In "honor" of the tenth anniversary of "Shock and Awe," here's a little ditty I wrote back in early 2003.
RUMMY'S PLAYER
He are a drunken driver with a silver spoon
his Junker father spat into his tomcat mouth
(they is an old-time family founded on appointments,
an oily bunch of skull-and-boney schoolyard bullies).
He are no self-made man, no rocket scientist,
but just a five-to-four minority pretender,
a spastic spoiler of subject-verb agreement,
a legacy admission threatening to use
tactical atomic weapons to destroy
reinforced Iraqi bunkers underground.
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When you hear the Serious People all agreeing about something, whether it's a war in Iraq or Iran, a "debt crisis," or the impending doom of Social Security—BEWARE.
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And Rummy still can't admit he was wrong:
10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.
— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013
Pink Maria is the new album by Leonti, a band from Basel led by singer-guitarist Nadia Leonti and featuring Manuel Neubauer, Beni Bürgin, and Benj Gut. I am especially proud to have written quite a few of the lyrics for Nadia. For some of them, she took poems I had already written; for some, she had sketches that I filled in. As before, it was great to work with her on the project.
For information on how to get your own copy, check the band's website here.
(There are also two lyrics of mine on the band's earlier CD Everyone/I, so you should buy that one, too, if you don't have it already.)
Paging through Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes, which I read in June 1998 (shortly after it was published), I stopped at an underlined sentence in the poem "Fever": "You cried for America / And its medicine cupboard." I must have underlined this line from this book of poems for Sylvia Plath because it rang so true to me: America as the place where people take medicines that relieve the symptoms of colds and the flu, which is so much less common in Europe even today.
But I notice something else now, partly because of several recent conversations: Plath was a writer in exile, or if that sounds too dramatic, at least a writer who lived abroad for a long time, and died abroad. I'll be sure to consider this perspective the next time I return to her work. It even suggests an angle for a seminar in her poems, or at least a seminar topic that could use her poems for a week or three. (And yes, I am well aware that my own biography makes me so interested in the issue.)
In my Intensive Composition course this morning, I gave the students an exercise that I took from Thomas Basbøll: they had 27 minutes to write one paragraph of no more than 200 words on a passage of their choice from Simon Armitage's poem "The Shout" (video below):
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm —
I lifted an arm.
He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.
Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
The Universal Home Doctor, 2002
(The poem is also the title poem of Armitage's American selected poems from 2005)
I did the exercise myself, too. The first time I tried this exercise in November, we were working on Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," and I had enough time in the 27 minutes to do three versions (see below). This time I was able to do three versions as well.
One feature of the development of the versions is how they begin. The first begins with a descriptive introduction to the passage, but the second and the third take material from the end of the first and second versions, respectively, and use that material to introduce the passage more analytically than descriptively. I have not edited the versions beyond what I wrote in those 27 minutes.
Version 1 In the experiment described in "The Shout", two boys take advantage of the difference between the speed of sound and speed of light to "test the range / of the human voice":
he had to shout for all he was worth, I had to raise an arm from across the divide to signal back that the sound had carried.
If the signals (a shout and a gesture; one acoustic, the other visual) that the two boys pass to each other both reach their destination, then the two boys are still within "range / of the human voice" from each other. Since sound is significantly slower than light, the shout will take more time to reach the other boy than the gesture will. The sound "carries," but the arm signal "carries" even faster. The experiment depends on this distinction to work: if at some point the shouting boy cannot be heard anymore, then the two boys will still be in sight of each other. They expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they expect "the range / of the human voice" to be less than the range of human vision.
Version 2
In the experiment, two boys take advantage of the difference between the speeds of sound and light to "test the range / of the human voice":
he had to shout for all he was worth, I had to raise an arm from across the divide to signal back that the sound had carried.
There are two signals here: not only the shout but also the speaker's gesture in return. The former is acoustic, the latter visual. As long as these signals both reach their destination, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". As sound is slower than light, the shout takes more time to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they implicitly assume that "the range / of the human voice" is less than the range of human vision, while also assuming that the voice's range is best measured by shouting.
Version 3
The experiment the two boys devise depends on an implicit assumption: that the loudest voice possible is necessary to "test the range / of the human voice":
he had to shout for all he was worth, I had to raise an arm from across the divide to signal back that the sound had carried.
But there are two signals here, one loud and one silent: not only the shout (a matter of sound), but also the speaker's gesture in return (a matter of vision). As long as these signals both reach their recipients, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". Sound is slower than light, so the shout takes longer to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other. That is, they not only assume that shouting will measure the voice's range, but also expect that range to be less than the range of human vision.
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In the course of the semester, I'll be doing this exercise with the students six more times, on poems by Adrienne Rich, Rob A. Mackenzie, Katy Evans-Bush, Andrea Cohen, Don Paterson, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Here's Armitage reading "The Shout":
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And here are the three versions of the Dickinson paragraph (as I wrote them in November, without further editing):
Version 1 The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker pass by as they ride along in Death's "Carriage":
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age (in this, it is reminiscent of the riddle of the Sphinx). The stages of life are bound together with the anaphora of "We passed" that begins the first, third, and fourth lines; the phrase is used transitively here, but its repetition opens up the possibility of reading it intransitively as a euphemism for death as well: "we passed" in the sense of "we died." This play of the transitive and intransitive is mirrored in the enjambment of the phrase containing the verb "strove" between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, the children's "striving" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of both play ("At Recess") and struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Thus, the two verbs in the stanza, "passed" and "strove," are both made ambiguous by the poem's form: "passed" refers to both death and the passage of life; "strove" refers to both work and play.
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Version 2 The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker see as they ride along in Death's "Carriage." The stanza contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated at the beginning of lines one, three, and four) and "strove," which is emphasized by its enjambed position at the end of line 1:
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age; the anaphora links those stages while also drawing attention to the isolated phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself. Thus, the anaphora connects the passage of human life and the passing of human life into one figure of "riding with Death." This formal construction of an ambiguity is repeated in the enjambment between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, "Children strove" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of play ("At Recess") as well as playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Just as "passed" refers to both death and the course of life, "strove" refers to both work and play—and both of these ambiguities are created by the poem's form.
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Version 3 The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated in lines one, three, and four) and "strove," in an enjambment at the end of line 1:
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" figures human life from childhood to adulthood to old age. The anaphora links those stages while also isolating the phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself; the passing of human life is thus contained in the passage of human life. The enjambment with "strove" repeats this formal construction of an ambiguity: read by itself at the end of the first line, "Children strove" refers to their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" becomes a matter of play ("At Recess") and of playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Again, one perspective is embedded in another, contradictory perspective; here, the striving of work is contained in the striving of childhood play.
