Mlle. Le Renard

MOVING!

2011-11-15T13:03:00.001-05:00

This blog has moved permanently to

http://www.kaschaandjohn.com/kascha/?page_id=5

"Intellectual" Poetry?

2011-10-03T11:45:00.003-04:00

Last night I was talking with another poet about who we'd like to work with and why. We began to make generalities about schools of thinking on poetry whether we liked them or not. One distinction to which we were (inevitably?) led between "intellectual" and "anti-intellectual" poetry. I said that anti-intellectualism piqued me and expressed frustration: it often implies that my philosophical training has no bearing on writing good poems which I think to be utterly untrue. My friend immediately offered that he appreciated intellectualism -- this is a person who can recite early Frost and Rimbaud by heart -- but that of course he also thought it was important that poetry feel. Reflexively, I responded that I thought that too, and that poetry that expresses "feeling" and "intellectual" poetry need not be opposed. We said yes, yes, and moved on... but I don't think we actually agreed on the definition on "intellectual."

When I say "intellectual" poetry, I mean poetry informed by wide reading and listening. The intellectual omnivorously consumes information and theories about experience and uses them to refine her understanding of her own experience. That is, we can still learn something of how the world works (science, technology) or how it came to be (history) or what it might mean (philosophy) and nonetheless emotively express our relationship to it. You might mention a fact, allude to a myth, or address a philosopher in a poem because doing so allows you to be more clear about a state of affiars. That can happen in third person or first person; it can be confessional or not. (That distinction needs a discussion of its own, by I don't see 'intellectual' and 'confessional' poetry to be opposed: think Hopkins or The Waste Land or Carl Philips.)

What I think a person might mean when she says "intellectual" poetry is writing that addresses conceptual distinctions: philosophical or political ones. For example, this kind of intellectual poet might tell you What Language Is or How to Relate To the Other. That can also happen in first person or third person.

Now, I should think of examples of each of these. In my sense of "intellectual," I think Anne Carson and Frank Bidart write this type of work, rife with allusion and informed by historical reading... but no less able to make you cry or moan or laugh. I don't think of any poets whom I really enjoy who fit the secondary definition, though I'm sure they exist. But I don't like reading them! If you want to give a theory of language, then you really should study and write philosophy. If you want to show experience,then you could write poetry and use some terms from a theory merely because they are more precise that other words. (Or, you could write a letter to your mother or a personal essay... poetry involves lines, meters, imagery, etc., not just commentary on experience)

Well, now I should get back to writing some poetry, intellectual or otherwise.

On praising "bad poetry"

2011-09-23T17:23:00.004-04:00

Book Forum and The Poetry Foundation are talking about why people praise "bad poetry." Plunkett argues that "most of published criticism is positive even though so much of published poetry is bad." I am wondering whether this is true and if so, whether it is a problem. The world of poetry is cold and lonely. It's incredibly difficult to get a book published, and to do so and hear that it was "bad" would be devastating. For your hard work, you get no money, little public recognition or social affirmation (yes, it's "cool" to say you're a poet but society does not give you the full pat on the back that it gives the software developer or medical professional). All you receive -- if anything -- is a tiny bit of feedback from a tight circle of other people who have made it to that enviable/inenviable place.

But art means absolutely nothing if it isn't good art so why should even that tiny circle affirm work that is so poor it only diminishes the value of the whole field? That seems to be Plunkett's polemic. But I hope he is either best friends with Dickman or never meets him, because identifying his work as exemplary "bad" poetry is not going to start a convivial relationship.

Somewhere between or beyond pointing out the "bad" and rehearsing praise of the "good" lies real criticism. One can profoundly, rigorously and minutely critique a fantastic poem -- some of Rilke's elegies just don't make sense either -- or can re-frame and draw out insight a mediocre poem -- some of my favorite lectures in grad school managed that. Critique reflects the aesthetic judgment of the viewer/reader as much as the creator. Wallpaper, as Kant tells us, can instigate the play of the faculties and prompt aesthetic judgment as much as a beautiful painting. Literary criticism, as Eliot tell us, means understanding what a poem means in relation to all the other poems that come before it. So writing good criticism is not entirely limited by the work that is its object of study. Good criticism can be an opportunity for the critical writer to express and explore ideas not yet born in the work itself. Tell us not that Dickman is "bad" but that his work falls in a particular stream of current popularity and tell us when and why that stream diverged from other aesthetic possibilities.

Or at least I hope that opportunity is there for critique. All that said, I empathize with Plunkett's frustration and share a sneaking suspicion that a book only needs a certain amount of inertia to keep getting more praise.

Site Specific and Seattle Specific Art

2011-09-22T15:29:00.002-04:00

As I get started writing about art in Seattle, I've dragged J along to a number of events, some more successful than the others, and I'm meditating on what is succeeding or not in this particular area. The best art in Seattle seems to be "happening": that is, the work involves an event, interaction, or performance. This, of course, is not unique to the Puget Sound; Roberta Smith just wrote a preview of the next New York season and notes a similar trend. That said, I like to think that performance art might have a particular appeal in this city that has a good record of getting audience out to live music. People here expect to go out in the evening, wait outside a door, and then hear and see something at a particular time. An audience prepped by music venues might be drawn to performances like SuttonBeresCuller's "To Be Determined" with its giant katamari ball recently at On the Boards or this weekend's "Swimming the List" by Susie J. Lee at Theater Off Jackson.

Of course, sometimes I just want to stand quietly between four white walls in the afternoon sun and look at some big forms. Or shift my weight while watching a nice old still life and wondering why people still paint. For that, I guess I'll have to go to the Met. One of the best site-specific sculptures I've seen recently, actually, was surprisingly at the gallery attached to U-Frame it in Ballard. "Ghost Dogs" had me gawking happily from the street for a good five minutes.

Jeffery Yang's epic

2011-08-25T13:11:00.004-04:00

I'm still trying to get a handle on Jeffery Yang's work. Vanishing-Line, new from Graywolf, took me by surprise after I finished Aquarium. The narrator's vision in Aquarium had a fairly steady focal range and a consistent format; you looked sequentially at an alphabetized list of creatures through a set of binoculars or microscope set up and handed to you by the narrator. They are all about the same distance away, and you get about the same amount of time to watch each one. Then, on to the next exhibit. Your ecological tour guide does make comments that assess and contextualize the images, but rarely strays from the format, describing each creature from "Abalone" to "Zooxanthellae." Here are the representative opening lines of "Anemone": "Anemones are warriors, colonizing / rock and reef in ranks. The history/ of the world is told thru the eye / of the colonizer, who takes pleasure in / sticking his fingers into an anemone's / mouth until it starves." You see the sea creature and then hear remarks that transfer metaphorically that image to the stage of history. (In other poems, the image transfers to the philosophy or religion or politics.)

But Vanishing-Line follows both a radically different form and works at a different scale. This is a geographic and wide-lens historical view. I think of slow pan in the opening of vistas of There Will Be Blood. The first and last words of the book are "place": the first poem is called "place" and the book closes with a quotation from Robert Duncan on place. In each place he presents, Yang positions "facts." These facts -- about his Chinese grandmother and her context or about the dark history of Native Americans on this continent's east coast-- function as artifacts in an epic reenactment.

These facts form the focus and the medium of the poet, as they so self-consciously did for the Objectivists and Imagists. The echoes and interplays between Yang's work at George Oppen's Of Being Numerous are well, numerous. (Yang mentions Oppen in this book's bibliographic note and in a poem in Aquarium, assuring me that I do not image the influence.) Although the author speaks mostly in the third-person omniscient, he occasionally allows an "I" to appear intimately integrated into the large-scale landscape. In Oppen, that landscape is New York; in Yang, it is the east coast surrounding that city.

I call these poems "epics" because of this scale, and perhaps the most fascinating moments are when an "I" does step into the poem or when the poem shifts from microscopic detail to macroscopic reflection. For example, in one line zooming from the size of a nail in a canoe to the scope of a dynastic nation: "Canoes without nails, scoops for oars // They walked // as Portugal lost its monopoly..."

Lots more to think about and a few more reads before I can articulate clearly what he's up to in this complex book that I highly recommend.

Sprout and the Hyper Local Movement

2011-08-22T13:23:00.005-04:00

I'm starting to blog here at Crosscut. This piece is about a great Seattle arts organization. J and I have been thinking a lot about the hyper local movement because of our salon (next one, November 12!).

Locality is old news in the realm of food – everyone (hip) goes to the farmers market and not just the grocery. In the last few weeks with flash mobs attack Cleveland, Atlanta and London, crowd sourcing and local movements have even take on a negative cast. But in visual art and cultural organizations, locality has at once an old history and a new one.

I very hesitantly offer the hypothesis that visual art and architecture has a stayed rooted in locality while other art forms – music, literature – have more easily been disassociated (for better or worse) from their physical origins (though there are now reactive movements turning back towards the local). Literature can and has been passed around more quickly from place to place. You can read Lolita in Tehran or Henry James in Idaho or Bannana Yoshimoto in Brussels. But it’s hard to move Bilbao or Falling water, but it’s also harder (though not impossible!) to move a Richard Serra or Tara Donavan piece to New Dehli. These works I select for their modernist, scale-based physicality in particular. That kind of installation/sculpture/etc. appears to be particularly resistant to displacement. That kind of art also dominates our cultural vision of what contemporary art is like. So perhaps it should come as less of a surprise that visual art has quickly taken to the local movement.

I’d like to keep thinking about this movement in “fine” art above and beyond the DIY culture. Yes, I know, craft and art need not be and cannot be entirely distinguished, but it does seem worthwhile to consider whether there is something special happening in that aspect of culture.

Funhouses and Madhouses

2011-08-19T12:46:00.003-04:00

J and I recently enjoyed these two shows in Seattle: Funhouse, a show at Western Bridge Gallery, and MadHouses (exhibit now closed) in a row of former Capitol Hill residences sponsored by MadArt and 4Culture. Together, these two exhibits point to the strengths and limits of “public” art and gallery-constrained art.

Funhouse wants to be a party in your backyard. The winking drapes of Martin Creed’s “Work No. 990” flash open and close across the wide entrance windows, hinting that something playful and large hides indoors. In the main room, under the shadow of Creed’s wall drawing, you climb into the show’s center piece, Julian Hoeber’s “Demon Hill,” an optico-kinesthetic illusion: that is, a box with a titled floor. Two or three steps inside the brightly lit, ten by eight foot wooden crate-like structure, you immediately feel sea-sick, despite the plumb line hanging from the ceiling. The simplicity of this architectural gesture points to a strong modernist ethos that undergirds this piece and the show. Essentially, each piece asks the visitor to reassess her commitment to perspectival space, emphasizing constant physical relations just the way a Donald Judd or a Walter De Maria might. The show purports to be about “fun” and “funhouses” which might lead to post-modern pieces that tugged at cultural expectations, but in fact, the work focuses on light and space, the great mainstays of modernist architecture.

In the back room, perhaps the most exciting piece hides: Mungo Thompson’s Skyspace Bouncehouse, a Claus Oldenburg-like version of a James Turrell. On a wood pew in Turrell’s original, you look up to see a square of light from the sky you’ve been in the habit of ignoring rather than worshipping. Inside Thompson’s piece, you bounce over the inflated cushions of a county fair moon-walk beneath a similar hole in the ceiling.

Visitors’ reactions to Skyspace could be shouts of “The sky! The sky!” while hopping like children. But Funhouse is ultimately a gallery show. The hush and dark of the gallery space invites a quiet, “Ah” instead. The roof blocks out the sky that appears in the actual Turell and the white walls and air-condition muffled backroom of the gallery mute the art from an “event” to a set of purchasable pieces.

Madhouses succeeds in offering a more fun place to be than Funhouse, although the actual sculpture does not reach the subtly of those tucked away at Western Bridge. SuttonBeresCuller, creators of numerous architectural-scale works at, for example, Bumbershoot and the Lawrimore Project, installed the initially and outwardly striking, “Ties that Bind,” red bands winding through two houses. Laura Ward’s “Skin” transforms the exterior of a house into a fragile latex cast that underscores the structure’s vulnerability. By padding the interior with used clothing, Luke Haynes points toward the history of inhabitation by past residents and visitors and caretakers that patinas the houses.

The opening of Madhouses included artists and friends but also members of the Capitol Hill community of all ages who happened to walk by the show. Likewise, on a sunny Sunday, a wide swath of the Seattle community – much more diverse than the handful of visitors who make it to Western Bridge – wandered through the structures. The effect of the informal open door policy created the atmosphere of an estate open-house, but one where no one was buying, a trope emphasized by the barcoded price tag in Troy Gua’s “Crysalis.”

Lucretius, Greenblatt, and the scale of life

2011-08-10T16:09:00.002-04:00

This article about Lucretius tempts me to trust it because it recovers such a lovely text, but Greenblatt makes too many over generalizations and errors to be believed. He claims we live in a “skeptical and secular culture,” reinforcing the secularization myth: the story that liberal atheism will, or has, inevitably subsumed simplistic, religious cult impulses. It simply hasn’t (See Charles Taylor on this non-shift). I live in a credulous, religious culture in which Lucretius is no more welcome than he was in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries that Greenblatt caricatures as dark, unthinking, unerotic times. (As a side note, I have to say that in that description, I think he errs again in over generalization: not every sect of Christianity after the fall of Rome rejected sexuality or thinking. We have the sensual, contemplative writings of Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, and Hildegaard von Bingen for starters. I’m no medievalist, but I know enough of them to believe that there are other conceptions of those centuries than as the “dark ages.”)

But Greenblatt’s discussion of Lucretius goes to the heart of issues at stake in our biopolar or schizoid era: hyper-religious and hyper-scientific at once. Most people don’t like the indifference of atomism; Greenblatt identifies this in the case of his mother, but overlooks it in his culture at large where masses of people pursue religions that guarantee them a loving or passionate or at least judgmental divinity, fully invested in their lives as any creator is in her products. No one wants to die and less do we want to find the intermediary of life to be meaningless. Fortunately, medieval credulity and secular skepticism are not the only options as worldviews. Foundations of meaning have been established on grounds other than immorality or even humanism. Greenblatt senses these alternatives in his frustration with Lucretius at the close of the article. But he does not pursue them in the short essay. I wish he had because those are the truly tricky accounts of how we should relate to this natural world the comprises us and composes us.

Nature can seem indifferent to us humans. We face the ocean, and we do not see any eyes or doors or gestures of welcome. But natural life is hardly indifferent to us or to most of its surroundings; to be alive is to have preferences, pleasures and pains. In that, Epicurus and Lucretius themselves may have overlooked the truly compelling qualities of nature. What fascinates me is that yes, we are made of the same atoms as granite and stars and computer chips, but our living systems contain a level of organization not apparent in these other natural bodies. That doesn’t mean we are supernatural or created by something supernatural. But it does mean that "nature" is not a synonym for "life"; it is a genus containing that species. Living nature contains more than the sum of its parts, its atoms. Atomism understands nature only in terms of parts, not wholes, in terms of the microscopic not the macroscopic. Natural lives that so interest us only appear at the macroscopic scale. That does not make them less “real” than their atoms, any more than a car is less real than its carbon and steel. Nor does it make them any more supernatural than a car.

Well, I can't cover the entire "Nature of Things" here. But I'm fascinated by our cultural fascination with giving nature a face or being frustrated in not finding one on her.

New Poetry I'm reading

2011-07-29T01:14:00.002-04:00

I enjoyed Carl Phillip's new book as I discuss here on the KR.
Right now, I'm wending my way through Emily Wilson's Micrographia. Her syntax rivals Hopkins at times (but without the rhyme), and the imagery is like medieval miniature, a marvel of density, precision and patience. Zach Savich's recent book is on my table next, beside Vanishing-Line and Aquarium, two books by Jeffrey Yang. Looking forward to picking through each of these carefully.

Octavia Butler's Fledgling vs. Meyer's Twighlight

2011-07-24T18:13:00.003-04:00

Somehow Octavia' Butler's Fledgling came out the same year as Meyer's first Twlight book, but to less acclaim. Butler's book is so much more subtle than Meyer's also compelling book. Butler adds dimensions of race, American history and first person narration that create depth from a quite similar plot line. Why then is Meyer's book more popular? Setting aside (unjustly) the quirks of publishing and timing, I think Meyer simply succeeds in plot where Butler dwells in character. Against Aristotle's advise, Butler privileges one character over plot that comprises many. I plowed through Twilight, skimmed the middle two books in the series, and admired Breaking Dawn. Meyer's characters accumulate momentum between them and drive the book. Butler presents one character, Shori, intimately. This device repeats the basic structure of Butler's earlier Kindred which also took you into the mind of a young women undergoing an unexplained and supernatural transformation. I enjoyed Kindred as I did Fledgling, but I could have put either book down half-way through or two-thirds of the way through with as much satisfaction as at the end. That's because by then I've absorbed the details of the character's peculiar situation and the premise of the novel. Beyond that, Butler's plot is mere footnotes. As a poet, I worry that I will let language enrapture me at the expense of plot. But here is another potential trap: character and premise at the expense of plot. But plot alone makes only the Twilight series and not Woolf's The Waves. I assumed there's something good in between ;) But what is it and how do I write it?

Thoughts on Carl Philips for the KROnline

2011-07-24T18:12:00.001-04:00

A few of my longer, more carefully edited thoughts here in a review of Carl Philip's new book, A Dream in Horses.

Epistles and First person narrators

2011-07-07T19:17:00.005-04:00

Reading Frankenstein after a few contemporary novels is odd because this book comprises letters and extended first person monologues. Not pages and pages of snappy dialogue that could be film script! (For example, I just finished The Eyre Affair which reads like a movie script; apparently the author wrote them for the industry before turning to novels.) The devices are so transparent. One character meets another and tells him he will tell him his story. Inside that narrative, he meets another character and that character says , "Wait! let me tell you my story." The book does include bits of dialogue and action, but much less than one might expect. I'm a bit envious of the nineteenth century writer... why can't I just tell everything in letter exchanges or long, retrospective first-person narratives? I suppose I could, but I also suppose it would be boring and/or trite.

I realize how little I know about the history of fiction or its progress, despite a few degrees that suggest I ought to. When did dialogue begin to take such prominence? I could tell you about stream of consciousness in Woolf or multiple narrators in Joyce, but I'm not sure about that more simple development.

Shelly's narrator on Past and Future "Natural Science"

2011-07-01T11:11:00.002-04:00

“ ‘The ancient teachers of this science, said he, ‘ promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promised very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hand seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the inivisble world with its own shadows.’

“I departed highly pleased with the professor and his lecture, and paid him a visit the same evening.” – Frankenstein

Is Frankenstein Sci Fi?

2011-06-29T13:33:00.002-04:00

In the horrible/uncharitable/anti-feminist introduction by Rieger to the edition I’m reading, he claims that we shouldn’t see Frankenstein as precursor to science fiction because: “The science-fiction writers says, in effect, since x has been experimentally proven or theoretically postulated, y can be achieved by the following, carefully documented operation. Mary Shelley skips to the outcome and asks, if y had been achieved, by whatever means, what would be the moral consequences? In other words, she skips the science” (xxvii). This reflects a simplistic notion of science fiction, both its motivation and its actual content. Predictive fiction – I think of P.D. James’s Children of Men or Asimov's I, Robot – considers the consequences of certain futures or developments. A gesture might be made to the “how” of such development but the emphasis is on postulation of consequences; the scientist (or more likely, technologist or engineer) deals with “how” and it is precisely the privilege of the fiction author to assess what would happen if such and such were possible, by whatever means. The scientist takes on supernatural (as in superintendent of nature) or natural powers; god-like or nature-like, she can bend or determine the laws of life. In this, she fulfills a role more like God in Paradise Lost than the author of a how-to-create-y text-book, as Rieger implies. Perhaps the science fiction reader enjoys the possibility than a person could accomplish y by “scientific” –i.e. human and natural – means more than by “magic” – i.e. supernatural in the sense of nothing-to-do-with nature – that tends to dominate so-called fantasy novels. But the effect of such accomplishments, the world brought about by a new technical or physical possibility, that is almost always the focus of “science fiction,” or again, as I would prefer, predictive fiction.

Predictive Fiction and Frankenstein

2011-06-28T10:25:00.002-04:00

“The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.” – Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

This seems good advice on which to recommence my novel. She incites her reader with the simple claim that, like all good ghost stories, her story is based on the truth. Isn’t this what readers of science fiction prefer over those of fantasy? (if such a distinction is helpful) Science fiction implies a building from science, from experiment and experience – from truth. Especially in predictive fiction, the author extrapolates from present reality toward something more than reality but not outside its structure, by definition. At least, that is the kind of science fiction/predictive fiction that I prefer.

If Frankenstein were predictive fiction, it is a successful one and not only for its readability. So many of its themes grow from reality and so many more intertwine with our present. We can make life now, in many different ways. We must take responsibility for life, on the planet, for the life we permit and the life we take away. The mutated fish can face us like The Creature; the IBF child can turn to its parents with the same demands; but most importantly, every ‘naturally’ conceived child can—and perhaps will – address its creators with need for justification for its origin. So we create gods and turn to them: to pose the question of our origins and our destinations

Last week, I was lucky to see a vampire ballet based on a short story by John Polidori, a friend who stayed with Byron and Shelly while she wrote Frankenstein. The dancing had its limitations but the costumes and the concept were remarkably innovative.

Now back reading Frankenstein...

Frankenstein and Life

2011-04-15T13:36:00.001-04:00

We saw Frankenstein by the British National Theater in a film version at SIFF last week. I’m afraid it’s leaking into my writing. That’s not inappropriate, but I don’t want to let it color the work too much. The play and the book are about the creation of life, the mystery of the difference between life and death, the responsibility of altering life. (I really need to read the original Shelley.) These are themes I’ve been thinking and writing about for a while now, from my dissertation to my article on species to teaching Aristotle’s On the Soul. It’s exciting to teach that text now because it provokes us to discuss the relation between life and non-life which seems especially pressing in relation to current biological and technological innovation. (And that’s very trendy even to passive students.)

I couldn’t help but imagine that the Creature spoke for, say, a child who’d been created by artificial insemination by, say, two men from the genes of different men or women. How would the child feel about the nature of this conception? Would she feel “unnatural”? Brought about into a situation that necessarily marked her as different? Of course, the Creature succeeds insofar as it speaks for all children: Why parents have you brought me into the world only to allow me to suffer it? Why am I not like everyone else? Why have you brought me to life if only to die? At the end of the play, the Creature asks Victor who’s near death what death is? And will he die too? Even Victor, the genius, doesn’t know.

Keats on Winter

2011-02-20T18:29:00.003-05:00

"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,"

-Keats, Hyperion. A Fragment

Great Thoughts

2011-02-19T19:31:00.004-05:00

I’ve just discovered Kay Ryan. Well, really, I’ve heard about her for years, picked up her books and rejected them a dozen times, and now, finally, I’m captivated and compelled by her precision and minimalism. I’m thinking about Ryan, along with Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, in preparation to review a few other new books. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of representation of women in literary journals, MFA program faculty and the like (for example, here in Slate). I think there’s some vague sense that women get MFAs because they have free time after (or when) they raise families and need to "express themselves" thus have only introverted and domestic, not Serious poems. This triumvirate of serious, funny and cerebral ladies should disabuse anyone of such presuppositions.

Today, I’m just thinking about Ryan, but the rest of the authors might come up in my public reviews. In Ryan’s more famous book, I entirely missed the poignancy and comic seriousness of the first, title poem “Say Uncle.” Now, I feel it and it hurts – like a strained lower back. It pulls you up in this truly painful way but with such suddenness and excess that you laugh at your own incapacity.

The poem that really got me, though, in my current disagreement with philosophy was this one:

Great Thoughts

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

Ryan sets up confusing and then counter-intuitive analogy. Why would one think that great thoughts do nourish as parents do children? Then, before explaining, she frames a second analogy: instead of like children, the thoughts are like the eucalyptus. What? The reader as yet has no idea what kind of great thoughts she means or what qualities they could share with that tree (scent? dusty greenness?). The next two lines resolve both apparent false analogies: great thoughts clear a space beneath themselves, perhaps poisoning the ground, perhaps taking its nutrients (I’m not quite sure how it works with eucalyptus: with black walnuts, it’s a poison.) So, well, gosh – the end of the poem tells me – it is awful here, next to great thoughts, if you aren’t having one, or worse, if you are trying to grow one, then, there’s no room. You must go to the fringe of the meadow and sow your seeds if you want any sunlight or soil.

That's where I'm headed, I hope.

Hyperion and Science Fiction

2011-02-17T13:56:00.001-05:00

Because I have a lot of grading to do, I thought I’d read some Keats in order to fortify my soul before its drain. I have been thinking about Hyperion but I hadn’t yet reread it. In the poem, I find a wish for magic. That is a wish I understand. It’s the same desire that leads me to science fiction. Keat’s Saturn longs for the power to create another world, an alternative physics to the one he finds around him. Listen to him as he wakes under this gravity: “But cannot I create? / Cannot I form? / Cannot I fashion forth/ Another world, another universe, / To overbear and crumble this to naught?/ Where is another Chaos? Where?”

Saturn discovers what all adults who enjoyed childhoods full of fiction find: in this reality, radical creation is not possible. Fiction cultivates in us the expectation that life includes resolution and radical innovation: in stories – especially in fantastical stories – the heroine or hero can enjoy an adventure that include a changes in the very structure of space time. She lives forever (Tuck Everlasting), she can travel time (A Wrinkle in Time), she can change the form of her beloved (Beauty), she will meet a wizard who will deliver her intended loves (The Once and Future King). Such a childhood leaves a reader of fiction with a distinction sensation of Fall, l’ecarte: a separation not from grace but innovation: heaven is parted from thee, and the earth/ Knows thee not, thus afflicted for a God.” This earth does not recognize our secret self as the environment of Harriet the Spy ultimately acknowledged her potential and gave her super-natural powers. Keat’s Saturn expresses the love of ever reader and writer of fiction and poetry: the possible rather than the actual. Upon leaving the childhood of fiction, like Keat’s Saturn: “I am gone / Away from my own bosom; I have left/ My strong identity, my real self / Somwhere between the throne and where I sit / Here on this spot of earth.” My own “strong identity” formed when I read those books. To discover their ultimate impossibility is to be ever disappointed in “this spot of Earth.” Such disappointment can, of course, also provide great motivation to write, to make that world of possibility, so that “there shall be / Beautiful things made new, for the surprise / Of the sky-children.”

Poetry and Plot or Poems or Plot? On Nicholoson Baker's Anthologist (and a little bit about V LaValle's Big Machine)

2011-02-06T15:57:00.007-05:00

"I've had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I've been genuinely interested in poetry -- interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing poetry it is a very different activity. Writing it, its as if the word 'poetry; is a thousand miles away. It's inapplicable."
- Nicholoson Baker, The Anthologist

Baker's narrator in this novel-on-poetry offers all kinds of tidbits that the writer-within-you will most likely identify with. ( Here's a link to a charitable and mostly accurate review. ) I think you can be pretty sure (if you're a writer) that you'll identify because nothing he says is too controversial or too particular. He -- the character -- is a distillation of any number of neurotic literary personalities into one burbling stream of consciousness. It can be comforting to listen to some sounds from your internal monologue echoed in the rambling, in a nice get-out-of-cartesian-isolation sort of way.

I respect Baker because he does little things like print "writing poetry it is" instead of "writing poetry is." That little "it" colloquializes the speaker's phrases and also makes a little verbal phrase that sediments a whole room -- context along with the activity-- into "writing it." There you are, in a room, staring off or at a screen or paper, wedged between things, at some distance from a window, working on a particular project. Just "writing" is contextless, theoretical, conceptual.

That said, I am reading the Anthologist because I got bored with Fermata. Sure, I found it titillating and fanatically well-written (for narrative details like the above "it") but ultimately, I found it broke Aristotle's recommendation to privilege plot over character. Coming from a poet, this may be unexpected, but I like plot. (I also think the best poems have plots: little intralinear dramas.) I love V Woolf and W James not because of their characters per se but because the way the characters propel domestic microplots. And I almost always prefer a snappy William Gibson novel to anything concerned with what you might label "personal discovery."

I haven't finished the Baker, but I'm not holding my breath for a reversal and recognition. Quite by contrast, I adored the finale and creepy, disgusting, allusive whirlwind of Victor LaValle's Big Machine. After finishing it, I looked backwards to his earlier Ecstatic but it didn't grip me with the same perversity of plot twist. I am looking forward to what ever he does next.

fallow blog

2010-09-13T13:11:00.003-04:00

Shall I sow some words?

Poetry
I am reading Thomas Sayer Ellis's Skin, Inc. and finding myself in a complex socio-political net that he has constructed for himself and his readers. It must be exhausting to write with such hyper consciousness of yourself and your readership!

Fiction
I'm craving the last Stieg Larssen book the way I crave a cigarette two days after I've quit... the biochemical urge hasn't disappeared and without conscientious reflective restraint I'll have it in my hands before I can help it.

Philosophy
Speaking of reflective restraint, I'm reading some things Heidegger has to say about human reflective cognition in contrast to "animal drives" in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. It's fascinating to read Heidegger using the word "protoplasm" and writing about the irises of bees. Nonetheless, he persists in dismissing animal life as "driven" and "poor" in world. He also claims that they are never "free for" things "as such." As if I can ever be "free for" my cappuccino as such! Or a cigarette "as such"! I identify much more with his description of animals than humans. Ah, my friend Heidegger, reflection is less frequent than we think. Present-to-hand is a useful descriptive ideal but nothing more actual than the ideally feminine, masculine or free.

On judgment - for John

2009-07-13T10:37:00.003-04:00

My new adviser just gutted a poem of mine and gave me some wonderful advice. On a practical level -- on the level of judgment -- he was totally correct about what the poem needed. But on a theoretical level, I am puzzling about this advice as a general stance.

He told me to review the poem and to merely look – as a formalist would – for the strongest language and excise the rest. In one sense, I totally agree: that was what this poem needed. In another sense, I am not sure I agree at all (nor actually that he does, given his respect for Eliot’s Four Quartets... but more on that later). In a way, I think it could be the strongest thing my poems ever do if I actually manage to keep that “weak” language and reuse it.

To reuse that language would be to do a pastiche.

John’s thesis at MIT was on pastiche. He presented a renovation of a movie palace in Brooklyn to a group of Dwell-magazine reading (latent) modernists on the review board: Eisenman, MyStudio, a few others. At first they tore him to pieces: his work exploited ornament, doing-up the movie palace in more curlicues and glitter than was in the original. But then the board loved him… because, I think, they realized they were uncertain of the origin and justification for their own predilection for simplicity. Why should we have white walls and white dresses, to use the words of Mark Jarzombeck? Of course, John’s building was also sustainable, malleable etc., and included a few other neat tricks; but for the most part, it called attention to the ground of contemporary taste. (Wow, John!)

I think in contemporary poetry we have a similar predilection for simplicity and consistency. We prefer language that does the same thing throughout, that deploys itself smoothly and with a bang at the finish. What if a poem went, dribble, Bang! Bang! Dribble dribble. Pop. And the end was so unsatisfying that you needed to start again? I think that might be interesting, and that very few people would like it.

Our preference for poems that – like my advisers's own – take one tone is a matter of taste. Of judgment.

Where do we get our sense of taste? Why is the one better than the many? Western metaphysics prefers one god, one good, and apparently Western poetry prefers one tone. We know that the subject dissolved, that god was gutted and replaced with the multiplicity of the world, but when we see art, we still want to know who made it, who’s speaking. Even when we read Joyce – with his multiplicity of styles undermining our search for “The narrator” – we read Joyce and we know who he is. We give exams to graduate students and ask them to identify authorial styles. We assume that a style commits a work to an author, and in poetry, I think we still identify a style with a tone.

Next summer, I think I might like to give a class on judgment. When we judge, we move from the singular toward the universal. For Kant, a determinative judgment – ‘all cows are bovines,’ or ‘this cow is black’ – collects the particular under the general ; an aesthetic judgment makes a judgment about the universal from the particular: ‘this chocolate is yummy’ or ‘this painting made of chocolate is beautiful.’ What is the beautiful? It is this painting I just encountered. What is a poem? It is this thing I just read. For Aristotle, we acquire phronesis from childhood; practical knowledge is acquired by practice. With Kant plus Aristotle – as in Arendt and Nussbaum – we find that aesthetic judgment is acquired gradually, from childhood, in history, by encountering many particulars: particulars so neatly crafted as to point the way toward the universal… without ever arriving.

In my course, I would begin with close readings of poems. I would say nothing general first; nothing about what poetry is. (The first words of the class would be “let’s read this poem.”) Rather, we would look at how one moves from a particular poem – and gradually, through encounters with many poems, in many circumstances – toward a general knowing of what poetry is. And, roughly, I found that to be this disruption of the logical “is/is not” with the metaphoric “like.” (Most recently, I saw this in the Carol Anne Duffy poem presented in a class...but again, more on that later...)

Indeed, more on all of this later!

the inimitable George Oppen

2009-04-14T01:42:00.002-04:00

I have been worrying over my lazy, unpolitical, unworldly existence as a poet... occasionally philosophy seems justifiable. But poetry? What do we do for anyone but ourselves? We had dinner with someone who works for the Gates foundation on microloans and savings in Africa who'd just returned from Ethiopia. She may not buy organic vegetables, but her very vocation improves the world. And I... write.

So, here are some wise words from M. Oppen:

"So with artists. How pleasurable
to imagine that, if only they gave
up their art, the children would be
healed, would live."

- from "Some San Francisco Poems"

art instincts... against my instinct but intrigued

2009-04-03T15:47:00.002-04:00

Denis Dutton's Art Instinct has been getting a lot of attention and recently in the New York Time Book Review I am terrified that this book on "Darwinian aesthetics" shares too much with the horrific Neo-social Darwinism in recent issue of the Economist that I whined about here. But I'm also intrigued... this is just intersection of the sorts of issues that interest me: art, biology, evolution. How can we talk about Nature and not lose sight of human-sized meaning for us? I've been thinking a lot about why evolution and speciation rarely comes up in phenomenology. It seems it's time to start talking about it with the number of Cambridge, MA evolutionary biologists making the New York times magazine. But does phenomenology have anything to say? I think it does -- what exactly I'm working out in that dissertation thing-y -- but it doesn't seem to be saying much yet. But how to begin a conversation in the dominant language ? "Instinct" is in the title of this book and not in, at least my, phenomenological vocabulary. Again, I come back to the problem of translation between two cultures...

space tools: scripts for architectural historians of the future

2009-03-30T15:12:00.003-04:00

Last night, I joined J and another computational designer for dinner with some heads of the architectural software firm Rhino. (Yes, I was there just for the free food) J and his friend have been showing some Oregonian architects what's up with scripting in 3d and this was a dinner to celebrate their success. Now, personally I'm fascinated with how designers "think" in the digital design atmosphere. (I've written a little about it in an article that will be out next year) CAD is so Cartesian: the circuit of hand and eye is disrupted not just by a pencil but a bunch of algorithms, a pregiven geometry and a certain order in which designers can create form, volume, lighting and texture. (an order quite backwards to which they might work in the 'real' world: volume and texture come at the end for example)

So I've been mulling all this over and thinking that Rhino which uses a different geometry and nerbs modelling system is a good alternative to allow a little variety in the methods for making the built world. ... lest everything look like a textureless CAD fly-through. The CEO s of Rhino are pretty proud of their product... but surprisingly to me, they didn't seem to think much about the long-term implications for (and restrictions on!) design and the built world. They felt they were creating a neutral tool that just let architects do better what they'd always wanted to do. In no sense did they feel the tools prescribed design ... even when J pointed out that it was a little bit odd and awkward to think about volume after form.

I imagine art historians of the future looking back at the last 10 years of architectural design and excavating not tools, but scripts and codes. They'll be trying to figure out which version of Rhino or Grasshopper a designer might have access to in 2007 or 2013 in order to invent as they did. They'll be thinking about how space became something we understood in relation to the fly-through tool.

But it was a great lesson to me that Rhino developers didn't need to think about any of that to make the built-world altering tool they've created. Nor do they want to think about it in order to sell more or refine it. And they certainly aren't reading anything coming out of architectural theory ... yet again (pace my post yesterday), there seems to be a one-way sort of conversation between theory and practice, humanities and technology.

stuck between two cultures

2009-03-29T19:44:00.002-04:00

I enjoyed this essay on C.P Snow's two cultures because I'm feeling quite caught between those two cultures right now. Well, no, more precisely I'm definitely from one culture -- the literary, humanities one -- and desperately trying to understand how to talk about the other culture. I just spent the afternoon reading up on 1950s developmental theory. This followed a week or so of trying to understand some evolutionary theory from the same time period. That actually wasn't the hard part... these articles tend to be quite readable, flush with quotes from Shakespeare and allusion to Goethe and plain language expressions of the experiments the scientists had attempted on developing cells.

The hard part was trying to figure out how these views of half a century ago compare to current views. This entails me tracking down basic developmental biology terminology that any kid with a B.A. in biology would understand. I found these newer essays much more impenetrable. Dense with abbreviations for particular genes and chemistry, they required much more work to translate into the language of my culture.

This process also put into relief some of the unique grammar of my culture. What people who might read what I write (let's assume these people might exist!) would want to know is what are the implications of these? what do these microscopic events mean for a person at a macroscopic scale? I have to formulate my sentences in terms of why and for whom. The claims should be at a person-sized scale.

And what in the world would it mean to translate those claims back into the other culture? Could there possibly be a developmental biologist out there interested in that project? Or, by definition, is this a one-way conversation? This latter possibility worries me even more than how little I know about genetics... or perhaps those are two sides of the same coin.

no, writing isn't all that fun...

2009-03-19T15:23:00.002-04:00

Apparently Colm Toibin made a snarky comment about how he didn't take pleasure writing. The KR blog puts this in context I suppose I have to agree somewhat with Tobin... only he gets paid for his 'suffering.' So it can't be all that bad. But let me clarify... it's not that I "hate" writing. No, hardly. But it's certainly not "fun" (like, say, playing shuffleboard or going iceskating). At the least, the pleasure of writing isn't in the process but in the afterglow. A friend said that I "write like I sweat." On the surface, that's a pretty good metaphor; it implies that in order to write, I have to work myself up, work out, get through something and along the way, some writing will be sweated out. But that metaphor only gets to the initial moment of productivity, forgetting that once you've "sweated out" some images, ideas and phrases, you have to work them into actual art.

Even so, in terms of when it offers pleasure, I could say that writing a bit like going for a very long run, at least for me. (Now, I want to say first of all that the following is a completely over-used and abused metaphor... but I use it again, not under the impression that it's novel, but because it, like many cliches, has a bit of truth) The actual picking up my feet and putting them down, the getting in shape to go more than a mile or two... none of that is fun (at least for me). Likewise, actually suffering through revisions and worrying over word choice, that's not fun either. Most of the time it's nerve wracking! But the endorphins after the run and the endorphins after finishing a poem do feel pretty good. The place where this metaphor breaks down -- if it hasn't already -- is that it's not quite clear when one "finishes" a poem nor when or if the endorphins are certain. I enjoy running in and of itself; I don't need to win a race to feel good about running. (In fact, I kind of abhor races!) But with writing... I do kind of want the secondary satisfaction of publication. I do get a certain pleasure out of just finishing a poem: wow, it's there! look how pretty it is when I change the font to garamond! But often there's a secondary moment when that pleasure is taken away from me. I go back to the "finished" poem and find it's not at all complete. Or, that it's "complete" but awful. Or, that it's complete and half-way decent but no one will ever read it. It would be like believing you'd finished a 6 mile run -- and feeling as tired as if you had -- and then discovering that you'd only gone a 1.5 miles. Or finishing a race but forgetting a chip and finding that your score doesn't count.

need more quarks

2009-03-17T21:12:00.003-04:00

It's spring break and I am absolutely craving a nice pseudo sciencey, popular physics book. Any suggestions? I want something with long discussions about black holes, strings, and flavored quarks. I don't even want science fiction! Or... well, I want popular science that is not consciously fictitious; I certainly will never be able to distinguish it from a good yarn.

But why do I want this? Well, experientially, it's just very calming to read about all these Very Big Things and Very Small Things. John and I went for a nice desert hike last weekend in a Very Big canyon; I had been haunted by some problems all week, but in comparison to the desert, they were Quite Propotional. That was comforting. After looking at the Very Big difference between the mountains in the snowy pass and the valley desert, I felt my little moods swings were Quite Negligible.

It's important that these Very Big and Very Small things also be True things. (Even if I can't tell) This is key to their calming quality. I live with plenty of fictions, makings, imaginings... but these all remind me of the human sphere. Precisely what is required is a perspective on the human sphere and all its made things and tools for making.

My inner nerd has always been calmed by a good star-gazing trip. But from our overcast Pacific Northwestern vantage point, there are few stars to be seen. So I require a virtual tour of some constellations or their contents. I do prefer the macroscopic to the microscopic, I must say; so any suggestions for my reading list might take that into acccount. Any thoughts?

Tony Gilroy and the Birth of Tragedy

2009-03-13T15:28:00.005-04:00

I just enjoyed this classically New Yorker, long-winded-but-pleasant story about the screen writer of Bourne Identity, Tony Gilroy.Gilroy sounds like a brilliant and thoughtful writer. He's not just clever but quite up on what's needed by his era. A bit like Euripides, actually. But let me back that up....

First some clarifications: In the article, the author claims that Gilroy virtually invented or at least first truly exploited "the reversal" as a plot device. They write "The core of “Duplicity”[Gilroy's latest film] is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” Well, I hate to break it to the article author or to Gilroy, but "the reversal" goes way back. Aristotle claimed it was one of the essential components of tragedy (along with a hero, a downfall, recognition and scenes of suffering). Many stories, not just Greek tragedies, have reversals: the audience thinks the character and her plot are heading in one direction, but oops! all is not as it seems. But in the end, the audience experiences some relief at watching the character suffer through these twists and turns.

Gilroy is know for increasingly complicated reversals. He feels that modern audience have become so savvy to possible plot twists -- making use of DVDs to replay and unravel them -- that it's harder to satisfy them. The authors suggest that the trend of Gilroy's method of making dramas more and more complex will continue. But is that the only solution? What about Euripides solution?

In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche noted that while the reversal method of effecting catharsis could work, sometimes plots were so complicated that the audiences wasn't getting the payoff . So Euripides introduced a figure who gave a prologue and told the audience ahead of time what would happen. That way, the audience could lose themselves in the pleasure of catharsis without needing to expend all that energy "figuring it out." Nietzsche found this decision of Euripides quite sly but also quite savvy in itself. (Notice that Nietzsche himself claims this is all philologically unjustified... so if there are any errors in this history, blame Nietzsche who doesn't mind anyway)

I suggest that film is moving in the direction of Euripides's plays. There's a limit to the complexity audiences can or are willing to take on. But, there seems to be no end to our pleasure in catharsis. So, rather than make plots more complicated, we have formulaic stories in which we enjoy for the effect and possibly for the novelty in aesthesis of the presentation of the standard plot (take Forgetting Sarah Marshall, as e.g.) Gilroy himself seems away of this with his basic rules about “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” But perhaps the solution to "not boring the audience" is not to make things more, but rather less complex plot-wise.

david foster wallace and "something so simple, really..."

2009-03-05T21:04:00.003-05:00

Now, I don't really like to do a lot of reflecting on what I think Literature Ought To Be or how I think one should write. One should write. That's it. But I was really struck by a few things in a recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace. I don't even particularly like Wallace's work per se; honestly, I've always found Infinite Jest to angsty, male and empty to get through. It's something my male friends read and cite in the same breath as the Big Lebowski. I know that's unfair to both the authors and enjoys of all those concerned, and it only reflects my personal hang-ups. But in this article, I did like what Wallace says about writing and what his writing seemed to be in his life as it appeared through the article.

After leaving a drug rehab half-way house, Wallace changed his tune and his reading interests. He found that the sorts of things that AA taught -- take it one day at time, for e.g.-- actually meant something to him, something that a lot of contemporary literature with its tricks and games didn't: "As he later told Salon, "The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important."

Again, treading lightly into the territory of what writing ought to do or be in genearl or for me, I'll dare to make some claims. In terms of visual art, I am *tired* of post-modern pastiche with its cheeky, snarky self-reflective struggle. This is something John and I have talked about countless times. Where's beauty? Why not just make something beautiful, for people to judge as such, and leave it at that? Why be cruel?

But I usually leave those grumpy claims for visual art and haven't extended them to poetry. It's easier to make definitive judgments about an art you don't practice. But in a way... I think I am starting to feel the same for poetry. I like to read beautiful poetry. I like lyrics, I like one-offs that stand on one, two, maybe three pages at most. I like them to ring and to be recitable. I like Bishop, not Lowell. I've never had the attention span to read or enjoy the epic; I tried to struggle through Lowell's The Dolphin and a few other later books as I read his biography and collected letters with Bishop. But little he wrote -- except maybe the poem for Bishop -- touches me the way her work does. Take her "Armadillo" for instance. This sayes more to me of Lowell's mania that ten of his sonnets that I have to string together to find a story.

I realize that the connection to Wallace may seem thin. What could Infinite Jest or any of his other works, finished or not, have to do with Elizabeth Bishop's poetry? Perhaps nothing in the larger scope of literary criticism. But for me, they are connected in what they mean for my intention as an artist and for my right to predilections as a reader. In a sense, I'm the intellectual's intellectual, the ideal product of an extremely liberal arts education. You'd think I'd be eating up the most post-modern, reflective of literatures, say -- I don't know -- Calvino and Ashbury. But with all my reflective tools, with all my purported knowledge of what art can do, I still just want to enjoy beautiful things that risk cliche before they risk being uninventive. There is something to the AA statement, "take it one day at a time." It works, I remember it. There's something to using a rhyme. It sounds good.

Well, that's all for now. We'll see if this leads to any good or at least pleasing work on my part.

Sounds and sense

2008-12-26T19:40:00.004-05:00

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

"this suffering business"

2008-12-20T17:47:00.002-05:00

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....

Biography, mania and mysticism

2008-12-16T19:19:00.001-05:00

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.

Letters

2008-12-13T17:31:00.004-05:00

"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.

astrology , therapy, Husserl?

2008-12-08T00:38:00.002-05:00

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?" = )

blake on mourning

2008-12-05T21:50:00.001-05:00

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...

art-life-art-life, etc, etc.

2008-12-03T18:18:00.003-05:00

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.

Intruder

2008-12-02T18:34:00.003-05:00

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.

pursuit

2008-12-01T14:14:00.002-05:00

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?

What I've been reading

2008-11-18T19:08:00.002-05:00

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.

Sokal Hoax and friendly Simon Blackburn

2008-08-18T17:08:00.002-04:00

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"

2008-08-18T13:03:00.003-04:00

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?

Why "me"???

2008-08-10T15:02:00.001-04:00

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.

Poems I love???

2008-08-06T19:04:00.003-04:00

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.

Civilizations, Images, and the Subjunctive

2008-08-01T19:55:00.007-04:00

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?

Imagism, Dramatic Monologues ... Presentation, Representation

2008-07-31T18:04:00.005-04:00

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...)

Bittersweet

2008-07-12T21:22:00.004-04:00

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'm back! (In Asheville)

2008-07-05T18:58:00.002-04:00

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!

Word and Helen Adams

2007-11-11T23:07:00.000-05:00

I watched a documentary on spoken word poetry in the '60s and 70s . My favorite was Helen Adams. Wow. A crazy old Scottish lady who sang a ballad of a Long Island junky riding the train. Damn. She said that in the traditional ballad, poets would write down verses that were spontaneously made up in the pub after the poet sang the part that everyone knew.

In this lecture that I've been listening to, she reads from Through the Looking Glass and talks about music of poetry. And then she just sings in a nice scottish-y way.

The other best part of the movie was Allan Ginsburg. He's like a tweedy economic professor doing karaoke.

Read Robert Hass

2007-10-21T21:26:00.000-04:00

I've been devouring Robert Hass's latest book Time and Materials. Wow. The first poem might be the best two line poem I have ever read.

My Mystical Turn

2007-10-21T21:13:00.000-04:00

So I’ve taken the plunge: the last few weeks I’ve been reading mystical poetry. From Celan and Hopkins, I went to the Song of Songs and medieval women and then the Indian Gavitagavinda and then Kabir and Rumi … some of this was inspired by a class, most from conversation, most of that with my dissertation adviser. I’ve just indulged. (My Daniel Dennett-toting cognitive science friends would box my ears if they knew!) I hadn’t even realized I was refraining until I gave in! Reading Rumi is simply luxurious. I’ve held myself away from most of this for some of the translation reasons I mentioned with Celan… and also because of the fear that mysticism is just a code word for laziness or worse, sentimentality. Sentimentality is a fate worse than death for a poet, in my book (death just makes poets martyrs, anyway). And laziness… well, perhaps that’s not what one thinks.

I was reading the diaries of the young Simone de Beauvoire who, I discovered, was quite in love with Merleau-Ponty (the subject of my erstwhile dissertation). She claims– much to my surprise, informed by his lush writing on embodiment – that he is naïve, Catholic and obsessed with abstract metaphysics. (He was only twenty or twenty-five at the time, and it is my thought that he was in love with her too and stylized himself in response to her rejection) She said of speaking to him, “I say, ‘skepticism.’ He says, ‘laziness.’ My skepticism has its excuses. Yes, but one must not need to be excused.” (July, 1927)

So… I have been skeptical. But one must not need excuses. This is just such ridiculously good poetry! Kabir … “ the musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.” Rumi… “close the language-door and open the love window; the moon cannot come in the door, the moon must come in the window.” And “loves comes with a knife, not some shy question … The sun rises, but which way does night go? I have no more words. Let the / soul speak with the silent articulation of the face.” READ MORE

I have also been reading Hopkins. And I wrote about him. But I read him in the context of these fellows … A trope that persists through all of theses mystics is madness and intoxication by desire. This sounds so universal & vague as to be trite … but Rumi is not trite. Bertrand Russell – analytic of analytics – confessed that he had two great fears: loneliness and madness. The worse of it was, the one caused the other: the less mad he was, the more rational he was … and thus the more lonely. The less lonely he was , the more intimate he was… the more mad he was. I love this… and mostly because it’s crotchety old Russell who said it! (though, he did have 4 wives, the last when he was nearly 80 yr old!)

So, I have lots of new work this week. I don’t know if it’s all good or at all good, but I have been writing tons.

All these “I” pronouns in my work make me nervous…. I am worried that I wouldn’t like my work if I picked it up. What is the work about except me?? I wish I had the same poem(s) without an I. I worry that I’ve let this “I” slip in at certain encouragement but without my own approval… on the other hand, it’s been so freeing. Much like reading the mystics. It feels like more aural/oral poetry than poetry on the page. I’m just writing the way I think when I walk.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with Brendan Kennelly. He’s a pretty darn well known Irish poet who happens to have a chair at our strongly Irish Catholic School. He’s rather old and his only job is just to stay around campus and write. My adviser - an Irish philosopher—and I were having coffee last week and we ran into Kennelly and I was introduced. Later in the week, I was walking around campus and crossed his path and he said, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” And I said, “Yes, it ‘tis.” And then I re-introduced myself and we had a nice chat. Then he “spoke” me a poem... he insists that he only speaks poems, he doesn’t write them. The poem was about a loaf of bread he remembers watching his mother make. The poem was told from the point of view of the bread, and it began, “Someone cut my head off in a field…” And ended with the bread being torn and consumed by the mother. Wow. (wow with an explicative and raised eyebrows!) He just recited this to me sitting on a bench on campus. He asked me about my work … and my work is … on the computer? I couldn’t recite anything! (and summarizing poetry is worse than not writing it) So I changed the subject.

This past week he gave a public address... in which he spoke his own poems and the work of maybe 5 or 10 other authors from the last 50 years of Irish poetry. All from memory, not one note for an hour. He is a rhapsode in the strongest meaning of the term.

So for the past week, I’ve been trying to memorize little things. Some Rumi. Some of my own. So that, at the least, if I run into Mr. Kennelly again, I can recite something for him. The summer, before the WW retreat, I memorized the first 15 or so sections of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” That was a great exercise. It’s really hard for me… I am such a visual person. When I used to play the violin, even though I supposedly learned through the Suzuki method, I actually just memorized the look of the sheet music and watched it. I worry that I don’t have enough music to be a poet … shouldn’t I think like that?

I do write often while I walk. Mr. Kennelly and I talked about that too… about Coleridge and Wordsworth and then, locally, Emerson and Thoreau. He said Coleridge and Wordsworth walked twenty or thirty miles a day. I think actually some of my better poems are one that I write that way : these peripatetic poems end up only being as long as what I can manage to memorize on my walk and write down upon return. My walks are limited by modernity and my busy schedule and the poems are thus limited by those factors plus my weak aural memory. But … maybe those are good strictures to hold to. Could Oppen himself ever have memorized all of “Of Being Numerous”? Could Shakespeare recite all of Hamlet? Maybe he could have, actually…

So.. to summarize ;) I have been, of late, concerned with the aurality/orality of poetry and poetry as unconstrained, mystical speculation. This is quite a far cry from my concerns a year ago, or even six months ago

Ein Drohnen, Paul Celan

2007-10-15T22:43:00.001-04:00

Ein Drohnen: es is
die Wahrheit selbst
unter die Menschen
getreten,
mitten ins
Metapherngestoerber.

P. Celan

John Koethe

2007-10-02T11:44:00.000-04:00

“ … Nineteen
Was nothing special and I wouldn’t want it back,
Yet sometimes when I think about the years to come

I see almost as many as the ones since then.
I feel a vague and incoherent fear, a fear
Of waking from time’s dream into an even stranger place,
As different from today as now is from nineteen,

Without a sense of where I am or where I’d been before –
Which is always here, in my imagination.”

- John Koethe, from “The Maquiladoras”

Paul Celan and the Museum of Bad Art

2007-09-16T20:41:00.000-04:00

We went to the Museum of Bad Art this weekend in Dedham, MA. A really fun trip … I recommend it, though you should be cognizant of the fact that you are going to have to drive a good 45 minutes at the least from somewhere to see ... well, BAD art. But the commentaries are what make it .

So, it was a *fun* trip and you shouldn’t think I was moping about this the museum. But, while I was looking at some of the bad art, namely this one, I was thinking about what makes people make precisely this kind of bad art. I mean ... the poor guy obviously just wanted to pain Loneliness. What first year art student doesn't try to paint Loneliness, in some way or another? (Or another Bad Art favorite topic such as People Making Love, or just Love or Passion.) Now, I'm not saying they necessarily set out to paint the noun with the capital letter... but they end up with an image like this, whether in sculpture, painting, or photography. All this abstract art and all this talk about it... and really all that 98% of us want to painting are images of people, happy or sad. And.... in a way, there's nothing really wrong with the topic they've picked; the execution alone sometime does qualify them as bad art . Discussing the execution doesn't explain whether or not the impulse toward these images itself is misplaced.
READ MORE
I heard an interesting lecture on cliche this summer by poet/classicist Brooks Haxton. Haxton argued essentially that cliches work... that half of Shakespeare's sonnets are cliches. He was being polemical, but his point was that audiences enjoy cliches, or at least the content of them. For one, we like repetition, we like familiar territory. For another, the things of cliches are the things, for the most part, that matter ... life, death, love, loneliness, joy, heartbreak, etc. But it isn't just the content that we want to hear repeated ... we like the form to be similar too. A truly great poem manages to give you all that with some subtle permutation so that you hardly realize it was familiar until you feel the pleasure afterward.

Which brings me to Paul Celan. I have been reading Celan this week, for the first time seriously. I've read single poems and read about him many times -- it's hard to be an continental philosophy program and avoid the name -- but I've never delved into him. I decided it was time to tackle him. I bought two translations with German and English text beside eachother and settled in this morning.

Well, needless to say, this was quite a way to being a Sunday. I was overwhelmed. I tried reading the German out-loud, then reading the English silently and going back to the German so I could fit sound with sense. Many of the images in the early poems particularly, came from this 'cliche' set of topics and even imagery; he speaks of water and flowers and circles and blood and milk ... and of course death. But the presentation is so peculiar that these most familiar images are strange and disconcerting; "poplar" and "poppy" become morbid and threatening instead of pastoral and cheerful.

Tom Sleigh once said to me, “John Ashberry is the greatest living poet. You should read him. But you should never try to write like him.” I would say something similar about Celan, except that he would be German and dead. He’s too good; he’s archetypical. You can read this for years and acquire a taste for its strangeness. But you should never, ever try to write like Celan.

At the same time ... Celan writes about what all poets want to write about. How can we not take him as a mentor, as a guide? How can him be great if he is not a model to follow? Many Kantian phrases about genius and beauty come to mind, but I am dismissing them because they only circumscribe the question rather than answer it... novelty intrigues but repetition pleases. A rose is a rose is a rose. And it is pretty...

Prose of the World

2007-09-09T15:56:00.000-04:00

"Men have been talking for a long time on earth, and yet three-quarters of what they say goes unnoticed. A rose, it is raining, it is time, man is mortal."
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

Anglophilia

2007-09-09T15:16:00.000-04:00

Hello from England. I am in Sussex for a philosophy conference. It's so unexpectedly beautiful here! The campus is a bit of a 1965 modernist mess a la StonyBrook or SUNY Buffalo (and for the same reason --a late 60s move to create self-contained rural campuses. Interesting the same thing happened in Beligum at Leuvain also). The surrounding area, however, is just lovely. (I'll post some photos when I get back) I've realized / remembered what an Anglophile I am ... I really grew up fantasizing about this country, be it King Arthur or Wuthering Heights. (Oddly, I'm just reading Anne Carson's book where she writes about her one fascinating with the Brontes, Glass Irony and God) But mostly it was the former ... those King Arthur stories. I read literally ALL of the books in the local library when I was growing up; I was *especially* into the Lancelot/Guenevere/Arthur myth. (Rather like the Harry Potter triumvirate, I'm just realizing!) This is a bit embarrassing to reveal -- more embarrassing if you knew the content of those fantasies! -- READ MORE .. but basically from age 10 to 12 I was fairly certain in an unarticulated way (thank god it remained so) that it would ultimately be revealed that I *Was* Guenevere in some former or future life. Lord know what this has done to my psyche permanently -- my overly psychoanalytic shrink would have a field day if she knew -- but the myth really was beautiful (And complicated .. you've got the Merlin and Moran Le Fay back stories, Sir Gawain ... the list goes on. Sigh :).

God, I really wish I could live here! I don't say that about many places ... in fact, I can't really remember saying about anywhere. I mean, Tuscany is beautiful, Paris is exciting, Germany is cozy and I've contemplated spending time in all those places. But I can actually imagine moving to the UK and being an ex-pat permanently.

It's partly the language-thing (easier to imagine being an ex-pat when ordering dinner isnt' stressful), but it's really more than that.... I really have mythologized the place until it's sort of already part of my psyche, like a place you grow up in, or miss, I feel a bit of Seinsucht and all that. I've only actually been to London before and I know this is a bit precipitous -- it only being a four day stay and all! -- but I really don't think I've reacted this way to a place before. (I'm going to apply to another conference here, hoping to come back!)

It's as if the England that I imagined and researched around those stories became the setting for *all* my dream life, whether or not it related to the myth. Perhaps other people have another place that functions this way -- maybe Italy, maybe a summer holiday place, a particular garden near your house, maybe Iceland, I don't know -- and I can think of others for myself, but none as strong as England. England was my archetype of mythological space.

I'm not saying I find England to actually meet my idealized version of it -- although I did take a mostly romantically perfect walk in the countryside today! -- but rather, whether or not its current conditions meet my expectations, it already *is* my dream world. It's particularly the physical landscape itself ... the shape of the hills, the proportions and layout of the villages and countryside. They share something with the hills of Southern Ohio where I was raised, but with a bit of cultivation, compartmentalization. Certainly this has been amplified as fantasy in *every* American's imagination by Romantic reproductions, be they paintings or gardens by Fredrick Law Olmstead, but because of my particular (by no means singular) attachment to those King Arthur stories, the exponent of archetype has been raised by another power.

Well... I'm going to go back to sighing out my window to see if Lancelot is on his way while I get over my jet lag.

Carl Phillips, "Sea Glass"

2007-08-09T11:20:00.001-04:00

"The body is not an allegory -- it
can't help that it looks like one, any more than
it can avoid not being able to stay."

- Carl Phillips, from "Sea Glass"

Why isn't Poetry a Graphic Art?

2007-08-08T10:37:00.000-04:00

While I was reading about how Emily Dickinson collected her fascicles, for initially unrelated reasons, I pulled out a book on visual poetry from the 1920s. (also called concrete poetry) This interests me because I worked as a graphic designer for a while, and I was always considered about fonts and page layouts. Poets talk a lot about line breaks and “the poem on the page,” etc. but rarely to do they really venture off into true graphic design technique. I know there *is* visual poetry out there -- there's always some experimental or web journal publishing it -- but it's still not mainstream after a few hundred years (even George Herbert and Mallarme were trying it). Why is that? What’s this line between the poem on the page and the graphic art work? I get the impression it seems somehow dishonest to cloth your words in anything but Times New Roman… but that's like saying it doesn’t matter how you dress but dressing all black for every party, or saying your hair cut doesn’t matter and shaving your head. That certainly makes a statement! I think the difference between Dickinson’s physical presentation (even if it was self-presentation) of her work and my own is fairly profound.

I think poet’s are a bit afraid to talk about that… there would be too much to deal with . But I think we need to acknowledge that the unwritten rules of the game are that you write with Times New Roman at twelve points; it’s like not acknowledging in the sixteenth century that iambic pentameter was standard. I’m certainly not against having standards, any more than I’m against an other formal frameworks. The Times New Roman standard gives a certain graphic grammar to bump up against. At some point, someone had to come to the full realization that iambic pentameter was the standard and then he could take full advantage of the possibility of diverging from it.
But can the same thing happen with the graphic presentation of the poem on the page? Historically, we’ve moved from poetry as completely orally/aurally transmitted to poetry as an art whose printed component factors significantly in its assessment. But I do not think that we’ve fully made the paradigm shift. Perhaps this is only now possibly as typographic software allows the poet to experiment in private (as poets like to do) with the potential formal variations. I imagine that there are poets – Olga Broumas comes to mind – that poetry is primarily an oral art and thus the visual and physical dimensions of its presentation will always remain secondary. I would argue that it’s already become a printed art; as much as the news went from being the material of the town crier to the material of the printed page to the stuff on the digital screen, poetry can cross media. Poetry is, of course, one of the older arts, and conservative in its way; perhaps it’s just not ready to make the changes. Perhaps… Olga’s right and it won’t ever be on the page any more than Beethovan or Miles Davis is in the sheet music. But couldn’t graphic presentation be just a better tool to help the reader hear more clearly in her mind’s ear?

"Open the Door..." Emily Dickinson

2007-08-04T22:25:00.000-04:00

When here nephew died, Emily Dickinson wrote,
" ' Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,' was Gilbert's sweet command in delirium. Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know -- Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents' feet -- All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me is name!"

When Dickinson wrote poems, she wrote them on regular paper and collected stacks of these papers. She never published anything publicly but after a few years she would polish her poems for her self. She'd recopy them onto nice stationary, stack up a few sheets, punch holes in the edges and bind them together with string (these groupings are now called fascicles). She destroyed all the earlier drafts of the poems and put the fascicles on her shelf. Her handwriting wasn't very good; it was pretty but hard to read, a bit long and scrawly. It seems she really never intended anyone to read poems.

I don't think publication or popularity necessarily reflects the quality of a poem or poet, but I can't imagine what writing is if publication -- in the simple sense of making public -- is not the aim. What is this thing that Dickinson was doing if it was completely private? R Kearney always says that literature is someone says something to someone... and hermeneutics deals with each of those "some--"s. But to whom was Dickinson speaking except for a couple friends in letters? To herself? To God? When George Herbert writes confessional poems to God, he was so religious in a strict Christian sense that he actually believed he was speaking to an invisible being who could hear the words, whether or however this being responded.

Antipodes

2007-07-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

Apparently, from Greeks to at least the 16th century, there was a real concern over whether there were antipodes, i.e. people on the other side of the globe with their feet turned toward ours. The church worried whether that postulation implied a division in the human race; Augustine concluded it must therefore be nonsense. In "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward," John Donne wonders if, from God's point of view, he could "behold that endless height which is / Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, / Humbled below us?"

From the OED:
antipodes, n. pl.

1. Those who dwell directly opposite to each other on the globe, so that the soles of their feet are as it were planted against each other; esp. those who occupy this position in regard to us. Obs.
2. fig. Those who in any way resemble the dwellers on the opposite side of the globe. Obs.
3. Places on the surfaces of the earth directly opposite to each other, or the place which is directly opposite to another; esp. the region directly opposite to our own.
4. a. transf. The exact opposite of a person or thing. (In this sense the sing. antipode is still used.)

The antipodes seem to be our opposites, but not malicious; they're not our evil counterpart, just our significant other. A bit like today's 'dark matter.' (Antipodes sounds about as scientific as 'dark matter' does any way... ) Maybe these antipodes are just our shadows.

Asheville Shindig

2007-07-21T22:58:00.000-04:00

Today we bounced the baby on down town for the Shindig on the green. It's a bunch of casual blue grass sessions -- real hill billies with guitars, washtubs, banjos and dulcimers -- around the edge of a park with a mainstage band and square dancing. Every Saturday and quite an event.

Robert Pinksky "Keyboard"

2007-07-21T22:55:00.000-04:00

"A disembodied piano. The headphones allow
The one who touches the keys a solitude
Inside his music; shout and he may not turn:

Image of the soul that thinks to turn from the world."

- Robert Pinksky from "Keyboard"

Lyric

2007-07-19T11:13:00.000-04:00

"The best teacher I ever had told us a lyric poem can only say one of three things. It can say 'Oh, the beauty of it' or 'Oh, the pity of it,' or it can say, 'Oh.' "
- William Meridith.

Ontology and Address...I, You, Ich, Du, Sie, Vous, Tu...

2007-07-18T10:38:00.000-04:00

We speak often of the problem of the “I” in lyric poetry, but what of the “You”? Literary critics struggle with whether to assume that the “I” who speaks is the poet or a character or a narrator, but perhaps the first question ought to be, “to whom is this ‘I’ speaking?” To start with the “I” rather than the “you” implies a certain ethical and ontological stance that may not be appropriate to all lyric nor even to all speech.

George Herbert’s devotional poems, such as "Jordan (1)" would be incomprehensible without considering the “You” that the poems address. This “you” is generally either God or a fellow Christian (or both simultaneously), or a potential convert or wayward Christian. This you, especially when it indicates God, is a powerful force. The poem is not a circle radiating from a central “I” but an ellipse, defined by its two poles.

While I do not intend to address God in my poems, I do often use direct address and dialogue. I am struggling with the role of the “I” in poems – whether I want one to write with this pronoun at all, or if so, with what relation to have to the pronoun -- but I had not considered the opposing “you.” This, perhaps, says more about my character than that of anyone’s poems.

But why do we assume the I is equivalent to the poet? I'd be open to the possibility that other people consider the "you" first, but a number of grad and undergrad literature courses suggest that most people make that fatal intentional fallacy. Does our tendency to make the intentional fallacy suggest something about our original relationship to the world? Or, perhaps, conversely, we cannot help but feel addressed by the poem... implicitly called to by an other behind the page.

Herbert's poems do not call directly the reader: they speak to God. The reader, for the most part, simply listens in on conversations between the poet and God. “

Jordan

(1)” begins with a series of questions; these are not rhetorical questions posed to the open air but questions put to God and Christians who read poetry. The poem asks: “Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair / become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?” Insofar as he addresses other Christians, Herbert less asks these questions than he implies their response: poetry’s proper role is to display beautiful truths not pretty fictions. Insofar as he speaks to God, Herbert appears to genuinely inquire into poetry’s potential for presenting sacred subjects; perhaps poetry, as artifice, can only remain several removes from the truth. He refers to the "painted chair" and alludes to the infamous Platonic defamation of the poets; but like Plato, he duplicitly presents this "argument" in poetry, undercutting our trust the explicit statement.

Because the poem actually puts the question to God, this is not idle speculation; as a Christian minister, Herbert could expect an answer of sorts. The answer might not come in sonnet reply, but as addressed to God, his poem takes on the power of prayer. This element of “craft” is performative: Herbert performs prayer in poetry. His craft choices addresses the problem of craft: should poetry craftily generate more false images of “enchanted groves” and “purling streams” or should it speak directly (to God) and avoid artifice?

Of course, the poem itself appears within a sturdy form: iambic pentameter with alternating end rhyme. Apparently, this aspect of craft is appropriate or necessary for communicating even with God. When a poet writes in images, it causes all to “be vail’d” and “he that reades, divines, catching the sense at two removes.” God, of course, created the original world; poem that addresses God in images would be periphrastic. Herbert even begs that he not be punished “with losse of rime” because he would use his rhymes to say “My God, My King.” In “Jordan (2)” Herbert regrets when his writing was “curling with metaphors a plain intention, decking the sense, as if it were to sell.” I will not have the space to fully consider the second poem, but it is important to note that, though it does not commence with questions and directly invoke an addressee, the poem still implicitly presents itself to God, as framed by the first poem.

Identifying the addressee of the poem as God implicitly suggests that the speaker of the poem is the poet. If this poem truly performs prayer, then it must be prayed by a living soul, not a fictional or artificial narrator. Confession not only celebrates God, but confesses one’s own sins; to create a ‘narrator’ dissociable from the poet would prevent the poem from fulfilling this second function. If the poem addressed someone else – say, a mother or a lover – we could possible envision a scenario in which the narrator has an identity distinct from the poet. For example, as Linda Gregerson points out in “Rhetorical Contract in the Erotic Poem,” the famous Marvell poem “To His Coy Mistress” appears to directly address the lady beloved, but in fact the title offsets the addresser and addressee as his coy mistress. The title casts the poem in an ironic light; someone is saying this to his lover, but it isn’t necessarily the poet. To do the same to an address to God, would be to mock the entire framework of the confessional poem; the poem would no longer be confessional nor could it perform the act of prayer. We must assume sincerity in address in the Herbert poem; the craft element must be taken as intentional in order for the poem to have its intended effect.

Geroge Herbert - "Jordan (1)"

2007-07-18T10:36:00.000-04:00

Jordan (1)

Who says that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passes, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring:
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King

Randal Jarell from "The Lost World"

2007-07-14T14:12:00.000-04:00

"... In my
Talk with the word, in which it tells me what I know
And I tell it, "I know--" how strange that I
Know nothing, and yet it tells me what I know! --
I appreciate the animals, who stand by
Purring. Or else they sit and pant. It's so --
So agreeable. If only people purred and panted!"

- Randal Jarell, from "The Lost World"

Addendum to "Do Poems Have Any Ideas"

2007-07-14T14:08:00.001-04:00

Today Heather McHugh said, "the heart's reasons are the minds love." And Paul Valerie said, "The world of sound is not like the world of colors: there is no sun of the world of noises." Thus, "art is about something the way a cat is about the house" (Alan Grossman). Hmm.

Do Poems have Any Ideas?

2007-07-14T01:00:00.001-04:00

I have come away from the residency feeling a little disheartened. I’ve gotten the impression that -- here – poetry is not about ideas. I rather thought it was. The poems that I like most communicate very big ideas; that does not mean the materials that generate the ideas are abstract concepts themselves, any more than Richard Serra’s sculptures are made of ‘ideas’ and not contorted steel. But the contorted steel communicates a very big Idea. Idea being an eidos, a form, the look of things in the world to the human perception; the look of human perception re-presented to it. There were great eras of ideas in poetry and literature in general: Rilke, Schiller, Goethe, Sartre just to name those at the tip of my tongue. These guys certainly attended to craft, but they wanted -- they say so in letters -- to express very, very big ideas in literature. Milton gave me ideas about love and God and pain; Wordsworth gave me ideas about souls and winds and travel and war. Graham and Carson pile up ideas about femininity, marriage, suffering, poetry.

These ideas -- these forms of life -- appear on the page from letters that make words (that conjure connotations) that make lines that also continue into or contain sentences (that have rhythm and music that set a mood) that make stanzas that generate images in my mind and the mind of other readers. The stanzas also produce characters and voices that may speak to me discursively -- i.e. communicate 'abstract' ideas -- but these are precisely voices and characters that speak in my mind, not mere abstraction. But through all this... just as, walking through an Ernesto Netto sculpture ... I received ideas. The art comes, Oppen says, when one feels the one thread ("One cannot come to feel he holds a thousand threads in his hand... this is the level of art") and that one thread is the form of many things, many aspects, many experiences.

I do not care for art that does not take its ideas seriously. Feeling ... well. You will feel something; but you can feel something looking at a bleeding rabbit or by putting your hand near a flame. Art builds a home for feeling to live in. Artifice is not the opposite of sentimentality; it is its human form.

We are here (as other writers are in other MFAs) to learn craft, sure; we are here to learn artifice, techniques, techne the knowledge of things that might be otherwise or not at all. But that does mean that from that craft won't come a thing which generates ideas. If you write of a helicopter descending like a mad fly in a bottle and also of single lives as a shipwrecks (as Oppen does), I will surmise some ideas about war and life and death. When I read a poem, I am willing to work away to learn those ideas; that might require studying the imagery and the syntax and the line breaks ... but also tracing the allusions and piecing together ideas in one section with ideas in another. Certainly, one can discuss ideas in a manner that is either literary critical or philosophical or historical (i.e. not in the manner of a working poet)... but I think one can also talk about ideas as an artist. That is, what kind of ideas grip me? what kind of ideas have I generated? That is, we should talk about in addition to what kind of scene, what kind of character an author has generated, what kind of ideas they have communicated.

No doubt this sounds like the ranting of a philosopher feeling unimportant or else someone who hasn't mastered her 'craft.' Certainly it is both. But I think some frustration is justified... and not just in regards to the program I am in now. It's quite a problem for artists in general, of many disciplines deal. But to take an example from this week, the well-known poet leading a discussion of Oppen's work wanted to talk about the tropes of "fate" and "being numerous"
in his poems but without discussing the ideas. She merely located the recurring themes in the text, marveled at them, made a few of her own comments about fate and was content to say that Oppen had read Heidegger. She resisted any discussion of what Oppen might really have said about singularity, perception, or death; she just wanted to discuss their presentation. I'm not advocating for literary analysis of the allusions to Heidegger or Husserl (both of which appear all through the Oppen) exciting as that might be ... but a discussion of Oppen's work that only describes imagery and syntax is like a description of a meal in terms of color and arrangement with nothing to say about taste and digestion!

Oppen's work -- like Goethe or Dickenson's or Carson's -- deserves to be respected precisely for its ability to communicate the ideas. Part of learning the craft of poetry must be learning how to communicate ideas therein ... which requires figuring out what a poet's ideas are and how they appear out of the syntax and voices ( and ought also, in my opinion, to include learning to think more carefully about these ideas, but perhaps that's leaning too far to the philosophical right or left.) To ignore that presentation in favor of asking either merely what the poem made you see or worse, made you feel is to oppose artifice not only to sentiment but to comprehension. Artifice allows sentiment to arise as it allows comprehension to arise. The great art of Bishop in "Crusoe in England" say, gives us the pain of Friday and Crusoe; it also gives us ideas about human finitude and friendship and intersubjectivity. That sounds like a shallow summary of Bishop and it is! Bishop's ideas are as complex as her presentation and I can't summarize them... they are poetic ideas, presented in poem. But that they appear as poetry does not prevent their ideality.

--
"One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands,

He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art"

- George Oppen. "Of Being Numerous," 1968.

View from poetry boot camp

2007-07-09T21:14:00.000-04:00

Today I heard a fabulous talk on James Wright's Two Citizens. Apparently the book was panned because it diverged from his earlier imagistic work and turned to focus on colloquial language. Alan Williamson did a close reading of "Ohio Valley Swains" that opens "The grandaddy longlegs did twilight / And light" moves from lyric to close with "and if I ever see you again, so help me in the sight of God, / I'll kill you." I think it's a perfect narrative poem. Williamson, citing Kristeva, described Wright's technique as "pre-position" in which he inserts certain phrases or allusions earlier into the poetic sequence than the narrative sequence. In Kristeva's view, this indicates the "pleasure principle" (showing what's important to *me*) winning out over the "reality principle" (accurately giving an account for the other/reader). Now, in either poems or conversation, I am thinking about whether the pleasure or reality principle is winning (for me or for my interlocutor).

In another talk on "Daring, Drama, and Melodrama" given by Baker, he cited a poem by Linda Gregerson that really blew me away with its epic, almost cosmic ennui. Gregerson is someone I would like to read more closely. He also read an amazing poem by Auden that manages to avoid sentimentality while rhyming and concluding with the following lines :

"Much can be said for social savoir-fare,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear."

Mythos vs. Logos

2007-07-09T00:48:00.000-04:00

Some Differences Between Poets and Philosophers:

- Poets are performers and persnickety. Philosophers are mostly ex-nerds or averages joes (mostly joes, also mind you, not janes where as poetry departments are heavy on the ladies) who like to use dinner to argue. Poets either don't speak much at all or are extrordinarily cool and prefer to use dinner to drink and to gossip rather than pontificate.

- Poets think they are in some way "ordinary people"... they're writing about what's really happening, what's really out there, for what people really care; philosophers argue about why what they do is applicable or underpins what's going on "out there" but rarely simply accept that they are doing what "regular people" are doing

-Poets and writers really don't care about argument! They occasionally think they do of course, but it's nothing like philosophy. Seth Bernadette can find all the argument in the action he wants, but something really happened when mythos and logos diverged...

- Poets mine the current events, encylcopedias, and art exhibits for images and tropes to link in intuitive associations where philosophers look for evidence, trends, and historically contextualized trivia that they can place neatly in a stable niches of a well-constructed historical or analytical account.

- Poets read other poets and allude to philosophers to make things sound cosmically significant. Philosophers read other philosophers and allude to poets to make things sound humanly significant.

Serious, seriously

2007-07-08T19:51:00.000-04:00

Today I attended poetry boot camp day 3. I am seriously questioning my intentions/expections in coming here. It's been a long time since I've taken poetry "seriously" or been held accountable for my writing as serious. It's terrifying! This place is like poetry boot camp: 9 am to 9 pm with only breaks to eat dinner and for the occasional softball game which they also take seriously. My adviser, David Baker, is a pretty intense guy, an NEA / Guggenheim winner to boot, and our conferences feel more like therapy sessions than poetry workshops; he says things like "Well, what makes you that way?" and "Why, are you afraid?" And then just gives you this soccer-coach-beside-the-bench stare. Which causes me to gulp and reassess in a bad moment or to cough up something unexpectedly true and honest in good moments. I'm nervous and excited to see what the semester brings. I have in the back of my mind a very long poem sequence I'd like to try.

I've realized what a philosopher I've become and also how much I miss writing. I don't talk the talk here; at a philosophy conference / conversation, I know enough to know what I ought to know (but usually don't) and thus when to keep quiet or when it's reasonable to ask a question ... here, people are mentioning names right and left that I don't understand so I don't even know when I can pipe in without sounding ridiculous. On the other hand, it's rather nice to feel like a beginning student again and not responsible for knowing, if not everything, at least a little something!

This even I heard an amazing poet recite *her own* 30 minute poem aloud ... it was somehow about the flood in New Orleans and it blew me away. I can barely recite Emily Dickenson...

Accessibility, Cliche and Carrion

2007-07-07T23:28:00.000-04:00

Today I heard a wonderful Aztec poem. It's anonymous, so I think it's safe to write it in completely below:
"The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.
The true artist: draws out all from his heart,
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents;
arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things,
works without care, defrauds people, is a theif."

The lecturer said that for "carrion" we might read "post-modern." Ouch, but right on.

I also heard a fascinating lecture by Bruce Haxton on cliche. I'm currently muddling over the difference between cliche, dead metaphor and live metaphor. Haxton argued that cliche, though not perhaps the aim of poetry, works quite effectively occasionally and then because it can rely on a commonality between reader and writer. A completely novel metaphor has fewer such commonalities to moblize for its effect. A dead metaphor -- "the leg of a chair" or "the brook ran around the hill" -- seems to assume complete commonality of meaning between reader and writer: for both, "leg" and "run" transfer meaning (i.e. perform metaphorically) but in a complete way. In a novel metaphor, such as Yeat's "their throats were the throats of birds," the reader must perform many more (in fact, an infinite, incompletable series) of transformations on the terms to find the common meaning. A cliche seems to be somewhere in between these two ends.

Finally, I got really angry at a lecture on metaphor itself. The lecture was given by a well-known poet who presented a sort of big-picture historical (i.e. Neanderthals on) account of language development in relation to myth and metaphor. He concluded by appealing to Chompskian linguistics as evidence that language is hard-wired... and then somehow that myth was also hard-wired. (I am no expert in Chompsky, but I'm pretty sure he specifically separates cultural and linguistic practices. I tried to mention the Piruhua controversy, but he would have none of that) He also claimed that Kantian dualism was just like the left-brain right-brain split (which caused me to tear up some near-by paper), and that MRI scans can "without a doubt" prove that you are lying. (see a New Yorker article that pans exactly that assertion) It's not just the New Yorker but lots of conscientious cognitive scientists who'd admit that MRIs, while very cool, are not the final word on intentionality.

Although I had a personal distaste for the lecture because he was a stodgy old white man, I also had fear for the audience. This group of poets and writers took his word as gospel! The humanities bowed before the idol of the MRI. Instead of the poets and shamans having powers, it's the techies. Far from advocating a return to shamanism, I wish more humanities people (including myself!) were better educated to be able to assess these assertions without blindly sliding into scienticism. Perhaps a bit of scientism is a healthy for the humanities that can suffer equally from Romanticism, but it all has the air of mysticism... Yeats bought into automatic writing and they're looking at MRI scans, the latest phlogiston.

In any case, I certainly won't have to deal with that lecturer's brand of scientism any more because I offended him enough to ward of future conversations...

Now to bed and up early for more poetry boot camp...