Collective Wisdom

This nicely captures the interplay of tradition and innovation in the development of art forms:

'In her recent book about the novel (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel), Jane Smiley points out that while the writer gets to make the rules for his or her work, the reader has the option to read it or not, and is free to "object or disagree." This critical pact has required novelists since Boccaccio to think about the best ways to lure the reader into reading (for it remains true, with few exceptions, that novelists want their books to be read). They experiment with ways of telling stories, and because some experiments are more fruitful than others, a collective wisdom eventually accrues about how to proceed.' (Diane Johnson, "The Malibu Decameron," New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007)

This may refer to fiction, but it can also apply to poetry: those who radically assert the necessity of innovative forms (along with a rejection of traditional forms) fail to consider that the traditional forms are the results of fruitful experimentation—which is exactly what the ideological traditionalists also forget!

(The article is only available in full to subscribers to the NYRB electronic archive, but this is the first paragraph, which anyone can read!)

Shields Maze

Here's a news item about a maze being built in honor of Carol Shields. As the story mentions, the main character of her novel Larry's Party is a man who builds garden mazes. That book contains the wonderful line, "They didn't have an inkling, and it takes a thousand inklings to make a clue."

Fine Wine

Here are Sarah Sloat's descriptions of some lovely-sounding wines, which I have unfortunately been unable to locate at my local supermarkets (Swiss, French, or German).

Dylan in Zurich

I was going to write one of my verse "essays" as a review of the Dylan concert (see my "essays on jazz" on Ron Carter and Dave Holland), but the verses I began writing took on a life of their own and have evolved into a poem in their own right (i.e., no longer a review of the concert) that I will have to do a bit of work on to get right. So these few words in prose will have to do as a review.

Dylan continues to blow the roof off with his live performances. This is a working band of the finest quality. I was especially struck by Denny Freeman, whose guitar work had never really caught my attention before (he joined the band in March, 2005, and I heard him with BD in Zurich in November of the same year, plus I've heard him on quite a few bootlegs). His playing was eye-opening, especially on the ballads, above all on a gorgeous rendition of "Visions of Johanna," where he played the sparsest, slowest of melodies, with a couple of slightly bent double-stops as climaxes.

The setlist:

1. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
2. The Times They Are A-Changin'
3. Watching The River Flow
4. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

I missed Larry Campbell's bouzuki here, but it was still a powerful version.

5. Girl Of The North Country

The current arrangement of this one is so poignant that it continues to bring tears to my eyes.

6. Rollin' And Tumblin'
7. Visions Of Johanna

I mentioned Freeman's soloing here; Dylan began the tune with a painfully beautiful harmonica solo, too.

8. Things Have Changed
9. When The Deal Goes Down
10. Highway 61 Revisited
11. Spirit On The Water

This was the one I was looking forward to from Modern Times. Great to hear it!

12. Tangled Up In Blue

Absolutely blew the house down. Freeman was brilliant here, too; again, nothing with virtuosic speed, just beautiful melodies, especially in the guitar's low range. "Some are mathematicians ..."

13. Nettie Moore

Even more haunting live than on the album.

14. Summer Days

Serious Dylan fans are sick of this one, but I hope they listened to it last night, because the band just took off with it. As powerful as Neil Young with Crazy Horse—and like CH, also threatening to lose control, but never quite doing so.

15. Blowin' In The Wind

An unusual, surprising almost rock-n-roll version. This one was for all those who complain about how Dylan rearranges his tunes, because this rearrangement was absolutely first-rate.

(encore)
16. Thunder On The Mountain

Faster than on Modern Times, much more rock-n-roll drive.

17. Like A Rolling Stone

The first Dylan show I have ever attended where he did not play "All Along the Watchtower"!

DPP5

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FIVE

Here are the poems to vote for in week five of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 23, to Sunday, April 29):

29. Don Share, "Ruby"
30. Meghan O'Rourke, "Descent"
31. Julianna Baggott, "Q and A: Do you write about real stuff or do you make it all up?"
32. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Friends,"
33. Philip White, "Raptor"
34. Paige Ackerson-Kiely, "On the Gentle Nature of Swales"
35. Karin Gottshall, "The Current"

The Rules:

You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list above! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem! Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, MAY 3!

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two
Week Three
Week Four

Umbrella

I just like this little joke in the midst of "For Six Seconds," by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis:

You're just like that streetcorner guy
that whacks me with an umbrella
and then apologizes to the umbrella.

DPP4 results

This morning, the class voted on the poems. The vote was both close and a runaway, as two poems had five votes each:

22. Mike Dockins, "Poem of Low Latitudes"
24. Janice N. Harrington, "Shaking the Grass"

In the class, no other poem received more than two votes.

The blog voters (16 votes this time, counting mine; thanks, everyone) produced an entirely different result, with Dockins receiving 0 votes and Harrington 2. Again, 5 votes for the winner:

28. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"

And 4 for the poem in second place:

26. Jeffrey Franklin, "Drucker's Mule Barn"

Last night, Franklin had received 4 votes, and Grossman 3, but when I checked my email this morning, two more votes had come in for Grossman.

My short list had been Franklin, Grossman, and David Harsent's "Spatchcock" (poem 23). I waited several days to see which poem would convince me to vote for it; after a while, I got tired of Harsent's weirdness, and when I went to choose between Franklin and Grossman, Franklin's mules threatened to kick me, so I voted for his poem:

That's why when someone I don't know
and don't want to know rings my phone
I sometimes pick it up and say, "Drucker's
Mule Barn."

Or as I always wanted to say on the phone: "Fenway Park, second base." (Hey, how do you like them Sox?)

I'll be posting a call for votes for week five on Sunday (Dylan in Zurich on Sunday evening!); in the meantime, of course, you can already read the poems on Poetry Daily (the poems from April 23 to April 29).

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two
Week Three

DPP4

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR

Here are the poems to vote for in week four of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 16, to Sunday, April 22):

22. Mike Dockins, "Poem of Low Latitudes"
23. David Harsent, "Spatchcock"
24. Janice N. Harrington, "Shaking the Grass"
25. Fleda Brown, "Reading Poetry at the Horse Meadow Senior Center"
26. Jeffrey Franklin, "Drucker's Mule Barn"
27. Moira Linehan, "Refuge"
28. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"

The Rules:

You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list above! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem! Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, APRIL 26!

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two
Week Three

Shepherd on Race and Academia

I highly recommend Reginald Shepherd's long, thoughtful post "Some Thoughts on Race Academia." I have two small glosses to the text, neither of which is about its central issues.

First of all, Shepherd writes, near the beginning: "My blog is my public face." This was hammered home to me recently when the always lively and interesting Ms. Baroque quoted a post of mine in some thoughts she had about translation. How fascinating to see how my thoughts, which had seemed rather private, were suddenly revealed to have become completely public. I stand by what I said in that post, and I do not regret going public with those comments, but I had to see the remarks quoted to fully understanding that a blog is indeed a "public face."

Right at the end of his post, Shepherd writes: "Multiculturalism is just a new word for segregation, keeping all the minorities safely in their places." This reminded me of an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books long ago. A search in their on-line archive located it: "The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding." Here is the paragraph that struck me back in 1997:

"Coming, as I do, from Ghana, I find the broad cultural homogeneity of America more striking than its much-vaunted variety. Take language. When I was a child, we lived in a household where there were always at least three mother tongues in daily use: we spoke English (Ghana's official language and my mother's) and Twi (my father's first language); and our cook and steward, who came from further north, also spoke the language of Navrongo, where they were born. (The watchman spoke Hausa.) Ghana, with a population smaller than that of New York State, has several dozen languages in active daily use and no one language that is spoken at home—or even fluently understood—by a majority of the population."

(The full article is only available to subscribers to the archive, but I have it if anyone wants it.)

Voting on poems

Jonathan Mayhew and I exchanged an email or two about how we pick the poems for the Daily Poem Project. Here's my last note in the exchange:

My procedure is ... read the poems, read the poems, read the poems. :-)

More seriously, my procedure is to read each poem hoping to be blown away. If anything gets in the way of that, then I put the poem aside. Last year, this procedure usually led me to pick a poem quickly, or choose between two very quickly. This year, I'm trying to give them more time; in fact, I'm trying to see how the things that irritate me might actually be the things that are worth looking at more closely (à la the "I can see" motif in Christian Wiman's "The River" in week one).

So I'm shifting my focus a bit to how irritation can be a good thing, a reaction that tells you what to look at just as much as a "wow" does.

Shooting Star

Listening to a splendid live version of this Dylan tune, from 1997, I was struck by the wonderful bridge ("Listen to the engine," etc.):

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you.
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew.
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through.
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you.

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me.
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or
Over-step the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me.

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by, all good people are praying,
It's the last temptation
The last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount,
The last radio is playing.

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip Away.
Tomorrow will be another day.
Guess it's too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say.
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away.

(from Oh Mercy, 1989)

DPP3 results

This morning, the class voted on this week's poems. It was a close vote, with the winner receiving 4 votes and 3 poems receiving three:

4 votes:
20. Josephine Dickinson, "The Bargain"

3 votes:
17. Jessica Fisher, "The Promise of Nostos"
19. D. A. Powell, "Sprig of Lilac"
21. Matt Donovan, "Saint Catherine in an O: A Song about Knives"

I voted for Donovan's poem and was quite surprised that Dickinson won. Still, my reason for disliking the poem was perhaps quite technical; I found (and still find) the third line too hard to parse:

and you think not I might not hear you go

Donovan's poem had also not excited me at first, but on a third reading (it took that long), the poem's densities and layerings began to open up for me, to the point where it overwhelmed the other poems, even D. A. Powell's wondrously beautiful "Sprig of Lilac."

The blog voters were of one mind this time: nine votes received, five of them for Fisher's "The Promise of Nostos." I was quite surprised by this, as I had not given Fisher's poem much of a reading, but the enthusiastic comments I received on the poem sent me back to it, and I have to agree, there's a lot more there than I thought at a third reading. :-)

I'll be posting a call for votes for week four on Monday; in the meantime, of course, you can already read the poems on Poetry Daily (the poems from April 16 to April 22).

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two

DPP3 voting

Just a note to mention that the voting is still open for week 3 of my Daily Poem Project. The poems in question are here:

15. Henri Cole, "Gravity and Center"
16. Carl Dennis, "Birthday"
17. Jessica Fisher, "The Promise of Nostos"
18. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Suddenly in Grace"
19. D. A. Powell, "Sprig of Lilac"
20. Josephine Dickinson, "The Bargain"
21. Matt Donovan, "Saint Catherine in an O: A Song about Knives"

The Rules:

You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list below! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem! Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, APRIL 19! (BUT I WILL PROBABLY ONLY FINISHING TALLYING THE VOTES SOMETIME FRIDAY.)

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two

Silly Rejection

On March 8, I submitted a few poems to Hotel Amerika. Today (April 18), I received the following rejection:

Dear Author,

Thank you for your interest in Hotel Amerika. Unfortunately, our reading period concluded on May 1, so we are returning your work to you unread.

*

It actually took me a while to figure out what was absurd about this! (If you have not figure it out yet, check the dates.) That's a sign either of how stupid I am or just how silly the letter is.

Second Essay on Jazz

[As the date of the concert suggests, this should have been posted weeks ago.]

SECOND ESSAY ON JAZZ

Ron Carter—bass
Russell Malone—guitar
Mulgrew Miller—piano
Theater Basel, March 26, 2007

What makes jazz jazz is often unrecorded
or, if it gets recorded, undernoticed.
When Miller lays his left hand on his lap
to let his right hand play around alone
(Malone and Carter laying out for him),
before, beyond, his virtuosity—
the simplicity of melody!
And not Malone's dexterity—the speed
of breakneck runs that segue into octaves,
the complex lines atop his chordal solos—
instead his strumming for a half a chorus
of just one chord with half a melody
worked out within it by his middle finger
while Carter meddles with his walking bass
with dropped-in double stops each sliding down
a tone, a minor third, a major third,
without the slightest lessening of swing.
Arrangements, solos, comping, interplay—
but what makes great jazz great? The little things.

Antique Lays

This was on the Poetry Calendar 2007 today. If the boy gave them "antique lays," then how can he say that he was spurned?

Last Verses

Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick,
Lovers of mammon, worshippers of trick!
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,
By nature fitted for corruption's tools!
I go to where celestial anthems swell;
But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.
Farewell, my mother!-cease, my anguished soul,
Nor let distraction's billows o'er me roll!
Have mercy, Heaven! when here i cease to live,
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.

Thomas Chatterton

*

I liked yesterday's poem, too, a simple but resonant poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Vox Populi

When Mazarvan the Magician
Journeyed westward through Cathay,
Nothing heard he but the praises
Of Badoura on his way.

But the lessening rumor ended
When he came to Khaledan,
There the folk were talking only
Of Prince Camaralzaman,

So it happens with the poets:
Every province hath its own;
Camaralzaman is famous
Where Badoura is unknown.

DPP3

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE

Here are the poems to vote for in week two of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 9, to Sunday, April 15):

15. Henri Cole, "Gravity and Center"
16. Carl Dennis, "Birthday"
17. Jessica Fisher, "The Promise of Nostos"
18. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Suddenly in Grace"
19. D. A. Powell, "Sprig of Lilac"
20. Josephine Dickinson, "The Bargain"
21. Matt Donovan, "Saint Catherine in an O: A Song about Knives"

The Rules:

You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list below! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem! Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, APRIL 19!

(If you are planning to keep voting uring the rest of the project, then you can always read the poems each day they appear!)

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two

DPP2 results

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO RESULTS

This morning, the class voted on the poems and was of as many minds about them as the bloggers have been. The result: 12 votes, a three-way tie, and 3 votes each for:

11. C. D. Wright, "Dear night dear shade dear executioner"
12. Elizabeth Bradfield, "Industry"
13. Paul Zimmer, "Suck It Up"

Instead of a doing a run-off, I decided to have all three poems be accepted into the pool of finalists for the end of the term!

I voted for Zimmer's "Suck It Up," with Bradfield's "Industry" and Christopher Bakken's "Portrait Detail, with Pear" as close runners-up. Zimmer's poem perhaps snuck its way into my mind because it reminded me of J. M. Coetzee's novel Slow Man: it was as if I was reading about Coetzee's main character, Paul Rayment, watching a mediocre boxing match. On Bakken's poem, I fully agree with Don Brown's comment as to why he voted for that poem: "So Bakken wins for actually having a subject and rendering it well and just making us think about it in a way we might not otherwise. For me, poetry is all about 'as if' and Bakken writes 'as if' that portrait detail were simply waiting for a poem to notice it." As if the detail were waiting for a poem to notice it: a beautiful phrase, Don.

The bloggers (16 votes, Don among them) were also of many minds about this week's poems. When I talked to the class this morning, I had one result: a tie between Bakken and Zimmer. When I tallied up some late votes this evening, I had a different result: with four votes, the winner is Tom Sleigh's "Blueprint." Here again, I have to go with Don: it's too much in the "welcome in my head" genre for my taste. But it's the winner!

You can see the Week One results here. I'll be posting a call for votes for week three on Monday; in the meantime, of course, you can already the poems on Poetry Daily (the poems from April 9 to April 15).

Quietude

A comment on a post by Stephen Schroeder:

I'm in the School of Quietude:

"So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, griping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considerating touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks." (Herman Melville, "Moby Dick," chapter 29)

I'd rather be that than "before-after," which makes me dizzy.

Ezra Pound recordings on-line

I just received this information:

The Complete Poetry Recordings of Ezra Pound

edited, with an extended listening guide, by Richard Sieburth.

The PENNsound Pound includes many rare recordings, as well as a set of
private recordings, made in 1962-1972, whose existence had not
previously been known. Sieburth provides a detailed essay to accompany
the recordings, which cover Pound's two major recording sessions, at
Harvard in 1939 and in Washington, DC, in 1958. In addition, we include
Pound's 1942 reading of Canto XLVI, broadcast on Italian radio as part
of his radio speeches; Pound's reading at Spoleto in 1967; Pound's
reading of his "Confucian Odes" (Spoleto, 1970), and a private recording
of three Cantos from the early 1970s.

Other recent additions to PENNsound include the complete recordings of
William Carlos Williams, and extensive collections of recordings by
Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, Anne Tardos, Anne Waldman, Myung Mi Kim,
Charles Reznikofff, Alan Davies, Tracie Morris, Bruce Andrews, Barbara
Guest, Nicole Brossard, Robin Blaser, Amiri Baraka, Bern Porter, Robert
Grenier, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Allen Ginsberg, Brian Kim Stefans,
Kenneth Goldsmith & many others.

DPP2

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO

Here are the poems to vote for in week two of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 2, to Sunday, April 8):

8. Monday, April 2: Penelope Shuttle, "Dukedom"
9. Tuesday, April 3: Grace Schulman, "The Fifth of July"
10. Wednesday, April 4: Christopher Bakken, "Portrait Detail, with Pear"
11. Thursday, April 5: C. D. Wright, "Dear night dear shade dear executioner"
12. Friday, April 6: Elizabeth Bradfield, "Industry"
13. Saturday, April 7: Paul Zimmer, "Suck It Up"
14. Sunday, April 8: Tom Sleigh, "Blueprint"

The Rules:

You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list below! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem! Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, APRIL 12!

(If you are planning to keep voting for the next few months, then you can always read the poems each day they appear!)

You can see the Week One results here.

DPP1 Results

Here are the results of the first week of voting in my Daily Poem Project.

My students voted for Derek Walcott's "The Castaway," which received four votes. In second place was Lee Slonimsky's "The Burial of the Sun," which received three. Thirteen votes were cast in all.

Blog voters went for Christian Wiman's "The River," which received four votes. Four poems received two votes each (numbers 2, 4, 5, and 6). Thirteen votes again.

Overall, the Walcott would win with six votes out of twenty-six, with Wiman and Slonimsky each receiving five. (But that's not how I am doing the vote, especially as my vote counts both in the class and on the blog.)

I voted for the Wiman in the end, with Walcott's poem and Susan Tichy's "Couplet" being the other poems on my shortlist. Tichy's poem seemed too vague when I looked at closely: if I was enthralled but puzzled on a first reading, I was only puzzled after a third. Walcott is always rich and dense, but the poem seemed too dense for its own good; the richness prevented me from being able to think it through completely, and it prevented me from being able to feel the poem strongly enough. Wiman's poem had one irritating feature ("I can see"), but while I pondered it while biking home from a meeting, that irritating feature began to make sense, and the poem's one unclear element (is the father present in the scene or is he a memory?) added to the power of the work rather than subtracting from it. (While biking, I was unable to think about Walcott's poem because it was not wholly present in my mind: the over-richness of the language again.)

This from someone who does not usually like prose poems.

(For those who posted your votes through comments, the comments are now up, and you can read what other people said about the poems.)

DPP week 1, voting extended

I was going to post the results of the first week of Daily Poem Project voting this evening, but I don't really have time to do it before we head off to Kassel for Easter weekend. So if you still want to vote (please do, and tell a friend!), I am extending the deadline until Monday, April 9. On Monday, I will post the results of the first week of voting (both for the class and for the blog), and I will also post the list of poems to be voted on for the second week—those on Poetry Daily from April 2 to April 8, if you want to go check them out already. You can also go directly to the PD archive "by date" here.

Daily Poem Project 2007, week one

The Daily Poem Project (which I am running as part of my course "Songs and Poems Were All We Needed" this semester) involves reading the poem on Poetry Daily every day for a week. Then the students in the course vote, as I do, for the best poem of the week.

The course is on Friday, but the weeks will run from Monday to Sunday, starting last Monday, March 26, After we have done this for twelve weeks, we will have a final vote in the last week of the term on the best of the winners. Two summers ago, the winning poem in the end was "The Shout," by Simon Armitage. Last summer, the winning poem was "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings.

This term, I will be running a blog vote parallel to the class vote. If you want to participate, you can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list below! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem!

Oh, and a deadline: please send your week-one vote by Thursday, April 5.

One other rule: if PD has more than one poem on a given day, we will consider only on the first poem.

Think of it as Poetry Idol. :-)

The poets and poems for the past week:

1. Monday, March 26 - Christian Wiman, "The River"
2. Tuesday, March 27 - Derek Walcott, "The Castaway"
3. Wednesday, March 28 - Linda Gregerson, "Spring Snow"
4. Thursday, March 29 - Susan Tichy, "Couplet"
5. Friday, March 30 - Robert Kelly, "Rembrandt's Raising of Lazarus, 1642"
6. Saturday, March 31 - Lee Slonimsky, "Burial of the Sun"
7. Sunday, April 1 - Hailey Leithauser, "Coo"

It's worth noting that the blog finalist list could end up being quite different than the finalist list in the class.

Depths

"Charlatans and hydrographic engineers stand irrevocably on different sides of the crucial dividing line. Not the date line or the prime meridian line, but the line that separates the measurable from what cannot be measured and hence doesn't exist."

These are the thoughts of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a hydrographic engineer, the main character of Henning Mankell's Depths. The novel is full of this man's ideas, which are often quite pithy and charged with implications, both for the novel and as quotable quotes, as it were.

But as the novel wore on, I began to grow increasingly suspicious of anything Tobiasson-Svartman said or thought; you see, it turns out he is steadily going crazy through the course of the book. Slowly but surely, the reliability of his perspective is undermined. So what am I to make of the quotable bits?

In Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee begins with a "lesson" on "realism," in which Costello gives a lecture on realism. Ideas in novels, she claims, always have to be embodied by the individual to whom they are attributed or connected. She, the woman full of ideas in a novel of ideas, implies that all ideas become subjective perspectives. And Depths is certainly not the first novel in history to have a main character whose subjective perspective calls his ideas into question.

"He worked out distances, lived by checking where he was in relation to others. His wife looked for irregularities, in order to put them right."

One knows from the beginning that his wife is going to go insane, but not that he is going to become increasingly erratic and bizarre. But the two generalizations I have just quoted are not descriptions of the mad: "checking where you are in relation to others" or "working to put irregularities right"—these are not necessarily insane perspectives. The ideas are reasonable, but the characters lose their reason.

"No war can be won without a moment of improvisation. Just as no significant work of art can be created without that element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent."

This is Captain Rake, Tobiasson-Svartman's commanding officer. A reasonable pair of claims, a reasonable simile. The irrationality that creeps into Depths seeks its justification here—but from a man who says of himself that he talks too much. Even this claim, which may seem to have some bearing on the novel in question, begins to break down in its immediate and larger contexts.

"Nothing is as magical as exact knowledge."

Thus Tobiasson-Svartman, later in the book. Here, he is like Derrida taking on Levi-Strauss: when Levi-Strauss distinguishes between magic and science, Derrida shows how Levi-Strauss's concept of science depends on the concept of magic that it would negate (standard deconstruction, by now nothing spectacular). But here Tobiasson-Svartman seems to be deconstructing himself. But what he is really saying is that science is the better magic: he uses his skills as a hydrographic engineer to manipulate someone who does not understand those skills. Exact knowledge becomes a tool for manipulating those who lack it. Is this what I am supposed to take from this book?

I read Depths "between the years"—to use the wonderful German phrase for the days between Christmas and New Year's Eve. It's haunted me for three months now. What more can one want from a novel?

Coetzee on Mailer and Hitler

Some choice passages from J. M. Coetzee's "Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist" (great title), a review of Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest (NYRB, Feb. 15, 2007):

All in all, the adventures of Adolf Hitler in the realm of ideas provide a cautionary tale against letting an impressionable young person loose to pursue his or her education in a state of total freedom. For seven years Hitler lived in a great European city in a time of ferment from which emerged some of the most exciting, most revolutionary thought of the new century. With an unerring eye he picked out not the best but the worst of the ideas around him. Because he was never a student, with lectures to attend and reading lists to follow and fellow students to argue with and assignments to complete and examinations to sit, the half-baked ideas he made his own were never properly challenged. The people he associated with were as ill-educated, volatile, and undisciplined as himself. No one in his circle had the intellectual command to put his chosen authorities in their place as what they were: disreputable and even comical mountebanks.

Normally a society can tolerate, even look benignly upon, a layer of autodidacts and cranks on the fringes of its intellectual institutions. What is singular about the career of Hitler is that through a confluence of events in which luck played some part, he was able not only to spread his nonsensical philosophy among his German countrymen but to put it into practice across Europe, with consequences known to all.

[...]

It is not too much to say that Mailer's quarrel with Arendt is a running subtext to The Castle in the Forest. But does he do justice to her? In 1946 Arendt had an exchange of letters with Karl Jaspers sparked by his use of the word "criminal" to characterize Nazi policies. Arendt disagreed. In comparison with mere criminal guilt, she wrote to him, the guilt of Hitler and his associates "oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems."

Jaspers defended himself: if one claims that Hitler was more than a criminal, he said, one risks ascribing to him the very "satanic greatness" he aspired to. Arendt took his criticism to heart. When she came to write the Eichmann book, she endeavored to keep alive the paradox that though the actions of Hitler and his associates may defy our understanding, there was no depth of thought behind their conception, no grandeur of intention. Eichmann, a humanly uninteresting man, a bureaucrat through and through, never realized in any philosophically full sense of the word what he was doing; the same might be said, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of the gang.

To take the phrase "the banality of evil" to epitomize Arendt's verdict on the misdeeds of Nazism, as Mailer seems to do, thus misses the complexity of the thinking behind it: what is peculiar to the everyday banality of a bureaucratically administered, industrially organized policy of wholesale extermination is that it is also "word-and-thought-defying," beyond our power to understand or to describe.

[...]

If one takes seriously Mailer's reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents—that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches—then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life.

Poetic Words

"... much of our poetry for the last hundred years has been a rejection of the idea that certain words are more poetic than others." (Charles Simic, "When Night Forgets to Fall," a review of The Curved Planks, by Yves Bonnefoy, trans. Hoyt Rogers, FSG, in NYRB, March 1, 2007).

By "our" poetry, Simic means English and American poetry, as opposed to French poetry (e. g., Bonnefoy).

For one of Rogers's translations of Bonnefoy, see here.