Squandermania and other foibles

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...

*

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.

*

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.

Psst! Wanna see Emily Dickinson's snood?

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:41:00 +0000

Everyone's interest in Emily Dickinson's famous recipe for coconut cake has got me thinking that thanks to my wonderful former colleagues at Harvard's estimable Houghton Library, you can see Emily Dickinson's snood - you don't know what a snood is?? - and many other poignant artifacts of her existence off the page - by clicking here (scroll way down).

Her first book? The Herbarium, of course! To see it, click here.

One does continue to wonder what Emily Dickinson looked like. In addition to the famous daguerreotype, there are things like a silhouette, a painted family portrait (at Harvard), a lock of her hair. But relating to the so-called second daguerreotype, purchased on eBay (tm) by Philip Gura, click here and, regarding forensic evidence about its identification, see also here. An article about the image appeared in the May 22, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, which you can read here. I've never discussed this with the Houghton curatorial folks, but maybe I should!

Good advice

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:42:00 +0000

Write about China, Greence, Tibet or the Argentine pampas — anyplace you've never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your home town, or your home folks, or yourself.

*

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

*

Every writer faces the problem of the person that he is writing for, and I think nobody has ever been able to imagine satisfactorily who this “homme moyen sensuel” will be. I try to aim at as wide an audience as I can so that as many people as possible will read my poetry. Therefore I depersonalize it, but in the same way personalize it, so that a person who is going to be different from me but is also going to resemble me just because he is different from me, since we are all different from each other, can see something in it. You know — I shot an arrow into the air but I could only aim it.

*

Many writers who are no longer young claim, for various reasons, to read very little, indeed, to find reading and writing in some sense incompatible. Perhaps, for some writers, they are. It's not for me to judge. If the reason is anxiety about being influenced, then this seems to me a vain, shallow worry. If the reason is lack of time — there are only so many hours in the day, and those spent reading are evidently subtracted from those in which one could be writing — then this is an asceticism to which I don't aspire.

*

A good writer should be so simple that he has no faults, only sins.

*

As if I have to earn the right to write by being a good girl—all about me must be perfectly rinsed and dusted before I can start working.

*

I sat in small room with Robert Lowell, then my teacher, and asked him how I might lift from its doldrums a particular poem. Lowell had spent about fifteen minutes showing me why this poem was horseshit, something I already knew, for I had come to him not for praise but for help. He had just paused in his steady assault on my poem, when I asked him how I might go about making it better. We sat in silence for over a minute. Then he looked at me, a little resigned smile on his face, and said, "You know, it's damned hard to make sense and keep the rhythm."

*

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that the earlier stages of life we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance...

*

Every writer must have common sense. He must be sensitive and serious. But he must not grow solemn. He must not listen to himself. If he does, he might as well be under a tombstone. When he takes himself solemnly, he has no more to say. Yet he must despise nothing, not even solemn people.

*

As we're no longer supposed to be capable of authentically altruistic feelings, we're not supposed to be capable of writing about anyone but ourselves.

*

One writes what one can write. One writes up, though one man’s up is another man’s basement.

The foregoing is excerpted from an incredible anthology of writing advice, "How and Why to Write," online at This Recording, which features James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, W.B. Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, and Stanley Elkin. See if you can match the bits above with the cited quotations in the full collection! As far as the value of the good advice given therein, see the Allan Sherman video above.

The guts of the living

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Auden famously said in his elegy to Yeats that "the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living," and like so much else Auden wrote and said, this was taken as an abstraction rather than actual poetry. There's no question that poets digest, in a really visceral way, the works of certain other poets who are special to them; Louise Gluck described this as "feeding" on the work of particular poets, then moving on. But some poets we never move on from; for me that list includes Auden, Yeats, Pound, Frank O'Hara, Frank Stanford, Robert Lowell, Milton, Hart Crane, J.H. Prynne, Hopkins, John Clare, Traherne, Delmore Schwartz, the best of Patrick Kavanagh, Bishop, Marianne Moore, May Swenson, Charlotte Mew, and lots of others. But the first poet I truly fell in love with was... archy, pictured here on the typewritter (to the astonishment of a cat named mehitabel). You can see that he's a cockroach, and he's quite literate, having literally digested a few works in his time. A cockroach, you exclaim? Well, let me explain. In 1916, the humorist Don Marquis, who had a daily newspaper column in The New York Sun, had an unusual experience at his typewriter, narrated here in the customary editorial first-person plural:

We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys. He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.

Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore
there is a rat here she should get without delay

most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i haven't had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste and leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy

*

Talk about Lunch Poems!

Well, here we have the embodiment of modernist free verse: the end of the each line marks, as we know from the word "verse," a turn; the term originates in the Latin word versus, which denotes what you do when you are ploughing your field... you reach the end, turn around, and make another furrow! Here, archy struggles with the carriage return at the end of every line, and positions with exquisite care every letter (prefiguring E.E. Cummings) by using his own head - literally - to press the keys. Above all, archy's story is emblematic of the ur-trope of all modernism: a human being... a writer... wakes to find himself an insect.

Marquis invented many other things in his own writing career, but to his eventual dismay, archy and his Jezebel-like colleague, mehitabel, came to outlast them all. The archy poems, collected in book form in several volumes, have always been in print - and were even illustrated by the remarkable George Herriman, who is perhaps more famous for his own creation, Krazy Kat.

Many moons ago, I did some research on Don Marquis and compiled an annotated bibliography of previously uncollected archy and mehitabel pieces - quite a large number of them had appeared not only in newspapers, but in a variety of long-vanished popular magazines. That bibliography was duly supplied to a number of people who were then compiling work by and about Marquis, though my work was never acknowledged by any of them in print. This used to bug me, no pun intended - but as archy himself put it so laconically, fate is unfair. No matter: he will always be my first poet-love, and his example serves as a chastening warning to anybody trying to write his or her own verse: we run the risk of reincarnation, so... watch out!!

If this has whetted your, well, appetite, I recommend finding the lovely old Doubleday collections, found in many a used bookstore (if there still are any near you) - or the in-print Michael Sims' The Annotated archy and mehitabel and Everyman "best of" selection.

Anyway, here's my favorite archy poem:

freddy the rat perishes

listen to me there have
been some doings here since last
i wrote there has been a battle
behind that rusty typewriter cover
in the corner
you remember freddy the rat well
freddy is no more but
he died game the other
day a stranger with a lot of
legs came into our
little circle a tough looking kid
he was with a bad eye
who are you said a thousand legs
if i bite you once
said the stranger you won t ask
again he he little poison tongue said
the thousand legs who gave you hydrophobia
i got it by biting myself said
the stranger i m bad keep away
from me where i step a weed dies
if i was to walk on your forehead it would
raise measles and if
you give me any lip i ll do it
they mixed it then
and the thousand legs succumbed
well we found out this fellow
was a tarantula he had come up from
south america in a bunch of bananas
for days he bossed us life
was not worth living he would stand in
the middle of the floor and taunt
us ha ha he would say where i
step a weed dies do
you want any of my game i was
raised on red pepper and blood i am
so hot if you scratch me i will light
like a match you better
dodge me when i m feeling mean and
i don t feel any other way i was nursed
on a tabasco bottle if i was to slap
your wrist in kindness you
would boil over like job and heaven
help you if i get angry give me
room i feel a wicked spell coming on
last night he made a break at freddy
the rat keep your distance
little one said freddy i m not
feeling well myself somebody poisoned some
cheese for me im as full of
death as a drug store i
feel that i am going to die anyhow
come on little torpedo don t stop
to visit and search then they
went at it and both are no more please
throw a late edition on the floor i want to
keep up with china we dropped freddy
off the fire escape into the alley with
military honors

archy

Fear of the other side of the coin

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:55:00 +0000

This is refreshing! From The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956; p. 245.

*

Beckett's attitude to literary prizes is a little more difficult to define. What he dreads above all, in the very unlikely event of his receiving a prize, is the publicity which would then be directed, not only at his name and his work, but at the man himself. He judges, rightly, or wrongly, that it is impossible for the prizewinner, without serious discourtesy, to refuse to go in for the posturings required by these occasions: warm words for his supporters, interviews, photos, etc., etc. And as he feels wholly incapable of this sort of behaviour, he prefers not to expose himself to the risk of being forced into it by entering the competition. Perhaps he has an exaggerated sense of the prizewinner's duties. But if, as prizewinner, he could without unacceptable rudeness stay out of it all, he would see no objection to being one. You see, it is not an aversion of principle, but simply the fear of the other side of the coin.

-- Suzanne Dumesnil, for Samuel Beckett, to Jerome Lindon, Editions de Minuit, 19 April 1951

Degrees of badness

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:51:00 +0000

To celebrate #empsonweek on Twitter, I'm reprising a few posts in WE's honor; Empson is a great hero for me, and I never tire of quoting him, viz - "The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own." This I believe!

Here's a nugget from pre attack-of-the-difficult-poem times...

Now, greatness in poetry, as we know, has been abolished. Badness, too, therefore! There remain only those who fear the new, and those who fear the old.

I imagine, all this notwithstanding, that there may still linger a wistful nostalgia for some imaginary good - if not actually great - old days. And so, to accompany these deep autumn days, I thought I'd occasionally dig up a cool odd buried chestnut or two from a bygone era. Here's the first little chill pill I found! It's from a review by William Empson of Cleanth Brooks's Modern Poetry and the Tradition, from the December 1939 issue of Poetry:

Perhaps the best single crack is the remark that it is not the obscure poet but the unwilling public who escapes into an Ivory Tower. A short review of such a book had best look round for the points of disagreement, but the main body of it seems to me true and convincingly argued.But whom is it meant to convince? I suppose people who already read poetry, but bad poetry. They might be told more about the degrees of badness. It seems clear that Propaganda poetry ("I want you to feel like I do about this," or what Collingwood recently called the magical use of art, more of a social function) is not in itself Sentimental poetry (keeping to a limited range of feelings, to let them run riot), and Uplift poetry is different again. Assuming they are all bad, there is a question what poetry is used for - what kind of threshold ought to be crossed before you spill over into it from normal life? Is it better to have second-rate poetry in your life than not? And what sort of effort is required to produce or enjoy the virtues Mr. Brooks praises? Do you want to be cool or nearly crazy? Oddly enough, you seem to want one extreme or the other.

A Null Dust

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:06:00 +0000

What is [nihilism]? We have our choice of a variety of definitions. For Nietzsche, nihilism signifies the abolition of all hitherto accepted measures and fundamental values. But that may be too broad to be useful. More to the point is the assertion that nihilism denies the existence of any distinct substantial self. This lack of self-substance makes all persons nugatory or insignificant. If we are insignificant, what does it matter what becomes of us? Still, those who are killed need not accept their definition from their killers or have their humanity taken from them as well as their lives. The burden of valuation is on the killer whose ground is nihilistic.

Let the country that committed the crimes bear the blame for them. The slain were not invited into Nothingness, they had it thrust upon them. We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us. It was the judgment of the slayers that slaughter was permitted, that the slain had at best a trivial claim to existence based on an untenable fiction of inviolate selfhood. Theorists of euthanasia had long ago consented to the destruction of the unfit. Even mild vegetarian Fabians like G.B. Shaw (there were others) agreed that measures should be taken by a progressive society to rid itself of defective types. These socially and historically “progressive” reforms were applied in Central Europe by the Nazis with programmatic rigidity and also a kind of purgatorial irony to the Jews and other peoples judged superfluous. This is what causes me to speak of nihilism.

It would be a mistake on modern grounds to set aside as unimportant the age-long inclination of connecting the spiritual order in the universe with our own lives. In our pragmatic attitude toward the social order we leave no room for the influence of general beliefs on our own particular views of morality. In his recent short book Death of the Soul, the philosopher William Barrett offers a useful discussion of the consequences of the disappearance (the destruction, in fact) of the self. He examines critically Heidegger’s treatment of the human being. How, in Heidegger’s view, are we in the world? We ask of Heidegger, “Who is the being who is undergoing all these various modes of being? (Or, in more traditional language: Who is the subject, the I, that underlies or persists through all these various modes of our being?) And here Heidegger evades us.” “We are nothing,” he says, “but an aggregate of modes of being, and any organizing or unifying center we profess to find there is something we ourselves have forged or contrived.”

Thus there is a gaping hole at the center of our human being—at least as Heidegger describes this being. Consequently, we have in the end to acknowledge a certain desolate and empty quality about his thought, however we may admire the originality and novelty of its construction.

And Barrett asks, “How could a being without a center be really ethical?” He concludes:

[Heidegger] cannot be dismissed: that desolate and empty picture of being he gives us may be just the sense of being that is at work in our whole culture, and we are in his debt for having brought it to the surface. To get beyond him we shall have to live through that sense of being in order to reach the other side.

To this I should like to add that questions that can be closed by philosophic argument often remain open for art, and it is therefore a mistake for writers to accept the preeminence of the philosophers, and write poems, novels, and plays to illustrate, to confirm, to work out in their art and in human detail, the thoughts given to us abstractly by distinguished (and also by undistinguished) thinkers. (Cartesians, Kantians, Hegelians, Bergsonians, Marxians, Freudians, Existentialists, Heideggerians, etc.) Neither the philosopher nor the scientist can tell the artist conclusively, definitively, what it is to be human.

* * *

For writers in the West and particularly in the US, it is almost too late to resolve the difficulties described above. Hardly anyone now is conscious of them. Writers seldom give any sign that they are aware of the degree of freedom they enjoy here. Their privilege is to be unrestrained in their destructiveness. They show by this that our giant America does not own them. They are very prickly about not being owned. But then nobody takes them very seriously either. To state the matter more clearly, they are not held to account for their opinions. These opinions are a null dust—weightless
.
What does this mean? Can it be said that in our dizziness we are annihilating even nihilism?

-- Saul Bellow, in The New York Review of Books

Pictured: A dust storm

Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd.

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:19:00 +0000

It is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization; I think of Aeschylus not as the Titan or the Cyclops that people sometimes want us to see him as, but as a man feeling and expressing himself close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do. I think of the mechanism of justice which he sets before us, this alternation of Hubris and Ate, which one will not find to be simply a moral law unless it is also a law of nature. A hundred years before him Anaximander of Miletus believed that “things” pay by deterioration for the “injustice” they have committed by going beyond the order of time. And later Heraclitus will declare: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.”

The Erinyes will hunt down the sun, just as they hunted down Orestes; just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this intimacy. Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling? “Just anthropomorphism,” people say, and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can one look into the Odyssey?

We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son:

The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone.
But quickly turn your desire to the light
And keep all this in your mind.

[Odyssey XI, 222-224]

*

Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or to sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse. When this instinct is not mature enough to show the way, the most fiery sentiment may become disastrous and useless, like frozen ratiocination; it will be able to do nothing but stammer.

-- George Seferis, via Poetry International Web; translated by Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos in On the Greek Style. Pictured: The Furies