The Blog has been my companion for six months, padding after me in the house, wanting his daily rations of nourishment and attention. His tail thumps on the bed when I wake up in the morning, and he happily guides me to my desk, where I feed him and give him a scratch behind the ears. Good Blog.

Today is... Tsiknopempti here in Greece! No, I don't expect that to ring any bells for most of you. The word literally means, "the-smell-of-roasting-meat-Thursday" and, in the preparation for the fasting of Lent (the Eastern church is on a slightly different calendar), people all over Greece will fire up the coals and put slabs of meat on the grill, or join friends in crowded and overbooked tavernas for a raucous night of overindulgence. The sublime aroma will rise up to the heavens to be savored by God--or gods--and people get to dig in to the left-overs--that is the actual flesh. In other words, it sounds suspiciously like pagan sacrifices, when, again, the gods enjoyed the fragrant smoke from fat wrapped around thigh bones, while people got to enjoy the rest of the lamb or goat or calf. Though the Athens of Pericles seems infinitely far away in the mists of time--as difficult to envision as a technicolor Parthenon--somehow the Greece of Homer always seems to be right around the corner.

Mention of "The Sheep Child" here has called to mind all kinds of recollections from the Atlanta of my youth, in which, among literary circles at least, James Dickey loomed large. Everyone had a tale, either of generous encouragement, or booze-infused arrogance and aggression--sometimes both. I myself had witnessed his (probably inebriate) overbearing on a literary panel (he insisted on answering every question from the audience, even if specifically addressed to another panel member), but also treasure a letter he typed (how quaint typing now seems!), addressed "Dear Mr. Stallings," (sic) when my manuscript was a Yale finalist, encouraging me to keep at my work "for me, for poetry, and for Yale" as if he were Coach Dickey and I a quarterback...

I have been thinking about diction lately—the quandaries of word choice. Maybe it is partly to do with my 3-and-a-half–year old son’s vocabulary becoming richer and more sophisticated, and one finds oneself pushing him gently towards one word choice over another, though both might be more or less intelligible in context. Diction is often what makes or breaks a poem, though it can seem one of the least important of its mechanisms. Perhaps since John Ashbery made jarring registers of diction—from Elizabethan to contemporary slang and pop references--so much a part of his style, it has become a common-place of contemporary American poetry. Well-handled, mixed registers of diction can be playful, rousing, provocative; though it seems to me mixing registers is often adopted by poets as a postmodern tic, and that when it is applied glibly, the effect is of a poem channel-surfing, or too busy talking to itself to listen.

It has been snowing—yes, snowing!—the past two days in Athens, and the concrete city of horn honking and jack hammers, illegal parking, protest-marches and garbage collection strikes, has suddenly been transformed—briefly— into something nearly silent and pristine. The Parthenon, sugar-dusted, gleams against a bright blue sky. Youths normally dressed in black and sulking in cafes with cigarettes and cell-phones are out in the streets, grinning and hurling snowballs at one another. Small children are looking at the wondrous stuff often for the first time in their lives or short memories. (Northern Greece—an altogether wilder and woollier place—is quite used to being snowed in; but here in Attica it is a rarity.) It is laiki day—farmer’s market day—but only a few vendors have trundled in from the frozen countryside, bearing oranges and leeks and potatoes.

I've been thinking about a post on Lear, but a couple of entries have pushed it to the fore... Steve's which mentions the ghazal, and Daisy's on Rexroth in Rome. And I have been thinking too about poet-painters and painter-poets. And it ties in as well with some of my recent entries on children's literature--Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss. One of the pleasures of having a small child is revisiting the literature of childhood in the presence of those fresh eyes and ears, remembering the intensity of childhood listening and reading, which is on a different, almost magical level, it seems to me, from adult reading--a complete lack of sense of divison from the narrative and the words, a total unity with it. The parent who takes the small amount of time required to memorize "The Owl and The Pussycat"--if it is not already lodged in the memory--so that it can be pulled out of a hat to calm or entertain or entrance, will never regret it.

As far as I can tell (apologies if I missed somebody), I am the ONLY current Harriet blogger not to have been at AWP in NY. What did I miss? Was there a secret meeting of Harrieteers? What did go on at all those parties? What was the most fabulous reading I missed?

So here's a post for everyone who WASN'T there. What are your excuses? Your reasons?

Daisy's post with its reference to Dr. Seuss' The Foot Book reminds me of how important an influence Dr. Seuss is--acknowledged or not, consciously or unconsciously--to metrical poets of my generation. He gave us part of our ear for rhyme and our ear for rhythm. Sure, he is usually metrically quite regular, but the rhythms are highly varied--monosyllables and polysyllables, heavy and light nuggets of sound--as they are distributed over the metrical feet, in a breezily and distinctly American vernacular. All you need to do to appreciate Dr. Seuss's nimble prosody is to pick up any other contemporary book of children's verse. So much of it is so lackluster--full of clunky, predictable rhymes, barely scanning, and larded with filler. (Julia Donaldson, of Gruffalo fame, is a rare exception, though not quite in the same league.) When I try to read the books of plodding prosody to our toddler, he frowns a page or two in and announces, "The End."

Of course, Seuss is subversive too--what could be more subversive in a Puritan society than to announce to kids that "Fun is good"? We romanticize childhood to the extent that we shun adulthood, but being a child is also to be helpless and in the power of others (as anyone with a toddler can tell you, this is extremely frustrating!). Yet "A person's a person no matter how small."

Boredom is the mother of imagination. How many of us began to be writers--even if it was telling stories to ourselves or other children--because of a lonesome childhood, or a childhood of sickness, or long afternoons in a house of grownups and grownup books, or later, endless tedious classes, where one's own imagination was the only escape.

Boredom is endangered. We live in an age of passive entertainment, and the mind is seldom if ever allowed to wander in search of its own self-made pleasures.

Have ya’ll had enough of Greek poets yet? Hmmm. Probably so—this is the last one, promise. I am working on a review of George Seferis’ A Levant Journal, translated and edited by Roderick Beaton, due… erm, in a week or so I think. One of the curiosities of being an ex-pat poet is that people assume I am an expert on Greek poetry. And I guess the result is that I am becoming one!

The question that keeps niggling in the back of my mind about Seferis (1900-1971), one of Greece’s two Nobel laureates (here, by the way is his Nobel speech) is—is Seferis a great poet? He is clearly a major poet and an important poet and a good poet, as well as a major critic. But is he a great poet? And what do I even mean by that? Frankly, can I, not a native speaker of Greek, even judge?

Rigoberto writes here of encountering Cavafy in his high school library, and the sense of discovery and liberation Cavafy's frank evocation of homosexual eroticism gave him as a young poet. Reginald writes in the comment box that:

All the translations I've read make Cavafy sound like prose broken into lines--well-written, sensitive, insightful prose, but prose nonetheless. Reading the introductions to the translations and other work about Cavafy, I understand that Cavafy was an obsessive poetic craftsman, obsessively revising and refining each line. . . . None of this comes across in any of the translations I have read. This absence, combined with the relative paucity of figurative language--as I recall, Cavafy has vivid imagery, but few metaphors and similes--contributes to the prosaic feel of his poetry in the translations I've read.

Cavafy is without doubt the most translated and retranslated of modern Greek poets--perhaps among the most translated of foreign poets into English period. What are these translations not bringing to the table? What are we missing when we aren't reading Cavafy in Greek?

When I was sick as a little girl (which was pretty often), I would lie in a darkened room with the cool whoosh of the humidifier beside me and would listen to LPs of a complete reading of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." The two things are combined in odd ways in my memory, as if being unwell was a kind of going down a rabbit hole into a feverish world of the imagination. That my name is a diminuitive of Alice probably has something to do with my identifying so strongly with it. There is something about how she transforms poems that she wrongly remembers into odd original works, and how the book itself begins with reading over someone's shoulder, "And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?," that makes this listening to the book over and over in the dark room with a cool cloth on my head seem seminal to the idea of writing.

I live in a town where Byron is Big. There is a beautiful statue of him being embraced by Ellas (Greece) on the corner of a main thoroughfare. There is a street named after him in the center, on which he also has an eponymous hotel. Heck, there is a whole neighborhood named after him. There are even people named after him--Byron has become a Greek given name (Vyronas).

The only place where Byron is Bigger is possibly Missolonghi (a helluva a backwater to die in), where any establishment not named Liberty is probably named Byron.

Some of the lack of boldness in translation in the past fifty years or so has been a lack of technical boldness, of even attempting to get across the meter, rhyme sounds, puns, etc., of the original. After all, free verse represents a rather slim subset of poetry over the millennia. Can all poets of all times and languages really have sounded like mid-American, mid-century free verse poets in the plain-speaking tradition?

Often the translator(s) will state in an introduction that to have even attempted to convey the rhyme scheme or demonstrate a metrical pattern would have meant to sacrifice the “true� essence of the poem (the old Puritan notion that artifice and authenticity are at odds). Would it? It starts to sound to me like a cop-out. Can it simply not be done? Whose fault is that? As Daisy said, “Try harder, then.�

Dear Letter,

It's been a long time since I've written you. But I think about you often. It's always great to hear from you, to hold you, to gaze at the stamp of your beauty, your unique hand. Reading this article made me worry if you are OK. Are you OK?

As a poet who works in form, I weary of seeing in critiques--either in on-line workshops or in published reviews--the complaint that a poem or phrase or line is "rhyme driven."

Of course rhyming poetry is rhyme driven. Rhyme is an engine of syntax. If rhyme is in the car I want her stepping on the gas, minding the wheel, eyes on the road, shifting the gears. I don't want her there as mere ornament, nattering on her cell phone, putting her mascara on while gaping in the rear-view mirror.

Reginald's recent translation post has me thinking about translation again... as did my week-long marathon of getting in an application for an NEA translation grant (hope springs eternal!) And I had been meaning to write as well on some Greek women poets ever since Rigoberto's post on Aurora de Albornoz many weeks back.

Some poets do seem to gain or lose reputations in English based on how well they translate or how well they are served by translators. And it does seem to me that it is the contemporary Greek women poets whose work often "translates" better than their male contemporaries. Why?

It’s the eve of Epiphany, 12th night, the last day of Christmas. Epiphany is probably as big a holiday in Greece as Christmas (maybe bigger). As with the mornings of Christmas eve and New Year’s Eve, children are stalking the streets of Athens armed with jangling triangles to sing a carol known as “Kalanda� to unsuspecting adults, who must then give them coins. I already saw a band of children this morning hitting the toy shops with their pockets bulging with Euro coins (real money these days—not paltry drachmas).

James Merrill—who lived in Athens in a house on Lykabettos, not far from where we first lived when we moved here—has a poem that describes this tradition, “Chimes for Yahya,� which starts:

Imperiously ringing, “Na ta poume?
(Shall we tell it?)� two dressy girls inquire.
They mean some chanted verse to do with Christmas
Which big homemade iron triangles
Drown out and a least coin silences
But oh hell not at seven in the morning
If you please!

One of the problems with these calendar-year lists (not to mention grant and prize deadlines) is that it tends to give books published in the autumn or winter of the year rather short shrift. When asked about our end-of-year picks, I was still holding out hope that this book would have arrived, because I had a feeling in my heart of hearts that it was the one I wanted to choose. But I certainly couldn’t choose it without reading it through. Yes, I had seen plenty of the poems around in journals, and even a handful of them in process. It was a book I was excited to get my hands as soon as I learned it was coming out. But then it became something more urgent. For it is not just a terrific second book of poems, fulfilling the promise of a knock-out first book that had both nimbleness of formal execution and wildness of emotional landscape—it is also, bar a posthumous collection from manuscripts, a last book of poems. Maybe it is better to talk about it in January, that month of the two-faced god, a time when beginnings can look like endings, and endings like beginnings.

Many a Christmas carol has been spoiled by slick, oversweetened arrangement, piped into a mall to stimulate more panic buying. Christmas poems, read in a quiet moment to ourselves, are harder (though not impossible of course) to commodify. They are something of an antidote. As a member of Muzak's marketing department remarked, quoted in a New Yorker article a year or two back, "Our biggest competitor is silence."

I actually had a couple of other posts brewing (or gestating, as Annie Finch put it), but the twin prompts of Ange's Malice of the Sonnet post and a timely reminder via Writer's Almanac, made me realize a short post on Edwin Arlington Robinson was in order today.

We’ll be spending Christmas in Greece this year, about which I have mixed feelings. Christmas is not a big holiday in Greece or the Eastern church generally, which has its upside (a little less commercialism, though that is changing every year). Easter is what Greeks do best. So I guess I am more inclined to homesickness of a sort. There are things I miss about Western Christmas—mostly the carols. I’ll definitely be getting down to St. Paul’s Anglican church Christmas Eve for the carol service. Meanwhile, I have been cracking open my ancient book of carols from piano lessons of Christmas Past. It was always of course the melancholy ones that appealed to me, the minor keys and the modal tunes. I used to love “We Three Kings� (perfume/gloom/tomb), "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" (which never really sounded merry, and which I suppose I associate in some way with the black & white version of A Christmas Carol that used to frighten me a little as a child), and best of all the Coventry Carol, which always gets me (whether it is the lilting lullaby or the slaughter of the innocents I’m not sure… but what a combination.) Likewise with Christmas poems, it is the poems that explore the juxtapositions of the season—pagan and Christian, birth and winter, darkness and starlight, hope and doubt—that attract me, “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,� “I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different,� “I should go with him in the gloom/ Hoping it might be so.�

Our special guest today is the sonnet. No stranger to controversy, gender bending, political debate, the tug-of-war between the avant garde and the retrograde, the sonnet again finds herself a topic of discussion.

Her Sophia Loren Italian incarnation is top-heavy and wasp-waisted. When showing her English-rose side, she can seem a little more logical and four-square, her Barbour jacket and wellies obscuring her shapeliness (not to mention the Elizabethan ruff). On closer look, though, her graceful measurements, approaching the Golden Ratio, put you in mind of the human face or the Parthenon. The sonnet takes some time out of her busy schedule (she is in the midst of a revival, with talks of a movie deal, hot on the heels of Epic) to speak with Harriet blogger, A.E. Stallings.

I’m guilty—because I quoted Wendy Cope.
I’d wanted something apropos and light—
Now suddenly I'm feeling like a dope.
I thought a credit was sufficient—nope;
I hadn’t asked permission. Now I hope
I haven't trampled on her copyright!
I’m guilty—because I quoted Wendy Cope.
(I’d wanted something apropos and light.)

Maybe some people do want to be New Formalists after all. (I'm suddenly feeling better about the label myself!) At any rate everyone, it seems, has an opinion on form. And the poster child of form has to be the sonnet. We are in the midst of a sonnet explosion arguably on a par with the great 19th century revival. (The form had fallen into a rare desuetude during the previous century.) And yes, as in any age, there are slews of bad or boring or in-competent or merely-competent sonnets being written, but many that are exciting, powerful, new. I don’t mean 17-line free verse poems that title themselves Sonnet (that’s another discussion), but the garden 14-line variety, many of which even rhyme, sometimes, yes, even going ABBA or ABAB.

Over the weekend we managed to abstract ourselves from the Concrete City, and drive down into the Peloponnese to Sparta. Outside of Sparta, heading up into the foothills of Taygetus, our friend, poet Mark Sargent, has a house with spectacular views of the mountain range (famed as a spot for exposing less-than-perfect Spartan infants in ancient times), and some fine groves of olive trees. We were there to help with the harvest. I'm not sure we were much help in the end (it was probably more help to us not-exactly-new Athenians to get out of town)--we could only stay one full day, Monday, and while Mark was up in the trees cutting out the dead wood, and my husband was raking the olives into nets, I was entertaining a toddler. And also musing on a host of things, of course, including year-end harvests of poems.

So (as Seamus Heaney might begin this). My husband and I actually went to a concert last night, which we have not done in an age. He had managed to swing tickets to a sold-out Alfred Brendel concert at the Megaron Mousikis, an evening of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. But we almost didn’t go, because it meant leaving our toddler at home with a raging fever. In the end, his grandmother came over and looked after him, and we guiltily fled for the concert.

Greek audiences are not quiet audiences. They are lively and engaged, even the rather aged, mink-clad dripping-in-Chanel set that is likely to attend a pricey classical concert. Greeks aren't quiet even in church on the holiest night of the year—there is fidgeting, whispering, the inevitable chirping of cell phones. Still, at a classical concert people know better. Nonetheless, during the first movement of the Haydn, I was actually thinking to myself, you know, this is a pretty fidgety audience (everyone in there seemed to be muffling emphysemic coughs) when Alfred Brendel abruptly stopped playing and announced to the audience that if there was not complete silence, he would not continue.

Some of the lively discussion at Harriet has alerted me to the fact that people debate over who gets to be in the church of the Avant Garde—who gets to be among the Elect, who gets to be in the Canon Outside the Canon. It is clearly a privilege, a badge of honor. (Maybe humans can’t even join—maybe you have to be a machine!) The rules are necessarily arcane and known only to a few. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!

Well, New Formalism is exactly the opposite. Anybody can join—you just have to write a sonnet or three, and the rules for that are easier to get off the Internet than directions for making a fertilizer bomb. (No one says the sonnet has to be good.) The club which anyone can join though is the club of which no one wants to be a member. Nobody but nobody wants to be known as a New—or even worse--Neo- Formalist.

Poetry and Prophecy

For the ancients, the two were very much intertwined—prophecies were given in verse, and one word for poet in Latin is “vates�—prophet. Both poets and prophets were supposed to be enthused—en-god-ed—inspired by forces outside themselves. (Virgil’s works were even used in the Middle Ages for prophesy by the picking out of verses at random.) This notion now strikes us as pretty quaint. A poet is someone who struggles on his computer with ornery lines, sometimes making a living by teaching others how to wrestle with the same blank screen. The contemporary poet has largely eschewed any claim to the “vatic,� a mantle many poets a generation or three ago aspired to.

I, as probably several of my fellow-bloggers here, published my first book as the result of a contest. In fact, the manuscript had been making the rounds for years, ever a finalist, never a bride. By the time it did win, and the $1000 check arrived, I had probably spent--who knows--twice? that on entry fees, copying, and postage. But what to do? It seemed the only way to publish a first book.

That appears to be changing...

Here amongst the other New Athenians, "metaphores" (metaphors) is often seen emblazoned on a van. In modern Greek, it means "movers," and comes with burly men used to hoisting large pieces of furniture and boxes marked, in vain, "prosoche" (fragile) and "ano meros" ("this side up"). More than once I have almost been run down by the Moving Van of Metaphor...

[Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago, but didn't actually manage to post it...]

Well, I guess the Anti-Muses have had it out for me since Snark & Blurb, so I am down with either a monster of a cold or, maybe, actually the flu, and so have spent the day in bed with aspirin and tissues and thermometer close at hand. Luckily, though, yesterday the postman brought a small heap of new journals to flip through--among them I've got the new Beloit Poetry Journal, a new Atlanta Review, a new TLS, and a slick and intriguing sample Subtropics. Sitting here at the screen is giving me a headache, so I am off to crawl into bed with new poems.

Dramatis Personae:

Snark, a thin, brittle, elegant demon, the shade of an autumn leaf, with dry, cicada-like wings, and a long sharp nose. Eyebrows perpetually arched in an expression of mock-surprise. His sneer shows off double rows of pin-like black teeth.

Blurb, a plump goblin covered in iridescent scales, with a wide, trout-like mouth and a show of feathery crimson gills. She has large, purple soulful eyes perched frog-like at the top of her head, and leaves a trail of silvery slime like a snail wherever she goes.

What is it? Is it catching, is it common, is it rare?
Is it something you have heard, and maybe uttered, unaware?

I know very little about the status of women in innovative poetry (though I’d agree with Stevens that “all poetry is experimental poetry� I recognize that some poetry is more conscious of and focused on innovation than others), aside from, say, the vaguely condescending introduction to Marianne Moore by T.S. Eliot, or the crushing neglect and sad facts of Lorine Niedecker’s life. (Zukofsky does not come out smelling like roses.)

Regarding the more general bean-counting chart and graph, I can say that it is fascinating and suggestive, BUT that these numbers are absolutely meaningless as statistics WITHOUT the related numbers of what percentage of submissions are from women.

Keats owns autumn, as this post by Ange reminds us.

Every Halloween I think also of Keats since this is his birthday. His last poem, which breaks off rather than ends, is appropriately "haunting":

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.
. . .

Today is a national holiday in Greece, the day when Greeks celebrate the word "No!"

Why are there so few good poems about air travel? And are there any great ones? Is it just that it has been around for public transport less time than boats or trains or even automobiles? I can think of terrific poems about all of these, but only a brace of air travel poems spring to my mind, both about the attendant misery of airports, among other things. I'm sure folks here can remind me of others and broaden my list.

I started re-reading Keruac's On the Road during our travels, not so much because we are on the road (travelling in a rented car to hotels with a three-year old is not exactly hitch-hiking, though it has its own challenges), as because of glimpsing a piece in the October 1 New Yorker, and because it got me thinking, again, of our old friend Alan Ansen, who passed away a little more than a year ago.

When I met Alan, he was in his late 70s, and had been housebound in Athens for 15 odd years--visiting him, which involved his passing a key through the difficult-to-reach ground-floor window, was rather like visiting the Onceler. I didn't know him in his youth, when he was a friend of the Beats, and the model for Rollo Greb in Keruac's famous novel.

(Alan's 80th birthday party, with me and Rosemary Donelly. Photo by John Psaropoulos.)

We are currently in West Chester, Pennsylvania, but we have been travelling over the last week through Kentucky and Indiana, enjoying the exotic particulars of place names. We keep driving past signs here pointing us to a town called "King of Prussia". Our favorite may have been in Indiana, Gnaw Bone, Indiana, where we saw a camper/rv park called "The Last Resort." What a great address--"The Last Resort, Gnaw Bone, Indiana."

We've left Chicago, and are now in Georgetown KY, located in the rolling hills and white fences of horse country. This is also bourbon country, though we discovered (on trying to get a couple of beers at a filling station--it had been a long day of travel with an ornary toddler) it is a dry county. We'll be driving today to Bloomington Indiana, and stopping at filling stations along the way. Which in turn has been making me think of Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station." I am an ardent admirer of Bishop, but it has taken me years and years to get over an initial dislike of this poem.

I apologize to my fellow bloggers for being a bit scarce. I've been travelling, and jet-lagged, and was just at the ALSC conference where I got to meet Harrieteers Emily Warn and Steve Burt. I've been thinking a lot about translation, not just because I was on a panel about poetry, philosophy, and translation, but because I have been in the act of translation... that is "carrying across" boundaries--myself, my luggage, my family. Because of a paperwork glitch in a visa in 1997, which means he must check the "yes" box on the green form coming into the country which asks if you have ever had problems with the INS, my Greek husband still encounters difficulties when we go through passport control. We inevitably get sent to the Orange Room (or whatever it is called in the particular airport we are in), along with various resident aliens and visitors whose paperwork or appearance or demeanor has somehow sent up flags with the immigration officer.

The neighborhood I live in in Athens is called Neos Kosmos, the “New World,� a largely working-class neighborhood (though gentrifying as it is convenient to the center), with a fairly large immigrant population among the Greeks—mostly Albanian, but that is shifting now to include more of the former Eastern Bloc and occasionally Pakistan, Iraq, the Philippines. Ironically, or maybe not, for me, it is the new world. I moved here from the States in January of 1999, just as the Clinton impeachment was underway, and I was here in Greece on September 11, 2001. In short, the country, the old world, I left is a century as well as an ocean away. The Greek for homesickness is “nostalgia.� It seems right to me that in English, nostalgia is homesickness for a time as well as a place.

I like Mondays because Monday is when the farmer’s market (the laïki agora), comes to our neighborhood, on the street just around the corner. There are plenty of drawbacks to living in central Athens—endless construction, garbage, pollution, traffic, strikes, protests, the eternal Kafka-esque tangle of bureaucracy, more protests—but this is one of the plusses. One day a week, every neighborhood gets its turn at a farmer’s market, and produce trundles in from all over Greece at 4 in the morning, with the Arcadian or Peloponnesian or Cretan or Euboian dirt still clinging to it, like etymologies to the roots of words.

I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual-fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman,
And he’s been dead since 1936.

(Serious Concerns)

...

All summer long I’ve had a deadline hanging ovet head—I was supposed to write an essay on a single word for an anthology. (Actually, the deadline has passed, and I’ve received a one-week extension!) I’ve been mulling over it for months. I’ve toyed with different favorite words—“loom,� “consider,� “shambles,� “aftermath� (it is partly the narrative of the etymology that interests me, as well as the sounds of the words themselves and their constellations of rhymes.) I’ve now signed on for “sagacious.� Maybe Ange’s senses' (sensational?) post will spur me to finish this damn thing!

Fit the First: Anxiety and Audience

I was working on this post a while ago, perhaps an oblique response to Brian Phillips' essay among other conversations, and then got caught up in some other thoughts and discussions. But this still seems relevant, especially viewing recent comments to Christian's Failure posts (particularly Marty Elwell's).

I wonder why we Anglophone poets are evidently so worried about audience. I meet plenty of Greek poets. They are writing in a marginal (though not currently endangered) language for the tiniest of audiences: even a best-selling novel here sells just a couple thousand copies. I’ve never seen Greek poets sell books at a reading, though they often give their reading copy away to a new fan. Poetry books are to be presented to friends, relatives, critics, editors. For a Greek poet, the ultimate wider success is to find an English translator and have their books published in English (whether in America, the UK, Canada), to reach a world audience. I've even encountered younger Greek poets who are writing in English, though it is not their native tongue. Personally, I think this is disastrous, but they seem to view it as a kind of survival technique.
So what do we English-speaking poets have to complain about, really? Why are we whining?

A couple of my fellow blogsters also have little ones underfoot, so I’m sure they will appreciate the problem of “toddler music.� (I need to track down Steve’s suggestion of a couple of weeks ago.) I was given a four cd set of toddler tunes, and also own some Rafi and other singers big in the little people set. Yes, I know, there’s no reason toddlers can’t listen to “real� music. Now my son (3) would just as soon listen to “Peter and the Wolf�, which he says he “watches,� because I guess to him it is like a movie, only scarier, perhaps, since the wolf as a sound rather than image on a small, two-dimensional screen seems freer to roam about the room and lurk in the dark corners of the house. But as an ex-pat, I was keen that our son learn all the English children’s songs and rhymes of my own childhood, so out came the toddler tunes.

I was reminded by several people (and the Writer’s Almanac) that today is T.S. Eliot’s birthday. T. S. Eliot was one of my first loves as a forming poet.

Like the Muses, they are attracted to talent and promising projects, and the presence of several at once probably means you are on to something big. Still, they can frustrate or even destroy the most inspired tender new poem, and send the poet into despair, alcoholism, or flash fiction. The more we know about them, the better.

It seems like someone should post about this. I guess it will be me. There is a changing of the guard over at the New Yorker—long-time Poetry Editor, Alice Quinn, is stepping down, and Paul Muldoon is stepping up. Maybe this is already common knowledge all over the poetry world—I just heard it the other day on a conference call with Emily Warn and our fellow bloggers. It’s big, exciting news.

I really enjoyed reading Steve’s post about translation. A lot of my writing time is spent not working on my own things, but translating. Translation is a great boon to a poet. You never have to face the white page alone if you don’t want to. I think of translation as a special kind of deep reading. It lets you try on other voices, and other genres (epic, didactic!). But it can be a heart-breaking business—there’s no such thing as a perfect translation, and every success is paid for by a failure. So since you are going to fail, why be dull?—be bold! Fail big! A couple of fun totally quirky (and distracting) translations:

During Greece’s long hottest-on-record summer, and while Arcadia was, literally, burning, and while I was without babysitting and left with the lioness’s share of child care (we have a three-year old, Jason), I took up . . . knitting.

I guess I should introduce myself. I am an American poet (I grew up around Atlanta, and went to the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia), but I have lived the past 8 years in Athens, Greece. (My husband is Greek—the old story.) There are problems and privileges in being an ex-pat poet. I am largely out of the loop for a lot of the professional poetry/MFA world in the US—AWP and so on. I think that is probably a privilege not to have to deal with all that. I can glimpse the Parthenon from my son's playground. But there are problems, too. A poet lives in her mother tongue, and I live in exile from it. That isn’t to say that English isn’t all around Athens these days—in pop songs, television shows, movies, bad and agrammatical slogans on billboards and t-shirts. But I miss the real thing—the American vernacular, American as she is spoke.