to the near-mindless sensuality of the chance visitor Mrs. Manresa; Giles, Bart’s son, fiercely masculine, back for the weekend from the City, also pulsing to Manresa’s vibrations; Bart and Giles skeptical and contemptuous of Manresa’s friend, the effete artist William Dodge; Giles’ wife Isa registering all, she and Giles storing up the day’s ammunition for their erotic blowout at dusk, timed against, alongside, the war also raging: it is 1939. “Since you’re interested in pictures,” said Bartholomew, turning to the silent guest [Dodge], “why, tell me, are we, as a race, so incurious, irresponsive, and insensitive”—the champagne had given him a flow of unusual three-decker words—“to that novel art, whereas, Mrs. Manresa, if she’ll allow me my old man’s liberty, has her Shakespeare by heart?” The way the matter of “having Shakespeare by heart” emerges as social chatter, an opportunity for display and (courtesy of the author) mild ridicule; the devastating faltering theatricality of Manresa; the “rescue” of Giles by Isa, who somewhat haplessly yet brilliantly moves from Shakespeare to Keats, his “Ode to a Nightingale” (“fade far away and quite forget . . . “), lines William Dodge, the sensitive aesthete, immediately recognizes and follows with another phrase from the ode (“The weariness, the torture, and the fret . . . ). a masterpiece of comedy, mourning, misdirection— the use and abuse of poetry—for life— Woolf’s imagery everywhere tinged by her immersion in poets: the graves looming in Between the Acts, the cigarette in this scene buried in “a grave between two stones,” years before the Somme— the interment imagined in Keats’ Ode, evoked here: the proleptic interment of the war, of Woolf herself in the Ouse: As Keats in his Ode images himself dead, buried, laid in the earth, “a sod,” no longer possessed of organs of sentience, reduced to the dirt he now dwells in: thus impervious to the nightingale’s song—
To thy high requiem become a sod. Woolf giving us in this novel her last requiem. Channeling Keats through her characters, that terrible death-vision born of long thinking on generations, their deaths, the endless repetition and waste: as Keats addresses his nightingale, considering— That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, Keats’ brother Tom had just died when he wrote this Ode; Woolf’s mother died when she was thirteen; her beloved older sister Stella died some years later; her brother Thoby still later; and now the imminent deaths in this second world war— The undertow of Woolf’s novels a tremendous and controlled keening: putting one in mind of Julia Kristeva’s elaboration of the “semiotic” domain of language, carried within and below language, alongside and beyond its “symbolic” structure: langue, the system of language, into which any speaking subject enters, bringing with herself that pre-existing pre-linguistic texture of the chora, the bodily music and terror of laughter, crying, keening, gasping, etc.: this semiotic force upsurging throughout Woolf, in poetry, in song, in rhythmic “scraps, orts, and fragments.” The chorus in the hedges of the village play in Between the Acts, that transhistorical chorus (chora) here mustered by the local artist-commandant, Ida La Trobe, writer and director of the annual village play; this gathering of folk through whom poetry courses—
Hark hark the dogs do bark— These voices from the hedges in Between the Acts sounding through Jorie Graham’s Overlord (2005), with its several poems “Spoken From the Hedgerows”—a striking feedback loop here between poetry and novels; how in a time of war to “think what we are doing,” as Hannah Arendt enjoins, how to sing beyond what we are doing— The great refrain in Between the Acts, dispersed are we— from a song La Trobe plays on the gramophone to signal the play’s interval—life, dispersed, in the intervals; communal life, gathered, momentarily, in song— Consider Woolf’s gramophone vs. T. S. Eliot’s: the gramophone, instrument of mass entertainment, associated with sexual disgust in The Waste Land—after the tawdry sex scene between the typist and the young man carbuncular: She smoothes her hair with automatic hand while in Woolf the machine is humanized, incorporated in the great albeit humble pageant, an instrument of communal consciousness—
dispersed are we These eruptions of poetry punctuate her novels, bearing a crucial bodily and ontological force: the pathos and narcissism of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, endlessly muttering Cowper’s devastating lines:
We perished, each alone. from “The Castaway.” No voice divine the storm allayed, Mr. Ramsay’s fiercely iterated solitude a masculine overdifferentiation? A denial or evasion of his obvious dependence on Mrs. Ramsay? An acknowledgement of the radical isolation we all, in the end, inhabit? It would seem this refrain is for him a fetish: an impasse: a barrier to inner movement. How people hold such lines in mind: for Woolf, a revelation of character. The aging Mrs. Dalloway proleptically mourning and consoling herself throughout the novel via these lines— Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Lines sounding the subliminal groundnote of her consciousness—and again like Keats’ Ode a singing unto death— Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Consider the trace appearance of the ballad “The Four Marys” (alternatively known as “The Queen’s Marie,” or “Mary Hamilton”) in A Room of One’s Own: a brilliant turn, this allusion to a traditionary (and thus by definition “anonymous”) ballad amplifying Woolf’s concern with “anonymous,” that author who may well have been a woman; for of course the point of oral tradition is that there is no “author” to any ballad—there is only communal authorization of ballads, via ongoing recreation of them—and Woolf is exploring what there is to be found in tradition for women, by women—and for all: Woolf conjures this ballad in the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own: "Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance)." But these names, so casually tossed off, are the very names itemized in the last stanza of the old ballad: Last night there were four Marys And why will there be “but three”? Because by day’s end, and by ballad’s end, Mary Hamilton will be hanged: she illicitly bore the king a child and—hoping to suppress this fact—killed it; and she’s been found out. Ripped from the headlines, indeed. (Some versions of the ballad are set explicitly during the reign of James I-James VI in Scotland, James I in England: “Word’s gane to the kitchen / And word’s gane to the ha, / That Mary Hamilton gangs wi bairn / To the highest Steweart of a.’”) And thus “Mary Hamilton” is one of the several great infanticide ballads in the English and Scottish ballad tradition: cf Francis James Child’s compendium, Web versions of which can be found at www.contemplator.com. And the violation of these membranes? From the sublime elsewhere— Today’s pop quiz: Billy Collins vs. William Collins: who would win?? ID test: Name That Collins: which Collins is it? Over the transom this week: Does Yvonne feel any kinship with Rainer Maria Rilke? Onomastics are fantastic. Also in: the latest “fold-up”—poetry broadside—is here from Pressed Wafer, Bill Corbett’s operation out of Boston, with Cris Mattison designing as always beautifully: this month, Taylor Stoehr’s translations of Chinese poetry: his songs of the frontier ringing as frontiers everywhere rage and get violently made— Woe to the soldiers, Mail Art! Mail Art! Time to revive: Shout-Out to Dick Higgins (R.I.P.) The poetics of space: Bachelard: and Amira El-Zein’s poem “Square is Jerusalem,” which she read at Lame Duck Books in Cambridge last spring, at a party for Arrowsmith Press’s new books: written in Arabic, translated by Karin Ryding, its refrain has stayed with me— I say: And this final devastating curse, or perverse blessing: Let warfare rage To transform what is into what should be: the bitter desideratum: let warfare rage—as rage it does: Amira writing most recently via email, devastated by the events in Gaza. Playwright and poet and divagator Brighde Mullins reports from LA that she is en route to a “conference on imagination”: would that we all were in such a perpetual conference! Imagination! —lifting up itself Also just in: galleys of Paul Muldoon’s Oxford lectures and his latest volume of poems: big brain! Big word-hoard! Razzle-dazzle! Plain style begone! Though he can stick it plain as anyone. Gray day, mists and drizzle, the sky and lake both slate—and now a downpour lashing the lilies— Ballad weather report:— The wind doth blow today, my love, ‘Mak hast, Mak hast, my mirry men all, ‘Late late yestreen I saw the new moone,Don’t go sailing, you sailors in Sir Patrick Spens, no matter what the king says! Weather is almost always ominous in English and Scottish balladry. Medieval weather report: query: Western wind, when wilt thou blow? Wallace Stevens weather report: Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: May: big ballad month for eros/thanatos sweepstakes: ‘Twas in the merry month of May The great tragic incest ballad, “The Bonny Hind” (Child #50), also a May ballad: O may she comes, and may she goes, And may she comes, and may she goes, “Give me your green manteel, fair maid, Just say no, you sweet fair maid! That gallant squire’s your brother returned from sea! Screw him you’re dead! Traditionary balladry and oral poetries more broadly inverting almost every “aesthetic” criterion of literary poetry. Consider this jacket copy, on William Stafford’s Traveling through the Dark (1962), found in today’s bookshelf foraging:
“A highly individual, very personal voice is heard through these poems . . .” No highly individual very personal voices in balladry! (Or for that matter in Homer.) So something else accounts for these poems’ power. Marx, ever astute: the individual is the social being. And it is true that from a certain distance the ostensibly individual voices of an era blend more or less into a range of period styles, a date-able idiom: which does not of course detract from strong works, or the immense pleasures to be found in various styles— that they bear the marks of their historicity. (Wondering this week: are we in a Silver or a Bronze Age of U.S. Poetry? These seem to me the options, if you are toying with a “four ages” model. Still this striving for, and hailing of, “new” voices, and “strikingly individual styles,” can be usefully submitted to the askesis of anonymous balladry— For from the point of view of the poem the poet doesn’t matter.
It isn’t always identity that sings. Wonderful line from a book of poems by a young woman, loaned to me by Françoise Meltzer years ago in Chicago—who was that poet, and what was that poem? Françoise? Katie Peterson beaming in her Voice from the Desert in the Comments section—with striking thoughts not least on anonymity— Anonymity: I am I because my little dog knows me.—Gertrude Stein. Because my little blog knows me. Consider Susan Stewart, in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, on the “Cultural work of lyric: the work of individuation under intersubjective terms.” Saussure Haiku Keats ever helpful, with the notion of “negative capability,” and his meditations on Shakespeare’s “life of allegory,” a phrase Marjorie Levinson uses for the title of her marvelous and peculiar book on Keats— Keats the striving beautiful pugnacious capacious soul remarking the deformations of ego in works of poets with “oversocialized egos,” as Levinson puts it, referring to Wordsworth and Byron—to which roster we should add Robert Lowell. And certain other living poets. Poets supremely assured of their social being. And in various ways entrapped by said assurance. Who can afford not to have an identity? Heteronymity: more than a useful gambit, esp. with Pessoa, who via his heteronyms explored radically different poetics and metrics as well as personae. So much for coterie consistency, or a ‘recognizable voice’! How dreary—to be—Somebody! Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”: you are an I Why indeed? What else could be inside me? That’s when I heard And Fanny Howe, marking the limits and conditions of enunciation—she like Graham speaking the silence they also break: I have backed up Judith Butler’s great lecture a couple of years ago on “the face of the other,” meditating in part on the double injunction of Yahweh: Do Not Kill/You Must Kill. This bind organized in part around the prohibition on images, the related prohibition against looking upon the face of God— How we give face to others, the Other: her cases—the post-9.11 obituaries in the New York Times, the image of Afghan women in US media around the same time, the mass-reproduced face of Osama Bin Laden: the image of others mourned; of others presented as subjects for identification, redemption; as “the face of terror.” Is the name a face? My superstition about writing under another name, other names—not sure I could manage the inner psychic roilings such a venture would entail: a regrettable inhibition perhaps. But no name: that’s another thing maybe— Strange offshoots in the history of persona poems: the Indian death-songs haunting romanticism (cf. the “Cherokee Death-Song” featured in several 18th C. antiquarian collections, a poem later revealed to have been written by one Anne Home Hunter, included in her Poems, of 1802; several of her poems were set by Handel. The “Cherokee Death-Song” also appeared in Royall Tyler’s play “The Contrast,” the first professional play produced in the new USA: strange migrations crucial to romantic poiesis and cultural phantasy; cf as well Wordsworth’s “Compliant of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” his faux-Cherokee in “Ruth,” Felicia Heman’s “Indian Woman’s Death Song”—all arising out of a general fascination with the primitive, cross-cultural sensibility, an interest in vernacular and ethno-poetics, primitives variously imagined as (or drawn from populations of) Native Americans, Greeks ancient and modern, Highland chiefs, Scottish border-raiders, etc. See Tim Fulford’s book on Romantic Indians.) Essex NY, where I now sit, a town near Split Rock Mountain, the old boundary line between the Mohawk and Algonquin peoples, and later the British and French: overlayings and displacements of peoples, your old boundary line my new one, your old trail my new path, new road. Your people, my people, your bombs, my bombs: There is a city of terror where Here we have the exchange logic of belligerence, the equations of war: a symbolic logic, wholly operational. Marx reminds us that capitalist commodification aspires to turn the working person into a thing, a quantifiable unit whose labor power is one exchangeable commodity among the cd’s, cars, food, sex, oil, and bombs humans are everywhere busily exchanging. In this poem it is as if Wordsworth had consorted with Marx and Dickinson to produce the fierce elegance of a lyric diagnosis. We see the violent thing-i-ness of humans, a thing-i-ness Howe, like Wordsworth, alerts us to: There is a city of terror where Note the ambiguity of reference here: not a terrorized city but a “city of terror”—a city that quite possibly breeds terror as much as it suffers from it. Note the civilians—marked only in their implicit opposition to soldiers. Note the ‘guys’—are the guys the killed civilians or “they” who kill them? Regardless, the “guys” are both fathers and things, both humanized in their families and reified into the instruments or objects of death. People are symptoms of dreams. One comes to believe that prophecy is not a matter of telling the future but a practice of paying the strictest attention to the now. That what looks in Howe like a forecast fulfilled is in fact “the news” we get only from those poets committed to a kind of political and aesthetic attunement—the news we should get everyday from poems, as William Carlos Williams hoped. Yet Even in wartime, there are objects Even in wartime one may see “an object of devotion/legitimate and romantic.” And elsewhere: And fervently the Senators declared they supported the troops And now, this week’s recap boys and girls! How did I get here?—Talking Heads. Ruth Lilly Haiku My blogging appointment is nearly over and next up, Joy Harjo! I was looking at her Web site, which I’d visited before—its lovely mix of stories-in-progress, anecdotes, lyrics, reflections, and the occasional picture, and was reminded of her and many others as poets working across media, bridging that oral-literary divide, alive to cultural complexities and the many ways poetries and souls get made— I’d seen in Harper’s some weeks ago that Christian Bök’s EUNOIA is coming out in a new edition: this book is a tour-de-force, dazzling, a neo-dada punk festival and brilliant: thanks to Jeff Dolven for recommending it a few years ago. Jeff himself is starting a second book, on Renaissance “communities of style,” particularly around the Wyatt/Surrey circle, if I have things right. This matter of “recognizing”-via-style something interesting to ponder, from Henrician to Elizabethan sonnets to langpo to Philip Guston’s late style to all manner of musicians: how does achieving a style differ from repeating oneself? (That very notion of “achieving a style” has a quaint Victorian ring.) And is there any problem with repetition? Eva Hesse, again: “Endless repetition can be considered erotic.” Or idiotic. Gertrude Stein: Let me repeat what history teaches. History teaches. Stein the savant of repetition, its several impacts, comedy, and bathos. Wordsworth another kind of idiot-savant of repetition: O Reader! Had you in your mind Here WW inviting us as readers to hear/read/ponder and participate in the poem’s making—deepening structures of poiesis (making), of tale-telling, circulating. Thinking a making: Frank Bidart’s Star Dust, its excruciated anatomies of making: Until my mother died she struggled to make Making out of thinking: consider this from Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”: I am a native in this world Native thinking—how natives think: the title of a book of early 20th C. anthropology: Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think—still notorious and also naming still-active questions about how ‘we’ think about the thinking of ‘others.’ Horne Tooke the brilliant 18th C. linguist who derived “think” from “thing”: as Celeste Langan at Berkeley told me some months ago, in notes she sent on meditating on Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819: “Tooke derives ‘think’ from ‘thing,’ an etymology which seems slightly less bizarre when one knows that ‘thing’ is now derived from the Old-English term meaning ‘discussion.’ Res a thing, gives us Reor, i.e., I am Thing-ed. . . . Remember, where we now say, I think, the ancient expression was—Me thinketh, i.e., Me Thingeth, It Thingeth Me.” Think and thing two crucial Wordsworthian keywords! Get your words’ worth here. Think thing. Things think. It Thingeth Me. I remember Janice Knight asking me some 20 years ago: Do you think that you speak the language or that the language speaks you? Is poetry like obscenity? You know it when you see it?
poetry stops before the end of the margin News flash: lost poem of Shelley found!! The Poetical Essay (1811). See news link on this site. Big news in the world of romanticists—one of the missing bits of evidence for Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford, and an early statement of his fused poetic and political commitments. Engagé for sure. And, a poem in couplets—unusual for Shelley, though his great later Julian and Maddalo returns to the couplet. Shelley who signed himself (in Greek) into hotels on the Continent: “Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist.” Shelley whose poetry is so outrageously musical, politically radical, intellectually vaunting, ideationally complex and highly wrought that most goes unread, or sniffed at by those irritated with a politics and erotics that to them seemed, as T. S. Eliot put it, “puerile.” And certainly a radical embrace of Shelley is complicated by certain biographical facts—his habit of ‘rescuing’ women, screwing and then abandoning them; his refusal to grapple with the asymmetries of gender (hello, pregnancy!); his casual aristocratic sense of entitlement; his egotism disguised as high-mindedness; his utopian erotics and harem habits which always seemed to serve his and not his women’s interests/needs— And yet there he is, shining Shelley— —who would have been a great poet for/of the space age—indeed was the poet of the space age: BLAST OFF! His characters are always beaming up, zooming down, floating into other dimensions: My soul is an enchanted boat, And “Adonais,” his famous elegy for Keats, Shelley sending his vehicle into space, outsoaring night into the “abode where the eternal are”— Poet of transfiguration/possibility/futurity— One feels Shelley would have liked 20th C. physics, and would have warmed to string theory. Yeats drew a line through Blake and Shelley and Samuel Palmer to himself—a vatic, visionary line. And Ginsberg drew a similar one to himself, via the Whitman highway. This past spring’s exhibit of Palmer’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum: the early “blacks,” as he called them, thick and dark beautiful rural landscapes, the dignity of rhythmic work and rest in the fields viewed slant; the shepherd trudging home; the beautiful moss-laden cottages and carts—the peculiar oranges and pinks of his great “Orchard” and “Pear in a Garden” paintings— The amazing media of those paintings: gum Arabic—and truly the black gum shone, inviting you to touch— The experience of going “off” a writer, a singer, a friend— Strange. To realize one had been so attached to someone or something and now— Shelley an affair of adolescence, Eliot declared, to be gotten over. Protracted youths an index of socio-economic plenitude etc.
Erectile Dysfunction Haiku By George I mean of course George Hyde-Lees, Mrs. Yeats, not George Bush, #41 or #43. We have now thoroughly tuned in to “random channel”: cf Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay,” as Mother elects “random channel.” We Poets in our youth begin in gladness He is thinking of Chatterton, the “marvellous boy,” prodigy, Bristol poet, sensation, hoaxer, suicide at 17; also of Robert Burns, perhaps the great under-read romantic poet, from whom WW learned (some would say stole) so much—Burns dead in grinding poverty age 37. Burns under-read because the Scots poems in particular require enormous concentration for native speakers/readers of American English: not quite requiring translation but almost. Is there a taxonomy for that spectrum?—what it takes, say, to read Chaucer “in the original” as they say, or Shakespeare, or even some English Romantics, many of whose works remain opaque for contemporary students/readers? Sometimes I feel I teach poetry in translation though ostensibly I am teaching poetry in various forms of English. On losers in the historical sweepstakes: Celeste Langan has nominated Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) as the great unread poem of romanticism. Has anyone out there read it, other than those of us who feel a professional obligation? It’s pretty great! Celeste shows how Scott invents TV before the fact!—or rather, how Scott’s tele-visual hallucinations in this poem (and elsewhere) give us a media allegory that looks mighty like TV. Again, I may be botching the many fine points of this argument. But there it is. Do you have a nominee for great unread/under-read poem? On poet-losers in the life sweepstakes: Chatterton, Burns. OK homeys:
What more I have to say is short. I’d like to thank the Academy for giving me this opportunity . . .
orts scraps and fragments as fragments they are, clearly, since I opted to go with a “first thought best thought” Ginsbergian mode, aided by my computer and google and friends in looking things up, turning things around— through smoldering ocher shards in a witch-puce riverbed, we dig for scraps reflecting Us. and to thank those who wrote in and who are writing in—
Go make you ready. |
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