Squandermania and other foibles

On sentimentality

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:54:00 +0000

The Pleiades symposium, led by Joy Katz, on "sentimentality" (PDF of the forum here) occasions a reprieve of the following various reflections on the subject from an earlier post on this blog.

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- from Oscar Wilde,"The Critic as Artist":

the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has 'nothing to say.' But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

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Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world (click link for details).

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Because of the growth of entropy, we have a very different epistemic access to the past than to the future. In retrodicting the past, we have recourse to “memories” and “records,” which we can take as mostly-reliable indicators of events that actually happened. But when it comes to the future, the best we can do is extrapolate, without nearly the reliability that we have in reconstructing the past... -- via 3 Quarks Daily

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Even for the one — before all for the one — for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness of the self-evident, [that which] makes every encounter with a stranger strange.: “Camarado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a human.”

Only from this touch — which is not a “making contact” — comes the way to intimacy. Aisthesis is not enough here, man is more than his sensorium. It is a question of conversation, as it is a question of language: (noesis does not suffice; it is a question of the angle of inclination under which one came together; it is a question of fate, as is the case with every real encounter, of the Here and Now, this place and this hour. -- Paul Celan, via Pierre Joris

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Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. -- Richard Hugo

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Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. -- G. K. Chesterton

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It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms—the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention—the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber—to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us—the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it. -- Roger Scruton on "Beauty"

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And here's a link to Kevin Prufer on "Sentimentality & Complexity."

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FINE PRINT RE ASISTHESIS (Via Preceptaustin):

Cf. Philippians 1:9 in the New Testament:
kai touto proseuchomai, hina e agape humon eti mallon kai mallon perisseue en epignosei kai pase aisthesei
(And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment) aisthesis from aisthánomai = to apprehend by the senses, to perceive and in NT speaks primarily of spiritual perception; our English = aesthetic; the root verb is aio = to perceive) refers to the capacity to understand referring not so much to an intellectual acuteness but to a moral sensitiveness. It thus speaks of moral perception, insight, and the practical application of knowledge--the deep knowledge Paul had already mentioned. Aisthesis therefore is more of an immediate knowledge than that arrived at by reasoning. It describes the capacity to perceive clearly and hence to understand the real nature of something. It is the capacity to discern and therefore understand what is not readily comprehensible. It refers to a moral action of recognizing distinctions and making a decision about behavior.

It is interesting to note that the meaning of aisthesis is almost the opposite of the English word “aesthetic” which is derived from the Greek word. Aesthetic speaks of one who is appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful. It has largely to do with personal taste and preference. Paul calls believers to put aside personal tastes and preferences and to focus instead on achieving mature insight and understanding.

The English dictionary states that discernment is the power to see what is not evident to the average mind and stresses accuracy as in reading character or motives.

What Do Poets Laureate Do?

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:44:00 +0000

What, exactly, does a U.S. Poet Laureate do?

You may think you know, but the real answer may surprise some folks. Fortunately, the Library of Congress has decided to clear up all the confusion in time for the title's current holder, Philip Levine (pictured above looking quite certain of his duties), to give his inaugural reading.

Howard Nemerov, we're told, was only half joking in 1963 when he wrote, “The Consultant in Poetry is a very busy man, chiefly because he spends so much time talking with people who want to know what the Consultant in Poetry does.”

And this advice was given to Allen Tate:

He should be warned that some of the questions referred to his attention will be trifling. They will emanate from school girls as well as from scholars, from poetry “groups”, and women’s clubs, and program makers, and catch-penny anthologists, and talent testers, and moon-struck (perhaps moon-stricken) novices too ponderous to be raised by Pegasus. Such work is part of the job; but it can be rather instructive and amusing.

I'll soon have the chance to ask both Levine and his UK counterpart, Carol Ann Duffy, more about what Poets Laureate do; here's your change to provide me with your own questions. I've already received a few from Anthony Madrid, viz -

* What poet, living or dead, are you devoted to, but nobody would guess from reading your work?

* Name a poem that's crap, but you love, anyway.

From Jim Sitar, one for Levine in particular:

*What is WORK?

Keep 'em coming!

Neglectorino or Underratino?

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:06:00 +0000

To say that a writer is neglected is not the same as saying that he is underrated, though the evidence for the assertion is the same in both cases, namely that he is not read. An underrated writer suffers from current fashions in taste, and the critic who would promote him must first change the fashion; a neglected writer suffers merely from public ignorance, and, to rescue him from neglect, it should be sufficient to make his work available to the public and draw attention to its existence.

-- W.H. Auden

Pictured: - inos.

Sources we tide from

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:56:00 +0000

Like the others I attached no particular value to the idea of a group, much less a school.

. . .

We were all very much concerned with poetic form, and form not merely as texture, but as the shape that makes a poem possible to grasp. (Would we all have thought that a satisfactory way to put it?) 'Objectivist' meant, not an objective viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object. Meant form. Louis' essay discussed sincerity on the one hand and objectification on the other. And sincerity - very brilliantly, it seems to me - as the epic quality.

Tradition? I don't remember discussing it. But who would write poetry if a poem had never been written? Beyond that, the members of this group had a very strong sense of their own histories. Rezi's awareness of the Jewish past, Williams' sense of America and its roots, Louis' relation to Bach and other 'sources we tide from,' ----- I am sort of short-winded historically, but not blind. I remember my father and grandfather: I think of my daughter. I'm aware that the subways are old (did you notice) and that the Queen Mary is fairly new. The ground seems very old to me. I write about nothing else. But I thought of Eliot as a sort of enemy at the time; I don't remember discussing 'tradition.' If we had, Williams would have spoken as in The American Grain, Louis might have used the word in a more classic sense, Rezi might have thought we were all talking about the day before yesterday.

And I would have been. I was twenty-four.

-- George Oppen, letter to Mary Ellen Solt about the Objectivists, February 15, 1961

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N.B. Cf. this piece, re W.C.W. and "theories, schools, and doctrines..."

Not with a bang but a whisper

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:42:00 +0000

- from "The Book From Which Our Literature Springs," by Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012:

If Bloom is right that "a test for great poetry and prose is an aura of inevitability in the phrasing," then the King James Bible passes that test brilliantly, thanks in part to the way it ends most of its verses with emphatic metrical stresses or resounding words, be they nouns, verbs, pronouns, or other parts of speech. Here are a few samples that I choose more or less at random from Yahweh's series of rhetorical questions to Job in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Job:

Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? (38:8)

Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place? (38:12)

Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat. (38:41)

Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? (39:1)

Canst thou number the months that they fulfill? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth? (39:2)

Compared to the strong lineaments of verses such as these, most of the poetry written in English today shows precious little "inevitability" in its phrasing. Some of the factors that have contributed to the drastic decline of the art of bringing phrases to closure are clear enough. They include the wholesale de-formalization of poetry in our time and the consequent premium placed on enjambment; our dogmatic insistence on open-endedness and the bland tones of everyday language; our predilection for understatement and uneasiness about rhetorical display; our aversion to affirmation and our cult of the whisper.

However: see this "Poetry Pairing," featuring Thomas Sayers Ellis, who is quoted therein as saying, “I don’t think the end of the word is more important than the beginning of the word. I don’t think the end of the line is more important than the beginning of the line.”

Pictured: Job Mocked by his Wife, Georges de la Tour

Rules for Poetry Radicals

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:09:00 +0000

(with apologies to Saul Alinsky)

Rule #1: Poetry is not only what you have, but what people from other schools of poetry think you have.

Rule #2. Never go outside the expertise of your own poetry people.

Rule #3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your poetry enemies. Look for ways to increase their insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty, e.g., on blogs, Facebook, Twitter.

Rule #4. Make your poetry enemies live up to their own book of rules. You can score points over them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than all that glisters can possibly be gold.

Rule #5. Ridicule is a poetry blogger's or comment box inhabitant’s most potent weapon.

Rule #6. A good style is one that your own poetry people enjoy.

Rule #7. A poetry horse that you flog too long becomes a dead poetry horse.

Rule #8. Keep writing poems. Never let them think you've quit like, say, Empson or Chatterton.

Rule #9. The internet is usually more terrifying than poetry itself.

Rule #10. If you dislike a kind of poetry long enough, it will push through and become a kind of poetry you grudgingly admire... or even like a whole bunch.

Rule #11. The price of a negative review is a constructive alternative. Sorry.

Rule #12. Pick your poetry target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. One acts decisively only in the conviction that posterity is on one's side - and that the dustbin of poetry history awaits the other side.

Don't read the other fellows...

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:36:00 +0000

From Edward Mendelson's introduction to Volume IV, Prose, 1956-1962 by W.H. Auden:

Auden waited until halfway through his [first Oxford] lecture before he claimed any merit for poets and critics, and when he did so, he claimed mostly the virtues of modesty. "Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it;" furthermore, when reading a poem by another poet, "he would rather it were good than bad," and "the last thing he wants is that it should be like one of his own." A poet's general statements about poetry are less likely to be valuable than his appreciations of individual poems, but they may be illuminating about the poet who makes them:

I am always interested in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously. As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete and always one-sided. Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis. In unkind moments one is almost tempted to think that all they are really saying is: "Read me. Don't read the other fellows." But taken as critical admonitions addressed by his [internal] Censor to the poet himself, there is generally something to be learned from them.

You can read Auden's entertaining essay on Sydney Smith from this book here, thanks to the publisher. Some of Auden's aphorisms on writing are here.

Soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:49:00 +0000

Charles Bernstein famously has asked whether art criticism is fifty years behind poetry, concluding that "indeed, pernicious is the cliché that poetry is fifty years behind visual art."

Yet in a recent review of Alice Goldfarb Marquis's The Pop Revolution, Adam Bresnick says this:

What Pop [Art] had done, to the annoyance of the proponents of Modernism, was to undo the essential European distinction between high and low art. Whereas for the Romantic tradition, of which Abstract Expressionism is a late variant, works of art were artifacts supposedly in touch with the sublime, Pop artists understood art in an anthropological and commercial sense, as an activity more or less like any other. Marquis quotes Dave Hickey, who suggests that the real blasphemy of the Pop artists "derives from the crisp analogy they draw between our appetite for 'fine art' and our appetite for food, sex, and glamour." To paraphrase [Jasper] Johns, Pop artists took objects from daily experience, did something to them, and then did something else to them.

[...]

In the new world of image reproduction, words no longer carried their former prestige, and the great intellectual authorities of yesteryear could no longer pretend to control the discussion of art.

Now, can we not, for the sake of discussion, replace in this quotation "Pop," that half-century-old phenomenon, with "contemporary American poetry?"

If so, what explains our belatedness?

Poetry and the Joy of Community: The Four Monologues Project

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Click here for the full story!

On Equity

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:15:00 +0000

Equity is a beautiful word, too beautiful for its own good, possibly...

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Words, generally speaking, are not equitable; even when we try to force them to be so. Words, when skilfully used, appear to hold themselves aloof from mere circumstance; but this is merely an effect. Words, even in the hands of a master, are impregnated by strait and circumstance; even those straits that they preen themselves on having avoided, even those circumstances they appear most gloriously to transcend.

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I said that equity is a beautiful word; it has a beauty of association. Equities, on the other hand, though it sounds as well, is damned by association. Our fallen minds and sinful hearts are drawn into mere businesslike usage (Locke would have approved) but fail to notice when business-shorthand is transposed into pseudo-rectitude, fake authority, and magical cant. The word equity, I believe, was felt and understood by English religious writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to be a word of particular moral beauty and was used by them in that understanding and to that effect. But: used casuistically; and therefore, to the extent that all casuistry is dramatic, used dramatically.

-- Geoffrey Hill, from a sermon preached October 16, 2011

On translation and squirming through poetry...

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

If you're interested in the translation of poetry, one thing you hear over and over and over again is that Octavio Paz said that all texts can be thought of as "translations of translations of translations." He must have written that in Spanish, of course; but what we get in English is this:

On the one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations.

In his Oxford lecture on Eugenio Montale's poem, "L'anguilla" ("The Eel"), Paul Muldoon explores this - and Montale's poem - wryly and thoroughly, perhaps definitively. Like everything else he does, it's a tour de force. As you'd expect, Muldoon starts off by quoting Robert Lowell's infamous introduction to Imitations, and, having presented his own version, wiggles his way through a number of competing English translations of the poem (there must be at least fifty, but Muldoon takes on a selection of the most formidable of them). My guess is that most American readers read Montale's poems in either Jonathan Galassi's versions or William Arrowsmith's, though Charles Wright's have been a perennial favorite as well. Galassi's are increasingly becoming the go-to versions in this country, revised versions of which have just been reissued in paperback by his company, F.S.G.

Anyway, it's a funny thing that such a slippery poem as "L'anguilla" should be such a touchstone for this kind of case study. This peculiar poem has wormed itself into the canon and is so well-known, even in translation, that it must by now produce little anxiety in the average consumer of poetry - no doubt thanks to its having been so relentlessly translated and dissected. (I was going to say that we're swimming in translations of Montale, but I'll quit joking and add that the compulsive, of which I am one, will also want to consult a handy volume, Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas.)

My post here is occasioned, though, by what appears to be the simultaneous reappearance of the Galassi and now the Arrowsmith translations in comprehensive volumes. Most folks who will have read to this point have seen the former, but it's quite good news that the Arrowsmith versions - published in separate volumes over the years, some of which are now quite scarce - have been collected for the first time in a single book, edited by Arrowsmith's best student, the diligent and brilliant Rosanna Warren.

It might not have happened. A 2005 article in the New York Sun called "A Montale Mystery" mentions a note of hers that appears in Arrowsmith's posthumously-published version of Cuttlefish Bones:

When William Arrowsmith died on February 20, 1992, he left in manuscript his translations of every volume of poems by Eugenio Montale arranged by the poet himself, except for "The Storm and Other Things"("La bufera e altro") and "The Occassions" ("Le occassioni"), which had already appeared from Norton in W.A.'s translation. "Altri versi," put together for Montale by Giorgio Zampa and published a few months before the poet's death in 1981, was not included; nor, for obvious reasons, was "Diario postumo," edited by Annalisa Cima and not published in toto until 1996.

The Sun telephoned Warren -

She told us that two Montale collections from Arrowsmith - "Poetic Diary: 1971 and Poetic Diary: 1972" and "Poetic Notebook 1974-77" - have yet to be published. In 1997, she put aside the remaining manuscripts and returned to her own work, which she'd been neglecting. Our inquiry, eerily, came just as she'd been thinking again about the remaining translations. "I have been feeling guilty about the manuscripts, and I am one of his literary executors," she said. "But it's a considerable job and has to be done by someone who knows the work."

These manuscripts lack Arrowsmith's end notes, which are among the very best writing on Montale in English and one of the things that makes his other versions of Montale so valuable. They need an editor who can work with Arrowsmith's translations and compile good annotations. "There's a lot of scholarship on Montale," Ms. Warren said. "To do it responsibly, the editor of these books should know that scholarship."

Ms. Warren was Arrowsmith's student at Johns Hopkins University and his colleague at Boston University. They shared a love for Montale, and he had been showing her his translations for years. "Montale is an enduring poet, and I'm confident that I'll find someone who'd like to take on the task - or that I'd come to a point in my work where I'd like to take on the task," she said.

Well, the task was indeed undertaken, and the book has now been published beautifully by Norton as The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977.

I mention all this because I am deeply indebted to both Warren and Arrowsmith. Rosanna was my mentor in all things relating to translation and editing; I'd not have translated Miguel Hernández, nor learned how literary magazines work, except for her guidance over a great many years. As for William Arrowsmith, I was one of his very last students, in graduate school. He had to stop teaching in the middle of the semester in which I was taking his class, "T. S. Eliot and the Mind of Europe." Out of breath and fumbling repeatedly for a plastic water bottle he carried with him in a flight bag, Arrowsmith - clearly quite ill - smiled as if teaching could make no man happier.

Arrowsmith suffered no fools and was intimidating; he could be blunt, and he was always sharp. But we hung on his every word, little knowing that his words were, sadly, in very limited supply. Early in the semester, I gathered up enough nerve to go see him in his office. He'd put some material for the course on reserve in the library, and when I went to retrieve them I found things in German, French, and Italian. I shuffled around the library shelves for translated versions; there were none. When I mentioned this to Arrowsmith he looked amazed. "You have to read them in the original," he said flatly. Unless, he proposed, I wasn't up to it. The hair on the back of my neck bristled: it was an eerie moment for me. Once before, when I was in college, I had made the same mistake. A comp lit professor of considerable talent sent me off to read some Wagner, and though I had taken just enough German to read it, I found myself wanting to get by with some English translations. "Why?" the prof asked me - "it's beautiful in the German, isn't it?" But Arrowsmith did not dismiss me as a lazy or ignorant neer-do-well which, in fact, I was. He simply pointed out that yes, these works were beautiful in the original, and that as we were talking about the likes of Dante and Eliot, it could scarcely be too much trouble to do as much work as they had, if I'd any real interest in poetry.

He was not being pedantic. I don't know when it was that poets decided they didn't need to know as much as, say, Dante or Eliot, that they could skate by on their own vocabularies and experience and the translations at hand. But that's how most of us are now. Arrowsmith and Warren sternly and generously sent me packing off in a different direction, and I never have been able to thank them enough.

What I remember most vividly about Arrowsmith, however, was a translation talk he gave in which he discussed his translations of Montale. This was many years before Muldoon became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, needless to say. And Arrowsmith dissected and demolished other translations of Montale including, you guessed it, "L'anguille," except his own. I especially remember his discussion of the strange poem, "Xenia I," for Montale's lover, later his wife, whom the poet nicknamed "Mosca" - Arrowsmith clarified it for us with great joy and, well, love, relating the housefly, which is what mosca means, to Donne's erotic poem ''The Flea'' (which Montale had read with another lover), to the mosca in Dante's Inferno and the spiritual itch that must be scratched ("let them scratch wherever is the itch," to translate Dante). He made his case exquisitely, dramatically, at times even venomously, reading from his own published notes to the poem. (These are among the principle pleasures of his work on Montale, by the way.) He waved books and papers in the air. I think he was even sweating; it was a smotheringly hot room. At first, we all kind of giggled. But we stopped that pretty quick. By the time he was done, I could see eels swimming like thick floaters in the water of my own eyes. I was frightened, exhilarated, inspired.

It is hard to express how much, in moments like those, I loved my teachers, loved languages, loved poetry. This has all seemed like a very long time ago to me (it was back in the 80s, after all), but the publication of William Arrowsmith's Montale brings it all back, resurrects a poet and his translator, and revivifies poetry itself. If gratitude is the grandest virtue, somehow, of all literature, then I have been amazingly lucky, and remain intensely grateful to so many others. And now readers can be grateful, too, for such a teacher as Arrowsmith... and for all the translations of Montale... and, of course, for the texts of which the translations are translations.

Pictured: An aalstecher. You can read a little of what Rosanna has to say about Montale here.

Hitchens on Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:20:00 +0000

It depresses me beyond measure that most people I meet cannot even recite, much less compose, this gem-like form. Nor can any student in any of my English classes produce a single sonnet of Shakespeare: not even to get themselves laid (the original purpose of the project).

I worry that by phrasing things in this way I may myself be adding to the general coarsening and deafness. Of course my test isn't the one true test: who can safely say that they have memorized Don Juan, for instance? But then who could you count as reliable who could not manage a stave or two of The Waste Land? The word "Koran" means "the recitation," and it seems that in Arabic its incantation can induce trance by sheer power and beauty. (Auden was wrong, in his valediction for Yeats, to say that "poetry makes nothing happen.") At least this restores the idea of a relationship to the theoretically divine, and to the audience. (Auden also wrote of Yeats that "mad Ireland hurt you into poetry," which at any rate implies the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between poetry and the reality of which Eliot believed that "human kind" could not bear too much.)

Yet very often, late at night, when I am not tired enough for sleep but too tired to carry on with absorbing or apprehending anything "serious" or new, I will walk over to the appropriate shelf and pull out the tried and the true: the ones that never fail me. And then I will always stay up even later than I had intended. And sometimes, in the morning, I really can "do" the whole of "Spain 1937" or "The Road to Mandalay," and can appreciate that writing is not just done by hand.

-- full essay here.

On being criticized for decisions made in editing a poetry anthology

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:32:00 +0000

"My anthology continues to sell, & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum - however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . ."

-- W.B. Yeats, from a letter of December 26, 1936 to Dorothy Wellesley

Bunting's Persia

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:30:00 +0000

Edited and introduced with notes by Don Share, Bunting's Persia collects Basil Bunting’s translations from Persian poetry by Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri, Sa‘di, Hafiz, and Obaid-e Zakani, including previously unpublished translations. Bunting, who is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century, proved unusual in his deep and abiding interest in Middle Eastern culture. Here, he renders poetry of remarkable tonal and emotional range in characteristically clear and resolute language.

“Reading Bunting’s translations, I am struck again by how fresh and strong they are, how vivid in their feeling, and how he digs into the spirit of the originals—a kind of passionate excavation work.”—Dick Davis, translator of The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

Published by Flood Editions.

Pre-orders via SPD, Amazon, B&N, Amazon UK, The Book Depository, and elsewhere.

On the beach (beneath the street)

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:47:00 +0000

The Situationists were formed over half a century ago - in 1957 - and after fifteen years of acting as provocateurs, disbanded in 1972; the Situationist International, we learn from McKenzie Wark's new book, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, had a total of seventy-two members.

They spoke, as Alex Danchev puts it in a recent TLS review (November 18, 2011), in tongues; he calls their Paris '68 slogans "a crash course in Situationist rhetoric." Viz -

REVOLUTION CEASES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT---- IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID ---- NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS ---- DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL ---- AFTER ART, GOD IS DEAD ---- DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON'T DIE OF STARVATION HAS PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM ---- CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE'S MISERY ---- DON'T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE ---- NEVER WORK ---- CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED ---- RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU! ---- BE CRUEL ---- THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE ---- LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME ---- INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE ---- PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTH ---- UNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!

That last slogan reads, in French: Sous les pavés, la plage! Danchev drily remarks: "Allowing for the fact that the beach has since materialized on the banks of the Seine, without so much as a crack in the social order, that slogan is wonderfully apt to the purpose."

The SI's position, as Raoul Vaneigem put it at one of their conferences in 1961, was "that of warriors between two worlds, one which we do not recognize, another which does not yet exist. We must precipitate the crash; hasten the end of the world, the disaster in which the Situationists will recognize their own." Their "secretary and strategist, their philosopher and disciplinarian, their Lenin with a grin, or at least of sense of humor, as Danchev describes him, was Guy Debord, who in 1958 wrote that they would have "neither Paradise nor the end of history..." Debord's first wife (and a founder of SI) Michèle Bernstein wrote a novel which, Danchev says, "catches straight-faced the atmosphere at Situ HQ," e.g.

"What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea."

"Reification," he answered.

"It's an important job," I added.

"Yes, it is," he said.

"I see," Carole observed with admiration. "Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers."

"No," said Gilles. "I walk. Mainly I walk."

Americans are big walkers in their cities, but the French (among others) seem always to have been better at drifting, in the sense of the dérive, than we. I wonder why. But maybe that's changing, with the occupy movements. Wark himself recently appeared at the Occupy Washington Square Park Teach In, where he said:

Those who talk about the 99% without talking about what they really love, what they really desire, what everyday life is a struggle about—they are speaking with a corpse in their mouth. The struggle to live unites us all—in all our differences.

Our ideas are on everybody's minds. Be impossible, demand the realistic. There is tenderness only in the crudest demands. Nobody should go hungry. Nobody should go homeless. Or be crushed by debt.

Both his book and Danchev's review are very much worth reading; the book, by the way, includes a "graphic essay" about the SI which tries to "détourn" Situationist thinking itself by using comics; you can read about that here. And archaeologists of literary culture can delve into the SI archives at SI online.

(One of my own fave Situationists is Alexander Trocchi, about whom I blogged here.)

Uniting us all in our differences; as Empson said, "The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own." There's a sorely-needed justice in that realization that's well worth struggling for.

Further info, including an interview with Wark at Berfrois.

Pictured: Self-explanatory object, available from Crazydog T-shirts.

If poetry editors aren’t editing, what are they doing?

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:55:00 +0000

“Conceptualism”	Poetry Editing
Concept	Taste Idea
Material sourced from [whatever]	Material sourced from contributors
Art as analytic proposition	Editorial work as analytic proposition
Seriality	Ditto
The death of the author	Anthologies

Full exposition of this chart can be found here.

Very much on the attack

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Via Zachary Bos's blog: A report on Geoffrey Hill's most recent turn at the lectern as Oxford Professor of Poetry.

According to the audience member Peter McDonald, the lecture was as much jeremiad as learned allocution.

Here's a slightly edited version of the account McDonald submitted to the Geoffrey Hill Exchange [Facebook group]:

Very much on the attack (which with Hill is often something done under the cover of defense): on the values of 'oligarchical' consumerist politics and culture. The Poet Laureate was accorded respect (at least her office was) before a pitiless exposure of the vacuousness of her publicly angled notions of poetry, and of 'texting' as a model for a supposedly -- and Hill implied, fraudulently -- 'democratic' model of modern poetry. Contemporary lit-biz was roundly deplored, especially bookfests, poetry prizes, 'flourishing' poetry lists etc. None 'scaped whipping - not least the University of Oxford, and its association with the deplorable tawdry bookselling festival antics of the Oxford Literary Festival. ... Fascinating reflections on August's riots as profoundly traditional occasions, conditioned by the values of very society they only seem to challenge. Overall a real -- rather scary, funny but when you think about it not funny at all -- call for head-on confrontation with the shambles of contemporary literary and political culture. Hill explicitly endorsed obscenity as a literary weapon in this, and it was no surprise to hear his praise of Swift in that context. As ever, he spoke with the bravery and conviction that punches a hole through the complacencies of 'professional' dealers in literature. Was it my imagination, or did one or two of them, usually so impervious to criticism, seem to shift a little uncomfortably in their comfortable seats -- or should I say chairs? No, I was imagining it: they know (as H. acknowledges) where the real power lies.

*

A new video of the maestro in action can be viewed on The Economist website, of all places. BBC's Newsnight even sent someone out to see what makes the great man tick; video here.

Podcasts of his Oxford lectures are/will be archived here.

Pictured: Chairs suitable for shifting in; Geoffrey Hill and the Oxford logo.

A crisis in literary criticism! (Making it new yet again...)

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:22:00 +0000

From "A crisis in literary criticism?" by Ellie Robins at the superb Melville House Books website:

"Spain’s El País newspaper has pronounced a state of crisis in worldwide literary criticism. In an article on Saturday, Winston Manrique Sabogal interviewed some of the foremost names in literary journalism, including literary editor of The Guardian Claire Armitstead; essayist, editor and translator Eliot Weinberger; and Marie Arana, the former editor of The Washington Post's now-defunct Book World review section. The piece attributes the crisis to the economic crash and to the world’s dual advance: the split between print and digital. Commentators didn’t pull their punches, and revealed some true anxiety about this question.

A choice quotation: Eliot Weinberger

The United States doesn’t have the class of literary supplements that you find in Spain and many other countries. It only has one important periodical literary criticism publication: The New York Review of Books. There aren’t any powerful American critics any more, as there were up until the 1960s, writing in a prose that was understandable by anyone and introducing literature into the political, social and moral problems of the day. So-called ‘serious’ criticism has passed, for the main part, into the dominion of academics, who write in a specialist jargon, in the strange belief that the complex can only be presented by means of impenetrable phrases… Criticism, in the United States, has been reduced to ‘recommendations’, which arrive through reviews, blogs and Twitter. Prizes have become the standard validation of literary merit. I can’t think of a single American critic to whom one can turn in search of ideas …"

Still missing the good old days? Then check out this piece by Jenifer Szalai on "Mac the Knife," aka Dwight Macdonald at The Nation.

If one were to point out that the wider authority of literary criticism is barely discernible today, one could hardly be accused of courting a controversy or kicking up a fuss. There certainly is a coterie of Americans for whom literature and its criticism is a matter of urgency or livelihood or both, but the notion of the literary critic as a cultural gatekeeper, whose judgments shape tastes and move units, sounds either fanciful or anachronistic, depending on whether you believe that such a creature ever really existed. [...]

More remarkable than Macdonald’s ire (unleashed in a magazine more typically associated with bloodlessness than with blood sport) is that the Great Books project, consisting of fifty-four volumes of “densely printed, poorly edited reading matter” by the likes of Epictetus and Hegel, was at one point selling more than 50,000 sets a year—this, despite a price tag that started at $298 and topped out at $1,175, the equivalent of $2,500 to $9,800 today. The stunning success of these extravagant book sets, as well as the 6,000 words of extravagant fury Macdonald lavished on them, are prime examples of what makes this essay collection so fascinating and strange. The criticism on offer is as much a testament to the exalted claims made for culture in midcentury America as it is a casualty of what has happened since.

Normal avant-garde intellectuals

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:56:00 +0000

Stephen Greenblatt, in The Swerve, a book about Lucretius's classic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) emphasizes, according to Anthony Grafton in the New York Review of Books

... the curial humanists' spite and jealousy, which found expression in everything from vicious written attacks on one another to actual scuffles. After one of these, George of Trebizond, a fellow scholar, wrote to Poggio [Bracciolini, a 15th-century book-hunter and scholar who found the text of Lucretius's poem]: "I could have bitten off the fingers you stuck in my mouth; I did not. Since I was seated and you were standing, I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands and thus lay you out: I did not do it." Greenblatt finds these quarrels "grotesque," evidence of "something rotten" in the humanists' lives. To me, these grumpy scholars look like normal avant-garde intellectuals, caught in a pressure-cooker environment that forced them to spend time together even as they fought to reach their patrons' ear trumpets: not so unlike the young playwrights of Elizabethan London, or, for that matter, the young New York writers of a few generations ago, who resorted to knives as well as fists at the sort of party where, in John Berryman's words, "Somebody slapped / Somebody's second wife somewhere."

-- NYRB, December 8, 2011

*
Check out Ben Jonson's horribly corroded edition of De rerum along with other rare delights in this post at the Houghton Library blog!

Pictured: A few good old-fashioned intellectuals on the title page of De rerum...

H.D., filmmaker

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:49:00 +0000

How 'bout a movie for the holidays?

Did you know that H.D. was an avant-garde filmmaker? She was part of the POOL Group, and also helped start an early journal devoted to film called Close Up, both with her lover Kenneth Macpherson; you can read about her involvement in the group here.

Perhaps the most intriguing film she worked on was the full-length film Borderline (1930), which featured Paul Robeson and Bryher; it explored matters of race and sexuality, employing then-revolutionary techniques like Russian-style montage. Below is an example of a POOL film, "Monkey's Moon."

Wingbeat, Foothills, and the complete film Borderline may be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center in New York; it's also available on DVD from the British Film Institute.

A confidence man amok among the Anglo-American literati

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:24:00 +0000

Another piece pertaining to literary truthtelling (see also yesterday's post): Simon Morley's review, "Incurable Dodger," in the TLS of November 11, 2011.

Morley examines a book about an industrious and well-known literary figure - a con man and poetaster named Thomas Powell - who, as contemporary as it sounds, "made good use of the cultural capital" he picked up way back in the literary world of the nineteenth century by spreading made-up literary gossip, embellishing literary history, publishing an edition of a famous poet's work "with revisions in the author's (probably forged) handwriting," and persistently recycling these antics until his death.

Far from being a diabolical Melville-style confidence man (e.g., "able to inspire confidence in the most faithless of his compatriots") this fellow "was capable," Morley writes, "of inspiring some quite advanced levels of disbelief," which seems to have been part of the game; he had what the novelist Thomas Gunn called "superfluous ingenuity," which almost always ended up with his being found out. "Realizing how little credit he had to draw on," our con man, when confronted, "took the line that if he wasn't trustworthy, then certainly he was a pathetic case, unworthy of punishment."

"His presence was tolerated," Morley writes, long after his antics had been unmasked, "although this has less to do with any devious manoeuvring than with his facility in churning out reams of ephemera." In the end, Powell's "monomaniacal desire to suck up to people overwhelmed his gift for making suckers of them." Although con men, literary and otherwise, thrive on distrust, "he must have written his creepy little exposés in the knowledge that they would only be consumed, not believed."

Quotations from Morley's review of The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man among the Anglo-American Literati, by Hershel Parker; pictured: manuscript material from Herman Melville's novel The Confidence Man

Why do poets think that they're truthtellers?

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:18:00 +0000

What is new since [nineteenth-century debates about poetry and theology] are theories of language that, in various ways, bypass Coleridgean questions about the truth of the imagination by asserting instead the truth of language. Perhaps best known is Michael Polanyi's claim that languages have an innate bias towards the truth. Clearly he did not mean that it is impossible to tell lies - he never disputed that much communication is intended to manipulate facts, or even to promulgate untruths - but, Polanyi argues, in the long run lies are usually seen to be just that. This is not a bid for access to absolute truths: rather, it entails the claim that unlike Orwell's Newspeak, or various technical languages operating with precise definitions, the innate fuzziness of ordinary speech has a long-term self-correcting tendency to revert towards the truth. Even though it may be possible to fool most of the people for most of the time, truth, like cheerfulness, will keep breaking through. If emperors fail to wear clothes, sooner or later someone is going to notice.

Though many postmodernists echo Plato's Thrasymachus in claiming that there is no such thing as truth, most poets wilfully persist in the conviction that they are somehow in the truth-telling business. Even the most scurrilous and cynical among them have usually insisted that they are exposing truths about human corruption and frailty. Indeed, if the creators of "fictions," poetic or novelistic, really believed in a total separation of language and truth, they would soon be out of business...

But the idea that language has an inescapable bias towards truth does not, of course, necessarily offer any moral guarantees, still less theological ones. It was Derrida, not Polanyi, who described the idea of innate textual meaning as "theological" - and it was hardly a compliment.

-- Stephen Prickett, "Religion Will Keep Breaking Through," TLS, November 11, 2011

Why They Did the Police in Different Voices

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:02:00 +0000

A common critical stance describes the [dramatic] monologue as an apprenticeship for young poets that was discarded at maturity, but it is based primarily on the careers of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and does not accurately represent their continued interest in the form or in the monologue experiments of such poets as Charlotte Mew, Amy Lowell, and H.D. [...] Dramatic monologues are imagined solo performances, but they also enabled poets to star in readings of their own work. The cultural uses of genre can change; as Delsartean practices of recitation faded, the dramatic monologue's function as solo performance shifted, even as New Critics, partially in response to the interpretive techniques of expression, began to read every poem as a dramatic monologue...

Modernist doctrines of impersonality were partial rejections of the Delsartean emphasis on fashioning personality through recitation. Other central modernist principles expanded ideas from expression: the objective correlative drew from the mask of the dramatic monologue; the mythical method reframed and updated typological hermeneutics; and polyphonic prose owes much to Delsarte-influenced elocutionary reforms...

Although elocution is no longer central to studies of literature, it had been a vital aspect of the classical education of elite men for centuries and was part of the pedagogical milieu that trained modernist poets. In England, the so-called Elocution Movement of the eighteenth century attempted to elevate the English vernacular, establish a standard pronunciation, and explore the relationship between language and society. Elocution was linked in the United States to the idea that democratic citizens would debate the problems of the nation and must develop their "powers of expression" and "individual character" to do so; [Samuel Silas] Curry claimed, "Freedom and oratory have ever gone hand in hand." In the twentieth century, new disciplinary divisions dispersed skills once considered part of elocution to other fields, including the new English departments teaching composition, literature, and rhetoric... Departments of expression do not survive in the contemporary university, but the cultures of recitation and interpretive techniques they promoted were an important context for modernist poetry.

--- Carrie J. Preston, Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance

A Nest of Pipits, or: The Return of the Attack of the Difficult Poem

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:54:00 +0000

Graeme Richardson, in the TLS, says that behind John Fuller's...

"pedantry [in his book Who Is Ozymandias and other Puzzles in Poetry] is a John Bullish confidence that puzzles can be solved - and those that can't be solved aren't worth puzzling over. The book is 'intended to comfort readers who find poetry difficult by showing that everyone, including professional critics, can find it difficult.' What do we do, though, when it seems 'wilfully difficult?' 'My basic position is this: if a poem has not in the first place earned its claims on us in some way, by getting into our head and charming us, teasing us or impressing us, then we are hardly guilty of anything if we put it aside.' Once a poem has earned its reader's trust, it should then give up its secrets: 'we expect cognitive enlightenment from our reading.' Poems, ideally, are therefore like crossword puzzles or jokes one can 'get.' Naturally enough, Fuller's favored poets and critics are 'sensible' and 'down-to-earth' people. But sadly there are silly highfalutin' sorts of poetry in which 'unfathomed characteristics like obscurity become exaggerated, like concentrations of undesirable deposits in the frequently reboiled kettles of pensioners.' John Ashbery, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and 'members of the Cambridge school' suffer from this limescale build-up. 'The reader may well puzzle over their work, but since pretty much everything in it is a puzzle anyway, it does not really fall within my brief. Nor do surrealist poème-découpages, or Google-generated flarf. There is much that is inevitably eye-glazing about that sort of thing.'

Dedicated flarfists might counter that the same was being said by contemporary critics of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevens and many of the poets Fuller now finds worthwhile. And there are obscurities in these now-accepted poets that ultimately baffle even the great puzzle-solver: what, for example, is Merlin doing in Auden's 'O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven?' After a long search for Eliot's Pipit, Fuller gives up, but 'it does not matter. Some puzzles can live with permanently delayed solutions.' If they can, why can't the puzzle itself be the thing that teases and impresses us, getting into our heads and charming us?"

-- full review in the Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 2011; see also Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems

Pictured: a nest of Pipits

On Veterans' Day / Remembrance Day

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:29:00 +0000

On the El not long ago, I met a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is now a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. We discussed what it means for a country to suffer from the deterioration of its ideals and infrastructure. I dedicate this post to him.

Every Veteran's Day, I feature the following story, told by Katy Evans-Bush on her outstanding blog, Baroque in Hackney; this year, I'm posting it with gratitude to my seatmate, and to countless others like him who are doing, have done, work that few of us can imagine - but all of us can appreciate.

*

In June 1918, a young poet called Eloise Robinson, touring the Front on behalf of the YMCA, was giving a poetry recital to an audience of American soldiers. Guy Davenport tells it: “Reciting poetry! It is all but unimaginable that in that hell of terror, gangrene, mustard gas, sleeplessness, lice, and fatigue, there were moments when bone-weary soldiers, for the most part mere boys, would sit in a circle around a lady poet in an ankle-length khaki skirt and a Boy Scout hat, to hear poems.”

I can’t find a picture of Eloise Robinson. But she was reciting poems, and in the middle of one poem, Davenport tells us, her memory flagged. “She apologized profusely, for the poem, as she explained, was immensely popular back home.” A hand went up, and a young sergeant offered to recite the poem. Here is what (in, as Davenport reminds us, “the hideously ravaged orchards and strafed woods of the valley of the Ourcq, where the fields were cratered and strewn with coils of barbed wire, fields that reeked of cordite and carrion”) the soldier recited:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree...

Eloise Robinson was surprised and impressed that he should know it. “Well, ma’am,” he told her. “I guess I wrote it.”

Joyce Kilmer was killed by a German sniper less than two months later, only three months before the Armistice. His most famous poem had been published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1913.

Eloise, for her part, continuing about her duties at the Front, wrote to Poetry that August: “I wish I might tell you of my visit to the French front, and how for two nights I slept in a ‘cave’ with seven Frenchmen and had a hundred bombs dropped on me. Not directly on top, of course. The nearest hit just in front of the house. And for five days and nights after that I was taking chocolate to advance batteries, to men who can never leave their guns.”

Davenport mentions how Kilmer’s Trees is in fact a self-reflective poem, about poetry itself. These days that’s a sort of no-no, a workshop cliché, but - even though the poem rates itself as second to a tree - the fact nevertheless gives us a clue to something ...

Please click here to read the rest of this wonderful post commemorating Remembrance Day/Veteran's Day, in which Katy moves forward to Tom Disch's reworking of the Kilmer poem (also published in Poetry), complete with a comment from the legendary Samuel R. Delaney!

As Katy sums up:

"Disch’s poem [which is called "Poems"!] also gets at something else, something important, that Kilmer – however conventional and pious – knew very well, and knew while he was writing Trees: the reason why he would bother to write a poem about a thing like a tree in the first place – and the reason Eloise Robinson was reciting poems to soldiers."

In appreciation for those who have served.

Pictured above: The poet and solider, Joyce Kilmer.