Workshop in Alicante with Matthew Sweeney

Matthew Sweeney, who was here in Basel a few weeks ago for a workshop with students and another workshop with Thin Raft (photo), just sent me the note below about a workshop in Spain in June. Before I get to his note, just let me say that we had a great time with Matthew; he gives good workshop. (A snowclone!)

Here's what Matthew wrote to me:

I'm tutoring a course next month in Spain, June 21st to 28th. Booking numbers are low, and the organiser, Christopher North, has asked me to help get more people.

The week is part of a regular series, recommended by the Poetry School, and advertised in key publications, such as Poetry London. The setting is a village, Relleu, in the mountains near Alicante, and the house itself, Almassera Vella, is large and beautiful, with a well-stocked library, and a swimming pool. It was once Relleu's original olive press. The cuisine for the week is Mediterranean, with good Spanish wine.

This course in June is different because it offers an opportunity to go twice to Alicante while the Fiesta is happening, with its fireworks and fascinating hogeuras figures. Because of this additional feature, the course is a little more expensive than other courses (£575 all inclusive) but I'm sure Christopher will offer a slightly reduced price to late bookers. His email address is christopher@oldolivepress.com and the telephone number is 0034 966 856003.

Guantanamo snowclone

On Heute Journal, the late-evening news show on the German television channel ZDF, there was a segment on the Guantanamo camps this evening. One billboard at the camp has a snowclone:

"I came, I served, I protected freedom."

I X-ed, I Y-ed, I Z-ed: greetings from Julius:

(Anastasio/Marshall)
© Who Is She? Music, Inc (BMI)

Danger
I've been told to expect it
I begin my descent
Down the cold granite steps

And who could have turned among those I confide in?
I think that I know what I haven't known yet
'Cause a week is a month
and an hour a day
When your reaching just pushes it further away
With your past and your future precisely divided
Am I at that moment? I haven't decided

And stretching out into the sea... Aquitana
Is that what the prophet told me he saw?
You gave it to me but I really don't want it
I came out on top by the luck of the draw
'Cause a week is a month and an hour a day
When your reaching just pushes it further away
And what's the return on the faith I've provided?
I think that I know now but I haven't decided

A snowclone about poetry

Dave Smith's otherwise rambling essay "St. Cyril's Dragon: The Threat of Poetry" contains a wonderful snowclone in its opening paragraph (in fact, it is the essay's thesis, in a sense):

No threat, no poem.

Here, the snowclone is "No X, no Y," based on "No harm, no foul."

*

The one book of Dave Smith's poems I have is Fate's Kite, which I love. The thirteen-line form of all the poems gives them a brevity and tightness that are admirable, along with a slightly truncated sensation, caused perhaps by the ingrown desire for a fourteenth line.

A LIBRARIAN'S GIFT

How long had it lain there, coverless, red-back
spine spurning the Midwestern dusk like dignity
in faces that stand so before the plate-glass,
then shuffle wordless to the end of the street?
The librarian's hand in flared sun. Your friend?
Red Warren's selected. I hadn't read to the end
but did by dusk, rocking in shade. It was to me
the revelation, the gaze of Mary's that gasps
when the stone's touched. All since I can track
like the night spilling over asphalt, and dawn's
dew-glitter in yards I ran, and earlier mowed
for cash, needing my way in the world. But why
did that book rise just then? Like a face at dusk.

Reviews and their effect on literature

Robert Archambeau provides a summary of (and interesting commentary on) an article by Marilyn Butler, "The Review: Culture's Medium." Before I start paraphrasing his paraphrase, may I suggest that you just check out his post? :-)

Butler looks at how the types of literary reviews published in the nineteenth century influenced how writers wrote. When the reviews were more general cultural reviews, writers began to write differently. In Archambeau's words: "So the journals in which literature was reviewed created a climate to which the writers responded. Writers, seeing their works treated in the context of social debate, came to see themselves as participants in that debate, and wrote accordingly."

As reviews began to be "more specifically literary," writers, too, began to focus more on literature, apart from general trends in the culture. This time in Butler's words: "Reviews were getting professionally self-reflexive, in that articles and books on the lives and personalities of men and women of letters were filling the place once reserved for articles and books on statesmen and men of action."

As Archambeau goes on to point out, such shifts have serious consequences for literature: "The inclusion of poetry in a more general cultural discourse leads to certain results; and one imagines the limiting of poetry to specifically literary contexts — as has happened in our own time — will lead to very different results." Today, after all, "poetry is reviewed and discussed primarily in literary journals." Archambeau points out two implications of this for poetry:

1. "Style über alles." (Note the snowclone: X über alles.)

2. "Sentimental politics rather than politics of a more hands-on variety."

If you have not read RA's post by now, I hope that all these tidbits get you interested. Feel free to comment here, since RA does not have a comment function on his blog!

Snowclones

Jonathan Mayhew gives good blog, and he drew my attention to the concept of snowclones. Be sure to check out the list of snowclones. To snowclone, or not to snowclone?

(Might I take this opportunity to refer you to the concept of eggcorns, too?)