In the December NY Review of Books, I enjoyed an article on two new books on Robert Frost, one a novel and one a biography. This of course sinks with my interest in maybe writing a biographical novel or biography, but also it called my attention to Frost in way that I hadn't considered before. I do love his work, but like an artist over-played on Starbucks' radio, I find it hard to appreciate the good bits hidden behind the over-popular pieces. I like what he says about sound in his prose reflections, for example, in this quote in that I'd like to find in its entirety to flesh out his position:
"I speak of imagination as having some part in the sound of poetry. It is everything in the sound of poetry; but not as inventor nor creator -- simply as summoner. Make no mistake about the tones of speech I mean. They are the same yesterday, today, and forever. There were before words were -- if anything was before anything else." (Collected Prose of Robert Frosted, cited in NY Review of Books, Dec 08)
To think of sound as summoning poetry is quite different that emphasizing the particular sonority or meter of a poem in reflection. Of course, it's all very useful to appreciate the meter in Hardy and to try to pound out a good anapest in your own work. But... I think this standarized, metrical / scansion model of understanding sound is only useful for criticism, not for creation. What Frost describes is how speech sounds evoke poems in the ear of the writer. With Frost's iamb's, the momentum of sound it quite strong. The iambs carrying that rocking feeling of walking, of the momentum of the walk carrying you in one direction until the next step is felt before it is thought. But you cannot see this meter as construction or appearing only in reflection; Frost had to hear that sense of sound, to get into it before thinking and then following into a poem. Hearing the "sound of sense" going before you as you write is like hearing a band playing in the other room and starting to write a melody to overlay while gradually sneaking up on them. The sound is much more than a meter: it's a sound-place, a complexity, open totality to explore. My old stand by, Merleau-Ponty, might call this the indirect voices of silence: the meaningful silence before and between speech. It's not an empty space or time but one which calls you toward speech.
Certainly, the sounds of Frost are ramifying all through American poetry. I certainly can't write without hearing a bit of "Whose house that is, I think I know..." already going before me
Friday, December 26, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
"this suffering business"
In one of Bishop's letter's -- sent in a time just around her own alcoholic breakdown and Lowell's first manic episode -- she slips in the following comment between chatter about lobster pounds and Eliot's criticism:
"Sometimes I wish we could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I guess I think it is so irresistible & unavoidable there's no use talking about it, & that in itself has no value, anyway..." (E Bishop to R Lowell, Sept 8th, 1948)
of that which we cannot speak....
"Sometimes I wish we could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I guess I think it is so irresistible & unavoidable there's no use talking about it, & that in itself has no value, anyway..." (E Bishop to R Lowell, Sept 8th, 1948)
of that which we cannot speak....
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Biography, mania and mysticism
Out of basically voyeuristic interest, I dug up a Robert Lowell biography at the university library today. Some of his person comes through in the letters to Bishop, but from the sketchy details of his mania and instability in the introduction, you get the impression that there must have been other sides of his character not represented. From the biography, that indeed seems to be the case. I read (quickly) the Hamilton 1982 biography which I found about as readable as a set of note cards – very choppy and full of too many long citations – but also detailed and informative (I’d like to see if there’s another better version?). Given my latent interest in mysticism, I was intrigued by the descriptions how in certain fits of mania, Lowell ‘renewed’ his Catholicism and became obsessed with prayer; the biographer says he “confused religion and sexuality" (158). Certainly that “symptom” would describe the behavior of certain mystics… the question is then whether they shared something psychologically with Lowell or whether Lowell perhaps read too much mysticism and unconsciously imitated them.
Having sated my biographical craving – in fact, I feel a bit abashed now, having actually been overwhelmed and terrified by Lowell’s character even at this distance – I’m going to turn back to the poetry now. I stumbled on a used copy of his complete works at Magus books, and read “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” while standing up in the bookstore. That read certainly confirmed it was worth the purchase.
Having sated my biographical craving – in fact, I feel a bit abashed now, having actually been overwhelmed and terrified by Lowell’s character even at this distance – I’m going to turn back to the poetry now. I stumbled on a used copy of his complete works at Magus books, and read “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” while standing up in the bookstore. That read certainly confirmed it was worth the purchase.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Letters
"We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel." - E. Bishop
On this shockingly cold day for the Northwest, I've just begun reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. After pouring over reviews of this collection the NY times book review, the New yorker, and the poetry book store, I felt I had to dig in. It both pleases me and makes me rabidly jealous. What a privilege to listen two great minds thinking and living with each other! I get to watch them magpie along, collecting bits from their daily life and travels and then flipping the visible side of the world over and turning it into poems. On the other hand, I envy them their special poet friend ... and also the permanence of letters ! I feel I have enjoyed some wonderful correspondence and exchange, but so much of it drifts away over the phone and the internet. I really wonder -- I realize this is an unoriginal reflection -- how this generation will be recorded. We've even seen that problem with the email of the president; because his correspondence must be public, he can't email... just another sign, that we really haven't found out how to keep a record of this transient medium.
Back to Bishop and Lowell. I realized while matching some of Bishop's poems to the ones mentioned in the correspondence that I haven't read much Lowell... I certainly had a copy of Life Studies once, but it seems to have drifted from my shelf. I think I like Bishop more anyway, but just for justice, I'm going to try to rustle up a copy of Lowell's work as I go through the letters so I can "watch them work."
But Bishop, Bishop... she is the writer's writer's writer, as Ashbery is cited as saying. Take that first line I've cited: the iceberg is the imaginary, the narratively drawn together life, that we prefer to the raw data of the world without us. But the iceberg is also the world without us: it's not the ship, the thing we've crafted and try to sail uselessly in a sea packed with brutal things like icebergs.
although it meant the end of travel." - E. Bishop
On this shockingly cold day for the Northwest, I've just begun reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. After pouring over reviews of this collection the NY times book review, the New yorker, and the poetry book store, I felt I had to dig in. It both pleases me and makes me rabidly jealous. What a privilege to listen two great minds thinking and living with each other! I get to watch them magpie along, collecting bits from their daily life and travels and then flipping the visible side of the world over and turning it into poems. On the other hand, I envy them their special poet friend ... and also the permanence of letters ! I feel I have enjoyed some wonderful correspondence and exchange, but so much of it drifts away over the phone and the internet. I really wonder -- I realize this is an unoriginal reflection -- how this generation will be recorded. We've even seen that problem with the email of the president; because his correspondence must be public, he can't email... just another sign, that we really haven't found out how to keep a record of this transient medium.
Back to Bishop and Lowell. I realized while matching some of Bishop's poems to the ones mentioned in the correspondence that I haven't read much Lowell... I certainly had a copy of Life Studies once, but it seems to have drifted from my shelf. I think I like Bishop more anyway, but just for justice, I'm going to try to rustle up a copy of Lowell's work as I go through the letters so I can "watch them work."
But Bishop, Bishop... she is the writer's writer's writer, as Ashbery is cited as saying. Take that first line I've cited: the iceberg is the imaginary, the narratively drawn together life, that we prefer to the raw data of the world without us. But the iceberg is also the world without us: it's not the ship, the thing we've crafted and try to sail uselessly in a sea packed with brutal things like icebergs.
Monday, December 08, 2008
astrology , therapy, Husserl?
Today I met an astrologer who knew Husserl. No, that's not a typo folks: I don't mean "astronomer." I was sitting at Peet's coffee and this man comes up to me -- after some chitchat about the Sunday market that made our coffee spot too busy -- and asks me what I'm working on . I say my dissertation; he says, "Oh, is it on Husserl?" I say - surprised - "No, but..." and this leads to a pretty cogent conversation about phenomenology.
And... somewhere along the way, he mentioned he was an astrologer. Despite his thoughtful, in depth thoughts on Husserl and Sartre, I struggled to maintain a charitable attitude. How could he both be a thinking person and an astrologer!? But I tried to keep my mind open, and he had some interesting things to say about how astrology was more like psycho-therapy than people thought. (He found it exhausting to listen to people's problems all day and respond to them. ) And then we talked just a little about how myth and astrology could have transformative, theraputic effects . Then... he started to talk about transmigration of the soul and he lost me a bit. Still, it was a healthy challenge to my latent scientism.
Plus, the kicker is that on Friday night at the company party, the very nice woman sitting to my left said, "Ah what do you do as a philosopher then? Is it like astrology?" = )
And... somewhere along the way, he mentioned he was an astrologer. Despite his thoughtful, in depth thoughts on Husserl and Sartre, I struggled to maintain a charitable attitude. How could he both be a thinking person and an astrologer!? But I tried to keep my mind open, and he had some interesting things to say about how astrology was more like psycho-therapy than people thought. (He found it exhausting to listen to people's problems all day and respond to them. ) And then we talked just a little about how myth and astrology could have transformative, theraputic effects . Then... he started to talk about transmigration of the soul and he lost me a bit. Still, it was a healthy challenge to my latent scientism.
Plus, the kicker is that on Friday night at the company party, the very nice woman sitting to my left said, "Ah what do you do as a philosopher then? Is it like astrology?" = )
Friday, December 05, 2008
blake on mourning
I love Blake. I bought a Dover Thrift edition just to have him near me. Here's a quote on mourning from "On Another's Sorrow"
"Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.
O! He gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan."
I would think with my general outward cynicism, I would prefer the Songs of Experience, but instead I love the Songs of Innocence, the more nursery rhyme the better. I'm sure Auden would agree...
"Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.
O! He gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan."
I would think with my general outward cynicism, I would prefer the Songs of Experience, but instead I love the Songs of Innocence, the more nursery rhyme the better. I'm sure Auden would agree...
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
art-life-art-life, etc, etc.
Last night I had a dream that I recognized a poem by E. Barett-Browning in a book that someone had disguised as Wordsworth (someone she parodies / contends with). I'm not sure what the dream was about, but I flipped open my copy of Aurora Leigh and found a passage that echoes what I was just reading in Merleau-Ponty. Browning writes:
"What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form'
For otherwise we only imprison spirit,
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward, -- so in life, and so in art,
Which still is life."
Basically... how should we write? Like we live. And vice versa. This is not a new idea... not even for a Romantic; what is beautiful but the good at which all things aim. Art should be like a living body, whole, unique, etc. Merleau-Ponty says, in turn, “the body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art” (PP 150). Any human action happens with the ambiguous unity of the art work: an action is individual, in relation to its situation “its meaning is not arbitrary and does not dwell in the firmament of ideas: it is locked in the world [like a poem] printed on some perishable page” (PP 150).
These prescriptions are pleasant... and maybe often, true. But they also feel insufficient. Certainly there can be bad art, better art, unsuccessful actions, better action, etc. So while the comparison is true, I wondered if it helped Browning at all in her writing ...
All I can think is that she chose, of all forms, the epic which requires a good amount of time to read. So her form, perhaps better than the lyric, reflects life and vice versa because both are temporal. As with reading Remembrance of Things Past, the sheer time it takes to read her book changes your relation to it.
"What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form'
For otherwise we only imprison spirit,
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward, -- so in life, and so in art,
Which still is life."
Basically... how should we write? Like we live. And vice versa. This is not a new idea... not even for a Romantic; what is beautiful but the good at which all things aim. Art should be like a living body, whole, unique, etc. Merleau-Ponty says, in turn, “the body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art” (PP 150). Any human action happens with the ambiguous unity of the art work: an action is individual, in relation to its situation “its meaning is not arbitrary and does not dwell in the firmament of ideas: it is locked in the world [like a poem] printed on some perishable page” (PP 150).
These prescriptions are pleasant... and maybe often, true. But they also feel insufficient. Certainly there can be bad art, better art, unsuccessful actions, better action, etc. So while the comparison is true, I wondered if it helped Browning at all in her writing ...
All I can think is that she chose, of all forms, the epic which requires a good amount of time to read. So her form, perhaps better than the lyric, reflects life and vice versa because both are temporal. As with reading Remembrance of Things Past, the sheer time it takes to read her book changes your relation to it.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Intruder
Intruder. What a catchy title. Violation can be so seductive. What has been violated? Or whom? By whom ? Who's on the inside now? What was valuable or taken? I for one was hooked by this title of Jill Bialosky's new book. That said, I don't actually enjoy all of the poems -- she mentions The Poet one too many times for me -- but I do like the arc of the story that springs out from the title. I also particularly enjoyed, "An Essay in Two Voices." Here is a passage:
"Perhaps under the transforming powers
of imagination, there's evidence of a positive attitude toward you.
This is what Stendhal thinks of as the 'second crystallization'' ;
and it is at this stage, he believes, that love becomes fixed."
Alan Williamson alludes to the same passage from Stendal's Love in his poem "Love and the Soul." Williamson describes the fixation of love as like "the branch gathering crystals out of the cold water.” Here is the passage from Stendal’s Love to which they both allude:
For Stendhal, this mental process of crystallization means that after falling in love, “a man in love sees every perfection in the object of his love” (Stendhal 45). In love, we are not blind, but we are misguided; like some sort of cognitively disabled Oliver Sacks patient, we have the strange habit of mis-attributing all virtue to one person. We see generosity in a neighbor, and we think ‘how much better that would look if my beloved did it’ and in a way, begin to believe s/he has done it. This sort of love leads to a “girl drowned” in the love of a man who lets her crystallize under the weight of too many qualities.
In Bialosky's poem, love sustained depends on imagination . The risk, as for Williamson and Stendhal, is not necessarily that love is not requited (though this is a possibility) but that it is imbalanced, substantiated by imagination not by the actual other person. How do we know the difference between empathy and imagination? Between caring blindness to faults and ignoring the real?
I'm going to stick with Bialosky's book through a few more readings because of this poem ... many of the poems share its method of building up and then pulling the rug out from under you. She crafts a gentle domestic setting with children, husbands, flowers and walks and then disrupts it (intrudes?). I get this sense that she's set up a still life on a table -- a table with normal, boring-pretty placesettings -- and then she's tilting the table, more and more until I'm uncomfortable and then concerned and then genuinely worried everything in the nice domestic scene is going to fall off and shatter.
"Perhaps under the transforming powers
of imagination, there's evidence of a positive attitude toward you.
This is what Stendhal thinks of as the 'second crystallization'' ;
and it is at this stage, he believes, that love becomes fixed."
Alan Williamson alludes to the same passage from Stendal's Love in his poem "Love and the Soul." Williamson describes the fixation of love as like "the branch gathering crystals out of the cold water.” Here is the passage from Stendal’s Love to which they both allude:
At the mines of
For Stendhal, this mental process of crystallization means that after falling in love, “a man in love sees every perfection in the object of his love” (Stendhal 45). In love, we are not blind, but we are misguided; like some sort of cognitively disabled Oliver Sacks patient, we have the strange habit of mis-attributing all virtue to one person. We see generosity in a neighbor, and we think ‘how much better that would look if my beloved did it’ and in a way, begin to believe s/he has done it. This sort of love leads to a “girl drowned” in the love of a man who lets her crystallize under the weight of too many qualities.
In Bialosky's poem, love sustained depends on imagination . The risk, as for Williamson and Stendhal, is not necessarily that love is not requited (though this is a possibility) but that it is imbalanced, substantiated by imagination not by the actual other person. How do we know the difference between empathy and imagination? Between caring blindness to faults and ignoring the real?
I'm going to stick with Bialosky's book through a few more readings because of this poem ... many of the poems share its method of building up and then pulling the rug out from under you. She crafts a gentle domestic setting with children, husbands, flowers and walks and then disrupts it (intrudes?). I get this sense that she's set up a still life on a table -- a table with normal, boring-pretty placesettings -- and then she's tilting the table, more and more until I'm uncomfortable and then concerned and then genuinely worried everything in the nice domestic scene is going to fall off and shatter.
Monday, December 01, 2008
pursuit
I've been reading more philosophy than poetry, but since most of it has been written by Merleau-Ponty, it's still pretty beautiful writing. He says: we are each " a being which is in pursuit of itself outside" (PP 451). We are chasing after our own motivations that lead us away from our bodies toward other bodies, toward other things, toward actions, events. For M-P this is a sort of "realistic" statment: you simply are always already outside of yourself; you're made up of the stuff of the world, a hollow or fold in the world not fundamentally different (as for Sartre, Descartes).
I've begun to think of his work as a sort of virtue ethics, a praxis you must take up, not theorize. He concludes the Phenomenology of Perception with a quote from St. Exupery: "Your act is you." And yet as a practice his philosophy seems to differ quite strongly from other philosophies to which I am committed, namely yogic philosophy. In yoga, one wants to stop seeking ourselves "out there"; stop looking at another person's mat to see what you should be doing. But yogic philosophy seems to have little postivie to say about desire or motivation; we are to distinguish ourselves from them.
But for M-P, to be motivated does not mean that we are not free. I wonder if M-P is only describing a situtation rather than prescribing it?
I've begun to think of his work as a sort of virtue ethics, a praxis you must take up, not theorize. He concludes the Phenomenology of Perception with a quote from St. Exupery: "Your act is you." And yet as a practice his philosophy seems to differ quite strongly from other philosophies to which I am committed, namely yogic philosophy. In yoga, one wants to stop seeking ourselves "out there"; stop looking at another person's mat to see what you should be doing. But yogic philosophy seems to have little postivie to say about desire or motivation; we are to distinguish ourselves from them.
But for M-P, to be motivated does not mean that we are not free. I wonder if M-P is only describing a situtation rather than prescribing it?
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
What I've been reading
I've been lazy about posting for the last month so I thought I'd just jump back in with a quicky. I took a trip to my favorite poetry book store today and got some new reading: Maureen McLane's Same Life. The text is sparse and cryptic -- starts with a fragment, makes allusion to sappho -- and it's made more compact by some ampersands and lack of capitalization ... but the content is rich, mystical, loving. I'm digging it.
(I also a copy of Field with some commentary and poems by lots of people I like) I also enjoyed reading the new poems in Linda Bierd's new collected work. Last week, I also enjoyed Jorie Graham's Sea Change... she's sort of a sure-fire fix.
(I also a copy of Field with some commentary and poems by lots of people I like) I also enjoyed reading the new poems in Linda Bierd's new collected work. Last week, I also enjoyed Jorie Graham's Sea Change... she's sort of a sure-fire fix.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Sokal Hoax and friendly Simon Blackburn
I found this to be a very thoughtful and even handed review by Simon Blackburn of Alan Sokal's latest book, Beyond the Hoax. Sokal mercilessly mocked a generation of postmodern scholars... and as anyone who's read in that area knows, some of the criticism is deserved. But not all. Blackburn does a very good job of explaining the awkward position that editors are in when facing an interdiscplinary article... and more importantly, a scientific article in a humanities discipline. So many philosophers, literary theorists, and even poets, as I noticed during the last series of WW lectures I attended, want to "interpret" or make use of the latest (or even, just the last 75 years) of developments in biology and physics. But... they just do get it. Well, they get *some* of it or they get the part the publishing scientist has put into words; but the humanities readers are not privy to the data or the technical pieces of the articles, and so they can't critique the foundations of radical claims about, for example, cognition or the relation of time and space. The Sokal hoax is not just an incident of a smart physicist showing up some poorly-educated lit crit-ers, but evidence of the difficulties communicating between the sciences and the humanities in general. Thanks, Blackburn for affirming that.
Tragedy, Logos, Mythos and Louise Gluck's "Lament"
Louise Gluck the prepares the readers of her book, Ararat, to read arguments. She perhaps wishes she didn't have to write so many arguments or respond to them, asking in the opening poem, "Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?" But the trouble is, she was "Born to a vocatoin / to bear witness / to the great mysteries" and she has realized that " these / are proofs, not / mysteries --." On that em dash, we enter the book, to read her proofs or... her readings of the proofs in nature. Throughout the book, Gluck is wishing for wholes, for neat, complete forms like circles; this "love of form is a love of endings." She wants things to be complete, including her arguments. She wants to start telling you about some problem, some situation, caused by nature -- her birth, for example -- and to complete the proposition with a definitive conclusion. But, nature resists endings. And our own nature, more than any other part of nature, resists being judged completely.
In "Lament," Gluck takes a look at her own nature. That is, she takes a look at her whole life, as it will be viewed after death. Or, more precisely, she attempts to take a look at that whole. She tells the reader firmly in the opening sentence that "Suddenly, after you die, those friends / who never agreed about anything / agree about your character." READ MORE... She says, definitively, This is how it will be when you die: everything will be visible and everyone agreed. The mourners will be "like a houseful of singers rehearsing / the same score." They will be the chorus, able finally at the end of your life, to pass judgment. They will be able to decide finally that "you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life." As Aristotle tells us in his Ethics, we cannot know things things until after a life is complete: the goodness of a person's life depends on how it finishes, on the fortunes of his or her family, on the change that person's fortune after life. The goodness of a life is not visible to the one living that life or even to those living that life with her.
Of course, those who gather at Gluck's speaker's funeral are not just a chorus, "they're not performers; / real tears are shed." And, "[l]uckily, you're dead," says Gluck because otherwise this excessive display would overcome you with revulsion. And yet... at the same time, when all the mourners have settle down, have gone over your life, have had the coffee at the reception, you might, in the end, envy these people. They are, after all, alive and you, says the speaker, are dead (that is the premise of the poem). Meanwhile, "Your friends the living embrace one another / gossip a little." And you see that, counter to Aristotle, "this, this, is the meaning of / "a fortunate life": it means / to exist in the present."
To exist in the present. This is something you are not permitted after death. It's something quite hard to accomplish even while you're alive. This is the aim of much yogic philosophy: to be fully present. Yogis struggle for many years, not to struggle with life's projects. But... is that an inhuman aim? Heidegger would think so: to live authentically, is to live in the face of one'death. That is, to live toward and in light of, one's future, not to understand existence only in terms of presence. In Gluck's model,in contrast to Aristotle, fortune is indeterminant. Neither the first nor the third person perspective reveals fortune. The mourner judging a person like a chorus after the person's death can decide the quality of life; the person living a life can never know if she fully exists in the present.
Gluck opens the poem with a hypothesis, considers one traditional response (Aristotle's), then exposes details through phenomenological research (i.e. looking at the lived experience of the situation) and finally concludes with her own assessment. The poem presents an argument, a proof. But we can't understand this proof as simply fuzzy "poet's logic." Gluck is really making a counter argument. To the logos, the account, of Aristotle, she presents another account, another logos. The logos makes use of a bit of mythos (On this distinction, see John Sallis, Being and Logos). But the conclusion we reach at the end, was hard won through this account, not just lightly presented.
Gluck changes the nature of tragedy, even while playing on the classical Greek mode. We cannot witness the lives of others and, through pity and fear, excise emotions in order to learn and live a good live, together as a health polis. There are not good actions or bad actions or fated actions that can dame or redeem us. No, no. The tragedy is that we can only learn, looking on the lives of others, that it is good to be alive, that all there is, is to be present to that life, whatever its quality.
And of course... by imagining her own death, by asking us to imagine ours, Gluck pulls herself and her readers away from the very present she has exhorted us to appreciate. Ironically, only through the lesson learned by looking away from the present -- toward death -- are we reminded to attend to the present.
Now, I'm reading Gluck's "Lament" because I also like to make "arguments" in my poems. I can help it! I read arguments all day. Of course, as a good philosopher trained in the 'continental' / hermeneutic tradition, I am also always asking myself what an argument is in the first place, how it differs from a story, and what the nature of language is that it permits us (if it does) to distinguish those categories, arguments and stories. As a philosopher, writing poetry, I am often worried about making "fuzzy" arguments: the sorts of poetic "arguments" that skip a few step, that enjoy the ad hominem, that don't care about objections. And... of course, as a poet, that I will be ruining my poems with too many arguments! Even Plato tells us in the Phaedo, that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must tell stories, not arguments. But... Gluck is certainly making a sort of argument here. And she's certainly a poet. So I must conclude that either Plato was wrong, (he was badly translated), he means something different by "story" than I do, that he didn't mean the categories as exclusive (you could have stories and arguments), or that poetry has just generally become something different than it was for Plato. I usually resist the last argument as an easy out that assumes a too-flexible view of the human condition. But the other options still leave too much room for a full conclusion.
So... let's abandon that tactic and Plato altogether, and just say that if Gluck can do it, then it's possible. Arguments *in* poems. But... the way to do it, is by way of a story. This poem would most likely fail were it not to include the rhetorical exercise of imagining your own death and the image of the mourners living through the funeral. So... the lesson is, A little of both? Well, that's a recipe that could use a few more details and it certainly won't help me write a poem. But Gluck's work affirms the possibility of this combination. And... outside of its crafty tools and rhetoric, I appreciate the content of the argument she's made. Be present. That's pretty straight forward. Isn't it?
In "Lament," Gluck takes a look at her own nature. That is, she takes a look at her whole life, as it will be viewed after death. Or, more precisely, she attempts to take a look at that whole. She tells the reader firmly in the opening sentence that "Suddenly, after you die, those friends / who never agreed about anything / agree about your character." READ MORE... She says, definitively, This is how it will be when you die: everything will be visible and everyone agreed. The mourners will be "like a houseful of singers rehearsing / the same score." They will be the chorus, able finally at the end of your life, to pass judgment. They will be able to decide finally that "you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life." As Aristotle tells us in his Ethics, we cannot know things things until after a life is complete: the goodness of a person's life depends on how it finishes, on the fortunes of his or her family, on the change that person's fortune after life. The goodness of a life is not visible to the one living that life or even to those living that life with her.
Of course, those who gather at Gluck's speaker's funeral are not just a chorus, "they're not performers; / real tears are shed." And, "[l]uckily, you're dead," says Gluck because otherwise this excessive display would overcome you with revulsion. And yet... at the same time, when all the mourners have settle down, have gone over your life, have had the coffee at the reception, you might, in the end, envy these people. They are, after all, alive and you, says the speaker, are dead (that is the premise of the poem). Meanwhile, "Your friends the living embrace one another / gossip a little." And you see that, counter to Aristotle, "this, this, is the meaning of / "a fortunate life": it means / to exist in the present."
To exist in the present. This is something you are not permitted after death. It's something quite hard to accomplish even while you're alive. This is the aim of much yogic philosophy: to be fully present. Yogis struggle for many years, not to struggle with life's projects. But... is that an inhuman aim? Heidegger would think so: to live authentically, is to live in the face of one'death. That is, to live toward and in light of, one's future, not to understand existence only in terms of presence. In Gluck's model,in contrast to Aristotle, fortune is indeterminant. Neither the first nor the third person perspective reveals fortune. The mourner judging a person like a chorus after the person's death can decide the quality of life; the person living a life can never know if she fully exists in the present.
Gluck opens the poem with a hypothesis, considers one traditional response (Aristotle's), then exposes details through phenomenological research (i.e. looking at the lived experience of the situation) and finally concludes with her own assessment. The poem presents an argument, a proof. But we can't understand this proof as simply fuzzy "poet's logic." Gluck is really making a counter argument. To the logos, the account, of Aristotle, she presents another account, another logos. The logos makes use of a bit of mythos (On this distinction, see John Sallis, Being and Logos). But the conclusion we reach at the end, was hard won through this account, not just lightly presented.
Gluck changes the nature of tragedy, even while playing on the classical Greek mode. We cannot witness the lives of others and, through pity and fear, excise emotions in order to learn and live a good live, together as a health polis. There are not good actions or bad actions or fated actions that can dame or redeem us. No, no. The tragedy is that we can only learn, looking on the lives of others, that it is good to be alive, that all there is, is to be present to that life, whatever its quality.
And of course... by imagining her own death, by asking us to imagine ours, Gluck pulls herself and her readers away from the very present she has exhorted us to appreciate. Ironically, only through the lesson learned by looking away from the present -- toward death -- are we reminded to attend to the present.
Now, I'm reading Gluck's "Lament" because I also like to make "arguments" in my poems. I can help it! I read arguments all day. Of course, as a good philosopher trained in the 'continental' / hermeneutic tradition, I am also always asking myself what an argument is in the first place, how it differs from a story, and what the nature of language is that it permits us (if it does) to distinguish those categories, arguments and stories. As a philosopher, writing poetry, I am often worried about making "fuzzy" arguments: the sorts of poetic "arguments" that skip a few step, that enjoy the ad hominem, that don't care about objections. And... of course, as a poet, that I will be ruining my poems with too many arguments! Even Plato tells us in the Phaedo, that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must tell stories, not arguments. But... Gluck is certainly making a sort of argument here. And she's certainly a poet. So I must conclude that either Plato was wrong, (he was badly translated), he means something different by "story" than I do, that he didn't mean the categories as exclusive (you could have stories and arguments), or that poetry has just generally become something different than it was for Plato. I usually resist the last argument as an easy out that assumes a too-flexible view of the human condition. But the other options still leave too much room for a full conclusion.
So... let's abandon that tactic and Plato altogether, and just say that if Gluck can do it, then it's possible. Arguments *in* poems. But... the way to do it, is by way of a story. This poem would most likely fail were it not to include the rhetorical exercise of imagining your own death and the image of the mourners living through the funeral. So... the lesson is, A little of both? Well, that's a recipe that could use a few more details and it certainly won't help me write a poem. But Gluck's work affirms the possibility of this combination. And... outside of its crafty tools and rhetoric, I appreciate the content of the argument she's made. Be present. That's pretty straight forward. Isn't it?
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Why "me"???
I was assigned to read “Andrea del Sarto,” because in Shapiro’s words, “there’s nothing but character” in this poem. But whose character? There are at least two important characters in the poem, represented directly and indirectly: the speaker and the addressee of the monologue. Both characters concern me: what are their characteristics and how does Browning manage to convey these qualities? The poem fits into steady blank verse, with some unobtrusive internal rhyme. These formal structures recede to foreground the quality of the speaker’s voice and thought.
The speaker is a painter, apparently the painter of the title, Andrea del Sarto. By his own account, he is a good painter and well-established. He does “no sketches first, no studies” before he paints; the many would-be artists around him struggle to accomplish what he easily dashes off: he does “what many dream of all their lives.” And yet, he does not relish his success or even find it honest. He thinks that those other, struggling artists “reach many a time a heaven” that is closed to him, even if his work itself is heavenly. But heaven is not something we can really reach anyway, del Sarto thinks. Heaven is an ideal, an aim, but unattainable: “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”
It’s hard for del Sarto to tell the difference between himself and his art.
READ MORE... During the autumn evening that frames the poem, del Sarto sees “alike my work and self.” And he sees that God controls all of this – the evening, the couple watching it, the art, the selves. But this deceptive God only gives the inhabitants of his world the appearance of freedom. They seem free, but God has fettered them. Del Sarto plays on the phrase, “to lead a life,” exclaiming that it is strange to look at “the life He makes us lead!” (my emphasis) God gives people the impression that they are in control, they are guiding their lives, but they are only walking ahead of him, attached by a chain he put on at birth. Like a perverse psychologist, God lets the speaker talk and talk, permitting him the impression that he controls the conversation. But a secret agenda and hidden rules and knowledge decide the situation and the very soul of the speaker.
Lucrezia, the character who is the addressee of the monologue and present at the speech, says nothing about del Sarto’s musing. She does not seem to think much about his work… or to think much at all, according to del Sarto. He tells her, “you don’t understand / Nor care to understand about my art.” She has smeared one of his paintings, “carelessly passing with … [her] robes afloat.” And the premise of the poem is that she’s asked him to paint something for a friend of a friend, to get a little money. After he promises to do so, he has to persuade her just to sit with him for the evening. She’ll also be his model for the promised paintings, so they’d better keep on good terms, even if the relationship is a bit unbalanced. Del Sarto wishes that with her pretty model’s face she had “but brought a mind!” He pithily remakes that “some women do so.” Not only that, he wishes that rather than asking him to pander his art for money, she’d said “God and the glory! Never care for gain.” But… these are only idle wishes in del Sarto’s mind; he’s not going to leave her and look for a more artistic, passionate partner. “God over-rules” everything and his fate is his fate. More to the point, “incentives come from the soul’s self; the rest avail not”: that is to say, del Sarto thinks his situation is his own fault. He has opportunities to rise through some great patrons, but he stuck with his Lucrezia. He admits that as a result, he might be a bit “underrated.” Musing on that, he dares to “fix” an arm in a painting by Raphael (or copied from a Raphael) that sits in his studio. Without glory, without praise from Raphael and Michaelangelo, the only criterion of assessment del Sarto has is money. If Lucrezia would consent to sit with him more often, he says he would work better, where “better” is equivalent to having more money: “I should work better, do you comprehend? I mean that I should earn more, give you more.” Despite all this – all his doubts about himself, his relationship – he concludes that “God is just.” He says – with purported resolve – “I regret little, I would change less still,” though only a few lines later, admitting that he let his parents die in poverty. After his long diatribe, all that Lucrezia does is get up to go out with her Cousin without del Sarto. Still, del Sarto finds ironically that in fact she loved him “quite enough … to-night.” Perhaps he’s had quite enough of her sort of love. In any case, he doesn’t stop her from going out.
I learn, through del Sarto, some details about Lucrezia’s responses to his work and via these details, something of del Sarto’s thoughts about himself. But always, always, the question in the back of my mind is, what does I learn of Robert Browning by reading this poem? Nothing? Enough? Should I learn something? Commentary on Browning takes up a substantial chunk of a stack in the university library. With all his masks of characters and dissociative relations between himself and his speakers, he’s a subject just begging for post-modern sort of commentary (and there is plenty). One comment I found helpful as a quick summary sort of position is that Browning “never thought of utterance as performed outside history in a Shelleyan lyric space” but that does mean that he was just trapped in “neurotic self-concealment behind his speakers.” Rather, Browning simply accepted that “consciousness, when properly conceived [and I infer, properly represented], will always generate a regress of frames that defer closure.” What a relief! I, we (poets), do not need to worry about representing consciousness completely! . Certainly then, I do not need to worry whether my consciousness will be communicated if no consciousness can be fully communicated. (I resist – with difficulty – digressing to a long, philosophical diatribe on the iffy-ness of any sort of “I” or unified consciousness, drawing support from everyone from Dennett, Hoffstrader, Fodor, Lacan, and Derrida.) Then why is there so much demand for me to say something personal on the page! The exclamation point in that sentence shouts in apostrophe to many of my readers and teachers, from parents to well-respected poets and philosophers. Do they make the same demand of authors of fiction? Does anyone put down Ulysses to demand of Joyce, Waves of Woolf or even Cavalier and Clay of Chabon, that he or she say more of herself? That is the “relief” the writer enjoys by using characters and plot: they speak for themselves (whichever selves, whosever they are, and whoever put them on the page). I can appreciate Browning’s work of this dramatic type in the same way as I appreciate good fiction. Like good fiction, this puts a big demand on the reader who must extrapolate from the specific characters represented, perhaps through a universal, toward a model that might apply to the reader’s own life. Rather than allowing the only particular to be the life or consciousness of a speaker identifiable with the poet, this fictional, dramatic type of poetry generates other particulars. These foil characters are somehow trustworthy in a way that a personal speaker might not be. Even when someone you don’t like as a person tells you a fairy tale or reads you a novel aloud, you can still enjoy the story. That is, if for some reason I start to feel like I dislike or feel distant from the speaker-character I associate with Sylvia Plath or Derek Walcott, it might be difficult to empathize with many poems. This one, albeit complex, “I” persists through many poems. In Walcott’s Midsummer, for example, there is no relief from the intense, 1:1 conversation with this insistent “I.” (And in the case of this book, I did at times want relief)
That said, of all Browning’s dramatic monologues – many of which could serve for study of his characters – I chose to write on “Andrea del Sarto” for personal reasons. I chose the poem not just for its tricks of formal method, but because of the topic and its relation to my personal life. This is a poem about a difficult relationship, about art – specifically visual art and living with a visual artist, topics close to home for me – and the relation between artists in general and their work, lives and partners in life. I – pause for ominous suspense after this pronoun – like this poem. I’ll probably write some poems modeled after it, or at least some poems around the same topics. The accumulation of selected topics and characters does allude to a curator, either Browning or myself. But the totality of that accumulation is precisely something I will never see in my own work, and something extraordinarily difficult to perceive even with all Browning’s work accompanied by years of criticism, sitting before me. But as a poet, writing via a foil character lets me, as I imagine it allowed Browning, to defer contemplation of that whole and concentrate on a few particulars.
The speaker is a painter, apparently the painter of the title, Andrea del Sarto. By his own account, he is a good painter and well-established. He does “no sketches first, no studies” before he paints; the many would-be artists around him struggle to accomplish what he easily dashes off: he does “what many dream of all their lives.” And yet, he does not relish his success or even find it honest. He thinks that those other, struggling artists “reach many a time a heaven” that is closed to him, even if his work itself is heavenly. But heaven is not something we can really reach anyway, del Sarto thinks. Heaven is an ideal, an aim, but unattainable: “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”
It’s hard for del Sarto to tell the difference between himself and his art.
READ MORE... During the autumn evening that frames the poem, del Sarto sees “alike my work and self.” And he sees that God controls all of this – the evening, the couple watching it, the art, the selves. But this deceptive God only gives the inhabitants of his world the appearance of freedom. They seem free, but God has fettered them. Del Sarto plays on the phrase, “to lead a life,” exclaiming that it is strange to look at “the life He makes us lead!” (my emphasis) God gives people the impression that they are in control, they are guiding their lives, but they are only walking ahead of him, attached by a chain he put on at birth. Like a perverse psychologist, God lets the speaker talk and talk, permitting him the impression that he controls the conversation. But a secret agenda and hidden rules and knowledge decide the situation and the very soul of the speaker.
Lucrezia, the character who is the addressee of the monologue and present at the speech, says nothing about del Sarto’s musing. She does not seem to think much about his work… or to think much at all, according to del Sarto. He tells her, “you don’t understand / Nor care to understand about my art.” She has smeared one of his paintings, “carelessly passing with … [her] robes afloat.” And the premise of the poem is that she’s asked him to paint something for a friend of a friend, to get a little money. After he promises to do so, he has to persuade her just to sit with him for the evening. She’ll also be his model for the promised paintings, so they’d better keep on good terms, even if the relationship is a bit unbalanced. Del Sarto wishes that with her pretty model’s face she had “but brought a mind!” He pithily remakes that “some women do so.” Not only that, he wishes that rather than asking him to pander his art for money, she’d said “God and the glory! Never care for gain.” But… these are only idle wishes in del Sarto’s mind; he’s not going to leave her and look for a more artistic, passionate partner. “God over-rules” everything and his fate is his fate. More to the point, “incentives come from the soul’s self; the rest avail not”: that is to say, del Sarto thinks his situation is his own fault. He has opportunities to rise through some great patrons, but he stuck with his Lucrezia. He admits that as a result, he might be a bit “underrated.” Musing on that, he dares to “fix” an arm in a painting by Raphael (or copied from a Raphael) that sits in his studio. Without glory, without praise from Raphael and Michaelangelo, the only criterion of assessment del Sarto has is money. If Lucrezia would consent to sit with him more often, he says he would work better, where “better” is equivalent to having more money: “I should work better, do you comprehend? I mean that I should earn more, give you more.” Despite all this – all his doubts about himself, his relationship – he concludes that “God is just.” He says – with purported resolve – “I regret little, I would change less still,” though only a few lines later, admitting that he let his parents die in poverty. After his long diatribe, all that Lucrezia does is get up to go out with her Cousin without del Sarto. Still, del Sarto finds ironically that in fact she loved him “quite enough … to-night.” Perhaps he’s had quite enough of her sort of love. In any case, he doesn’t stop her from going out.
I learn, through del Sarto, some details about Lucrezia’s responses to his work and via these details, something of del Sarto’s thoughts about himself. But always, always, the question in the back of my mind is, what does I learn of Robert Browning by reading this poem? Nothing? Enough? Should I learn something? Commentary on Browning takes up a substantial chunk of a stack in the university library. With all his masks of characters and dissociative relations between himself and his speakers, he’s a subject just begging for post-modern sort of commentary (and there is plenty). One comment I found helpful as a quick summary sort of position is that Browning “never thought of utterance as performed outside history in a Shelleyan lyric space” but that does mean that he was just trapped in “neurotic self-concealment behind his speakers.” Rather, Browning simply accepted that “consciousness, when properly conceived [and I infer, properly represented], will always generate a regress of frames that defer closure.” What a relief! I, we (poets), do not need to worry about representing consciousness completely! . Certainly then, I do not need to worry whether my consciousness will be communicated if no consciousness can be fully communicated. (I resist – with difficulty – digressing to a long, philosophical diatribe on the iffy-ness of any sort of “I” or unified consciousness, drawing support from everyone from Dennett, Hoffstrader, Fodor, Lacan, and Derrida.) Then why is there so much demand for me to say something personal on the page! The exclamation point in that sentence shouts in apostrophe to many of my readers and teachers, from parents to well-respected poets and philosophers. Do they make the same demand of authors of fiction? Does anyone put down Ulysses to demand of Joyce, Waves of Woolf or even Cavalier and Clay of Chabon, that he or she say more of herself? That is the “relief” the writer enjoys by using characters and plot: they speak for themselves (whichever selves, whosever they are, and whoever put them on the page). I can appreciate Browning’s work of this dramatic type in the same way as I appreciate good fiction. Like good fiction, this puts a big demand on the reader who must extrapolate from the specific characters represented, perhaps through a universal, toward a model that might apply to the reader’s own life. Rather than allowing the only particular to be the life or consciousness of a speaker identifiable with the poet, this fictional, dramatic type of poetry generates other particulars. These foil characters are somehow trustworthy in a way that a personal speaker might not be. Even when someone you don’t like as a person tells you a fairy tale or reads you a novel aloud, you can still enjoy the story. That is, if for some reason I start to feel like I dislike or feel distant from the speaker-character I associate with Sylvia Plath or Derek Walcott, it might be difficult to empathize with many poems. This one, albeit complex, “I” persists through many poems. In Walcott’s Midsummer, for example, there is no relief from the intense, 1:1 conversation with this insistent “I.” (And in the case of this book, I did at times want relief)
That said, of all Browning’s dramatic monologues – many of which could serve for study of his characters – I chose to write on “Andrea del Sarto” for personal reasons. I chose the poem not just for its tricks of formal method, but because of the topic and its relation to my personal life. This is a poem about a difficult relationship, about art – specifically visual art and living with a visual artist, topics close to home for me – and the relation between artists in general and their work, lives and partners in life. I – pause for ominous suspense after this pronoun – like this poem. I’ll probably write some poems modeled after it, or at least some poems around the same topics. The accumulation of selected topics and characters does allude to a curator, either Browning or myself. But the totality of that accumulation is precisely something I will never see in my own work, and something extraordinarily difficult to perceive even with all Browning’s work accompanied by years of criticism, sitting before me. But as a poet, writing via a foil character lets me, as I imagine it allowed Browning, to defer contemplation of that whole and concentrate on a few particulars.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Poems I love???
What sort of poems do I love? What a question. It’s a question Alan Shapiro asked me when we started out this term. That is, what were some of the first poems I loved? The poems I read before I even knew the names of the authors or what poetry was “for.” I remember going to my room – either because I was sent there or because I went to sulk there – when I was between maybe seven and thirteen and reading two or three poems form one book of poems over and over. These were my mantra poem: to read until I calmed down. Then I might browse through the book or get out other books and read them. But these two or three poems were the key to crawling into my safe place, mentally and physically. I recovered that book from my parents house this summer and found the poem that was most essential to my “practice” of retreating: “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. Magee won a small prize in poetry and published a few poems privately, but he was best known for this poem, “High Flight,” written while he was test-piloting a plane in World War II. He died shortly after Pearl Harbor. After Archibald Macleish selected the poem for a collection, it became well-known.
Of course, I knew none of this when I read the poem as a child. I read the poem because I had always wanted to be an astronaut: when I was five or six I told everyone I would be an astrophysicist; I dreamed of Space Camp; I read Stephen Hawking when I was eleven. Then I found out that astronauts must have perfect vision and be at least five feet four inches tall. After it was clear I would never attain even the requisite height on earth, I abandoned the career goal. I never bothered with physics in college and left off after a few advanced math classes. But the dream of me of being an astronaut – of seeing the whole thing – still haunted my vocational plans. Studying philosophy, writing poetry, seemed to be a way of short-circuiting the arduous scientific path toward that big picture knowledge.
Before I go any further, here's the poem:
I did not set out to investigate this poem because it acted via a particular pre-determined craft element. READ MORE... Rather, I want to study this poem to see which craft elements play a role in effecting the sort of poem I found (or find?) secretly and firmly to be paradigmatic of “Poem.” To that end, I will proceed from the outside in, scanning the poem from its most broad structures and conceits to find this hidden craft element. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to cut to the chase)
Magee’s poem is a fourteen-line, near-Shakespearean sonnet with an ABAB rhyme scheme, until the last five lines which proceed FEGFG. The rhymes are straight, perfect rhymes of one-syllable words. Alliteration and consonance of “s” sounds string together throughout the poem: for example, “slipped,” “surly,” “skies, “laughter-silver wings,” “Sunward,” all the way through to “silent… sanctity of space.” Coinciding with the dramatic action of the poem, “s” sounds build momentum as the pilot lifts off from earth and speeds into flight. And yet there is relief from this alliteration in the penultimate couplet, “Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.” At the moment in the poem, Magee's speaker has climbed “up, up the long delirious blue” ; acceleration has ceased: reader and speaker pause, in orbit, in empty, quiet space.
The lines are steady iambic pentameter, with a few exceptions in the first foot: line three varies the initial iamb with a trochee, “Sunward”; line five has a spoken stress on the initial “You” of “You have not dreamed of…”; similarly, line six, emphasize “High”; and line nine begins with a spondee, “Up, up.” These initial variations relax the sonnet into a slightly more colloquial tone. Both the topic and the discourse are so elevated that these gentle shifts in emphasize make the speaker and the content more accessible.
To address this issue of content, I want to consider first the plot or dramatic action of the poem and then the rhetorical tropes employed there in. The poem has a fairly simple plot: the speaker has “slipped the surly bonds” of gravity and headed up into the sky, past the clouds, where he has done many things “you have not dreamed of.” Up in the sky, he hovered, in some sort of “craft”-- I'll resist the temptation to dwell on poetic craft -- and then, he managed, up there in space to touch “the face of God.” Magee’s language fluctuates between semi-metaphors and periphrasis. For example, rather than directly saying that he has “escaped gravity” he says, periphrastically, that he has “slipped the surly bonds of earth.” In the atmosphere, he “joined the tumbling mirth” of clouds: that is, the clouds were, metaphorically, dancing around. He also chased the wind which was, metaphorically, “shouting … along.”
The most obvious criticism that I can imagine one might level at Magee’s poem is that it is abstract and sentimental. Let me take each of those accusations in turn. Magee’s poem is “abstract” in that it digresses through the periphrases mentioned above, and it includes adjectives whose content is difficult to pin down: for example, in the phrases “surly bonds,” “eager craft” and “delirious burning blue” and “easy grace.” As a reader, I know vaguely what he means to suggests, but my imagination depends on previous association of these words with elevated topics rather than an encounter with a new, specific image. Magee’s poem could be seen as “sentimental” in that he discusses perhaps clichéd topics – flying away from earth, dancing with the stars, and talking to God – and he reacts, as would be expected, with awe and joy.
But I love this poem! How can it be abstract and sentimental? (Or worse, if it is abstract and sentimental, why do I love it?) The success of Magee’s poem depends not on innovation in the sonnet form – as I hope I've shown, the rhymes, meter, and argument structure are standard – and not on the novel or bizarre language – again, we’ve seen that he uses clichéd adjectival phrases – but on its rhetorical tools and effect. Although I mentioned some instance of metaphor, as a whole, the poem performs as a metonymy. It is not the series of clichéd metaphors – joyful clouds and halls of air – that affect me as a reader. Rather, I am persuaded into the imaginary because the poem was written by a person literally up in the sky. (Magee wrote the poem at 30,000 feet, quite a height in the early twentieth century.) In my book, the poem appears above a photo of a Edward White, the first American to “float in space” and the facing page contains a picture of “Africa and Other Areas of the Earth, Seen from Apollo 17 Spacecraft.” (The poem was later quoted by Ronald Regan during the Challenger disaster)
Magee's poem results not from idle speculation, but observation. He does not aruge that some abstraction – say, the life of the mind— is, in simile, like floating in space or that it is, metaphorically, an adventure into the stratosphere. Magee is not wandering in the forest like Wordsworth, mulling over existence (personal and general) and history and offering comparisons or approximations. While Magee’s language might veer toward the abstract or sentimental, he conveys a quite concrete and specific experience to the reader. Magee says, “I am floating in space. I really am. That’s it.” And it just so happens that the next association over on the horizontal access of metonymic similarity, a la Jacoboson is “touching the face of God.” These two events are found together like shoes and slippers, a bed and a pillow, or a mother and love. It’s hard to disassociate a mother from love (whether the effect is to call up a lack of love, the pain of love, the loss of love, or an excess of love). Likewise, floating in orbit and watching the whole of the planet is, perhaps for our species, not dissociable from the notion of God (leaving that massive noun's definition in a secular suspense).
This poem appears in a collection titled, Imaginary Gardens, taken from a phrase in a Marianne Moor poem: “… nor till the poets among us can be / ‘literalists of / the imagination’… and can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (This poem is included in the collection) Moore means that the poet ought to create so accurately and precisely imaginary places that real and familiar things just appear in them. And the real work of the poet, the real poetry is with the real things, not in the “fiddle,” as she puts it, that generates them. Magee might fiddle around with language a bit, but he does get you to the real. He doesn’t make an imaginary garden; he only tells you where he’s sitting and that’s quite interesting enough.
Of course, I knew none of this when I read the poem as a child. I read the poem because I had always wanted to be an astronaut: when I was five or six I told everyone I would be an astrophysicist; I dreamed of Space Camp; I read Stephen Hawking when I was eleven. Then I found out that astronauts must have perfect vision and be at least five feet four inches tall. After it was clear I would never attain even the requisite height on earth, I abandoned the career goal. I never bothered with physics in college and left off after a few advanced math classes. But the dream of me of being an astronaut – of seeing the whole thing – still haunted my vocational plans. Studying philosophy, writing poetry, seemed to be a way of short-circuiting the arduous scientific path toward that big picture knowledge.
Before I go any further, here's the poem:
I did not set out to investigate this poem because it acted via a particular pre-determined craft element. READ MORE... Rather, I want to study this poem to see which craft elements play a role in effecting the sort of poem I found (or find?) secretly and firmly to be paradigmatic of “Poem.” To that end, I will proceed from the outside in, scanning the poem from its most broad structures and conceits to find this hidden craft element. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to cut to the chase)
Magee’s poem is a fourteen-line, near-Shakespearean sonnet with an ABAB rhyme scheme, until the last five lines which proceed FEGFG. The rhymes are straight, perfect rhymes of one-syllable words. Alliteration and consonance of “s” sounds string together throughout the poem: for example, “slipped,” “surly,” “skies, “laughter-silver wings,” “Sunward,” all the way through to “silent… sanctity of space.” Coinciding with the dramatic action of the poem, “s” sounds build momentum as the pilot lifts off from earth and speeds into flight. And yet there is relief from this alliteration in the penultimate couplet, “Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.” At the moment in the poem, Magee's speaker has climbed “up, up the long delirious blue” ; acceleration has ceased: reader and speaker pause, in orbit, in empty, quiet space.
The lines are steady iambic pentameter, with a few exceptions in the first foot: line three varies the initial iamb with a trochee, “Sunward”; line five has a spoken stress on the initial “You” of “You have not dreamed of…”; similarly, line six, emphasize “High”; and line nine begins with a spondee, “Up, up.” These initial variations relax the sonnet into a slightly more colloquial tone. Both the topic and the discourse are so elevated that these gentle shifts in emphasize make the speaker and the content more accessible.
To address this issue of content, I want to consider first the plot or dramatic action of the poem and then the rhetorical tropes employed there in. The poem has a fairly simple plot: the speaker has “slipped the surly bonds” of gravity and headed up into the sky, past the clouds, where he has done many things “you have not dreamed of.” Up in the sky, he hovered, in some sort of “craft”-- I'll resist the temptation to dwell on poetic craft -- and then, he managed, up there in space to touch “the face of God.” Magee’s language fluctuates between semi-metaphors and periphrasis. For example, rather than directly saying that he has “escaped gravity” he says, periphrastically, that he has “slipped the surly bonds of earth.” In the atmosphere, he “joined the tumbling mirth” of clouds: that is, the clouds were, metaphorically, dancing around. He also chased the wind which was, metaphorically, “shouting … along.”
The most obvious criticism that I can imagine one might level at Magee’s poem is that it is abstract and sentimental. Let me take each of those accusations in turn. Magee’s poem is “abstract” in that it digresses through the periphrases mentioned above, and it includes adjectives whose content is difficult to pin down: for example, in the phrases “surly bonds,” “eager craft” and “delirious burning blue” and “easy grace.” As a reader, I know vaguely what he means to suggests, but my imagination depends on previous association of these words with elevated topics rather than an encounter with a new, specific image. Magee’s poem could be seen as “sentimental” in that he discusses perhaps clichéd topics – flying away from earth, dancing with the stars, and talking to God – and he reacts, as would be expected, with awe and joy.
But I love this poem! How can it be abstract and sentimental? (Or worse, if it is abstract and sentimental, why do I love it?) The success of Magee’s poem depends not on innovation in the sonnet form – as I hope I've shown, the rhymes, meter, and argument structure are standard – and not on the novel or bizarre language – again, we’ve seen that he uses clichéd adjectival phrases – but on its rhetorical tools and effect. Although I mentioned some instance of metaphor, as a whole, the poem performs as a metonymy. It is not the series of clichéd metaphors – joyful clouds and halls of air – that affect me as a reader. Rather, I am persuaded into the imaginary because the poem was written by a person literally up in the sky. (Magee wrote the poem at 30,000 feet, quite a height in the early twentieth century.) In my book, the poem appears above a photo of a Edward White, the first American to “float in space” and the facing page contains a picture of “Africa and Other Areas of the Earth, Seen from Apollo 17 Spacecraft.” (The poem was later quoted by Ronald Regan during the Challenger disaster)
Magee's poem results not from idle speculation, but observation. He does not aruge that some abstraction – say, the life of the mind— is, in simile, like floating in space or that it is, metaphorically, an adventure into the stratosphere. Magee is not wandering in the forest like Wordsworth, mulling over existence (personal and general) and history and offering comparisons or approximations. While Magee’s language might veer toward the abstract or sentimental, he conveys a quite concrete and specific experience to the reader. Magee says, “I am floating in space. I really am. That’s it.” And it just so happens that the next association over on the horizontal access of metonymic similarity, a la Jacoboson is “touching the face of God.” These two events are found together like shoes and slippers, a bed and a pillow, or a mother and love. It’s hard to disassociate a mother from love (whether the effect is to call up a lack of love, the pain of love, the loss of love, or an excess of love). Likewise, floating in orbit and watching the whole of the planet is, perhaps for our species, not dissociable from the notion of God (leaving that massive noun's definition in a secular suspense).
This poem appears in a collection titled, Imaginary Gardens, taken from a phrase in a Marianne Moor poem: “… nor till the poets among us can be / ‘literalists of / the imagination’… and can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (This poem is included in the collection) Moore means that the poet ought to create so accurately and precisely imaginary places that real and familiar things just appear in them. And the real work of the poet, the real poetry is with the real things, not in the “fiddle,” as she puts it, that generates them. Magee might fiddle around with language a bit, but he does get you to the real. He doesn’t make an imaginary garden; he only tells you where he’s sitting and that’s quite interesting enough.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Civilizations, Images, and the Subjunctive
Today I'm reading Elizabeth Arnold's second book, Civilization. That's quite a hefty title to take on, but the book manages that sweep (most of the time). A set a poems about her father interspersed through the first half anchor the book. At first, every other poem treats some broader, less personal subject. By the end of the book which is divided into sections, we've left the intimate scenes of the father in a nursing home, for a wider lens that takes in everything from gravity, Europe in the Middle Ages, to the soul and Catal Hyuk. By the way, this is a really *beautiful* book, not just in content but as an object. It's put out by Flood Editions, and it has a black paper page in the front and back that ominously encase the poems.
As I mentioned in my last post, I've been trying to figure out exactly what's going on in an "imagist poem" and whether or not people are or can be writing anything like that today. Arnold's book contains a few petite poems that cannot help but call to mind Pound's "At a station at the metro" or other classic imagist poems (which were originally influenced by Japanese haiku and French symbolism). READ MORE... Here's one example from the book:
" Solstice
We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun! "
Because I've been taking a French class, I've been thinking a lot about the subjunctive. The French have to be more careful to differentiate between an opinion, a suggestion, a hypothesis, and a statement of fact. Of course, we use the subjunctive in English as well, but we use it less frequently and less precisely. You can make a suggestion that someone do something, and the tense doesn't necessarily differentiate it from the fact that the person *is* doing that thing. But more interestingly, we don't differentiate our opinions of events from statements of fact about those events.
It seems that a true Imagist poem could not have any subjunctive clauses. That is, the Imagist intends only to present what is... not to comment on it, or to suggests that the image might be otherwise than it is. Arnold's poem seems to negotiate just this subtlety, making subjunctive comments on images.
Of course, "Solstice" wouldn't literally require the subjunctive, even in translation. But it seems that the sense of the second sentences, "[I find it so pathetic / amazing / touching] that they tried to persuade the sun to come back." She hasn't just given us the Romans lighting fires, she's said what she thinks about this fact... and in French, that would entail the subjunctive. But her commentary takes us away from the image and into the mind of the poem's speaker who witnesses it. I wonder to myself, not just about the oddity of the persuasion of the sun, but about who "We" are that they were so erudite that they would sit around and chat about Roman solstice rituals. In another poem, "Daddy," she offers an image of her father diving, head first, hands behind him, and suggests "His whole being like that." This little phrase in a short, three line poem, again takes us from the image to a comment on the image. Moreover, in the context of the book, we cannot help but attend to the impact of this father's actions on the speakers of the poems... who are quite hard to disassociate from the author, Arnold.
So, though her petite poems give all the appearance of imagism, I would say they differ quite significantly, though in more or less obvious ways. (an image does not an imagist poem make) "Solstice" is much more subtle in its commentary than "Daddy" and others... and I prefer "Solstice" precisely because of the anonymity of the speaker. Many, many people might wonder about the persuasion of the sun; only Arnold wonders about that father. The pleasure of the imagist poems is that, as far as it is possible, it does let the speaker disappear. We can zoom out, we can enjoy that contemplating-the-universe feeling you have when watching the Discover Channel, Planet Earth, or the Life of Mammals. Or even the more human -- yet impersonal -- voyeurism of Benjamin's flanneur.
Merleau-Ponty speaks often -- and is equally often criticized for these comments about -- the "anonymous body." What he means by this is still unclear to me, but it's something like whatever we share that permits empathy, that permits collective behavior. It's whatever makes you human and not just you. The trouble (and the source of his well-deserved criticism) is that there might not be such a body, that not all bodies are the same, etc. And yet... I am persuaded by the potential of this notion. But we would have to let it mean not some literal physical construction, but a shared sensibility. In that case.. The best poetry (or, let's be clear: the poetry *I* enjoy) appeals to the anonymous body ... perhaps requires the anonymous body in order to be understood ... perhaps let's the anonymous body speak.
Would that make it the poetry of the indicative, not the subjunctive?
As I mentioned in my last post, I've been trying to figure out exactly what's going on in an "imagist poem" and whether or not people are or can be writing anything like that today. Arnold's book contains a few petite poems that cannot help but call to mind Pound's "At a station at the metro" or other classic imagist poems (which were originally influenced by Japanese haiku and French symbolism). READ MORE... Here's one example from the book:
" Solstice
We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun! "
Because I've been taking a French class, I've been thinking a lot about the subjunctive. The French have to be more careful to differentiate between an opinion, a suggestion, a hypothesis, and a statement of fact. Of course, we use the subjunctive in English as well, but we use it less frequently and less precisely. You can make a suggestion that someone do something, and the tense doesn't necessarily differentiate it from the fact that the person *is* doing that thing. But more interestingly, we don't differentiate our opinions of events from statements of fact about those events.
It seems that a true Imagist poem could not have any subjunctive clauses. That is, the Imagist intends only to present what is... not to comment on it, or to suggests that the image might be otherwise than it is. Arnold's poem seems to negotiate just this subtlety, making subjunctive comments on images.
Of course, "Solstice" wouldn't literally require the subjunctive, even in translation. But it seems that the sense of the second sentences, "[I find it so pathetic / amazing / touching] that they tried to persuade the sun to come back." She hasn't just given us the Romans lighting fires, she's said what she thinks about this fact... and in French, that would entail the subjunctive. But her commentary takes us away from the image and into the mind of the poem's speaker who witnesses it. I wonder to myself, not just about the oddity of the persuasion of the sun, but about who "We" are that they were so erudite that they would sit around and chat about Roman solstice rituals. In another poem, "Daddy," she offers an image of her father diving, head first, hands behind him, and suggests "His whole being like that." This little phrase in a short, three line poem, again takes us from the image to a comment on the image. Moreover, in the context of the book, we cannot help but attend to the impact of this father's actions on the speakers of the poems... who are quite hard to disassociate from the author, Arnold.
So, though her petite poems give all the appearance of imagism, I would say they differ quite significantly, though in more or less obvious ways. (an image does not an imagist poem make) "Solstice" is much more subtle in its commentary than "Daddy" and others... and I prefer "Solstice" precisely because of the anonymity of the speaker. Many, many people might wonder about the persuasion of the sun; only Arnold wonders about that father. The pleasure of the imagist poems is that, as far as it is possible, it does let the speaker disappear. We can zoom out, we can enjoy that contemplating-the-universe feeling you have when watching the Discover Channel, Planet Earth, or the Life of Mammals. Or even the more human -- yet impersonal -- voyeurism of Benjamin's flanneur.
Merleau-Ponty speaks often -- and is equally often criticized for these comments about -- the "anonymous body." What he means by this is still unclear to me, but it's something like whatever we share that permits empathy, that permits collective behavior. It's whatever makes you human and not just you. The trouble (and the source of his well-deserved criticism) is that there might not be such a body, that not all bodies are the same, etc. And yet... I am persuaded by the potential of this notion. But we would have to let it mean not some literal physical construction, but a shared sensibility. In that case.. The best poetry (or, let's be clear: the poetry *I* enjoy) appeals to the anonymous body ... perhaps requires the anonymous body in order to be understood ... perhaps let's the anonymous body speak.
Would that make it the poetry of the indicative, not the subjunctive?
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Imagism, Dramatic Monologues ... Presentation, Representation
Las week at Elliot Bay books,I found a cute little book of Imagist poetry in the used section. It was just small enough to fit in my purse making it an excellent purchase. Imagism was a short but extremely influential movement that begin around 1910 and continued (officially) until 1920. Some of the canonical, founding imagists were H.D., Amy Lowell, Flint, Eliot, W.C. Williams, D.H. Lawrence and even Ford Maddox Ford and James Joyce. But through W.C. Williams, Eliot and Pound, imagism carried well past 1920 and influenced a significant part of modern and contemporary poetry (including George Oppen whom I adore and want to study further). The book includes a rather well-written introduction that cites a few key tenants of the Imagists. One of these, codified by F.S. Flint, was "To use no word that does no contribute to the presentation." This little comment caught me. As a philosopher, of course I can't help but stumble on the word "presentation." The Imagists intend this to mean, "the image." But it's not quite clear what "presentation" includes: the sense or reference of the language, the rhythm or texture of the language, or -- more importantly to me at the moment -- a sense of who's speaking. That is to say, does this "presentation" include the re-presentation of the image that the poet wishes to convey? It seems that the Imagists, at least as expressed by Flint and conveyed by the author of the lovely little introduction, thought that their goals was to convey a pure presentation of an image... precisely avoiding drawing attention to the *re*presentation of that image. They do not want to call attention to the speaker or the texture of that language.
Beyond the philosophical concerns that might be considered here (Husserl's notion of intentional fulfillment, for e.g.), I have practical concerns as a poet. READ MORE... It seems that writing in a post, post-modern era, one cannot but help attend to the quality of the representation of an image or cognitive presentation (if it was ever possible not to attend to that and make good art, you now must at least notice when you are ignoring it.) Consider still-life painting, for example. Still lives call attention not to the existence or qualities of fruit or flowers per se, but to the *painting* of fruit and flowers... to how well a painter can re-present them.
In a poem, what is this equivalent of representation? Certainly, it includes the rhythm and texture of the particular words used to represent(or present for the first time) an image. (poets make pets of pretty words, etc.: whether you write, "I haven't seen the ocean but I know what a wave is," or "I never saw the sea,... but I know what a wave must be") But it also includes the speaker of the poem. That is, part of attending to "representation" is attending to how a reader or listener will understand not only what image is being conveyed, but who's conveying it. Not, "was the author G.M. Hopkins or Mos Def" but what is the nature of the implied narrator? Is the speaker the character Medusa or is the speaker the character who speaks in "J.Alfred Prufrock"?
So, for an extreme contrast (perhaps!) to Imagism, consider Robert Browning's, "My Last Duchess." This poems begins innocuously enough,
"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive"
But as it continues, we learn that this speaker isn't just a lonely widow admiring a portrait. He has some rather bitter feelings toward not only its subject (who has some flushed spots on her cheeks in the picture) but the painter of the portrait, Fra Pandolf:
"... I said
Fra Pandolf by design ... [because]
... Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, 'Her mantle laps
Over my Lady's wrist too much,' or 'Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flus that dies along her throat;' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and case enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart ... how shall I say? ... to soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sire, 'twas all one!.."
So... now we know that the Duchess was (according to the speaker) a bit of slut with no standards. And the speaker is quite irritated with her and her painter. But moreover, the speaker himself is a bit coy and insulting. He implies her character in a back-handed sort of way. By the end of the poem, we also learn something about the person to whom he's speaking : the immediate audience for the speech about the Duchess is the relative or servant a count with a daughter that the Duke is planning to now marry.
We certainly can infer all sorts of possibilities about the character of the speaker and his former wife. But as a poet, the real question for me is, what if anything, do we learn about Robert Browning? Is that important? It doesn't really feel very important as I read the poem: I'm only concerned with learning about the characters in the poem, as they are developed, just as I would be with the characters of a novel. Whether I'm reading the Waves or Cavalier and Clay, I'm worrying very little about what the characters tell me about either Virginia Woolf or Michael Chabon. I learn something about life by learning about the characters these authors have represented. (And I learn not only through what is said but how it is said, i.e. both through presentation and representation) But always a speaker or an implied narrator intervenes between myself and the author. I simply don't care too much whether Woolf's book reveals her personal hopes and desires. Certainly in the Browning, there is some indirect revelation but I don't think you can ever follow that indirection back to the person Mr. Robert Browning.
Yet in the confessional/ post-confessional era of poetry, there is a strong demand (from my readers anyway) to know about me. i.e. why aren't my poems more personal? Why don't they express my feelings? I'm sure there are many reasons for the failure of many of my poems.. but in theory --had I written a good poem -- why should the poem tell you anything about me?
But, I suppose if it isn't going to tell you anything about me, then perhaps it needs to tell you something about some other characters. And so perhaps the lesson from all this is that I need to work harder on creating strong characters. (Although even there I resist... why isn't an expression of consciousness or representation of qualities of the world sufficient? But I'll defer that for later...)
Beyond the philosophical concerns that might be considered here (Husserl's notion of intentional fulfillment, for e.g.), I have practical concerns as a poet. READ MORE... It seems that writing in a post, post-modern era, one cannot but help attend to the quality of the representation of an image or cognitive presentation (if it was ever possible not to attend to that and make good art, you now must at least notice when you are ignoring it.) Consider still-life painting, for example. Still lives call attention not to the existence or qualities of fruit or flowers per se, but to the *painting* of fruit and flowers... to how well a painter can re-present them.
In a poem, what is this equivalent of representation? Certainly, it includes the rhythm and texture of the particular words used to represent(or present for the first time) an image. (poets make pets of pretty words, etc.: whether you write, "I haven't seen the ocean but I know what a wave is," or "I never saw the sea,... but I know what a wave must be") But it also includes the speaker of the poem. That is, part of attending to "representation" is attending to how a reader or listener will understand not only what image is being conveyed, but who's conveying it. Not, "was the author G.M. Hopkins or Mos Def" but what is the nature of the implied narrator? Is the speaker the character Medusa or is the speaker the character who speaks in "J.Alfred Prufrock"?
So, for an extreme contrast (perhaps!) to Imagism, consider Robert Browning's, "My Last Duchess." This poems begins innocuously enough,
"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive"
But as it continues, we learn that this speaker isn't just a lonely widow admiring a portrait. He has some rather bitter feelings toward not only its subject (who has some flushed spots on her cheeks in the picture) but the painter of the portrait, Fra Pandolf:
"... I said
Fra Pandolf by design ... [because]
... Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, 'Her mantle laps
Over my Lady's wrist too much,' or 'Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flus that dies along her throat;' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and case enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart ... how shall I say? ... to soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sire, 'twas all one!.."
So... now we know that the Duchess was (according to the speaker) a bit of slut with no standards. And the speaker is quite irritated with her and her painter. But moreover, the speaker himself is a bit coy and insulting. He implies her character in a back-handed sort of way. By the end of the poem, we also learn something about the person to whom he's speaking : the immediate audience for the speech about the Duchess is the relative or servant a count with a daughter that the Duke is planning to now marry.
We certainly can infer all sorts of possibilities about the character of the speaker and his former wife. But as a poet, the real question for me is, what if anything, do we learn about Robert Browning? Is that important? It doesn't really feel very important as I read the poem: I'm only concerned with learning about the characters in the poem, as they are developed, just as I would be with the characters of a novel. Whether I'm reading the Waves or Cavalier and Clay, I'm worrying very little about what the characters tell me about either Virginia Woolf or Michael Chabon. I learn something about life by learning about the characters these authors have represented. (And I learn not only through what is said but how it is said, i.e. both through presentation and representation) But always a speaker or an implied narrator intervenes between myself and the author. I simply don't care too much whether Woolf's book reveals her personal hopes and desires. Certainly in the Browning, there is some indirect revelation but I don't think you can ever follow that indirection back to the person Mr. Robert Browning.
Yet in the confessional/ post-confessional era of poetry, there is a strong demand (from my readers anyway) to know about me. i.e. why aren't my poems more personal? Why don't they express my feelings? I'm sure there are many reasons for the failure of many of my poems.. but in theory --had I written a good poem -- why should the poem tell you anything about me?
But, I suppose if it isn't going to tell you anything about me, then perhaps it needs to tell you something about some other characters. And so perhaps the lesson from all this is that I need to work harder on creating strong characters. (Although even there I resist... why isn't an expression of consciousness or representation of qualities of the world sufficient? But I'll defer that for later...)
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Bittersweet
The theme of the residency this term, from the first to the last was "bittersweet": happy in the sad, pleasure in pain,If it makes you happy why are you so sad,etc? Why can't poets write happy poems? Because usually joy makes you forget to write. Lolita is high contrast -- ecstacy, pain, rape, communion -- but painted in what at first appears to be grey, but on closer inspection, a fine hash of black and white. But not every text is sad: Let's not ignore Christopher Smart and his eternal "Jubliate Agneau"... but he was mad; is it only with madness that joy is urgent enough to express?
I am memorizing this Herbert poem. Notice the activity of God, and the passivity or receptivity of the man... or for the irreligious, for 'God and man,' substitute the 'beloved and the lover.'
Bittersweet
- G. Herbert
Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou does love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
and all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.
I am memorizing this Herbert poem. Notice the activity of God, and the passivity or receptivity of the man... or for the irreligious, for 'God and man,' substitute the 'beloved and the lover.'
Bittersweet
- G. Herbert
Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou does love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
and all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
I'm back! (In Asheville)
Hello, infrequent but welcome visitors to Mlle. Le Renard. I'm back... and ready to attempt blogging. A year later after some pesky doctoral exams, I'm back in Asheville at the Warren Wilson residency where I'm getting ready to write some poems. I had a fabulous time as a fellow at the Kenyon Review workshop where I worked with the fabulous David Baker who taught me all about formal conceits that I either never learned or forgot. This term I'm working with cheerful but intimidating Alan Shapiro.
This morning kicked off with a great lecture on the development of the manuscripts of Seamus Heaney's "North" in the book of the same name. We looked at how he took an image-based poem, told from the first person into an epic poem that include second person address. Wow. I'm full of images of Ireland and these filtered through the room.
I'm working on some biblical mis-interpretation poems right now, perverse Protestant midrash as I think of them. I find the biblical to be more my "mythology" than the Greek or Latin cast of characters. ... we'll see where this goes with Mr. Shapiro.
And now off to the annual Shindig on the Green in Asheville!
This morning kicked off with a great lecture on the development of the manuscripts of Seamus Heaney's "North" in the book of the same name. We looked at how he took an image-based poem, told from the first person into an epic poem that include second person address. Wow. I'm full of images of Ireland and these filtered through the room.
I'm working on some biblical mis-interpretation poems right now, perverse Protestant midrash as I think of them. I find the biblical to be more my "mythology" than the Greek or Latin cast of characters. ... we'll see where this goes with Mr. Shapiro.
And now off to the annual Shindig on the Green in Asheville!
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