Friday, December 26, 2008

Sounds and sense

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

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....

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.

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.

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?" = )

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...

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.

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:

At the mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals…. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. (Stendhal 19)


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?