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.

De Who?

Luisa was sitting on my lap saying, "Geh, geh"—which is her last bit of baby talk. It means, "Daddy," and we like to play a game where she says "Geh, geh" and I say "Lulu" back and forth.

Andrea said to Luisa, "Is Daddy the love of your life?" Then, since we watched "Meet the Parents" last night (imdb plot summary: "Male nurse Greg Focker meets his girlfriend's parents before proposing, but her suspicious father is every date's worst nightmare"), Andrea wondered whether I would respond to her future boyfriends "like Robert De Niro."

And Miles said, "Robert De Who?"

My house

For me, "my house" is the one I lived in when I was 10 to 15. It was in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, where I was very unhappy, but the house was great, and it is still my Platonic ideal of a house.

The only places I have lived almost as long were my first two apartments here in Basel, and neither of them has anything like the resonance of "my house."

(Posted as a comment on Steven Schroeder's blog about his house.)

Lego Roger

During the semifinal of the 2004 Australian Open, I built a Roger Federer out of Lego and put it on the television as a kind of voodoo doll to help him win. When he did (6-4, 6-1, 6-4 against Juan Carlos Ferrero), I put a #1 on his racket to symbolize that he had just taken over the top ranking. I also resolved to not take the Lego Roger apart until he was no longer number one. Even at the time, I mentioned to Andrea that, given how well he was playing, he might be #1 for a very long time, barring injury. I guessed that he had a good shot at being #1 for five years.

Well, Roger the tennis player is still #1 and is just going past Jimmy Connors for the most consecutive weeks at #1 since the rankings began in 1973. He had his one serious injury in the fall of 2005, but recovered quickly.

Roger the Lego figure has fallen apart a couple of times, but that just shows that the figure is not really a voodoo doll!

And by the way, here's proof that I am not wholly partisan: I have considered building a Lego Rafael Nadal, with his racket in his left hand and a #2 on the racket. :-)

Jonathan Schild

When I was teaching in Saarbrücken, I once took an English-German translation test when I was supposed to be proctoring the German-English test that was to take place after the E-G test. Since my colleagues were going to be doing the grading of the E-G test, I could not hand it in under my own name, so I wrote "Jonathan Schild" on the test (my middle name, and the German version of my last name).

My colleagues did not get the joke until I revealed my identity to them. I had gotten a B+.

Daddy's lap

I improvised a rhyme for Luisa:

Daddy's lap's a place for Lu,
and for Miles and Sara, too.

But if all three
sit on me,
squashed I'll be.

(Miles immediately added:

but not a tree.

I added:

Not zucchini.)

Having an idea

"Look here," said Cyril. "I've got an idea."

"Does it hurt much?" said Robert sympathetically.

(E. Nesbit, Five Children and It)

Adam's Arm

I was once asked to write something about translating a joke. So I did, but then the piece did not get published. Here it is.

ADAM'S ARM

In the mid-nineties, I heard a German version of this joke:

In the Garden of Eden, God asks Adam how he's doing. Adam praises the garden at length, but says he is bored to death. God offers to provide Adam with a solution to the problem: a woman.

"A woman? What's a woman?" asks Adam.

"A woman is wonderful," says God. "She'll cook for you, clean for you, look up to you, obey you, and, best of all, have sex with you whenever you want."

"What's sex?" asks Adam.

"Oh, it's great; you'll love it!" exclaims God.

"Sounds pretty good," says Adam. "What'll it cost me?"

"How about a leg?" says God.

Adam ponders this for a few minutes.

"What'll you give me for a rib?"


I liked how this joke managed to be misogynistic and misanthropic at the same time, and I began to share it with friends, in German and in English. With repetition, I came up with an English variation. After God says Adam will love sex, Adam responds:

"Sounds like it'll cost me an arm and a leg."

"Yes, that's a good price," says God.

Adam ponders this for a few minutes.

"What'll you give me for a rib?"


The idiom "to cost an arm and a leg," which does not exist in German, made a nice addition to the English version.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the joke was emailed to me around 2001 — in English, with Adam's arm! Presumably, someone had heard my version, typed it up, and sent it into cyberspace. Eventually, it found its way to my inbox.

But before this puffed up my pride too much, I emailed the joke to my brother and asked him if he had heard it before; if so, did he remember when? He wrote that he had heard it in college, hence around 1980. And he confirmed that both the arm and the leg had already been part of the price.

However pleasing the idea of my variation becoming an Internet joke had been, the discovery that Adam's arm predated me was much more striking. Apparently, the joke was invented in English with both limbs, but in German, the arm had become superfluous and was dropped with repetition. The joke was no longer a play on words; what remained was Adam haggling.

Then, when I translated the joke back into English, the juxtaposition of "cost" and "leg" led — perhaps inevitably — to the restoration of the joke's "arm," which I had not even known had been amputated.

Scrotum

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

This appears on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal. Libraries, it seems, are refusing to stock it because of the use of the word "scrotum."

What else should Patron have said here? The word appears when Lucky, the ten-year-old heroine, overhears someone say he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog Roy on the scrotum.

The only alternative would have been, "That snake bit Roy in the balls!"

Some people. :-)

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!

Crescent Moon

At dusk this evening, just above the roofs of the row of houses across the street, the last sliver of a waning crescent moon, with Venus to the southwest, large and bright against the almost-black blue. I carried Luisa up to my room to show her the beautiful sight: "Moon," she said, "and a star."

And I remembered driving along Campus Drive at Stanford in my friend Libby's VW Bug, with a Dead tape on, "Lady with a Fan," and just as we saw the crescent moon and Venus in the darkening sky, "Terrapin Station" began:

Counting stars by candlelight
Some are dim but one is bright
The spiral light on Venus
Rising first and shining best
Oh, from the north-west corner
Of a brand new crescent moon
Where crickets and cicadas sing
A rare and different tune
Terrapin Station
In the shadow of the moon
Terrapin Station
And I know we'll be there soon

Obama as seen in Switzerland

German speakers and readers in the U. S. may be interested in Andrea Köhler's take on Obamania, from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on February 17.

Nonsense

"I don't think a person without a love of nonsense could become a poet. The nonsense is there in the very soul of language. All that reaching after meaning, all those beautiful sounds, all that magnificent failure." (George Szirtes)

That moment in poems that cannot be reduced to sense because it is not motivated by sense: whether rhyme, meter, word choice, or some Oulipian constraint. Not necessarily the nonsense verse that Szirtes refers to, but something playful even in the most serious verse, "something there is that doesn't love a wall," as it were.

German speakers could take a look at Rüdiger Görner's article on W. H. Auden in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of February 17. Görner claims that one can never be sure that Auden did not say things just for the sake of rhymes, such as:

Paul Valéry
Earned a meagre salary,
Walking through the Bois,
Observing his Moi.

Reading on the Road

I enjoyed Jay Parini's article "A Traveler's Library," which I came to thanks to AL Daily. Parini nicely captures the special effect of books that one reads while traveling, how they become associated with the place where one read them, as in this discussion of 1968:

"That same year, I spent Christmas with a friend's family in an icy, remote village in northern Spain. They were wonderful, but I missed my own family in Pennsylvania. Rather wisely, I had brought with me several books by John Updike, and I spent hour upon hour in my unheated bedroom, gloves on my hands, lost in Updike's early fiction, which evoked the sights and sounds of my home state, with its mild landscape, its gently rolling fields, and the small towns where high-school basketball games mattered desperately. I practically memorized the stories in Pigeon Feathers, still one of my favorite volumes of fiction because of its acute particularity, especially in the title story, which features an adolescent boy in the passion of self-discovery. I read and reread Of the Farm, a splendidly sensuous novella. I even liked The Centaur, which now strikes me as rather forced and dull. Whenever I see those books on my shelf, I can smell the cooking of that Spanish kitchen, where I also often sat at a plain wooden table while my friend's mother fried garlic and fish over a gas stove."

The push and pull of emotion in this paragraph is striking: Parini read Updike in Spain in order to remember Pennsylvania, but now when he thinks of those books he remembers not Pennsylvania, but Spain. The vividness of the books' contents have been replaced by the vividness of the place where he read them. Parini later mentions a similar experience of reading War and Peace in Italy: "Forever I will associate that story with that place, and that time in my life."

I also enjoyed his discussion of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, which he read while traveling in Eastern Europe. Like Parini, I have always ben thrilled by the story of Auerbach writing Mimesis "under trying wartime circumstances, without the benefit of a library; he had nothing but his own well-stocked mind for recourse." It almost seems as if every literary scholar should set himself or herself the challenge of writing just an essay (and not a whole book, as Auerbach did) without anything but his or her own mind as the source of the material. That would be a serious test of one's intellectual and scholarly skills! Could one produce (in Parini's words) "something as densely packed, informative, and meditative" as Mimesis?

I, too, associate certain books with travel, mostly with airplanes. But once I was reading an Ishiguro novel (either Remains of the Day or An Artist of the Floating World) on one end of my Dad's couch while Andrea was reading A Pale View of Hills (also Ishiguro) at the other end. Suddenly, near the end of the book, she gasped, astonished. My Dad was also in the room, and as he had read the book, he immediately knew why she had gasped. A few days later, I was reading the same book on the plane back to Europe, and suddenly, near the end of the book, I gasped, astonished. I was on the same page that Andrea had been on when she gasped. In fact, it was the same exact word that made me gasp.

Which word was it? Read the book. :-)

(By the way, here's a tasty poem by Jay Parini, too: "Aristotle in the Middle Ages.")

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

"And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed."

Well, it's February, so in keeping with my plan to read one HP book every month until the new book comes out in July, I recently finished HP and the Chamber of Secrets. Little did J.K. Rowling know when she wrote the above that it was her own book that people would be causing people to run into doors.

I was surprised to find this little bit of morality at the end of the book, which I surely noticed before but had forgotten:

"It is our choices, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities."

Another spin on talent and effort? It also reminds me of this article by James Surowiecki, with its wonderful conclusion: "culture is what you do, not who you are."

Intelligence in poetry

"Intelligence, when used well in a poem, never makes the reader feel less smart than the writer, or left behind. Rather, it gives the reader the exhilarating pleasure of being smart in concert with the speaker." (Tony Hoagland)

Effort, not Talent

About nine or ten years ago, my Great-Aunt read a translation of mine (Jacques Réda's "The Letter Scale") and remarked on how talented I was. To my surprise, and especially to hers, I was offended: I had worked for hours and days and weeks on that translation, and I wanted to be praised for my effort, not for my talent.

I thought of that little incident when reading "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson, which I found a link to on AL Daily. Bronson addresses research by, among others, Carol Dweck:

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Considering Dweck's emphasis on effort rather than talent, I found it ironic that Bronson quoted someone who said that "Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius."

At the end of the article, Bronson describes his own efforts to apply these ideas to his son:

Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

Yeats again

Here's another case of William Butler Yeats as an intellectual reference point, this time in an NYT review, by Lee Siegel, of Mugglenet.com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7:

'Either way, this wonderfully enthralled, believing, open book makes me hope that Rowling ends Harry’s story, when she does, with Yeats’s tender lines in mind: “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”'

The first chapter of the mugglenet book is also on-line. Perhaps the most fascinating bit in it is that, two months before Rowling announced the title of the book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), the authors predicted that the title would be Harry Potter and the Hallows of Hogwarts.

Frost and metaphor

"I doubt if any thing is more related to another thing than it is to any third thing except as we make it," Robert Frost wrote in his notebooks, as quoted by Adam Kirsch in his review, "Subterranean Frost." Kirsch comments that here, Frost "shows how the power of metaphor can turn on the poet, plunging him into a world of sheer perspectivism where there is no essence, only likeness."

When I wrote my essay on "The Mountain," I was quite surprised by my conclusion that the poem "acts out how poetry creates the contrast between nature and culture it purports to dissect." Though I once read all of Frost through (when I got the Library of America edition), I had not understood his work in such basically Nietzschean terms at all. But given the passage Kirsch quotes, it appears that I was on the right track: in Frost (and not only in his work but apparently for him as a person, too), the relations established by metaphor (or simile, in "The Mountain") create the contrasts with which we understand the world.

(Nietzsche: I'm thinking of "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne" in particular; an English version is here.)

Sir Thomas More in Basel

"... Professor Duffy's beguiling interpretation of Holbein's famous drawing of Sir Thomas More and his family in 1527, now in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung in Basel. All ten people present in the picture are shown holding books. This is often interpreted as being symbolic of a humanistic household, but Duffy suggests, credibly, that the family are at prayer and all are holding copies of exactly the same book, doubtless identical printed Books of Hours, so that all are praying together from the same text at once." (Christopher de Hamel, "The One and Only Book," New York Review of Books, Feb. 15, 2007, review of Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570)

Too Late Was What He Wanted

I first read Philip Levine when his poem "28" appeared in The New Yorker 20-odd years ago. I was not 28 yet, but I liked the idea of a poet from Detroit (where I was born in 1964). "28" then came out in A Walk with Tom Jefferson, which I bought in Boulder (just passing through to visit my friend Tiffany) on August 17, 1988, which also happens to be the day my nephew Alex was born.

Given our shared birthplace, I was thrilled when I read the opening of his poem "The Escape" in The Simple Truth in 1995:

To come to life in Detroit is to be manufactured
without the power of speech.

Such a striking line break, as "manufactured" becomes "manufactured / without the power of speech."

I especially love the last three lines of the new Levine poem in The New Yorker of February 5 (thanks to the blogger I stole this from so that I don't have to type it myself):

OF LOVE AND OTHER DISASTERS

The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he'd had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn't her, it wasn't
anyone he'd ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who'd moved back south
to live with her high-school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don't need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she'd been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn't get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. "The life line,"
he said, " which one is that?" "None,"
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then—embarrassed—looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. "There,"
she said, lowering his glasses, "I
got it," and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it's too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.

Creative disreputability

Peter Schjeldahl is his usual quotable self in "Different Strokes," his review of Martin Gayford's The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles:

"Creativity takes what it needs from the person who possesses it, or is possessed by it, and discards the rest."

"Imagine! A couple of disreputable men in a nowhere town slap paint on canvas and thereby change everything. It has been a long time now, half a century after Abstract Expressionism, since that scenario had its last echo in a real artistic or cultural development, except in tones of irony or elegy. No individual can any longer dandle the world at the end of a brush. The legend is correspondingly estranged and enhanced."

Wings, germans

Jane said, "I think it would be perfectly lovely. It's like a bright dream of delirium."

They found the sand-fairy easily. Anthea said:

"I wish we all had beautiful wings to fly with."

*

"I heard father say the other day people got diseases from germans in rain water. ..."

"What are germans?"

"Little waggly things you see with microscopes," said Cyril with a scientific air.

(E. Nesbit, Five Children and It)

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?)

A poem as a political reference point

In my post on "poets as intellectual reference points," I quoted Durs Grünbein:

"When an average intellectual today reflects on the last century's great artistic and intellectual achievements, he first thinks of such names as Freud and Picasso, Stravinsky and Heisenberg, Hitchcock and Wittgenstein. It is impossible to imagine that one of them could be a poet. Not a single poet from the ancestral gallery (whether Pessoa, Cavafy, or Rilke, whether Yeats, Mandelstam, Valéry, Frost, or Machado) will cross the mind of the historically-informed thinker, who dares to claim a monopoly on Modernism anyway."

As I summarized the issue: "what 'artistic' references do intellectuals use to support their points in cultural and political discussions?"

Well, C. Dale Young drew my attention today to a New York Times article by Adam Cohen, "What W. B. Yeats's 'Second Coming' Really Says About the Iraq War." Cohen indirectly deflates Grünbein's claim, in two ways:

1) He refers to many "uses" of Yeats's poem, belying the claim that poets and poems are never reference points for intellectuals.

2) "The pundits ... are picking up on Yeats's words, but not his world view": "world view" is a bit strong, but Cohen implies that it may not be possible to use a poem's words as intellectual reference points without engaging in careful interpretation of their nuances. In other words, the problem with poets, poems, and poetry is not that people do not refer to them in intellectual discussions but that poems resist being co-opted for such arguments in any straightforward way. Yeats's poem, Cohen concludes, is in fact "a powerful brief against punditry," against the very idea of predicting the future through intellectual argument.

This is still not a definitive rebuttal of Grünbein's claim, but it does put it in a somewhat more questionable light.

Commas at ends of lines

Here's a pet peeve of mine: the omission of commas at the ends of lines of verse.

Here's the example I just came across, from "Cher," by Dorianne Laux, today's poem in the Poetry Calendar 2007:

I wanted to wear a lantern
for a hat, a cabbage, a piñata
and walk in thigh high boots

Am I just being too picky (too much of an English teacher) when I stumble over the absence of a comma after "piñata"? Otherwise, the poem uses conventional punctuation throughout, and no other commas are omitted at the ends of lines.

I don't want to pick on Laux about this; it's something I see quite often, and I frequently stumble over it. In Laux's poem, at least, the missing comma does not make the grammar and syntax confusing, or create a distracting uncertainty about what exactly is meant (not an ambiguity but an uncertainty, which is a different thing).

Szirtes does Akhmatova

George Szirtes posted a lovely translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova. I wish more people would translate Russian poetry with the rhymes that pervade it. The sound is so important (I am told) to the feel of the work.

Szirtes prefaced the poem:

Here is Anna Akhmatova from Tashkent, thinking of St Petersburg via Dante. My translation:

Dante

Il mio San Giovanni
- Dante

Even after his death he kept well clear
Of the ancient Florence of his exiling.
It is for the man who did not reappear
Or once look back that now this song I sing.
Torchlight, darkness, a last embrace, then gone,
Past city limits to grim squawks of fate.
From hell he saw her and piled curses on,
But still recalled her, once through heaven’s gate,
Where barefoot, hair-shirted and lovesick,
He did not walk the perfidious and low
Streets of Florence carrying a candlestick,
Pining for the city where he could not go.

trilingual pun

Miles asked how cheese is made, and Andrea told him about a cheesemaker in the Emmental where one can go watch cheese being made.

I then said, "I'd like to finally go to the Papillorama."

So Luisa said, "And I go to Kinderkrippe."

*

To understand why we laughed so hard, you have to say "papillorama" in French: "Poppy-o-rama." You also need to know that "Poppy" (spelled "Papi") is Basel German for "Daddy." Luisa and Miles call me "Daddy," but when others speak Basel German to them, the children hear "Dein Papi" all the time.

So Luisa heard "Papi-o-rama" and thought that was where fathers go, so she goes to her day care (Kinderkrippe).

*

The sequence was only possible because I misunderstood the name of the butterfly garden in Kerzens, which is actually "Papiliorama." But it is true that we have been talking about going there for years.

All You Need Is Blah

A postscript to my previous post:

Michael Hofmann's translation of Durs Grünbein's poem "Ashes for Breakfast" contains a line that made me laugh for a very personal reason: "Maybe what will survive of us is Blah ..." This echo of Larkin is an echo of the Beatles for me: when Miles was two or three years old, he became a great fan of the Beatles, and we used to drive along singing along to Beatles CDs. One parody we liked to sing was "All You Need is Blah"!

Ashes for Breakfast

The taximeter skips ahead twenty cents at a time—money it takes
Forever to earn if what you do for a living is turn hexameters.

Durs Grünbein, "Berlin Posthumous," tr. Michael Hofmann, from Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2006

I do not often read German poetry in translation in English, because I tend to want to read the original instead. But I knew I wanted to read this book someday, as I am a great fan of Durs Grünbein's poetry; I wanted to know how his work comes across for those who read English but not German.

If I was ambivalent about reading the book, though, the explanation is clear: I spent five years in the late nineties translating a lot of Grünbein myself. In a sense, I learned how to translate by translating Grünbein. When the moment came for a collection to be published, the initial proposal was for Michael Hofmann and me to co-translate the book. When Michael and I talked about the idea, we decided it did not make sense: our approaches to translating Grünbein were just too different. (One symbol of these differences is that I translate Grünbein's rhymed works as rhymed poems and Michael does not.) When given the choice between Shields and Hofmann, FSG and Faber and Faber went for Hofmann.

So I approached Ashes for Breakfast with some trepidation: what if I hated the book? Would that just be a sign of resentment?

Well, I don't hate the book; I love it. It is a great pleasure to read Hofmann's translations and to imagine friends of mine with no German finally being able to get a sense of what makes Grünbein such a remarkable poet. I especially recommend the sequence "Variations on No Theme." And here's something I like from "Memorandum," to go with the quotation from "Berlin Posthumous" above:

Poets, so they tell us, are awkward customers
Not up to much. Even laughter has a keener, full-throated edge
When they're not around. They're not very amusing.

Poets may or may not be amusing (many blogging poets are very amusing), but Grünbein's often bitter humor is.

A line from the title poem made me wonder about how newspapers are printed these days (while also reminding me of Anthony Hopkins and his ironing of the newspaper in The Remains of the Day):

I have breakfasted on ashes, the black
Dust that comes off newspapers, from the freshly printed columns.

I don't think newspapers have that problem anymore, do they? My two newspapers, Die Basler Zeitung and The International Herald Tribune, do not seem to leave marks on my fingers anymore!

I do realize that many translators feel that they should not try to translate rhyme and meter, as the attempt to do so might distort the sense of the poem, but I do miss the rhyme and meter of the original. Some of Grünbein's poems heighten their dark comedy with the rhyme, and the line I began with about hexameters seems odd if the poem is not in hexameters. (It also contains a lovely echo of Goethe's image, in the Roman Elegies, of tapping out hexameters on the back of the woman he is sleeping with.)

Yet one poem in Hofmann's selection did make me wonder further about the translations in this book in general:

BUBBLING STREAM

with old auto tires, broken glass,
household junk, and the bones
of a small fort

of polystyrene and crap,
where, on a lagoon of oil,
with cotorni of bubbles

a yellow plastic duck
bobs round on its axis,
caught by low-lying branches.

Come,
waves of crystal waters, come.

I like this poem. It happens to be one I know very well in the original version, because I once planned (and even began writing) an essay on Grünbein that was to begin with it (and I did write a poem called "Waves of Clear Waters" about how I first discovered Grünbein). And of course I translated the poem myself:

BUSY BROOK

with old car tires, glass,
garbage, and an imitation
of a small weir

of cellophane and junk
in which amidst the foam
exposed on a film of oil

a green plastic fish
sways between the twigs,
spins lightly on its axis.

Come
waves of clear water, come.

Leaving aside all the other differences between the two translations (and perhaps can see why an edition with Michael and me as co-translators was not a good idea), many of which I did not notice until I went back to my version, I immediately noticed that Grünbein's "green plastic fish" had become Hofmann's "yellow plastic duck." In part, I noticed this because a comic version of the thesis of my unwritten essay was that Grünbein is a (green) fish, and my thesis does not make sense if the English poem turns the fish into a (yellow) duck. (The serious issue the essay would have addressed is the near-absence of the first-person singular in Grünbein's first three books and its partial appearance in his fourth.)

But more seriously, the shift from fish to duck raises two concerns for me: first, I do not understand the motivation for the altering of the image, and it seems to change the metaphorical implications of the poem quite considerably. The toy may be plastic, but a fish floating on the water is dead, while a duck floating on the water is not.

Secondly, and more generally, it makes me wonder whether Hofmann has altered Grünbein's imagery elsewhere in the book as well. Is this move from fish to fowl an isolated case? Or is it a symbol of Hofmann's translation procedure in general? If so, then those who discover Grünbein through this book might wonder whether the scaly Grünbein of the original German has become feathery instead. Or to put it another way, Hofmann has produced a wonderful collection of poems that are a great pleasure to read, but they might be more "yellow" than "green" (as in Grünbein).

Koethe

Andrew Osborn's interview with John Koethe (from the Southwest Review, on-line at Poetry Daily) not only taught me how to pronounce "Koethe" ("katy"; not a rhyme for "Goethe") but also contained this interesting summary of Koethe's writing style:

"I like poems to be locally clear so that when you're reading them sentence by sentence you sort of think you understand what they're saying. But then I also like them to be globally obscure, so that the whole poem remains the kind of free-standing artifact I was talking about earlier. You don't really know what the whole poem means, but you can read any sentence of it and, in a conventional sense, it seems clear."

I've tried to find the passage where Reginald Shepherd made the same point on his blog, but I have not found it. I was struck by how two quite different points made the same claim (one I am quite sympathetic to).

I printed out the interview to read it because it is so long. I had also printed out John Ashbery's "Yes, 'Senor' Fluffy" from PD, and it happened to be the next thing in my pile of things to read. The last lines of the interview with Koethe refer to "an enchanting exhibition devoted entirely to clouds" that he attended in Berlin. The first lines of Ashbery's poem:

And the clouds fretted and flew, as though
there was a reason for their acting distraught.

poets as intellectual reference points

I posted a comment on a post by Jonathan Mayhew that led to some discussion between him and me about the following quotation from my translation of Durs Grünbein's "The Poem and its Secret," which appeared in the January 07 issue of Poetry: "When an average intellectual today reflects on the last century's great artistic and intellectual achievements, he first thinks of such names as Freud and Picasso, Stravinsky and Heisenberg, Hitchcock and Wittgenstein. It is impossible to imagine that one of them could be a poet. Not a single poet from the ancestral gallery (whether Pessoa, Cavafy, or Rilke, whether Yeats, Mandelstam, Valéry, Frost, or Machado) will cross the mind of the historically-informed thinker, who dares to claim a monopoly on Modernism anyway."

You can read the post and the comments if you want all the gory details, but the conclusion is what I wanted to post here: what "artistic" references do intellectuals use to support their points in cultural and political discussions? For example, when Frank Rich writes his weekly column on the state of prevarication and obfuscation in contemporary American politics, what "artistic" works (in the broadest sense) does he refer to?

Too Hard

Many people have been linking Jim Harrison's New York Times essay on Karl Shapiro. My favorite line in it is about being a poet-professor: "I tried it myself but found the work too hard."

Harrison continues: "There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It’s like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating."

Defining Difficulty

Reginald Shepherd has been very helpful in his post "Defining Difficulty in Poetry." He distinguishes six forms of difficulty, from least to most difficult:

1. lexical: What does this word mean? Or what does it mean here?
2. allusive: What is being alluded to here?
3. syntactical: Can the syntax be parsed here?
4. semantic (including figurative): "I don't understand this poem." (Or "I don't understand this metaphor.)
5. formal: What kind of poem is this?
6. modal: What makes this a poem?

Shepherd concludes: "When people call a poem difficult, they are generally experiencing either semantic difficulty ('I don’t know what this poem is saying') or modal difficulty ('I don’t recognize this as a poem').

This summary is intended to get you to read the original post! (And also to outline the terms for myself, so that I can refer back to them later.)

Federer vs. Roddick

Mats Wilander said on Eurosport that the second set of the Australian Open semifinal between Federer and Roddick was the best set of tennis he had ever seen by a single player, and at the end, he said it was the best match he had ever seen anyone play: 6-4, 6-0, 6-2, with Federer winning 15 of the last 17 games after being down (on serve) at 3-4 in the first set.

Well, I once saw a set at least the equal of Federer's second-set dismantling of Roddick (24 points to 6!): the fourth and final set of the French Open final between Gustavo Kuerten and Alex Corretja in 2001. Kuerten won the first 23 points of the set to go up 5-0, 40-0. Then a funny thing happened on match point: Corretja won three straight points to get back to deuce before Kuerten then won the last two to win the match. Point total for the set: 25-3. For the sake of completeness: the score of the match in the end was 6-7(0) 7-5 6-2 6-0. (I had forgotten that Kuerten lost the first-set tiebreak at love!)

And for the sake of rubbing it in for Roddick fans: Federer 13, Roddick 1. :-)

Engagement

Charles Jensen has some interesting thoughts about "engagement" in poetry. My comment:

Even "difficult" poetry has to engage the reader somehow—has to provide some sort of opening to let the reader in. For that matter, even clear, straightforward, "accessible" poetry has to provide some sort of resistance to be fully engaging. The difficult must provide a bit of access; the accessible must provide a bit of difficulty. Without both elements—no engagement!

Blogs in Europe, the UK

If you read this, and you are blogging from Europe or the UK with at least part of what you blog about being poetry (or if you know anyone who is), please tell me (or tell me about the people you know). You can post a comment or send me an email.

Nicholas Manning and renew: you don't count; I already know you. :-)

Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins

[Jonathan Mayhew's post about under-rated jazzmen led me back to this review I wrote in 1996 of a concert by Charlie Haden.]

CHARLIE HADEN'S QUARTET WEST

Komoedie, Theater Basel, March 6, 1996
Charlie Haden -- bass
Ernie Watts -- tenor saxophone
Alan Broadbent -- piano
Lawrence Marable -- drums

I had already seen Charlie Haden's Quartet West twice before, once in San Francisco in the late 1980s and once in Berlin at the Berlin Jazz Festival a few years later. Of these two concerts, only one memory remained in my mind: in San Francisco, Billy Higgins (then the drummer in the quartet) was late to the concert because the airline had lost his drum set. When he arrived before the replacement drum set the Great American Music Hall management had ordered for him, Higgins took out his brushes and played accompaniment and a solo on one of the leather-topped chairs at the GAMH. This delicious event sped up the relaxation process which is so important in listening to jazz: the audience's laughter and Higgin's visible pleasure in his skills brought everyone into the proper frame of mind right at the beginning of the show, one usually only found somewhere in the middle of the second set, if at all.

Since then, Lawrence Marable has replaced Higgins in Haden's band, but Ernie Watts still plays the tenor sax, and Alan Broadbent is still on piano. By now I no longer associate Watts exclusively with his studio recording career: he proves again and again with Quartet West that he is a superb "jazz" saxophonist. While not a completely magnificent superstar like Higgins, Marable is a lively and humorous drummer with great rhythmic feel, which becomes especially clear in his swinging solos. However, until last night, Broadbent always seemed out of place in this band to me. His soloing and comping was always merely lush and sentimental, even schlocky; the nostalgic quality his playing shared with Haden and Watts, especially in tone, did not have Haden's folkiness or Watts' occasional dissonance to spice it up. Well, either he has improved considerably since Berlin, or I began to pay more attention to him, or both: in Basel, Broadbent stole the show from the other players.

As usual for him, Haden listed the songs in the sets before each set began. The compositions were all by Charlie Parker, Haden, or Broadbent; each set opened with a Parker tune, the first with a version of "Passport." This mid-to-up tempo performance was nothing spectacular, but it was a nice opening of the show, and it did contain the first hints of an Allen Broadbent night, as his solo closed with a beautiful chordal development of a simple phrase through several repetitions. This made me sit up; just as a spontaneous "ah" came out of me, the solo came to an end. It was then that I began to pay more attention to Broadbent's playing.

In the course of the rest of the set, my attention was more than satisfied. The band played three Haden tunes, "Hello, My Lovely," "Child's Play," and "First Song," and in each of them Broadbent's playing became denser and more fascinating. In "Hello, My Lovely," his lush introduction slowly introduced fragments of Haden's melody (very reminiscent of some Christmas song whose name escapes me), surrounding the mid-range melodies with flurries of high and low notes. In his solo, Broadbent began to detach his hands from each other, the left hand occasionally taking over the melody while the right played chords in the form of rapid arpeggios. In "Child's Play," which most will remember because of a magnificent solo by Marable, I was most struck by Broadbent's brief solo, in which the independence of left and right hand became even clearer, with the roles of melody and harmony less and less defined. This anticipated his solo in "First Song," where his two hands really played something more like a duet than a solo, passing around the lead, and often interweaving two interdependent melodic lines out of widely separated octaves. Here again, Broadbent stole the show for me from a show-stopping solo by one of his comrades: Ernie Watts closed the piece with a superb soliloquy, featuring a wonderful "spontaneous composition" of a bluesy/beboppy song structure (quite in contrast to the feel of Haden's sweet ballad), culminating in sustained overtone effects -- but Broadbent's solo still was the highlight of the piece.

It was the independence of Broadbent's two hands which struck me in the first set, and he continued to take full advantage of all ten fingers in the second set. However, he did not steal the show in each song as he had in the first set. In the opener, Parker's "Visa" (one I had not heard of before), Haden played a long solo, working, as is his wont, on a small melodic figure, worrying it until it gave out all of its secrets and became one with the voice of his bass. (If this sounds melodramatic -- well, there is often a melodramatic feeling to Haden's playing.) Haden's "Always Say Goodbye" followed; here, Broadbent played a fine solo striking in its simplicity: right-hand melody with quiet chordal accompaniment. Then, Haden played a magnificent solo, very short, introducing a melodic phrase reminiscent of "I Only Have Eyes for You" and varying it ever so slightly over a brief period. This solo had that folky, back-porch feel which makes Haden's playing so special, something which came out so beautifully in his records with Jan Garbarek and Egberto Gismonti.

If the first two songs of the second set belonged to Haden, the third, "The Long Goodbye," was all Broadbent, which is fitting, as he wrote it. Broadbent began unaccompanied, playing an endless and endlessly interesting four-part soliloquy. To me, given how I had been listening to him throughout the concert, it seemed like "variations on handedness": first, the melody was in the right hand and the arpeggios in the left; then the two hands reversed roles. In the third part, the longest passage of the introduction, Broadbent ran arpeggios up and down the keyboard, a swirling thunder which combined the lushness which his playing always features with an edginess I had not heard in his work before. Finally, he slipped through a rapid diminuendo into a slow two-chord figure with pretty right-hand melodies; this evolved into the head when Watts and the band entered after a time. But first, Broadbent seemed to confirm my interest in his "handedness": while playing the two-chord figure in the mid-range with his left hand, he ever so briefly ran the melody with his right hand down lower than the continuing left-hand figure. This otherwise minor technical gesture took on new meaning at the end of a solo in which Broadbent's two hands had each played all the roles a pianist's hands can play, to the point of completely throwing any division of labor between the hands out the window. After the head, Broadbent proceeded to play another, accompanied solo over the head, extending and developing the right-hand melodies which had closed the introduction. As if that were not enough, the piece also featured an unaccompanied coda in which Broadbent returned to the thundering arpeggios of the third part of the introduction. I suspect there is a nice studio recording of this piece somewhere; I hope that Haden puts out a live version soon.

The set closed with Parker's "Segment," with a slightly boogie-woogie feel to it. The highlight here was a superb Haden solo in which he walked through the whole solo, with Marable dropping *very* occasional cymbal effects in. Watts was also striking with a solo full of "sheets of sound." There was then a nice, unannounced ballad for the encore.

If the second set did feature some superb Haden solos, the highlight of the night for me was my discovery of Broadbent, whose playing had never impressed me before. While I was always aware of his technical skill, I had never heard any musical tension in what he played. I am happy to say that I stand corrected: Broadbent has developed into a powerful and varied piano player, still as lush as ever, but now with a bite that was not there before.

POSTSCRIPT
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 10:13:07 -0800
From: Lee Brenkman
Subject: Re: Charlie Haden in Basel

Andrew,

Thanks for reviving one of my fondest memories. I was the sound man/stage manager and, at the time of the Quartet West show, the talent booker at the Great American Music Hall.

Actually the airline hadn't lost Billy's drums they had already loaded them on the plane he was to have taken from Burbank when they found something wrong with the plane and bumped all the passengers to the next flight. Billy got on that plane not knowing that his drums were still in the cargo hold of the original plane.

He called me from the airport at about 7:15pm when he found out that he had the cymbals he had carried on the flight, but no drums. I told him to jump in a cab and I would get him some drums.

As it was a weekend evening all of the equipment rental places and drum shops were already closed . All of the jazz drummers I knew with extra sets were already at or on the way to gigs. One of them gave me the number of a student of theirs who agreed to bring his set over for Billy to play.

As you recall in your post, Billy started out playing "chair" with brushes and we added two of his cymbals on a couple of stands I had at the club. When the young man arrived with the loaner set we started setting them up alongside the stage. I began with the basics, the snare and hi hat while the young man took drums out of the cases.

Beggars can't be choosers but it turns out that this was a real rock 'n roll set. Billy was amused when I took a 22" bass drum with a hole in the front head and a pillow inside on stage, but he really cracked up when the young drummer walked out with a rack with THREE big rack toms on it. Billy smiled sweetly and pointed at the largest two drums and said "thanks but I don't need those". Al of this taking place while the Quartet was playing.

Our young friend was amazed at what Billy could do with just a few drums. Billy was a real gent about the whole thing, and Charlie, one of the most "nervous" leaders I know finally calmed down enough to play a couple of beautiful sets.

Quartet West remains my favorite setting for Charlie Haden and easily the best encouragement of Ernie Watts' jazz instincts.

Cheers,
Lee Brenkman

The Sky Over Basel

[This is another one of my old columns from the Basler Zeitung on-line English Corner. It was published in August 2002, hence the summer theme.]

THE SKY OVER BASEL

Summer began for me this year on the last Thursday in April in Ettingen, when two swifts curved down out of the sky from behind an evergreen and then disappeared into the dusk, leaving behind the scree of their cries resonating in my ears and the rush of their flight as a trail in my eyes. The astronomers say summer is from June 20 to September 20, the meteorologists make their recordkeeping easier by moving summer forward to June 1 and ending it on August 31, but my summer runs from late April until early August, when Apus apus leaves for Africa — the "apusologist's summer," perhaps, or just a swift one.

The amount of time I spend looking at the sky for those three-plus months makes me a dangerous bicyclist. But I've been granted some extraordinary visions as a result. The route I most often ride — down Riehenstrasse to the Rhine — seems to be a good one for heavenly observations. One early morning a few days after my apusologist's summer began, I looked up from a red light at Schwarzwaldallee and saw four swans flying briskly across the crisp background of a cool, clear sky. They had formed half a V rather than a full one, but what made the sight so memorable was the little flock's leader: a Black Swan. The Black Swans at the Zoo and at the Erlenpark make them a relatively common sight for any parent of a small child crazy about animals, but this was still a striking vision.

The swans were gone before the light changed, so no one had to honk at me. I had similar good fortune, traffic-wise, when another vision ascended into the sky before my eyes in mid-July. This time I was so distracted while riding that I could have been a danger to other people on the road — luckily there weren't any — and I would not even have been able to blame it on a bird. As I again headed toward the Rhine on Riehenstrasse, a chest of drawers rose into the sky over Grossbasel and crossed the river toward me; it was hanging from a long cable attached to a helicopter. Perhaps this is a new service offered by Basel movers. "I hope they don't lose any of the clothes," I thought as the helicopter vanished toward Germany.

So it's not just birds that make me a dangerous bicyclist — though it's mostly birds. But don't worry, usually I get off my bicycle if I see something worth watching. A Gray Heron stopped me once last summer beside the Erlen canal; it was perched on the roof over one of the locks, offering a good chance to see a heron close up. I earned quite a few puzzled gazes from passing bicyclists by standing there for so long looking at what they might have thought was nothing, but a few of those who followed my gaze rewarded me with a smile of understanding as soon as they spotted the object of my attention. And when the Gray Heron itself flew away, it rewarded me for my patience, too: seconds after it rose above the trees and disappeared from sight, a Dipper (the German Wasseramsel, or "water blackbird") darted along the canal, a species I had never seen before.

Of course, there are enough birds in Basel (though not enough flying chests of drawers) to make me a dangerous bicyclist in other seasons besides summer. The huge hammering man sculpture at Aeschenplatz always earns an affectionate glance from me when I ride past, but one sunny but bitter-cold afternoon a few winters ago, it was a veritable horde of birds at the very top of the alley of trees between Aeschenplatz and the SBB station that made me stop. Passersby may again have wondered why I was staring and staring up at the trees, but the birds were far enough away that it was difficult to identify distinguishing features. Later consultation with a bird guide (and a more experienced birdwatching friend) revealed the birds to have been Fieldfares, a rare sighting for Basel: the cold had brought them down from higher altitudes, it seems.

The cold will not be back for quite a while still, but the apusologist's summer will soon be over: sometime shortly after this column goes on-line, the swifts will head south, and winter will be on its way, no matter how warm the rest of the meteorologist's or astronomer's summer is. The sky over Basel will seem empty, but the streets of Basel will be safer, as one bicyclist will no longer be distracted — or will at least be less distracted — by what's happening in the sky. Barring the appearance of a flying four-poster, of course.

William Carlos Williams recordings

I have not had a chance to listen to these yet, but PENNsound has put the complete recordings of William Carlos Williams on-line.

Delurking

This is National Delurking Week, or at least somebody declared it that.

La bande des quatre

Andrea and I bought ourselves a six-film set of Jacques Rivette on DVD for Christmas, and we just now finished watching the first of them, La bande des quatre.

My French has deteriorated over the past few years (it was, naturally, much better when Andrea lived in France and I was spending a lot of time there), so I enjoyed the feel of the movie as much as anything else (although I was able to follow the story well enough, a lot of the nuances surely were lost on me). The one thing I thought I would comment on here is the presence in this movie of a subtle variation on the old play-within-the-play motif.

Sometimes, movies contain scenes where actors are performing on stage. This creates subtle nuances, of course: the actor is playing an actor playing a role. A variation on this is the actor rehearsing—a scene with a somewhat different ontology, if you will: now the actor is playing an actor who is not losing himself in the role but, in fact, quite the opposite, as the actor rehearsing is often as self-conscious as the actor performing is not.

But La bande des quatre puts a new spin on this. Many of the scenes in the movie involve not the rehearsal of a play but preparation for a production of a play (by Marivaux) in an acting class. The actresses, then, are not playing actresses rehearsing but something even more self-conscious than that: student actresses learning, under the critical eye of their teacher, played by Bulle Ogier.

If this were a play-in-a-movie, the actresses would lose themselves in the roles of actresses losing themselves in their roles. If this were a rehearsal-in-a-movie, the actresses would lose themselves in the roles of actresses self-consciously working out their roles. But it is an acting-class-in-a-movie, so the actresses are losing themselves in the roles of actresses both self-consciously working out their roles and self-consciously pondering what the acting teacher thinks.

Arendt

It was interesting to see "myself" quoted in Russell Jacoby's "Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation" (in the Dec. 8, 2006, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education). I was not quoted myself, of course, but Jacoby did quote my translation of Arendt's correspondence with Martin Heidegger:

"She was the student, indeed, the lover of Martin Heidegger ... While her liaison with Heidegger has given rise to much high-level gossip — in today's university, Herr Doktor Heidegger's affair with a stunning 18-year-old student would be even more outrageous than his Nazi sympathies — her intellectual loyalties are more the issue. She never conceptually broke with Heidegger and even intended to dedicate The Human Condition to him. She did not, she explained in a letter to him, because things had not 'worked out properly between us.' She wanted him to know, however, that the book 'owes practically everything to you in every respect.'"

Jacoby is very critical of most of Arendt's work, reducing the long-term interest of her writing to just a few works: "Arendt's achievement ultimately rests on Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as some tough-minded essays and thoughtful profiles."

I would add, though, that Arendt's correspondence with Karl Jaspers is an utterly fascinating book, as two philosophers who trust each other completely write to each other frequently between the late forties and Jaspers's death in 1969. Often, their commentaries on historical events of the period shed light on what those events felt like to those who could not see how they were going to turn out. For example, their discussion of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 makes clear (at least to this late-comer, born in 1964) just how frightening those days must have been to live through.

Gillian Beer on rhyme

I enjoyed Gillian Beer's article "The End of the Line" from The Guardian.

Beer uses the awful word "suggest" to make her claim; I would say that she "points out" that rhyme has two effects beyond helping us memorize: "rhyme makes experience from within the body and so can produce unreasoned intimacy; rhyme destabilises the hierarchies of sense and so lends itself to radicalism."

She goes on to argue that rhyme is "retrospective": "It is not until the second term appears, and it draws us back to what has gone before with a new thrill of connection. Thereafter it is janus-faced, leading the eye and particularly the ear forward to seek the chime, but with a ballast of sonorities generated in the poem's past. Rhyme makes memory within the poem. It practises recollection. It may also bring things back, uncannily changed."

Rhyme also serves to establish one of the basic facts of poetry: it functions "not as argument, but as experience - whether as fulfilment or entrapment - vouched for by the human ear."

But perhaps her finest point has to do with the "essentially destabilising" quality of rhyme, which she discusses near the end of her article: rhyme's arbitrariness, of course, but also its disregard for the niceties of language that are captured in the linguistic concept of "register."

Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty

Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, makes me sneeze.
Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, doesn't like breeze.
Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, turn your shoe.
Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, good for you.

— Miles David Delpho, 20.1.2007

Blake's Notebooks

Facsimiles of Blake's notebooks are on-line, thanks to the British Library. Even the large files are hard to decipher, but it is fascinating to look over Blake's shoulder anyway.

Third Nature

[This is a column I wrote for the Basler Zeitung "English Corner" a few years back. As it is no longer on-line, and a friend just asked me something that reminded me of it, I thought I'd republish it.]

THIRD NATURE

I went into Manor to buy vacuum-cleaner bags, but at first I wasn't sure where to look for them. Beside the escalator, I found the directory of the store's departments; after having determined what category might be appropriate — Haushaltsgeräte ("appliances") — I headed for the third floor.

As I went up the escalator, I recalled a moment of confusion I had had on a recent visit to the United States: it had been difficult to say what floor I was on. And what floor was I now heading to? The third in Switzerland, but in the U.S. it would be called the fourth. I used to use the latter numbering system, but after over a decade in Europe, it now seems strange to me. Even as I first wrote these lines upstairs at the Non Fumare cafe, I would not have wanted to say that I was sitting on the cafe's "second floor." These days it does not seem to me to have a second floor; how could it? It is only two stories high, so it has a ground floor and a first floor, doesn't it? What once seemed natural now seems wrong. A "second" nature has been replaced by a third.

In a sense, the issue of what floor you are on is just a matter of naming. After all, many hotels have no floor called "thirteenth floor," for fear of frightening any superstitious guests who may end up there. Such counting is merely a convention, a means of identification (where in this building do I want to go?) rather than precision (how many stories does this building have?). But at the same time, the numbering seems like more than a convention: the number I use to identify the floor I am on has an influence on my sense of space, of where I am.

This is not the only counting system that an American in Europe needs to develop a "third nature" for. Dates cause problems to: at the bottom of the first sketches of this column, I jotted down the date: 6.11.02. But that doesn't mean I started writing my December column in June. (Back then, I was still trying to pin down the topic of my August column.) After so many years in Europe, I find myself unable to write a date using the American convention. In this case, though, I have to admit that the date / month / year system has always seemed more logical to me than month / date / year (whereas the floor numbering in the U.S. did make sense to me until I moved across the ocean). One effect of the difference is that the American expression "9/11" does not make sense in Europe. Someone from the former East Germany might think it refers to the date when the Berlin wall was opened in 1989.

My first such shift from second to third nature was a big surprise, and it still seems uncanny. What do you say when you stub your toe or pinch your finger? After almost three decades of saying "ouch" or "ow" as all Americans do, I was startled to find myself saying "owah," even when speaking English. This shift took place within a year after I first moved from Philadelphia to Berlin in 1991. It seems like the language of pain ought to remain in one's native tongue, even when one lives abroad for a long time, but it, too, turns out to be mutable.

All this means, of course, that when I go visit the United States, my second and third natures begin to struggle for control. The reflexes I have developed in Germany and Switzerland no longer make sense: for the first few days, I have to think for a moment to remember to say "excuse me" instead of "Entschuldigung," for example, and during that time I'm always taken aback for a split second when people address me in English: "May I take your order, please?" Some of this disorientation might just be jet lag, but some of it is a matter of the conventions I live with every day in Basel, a matter of how my "third nature" has replaced my second one, of how, the longer I am abroad, the more European I become — European, not Swiss or German, in a way the Swiss and the Germans are not.

When I got to the third floor of Manor, it turned out I had been right about the Haushaltsgeräte — but wrong about which store to go to. My wife had bought the Migros house brand, not Manor's. So I had to head across the street to Migros and look for the right floor again. At least I no longer had to think about what category to look for in the directory.

The Presumed Politics of Poets

Some people argue that a preference for particular aesthetic forms implies a preference for a particular politics. For a complete dismantling of one such argument, see this post by Robert Archambeu. He defends Geoffrey Hill, Anne Carson, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg against the accusation that their poetry is — not "elitist" but "fascist."

I am on record as a fan of Hill's work; a line from his "Improvisations for Hart Crane" (quoted in the post I just provided a link to) nicely captures how what I like works for me: "Thou canst grasp nothing except through appetite." Appetite (or pleasure), that is, is the first step in grasping (or understanding) poems—not just "difficult" poems, but any poems (Reginald Shepherd made some insightful remarks along these lines, and on pleasure and judgment, too).

As for Anne Carson, I am also on record as a fan of her Autobiography of Red, one of the best of the verse novels I have read (the most recent of my posts on this subject is on Rosellen Brown, but I will have more to say about it at some point, maybe when the semester is over). When Carson goes into storytelling mode, as in AoR or the extraordinary "Glass Essay" from Glass, Irony, and God, all her supposed "difficulty" disappears, because I find myself drawn into the work "before" the question of difficulty ever arises, as it were.

Tim Parks on Thomas Bernhard

Tim Parks has written another fine essay in The New York Review of Books, this time on Thomas Bernhard: "The Genius of Bad News," in the January 11, 2007 issue. The article is not on-line.

Parks's wonderful summary of Bernhard's style could also apply to Parks's own work since Europa (1997), especially Destiny (1999): Parks describes "Bernhard's own tendency to introduce us in medias res to a mind in turmoil where events past and present, real or apocryphal, flash by in rapid succession without apparent order or hierarchy, where the voice speaking is so much aware of its own performance as to raise doubts about its candor."

I recommend both these writers highly, but with the caveat that, since Destiny (especially in Rapids, published in 2005), Parks has taken Bernhard's style further by incorporating the mental turmoil described above into narratives that have a clearer, crisper storyline than Bernhard's narratives usually do.

Robert Hughes on the Isenheim Altar

This is Robert Hughes on the Isenheim Altar in Colmar, as quoted by Clive James in his article "Golden Boy," a review, in the New York Review of Books of January 11, 2007, of Hughes's Things I Didn't Know:

I had never seen such a frightening picture before. Of course, as in Bosch, its repulsive powers were wound into the very fabric of the skill with which it was executed. But could one imagine the Isenheim Altarpiece hanging in a church or an infirmary back in Australia, where art never spoke of real pain, let alone grotesque sickness or deformity? Would there be any public place for it in America, or anywhere else in the modern world? It was only then, gazing on Grünewald's enormous and deliberately wrought masterpiece, that I realized how deep the roots of euphemism and evasion were sunk in modern life; how alien, as a result, the entire "Expressionist" tradition in modern art had been to me having grown up in Australia—and would also have been had I grown up in North America.... Almost all I knew of past art, and that imperfectly, was its Apollonian tradition, which spoke of order, idealism, satisfied Eros. Somewhere beyond and below that stretched another continent of esthetic experience which had somehow to be discovered, and it was probably true that my life had been too happy and healthy for me to really grasp it. This, too, was part of the reason I had had to leave Australia and come to Europe.

*

Grünewald's altarpiece is, indeed, one of the greatest works of art I have ever seen. For another take on it, see the first part of W. G. Sebald's Nach der Natur, translated by Michael Hamburger as After Nature.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

In anticipation of the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on July 7, I decided to re-read the first six volumes, one per month. As the publication date gets nearer, I will stop paying attention to the world, so as to not have the plot of the last book ruined for me by reviewers or other inadvertent betrayers of surprise information. And I finished my January reading a few days ago, The Philosopher's Stone. As a result of reading it, I have resolved not to read the HP series again, as I realized that I do not want to have to read about Draco Malfoy ever again. That's too much like being bullied in junior high.

My favorite line in the first book is still: "Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you."

(It's cool that there is a detailed Wikipedia page about this unpublished book.)

(And now that I have written this, I have been unable to find on-line confirmation for the July 7 publication date!)

German-English Anthology

Today, I received copies of a bilingual anthology of English translations of contemporary German poetry. It features my translations of poems by Dieter M. Gräf, Durs Grünbein, and Lutz Seiler, as well as translations of work by six other poets: At Villa Aurora: Nine Contemporary Poets Writing in German (Green Integer, ed. Douglas Messerli). And that is not the whole title, as it is volume 7 of Green Integer's PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century.

Puzzles and Mysteries

The January 8, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, contains an article by Malcolm Gladwell
called "Open Secrets." As is so often the case, Gladwell is happy to have discovered a counterintuitive concept that allows him to discuss everyday issues in a surprising way (the focus of the article being Enron; Gladwell has also been adding new thoughts on the subject to his blog).

Now an article about Enron may not seem like a good place to steal ideas for thinking about literature, but here's the bit I find suggestive: "The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. ... The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much."

This might be a useful way to think about "difficult" poems: some of them are puzzles, providing incomplete information, leaving the reader wondering about the unstated details. Others are mysteries, and the problem is not lack of information, or information that has not been given, but an excess of information, an overdetermination that leaves the reader wondering not what has not been said, but how to sort out what has been said.

I don't have any examples yet, but perhaps I will return to the issue someday soon, if I come across some poems for which the concepts seem to be useful tools (that, of course, is the test of any such concept: is it a useful tool?)

(I should add that I have not read the review that I provided as a link with Treverton's name, but I hope to have a chance to do so.)

Not a Museum

Miles got a huge Lego Star Wars set for his birthday, a Y-Wing Attack Starfighter. Since he finished building it, he has had it on the top of a bookshelf in his room. Today, he wanted to get it down, and I said it was not a good idea.

Andrew: It's not for playing with, it's decorative and just for looking at.

Miles: My room is not a museum!

A couple of minutes later, Luisa opened up Miles's closet full of games, and Andrea said: "Luisa, Miles's room is also not a supermarket!"

Michael Brecker

I saw Michael Brecker with the McCoy Tyner Trio a few years ago in Basel. Since Tyner was the pianist in John Coltrane's Quartet for years, the comparison was easy, but Brecker lived up to the challenge, riding Tyner's accompaniment into his own variations on Coltrane's incredible sound. (And Avery Sharpe on bass was brilliant, too. I don't remember who the drummer was.)

In the summer of 2005, I went to the Willisau Festival to hear the Saxophone Summit of Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, and Michael Brecker. It became a two-peak summit, because Brecker was in the hospital with leukemia. Liebman and Lovano were stunning; I can only imagine what it must have been like to hear those two with Brecker alongside them. Now I really can only imagine it, as Brecker died on Saturday.

It's ironic to me that Alice Coltrane, who replaced Tyner in Coltrane's band, also died last week, on Friday.

Orders of Infinity

Jacqueline Osherow's "Orders of Infinity" was on Poetry Daily yesterday. For a discussion of the particular concept of infinity she writes about, see the articles about infinity and aleph numbers on Wikipedia.

Fixing "The Lottery"

Warning: Before you read this post, read Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery."

So I had students write about Jackson's story, and one wrote a startling piece about how the lottery in the story is fixed. I was not sure I was utterly convinced, but then I suddenly was. Here's what I wrote to the student:

There's a fascinating point to be made here about the rules of fiction. After all, someone does pick out the victim: Jackson herself determines who the victim of the lottery is—or perhaps I should say of "The Lottery." The rules of fiction require her to have the victim of the lottery be a character she has already introduced to the reader. Further, in a context in which it is important that most of the figures be as nondescript (and hence "normal") as possible, the characters she does introduce to the readers are going to be the ones who "stand out" by stretching the rules of the game in various ways, as you have described.

In a sense, one level of the story's allegory is literary: this is a story about how stories work. They work by assuming a background of "normalcy" against which the outstanding qualities of the main characters can be established. By "outstanding" here, I do not mean "excellent" but something more neutral: the characters might be heroes, or villains, or even hypernormal people, but in one way or another, they have to stand out against that standardized background.

In most fiction, then, the author's job is to give the reader such "outstanding" characters to identify with. In "The Lottery," Tessie stands out in this way: not because of her excellence, but simply because her difference from the crowd makes her worth mentioning, whereas the crowd's standardized behavior, once established, recedes into the background. This makes the horror of "The Lottery," then, as powerful as it can possibly be: the reader identifies with the "outstanding" character, and the object of the reader's identification gets murdered. And all this is done in the most everyday way possible, which only increases the horror.

But all this also proves your point: Tessie Hutchinson's slight difference from the crowd around her selects her to be the victim. But it is not the lottery that selects her as the victim, it is "The Lottery" and its genre that do so. How? The same way that the characters in the story do so: by following the rules of the game.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Reginald Shepherd has published a brief but powerful reading of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" on his blog.

I read the poem in high school, and when I think back on it now, it was one of the first poems that showed me what a poem could do and be. Such memorable phrases and lines, too:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—an ecstasy of fumbling

...

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin

On Divination by Birds

Another interesting poem on Verse Daily today, "On Divination by Birds," by Kimberly Johnson. If I were to do an interpretation of it, I would pursue the idea that interpretation of poetry has some similarity to divination by birds.

I am always struck when a poem appears both on Verse Daily and on Poetry Daily, as Maura Staunton's "God's Ode to Creation" (which I mentioned here) has now done. Some may say that the two sites are so similar that there need not be two of them, but I like having two daily poems. I usually like at least one of the two!

Facing Reality—Climate Change

Birder Laura Erickson has some powerful things to say about what science is and what is wrong with the current administration's willful mishandling of science in her post "Facing Reality—Climate Change."

Thin Raft Anniversary on March 21

Thin Raft 10th Anniversary Reading
Wednesday, March 21, 6:30-9:00
Bergli Bookshop
Rümelinsplatz 19, Basel

This is your chance to hear local English-language writers read from their works: fiction, poetry, memoirs, etc. Come out and hear the kind of work produced by Thin Raft writers for the writing group, as well as for local and international publications. You can also find out how a writing group works and what it is for; all you need to do is start talking to the writers after the reading.

The Thin Raft group for English-language writers was founded in Basel in early 1997 and has been meeting regularly at various locations ever since. To celebrate the group's tenth anniversary, current members of the group will present recent work, and Padraig Rooney (TR member who teaches English at the International School Basel) will read from his recently published poetry collection The Escape Artist (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2006).

Thin Raft meets on the first and third Tuesdays of every month at Centrepoint in the Lohnhof. New members are always welcome.

Don't blame it on René

Here's a passage I meant to quote quite a while ago, from the Nov. 20 issue of The New Yorker: "Think Again," by Anthony Gottlieb, a review of recent books on Descartes:

'Descartes’s dualism is certainly not quite what it is often taken to be. In the 1994 best-seller “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,” the neurologist Antonio Damasio reports that Descartes believed in an “abyssal separation between body and mind . . . the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.” This is actually the opposite of what Descartes believed. He held that we “experience within ourselves certain . . . things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone,” and that these arise “from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body.” In his best-known writings, Descartes stressed the differences between matter (which occupies space) and thought (which does not). But he also maintained that, in human beings, mind and body are mysteriously and inextricably combined, as he tried to spell out in letters to Princess Elizabeth. (She kept pressing him on the point.) He could not explain how it is that mind and body are united, but he was sure that they were.'

Lake Superior

[This is another one of my "set pieces." I wrote it down back in 2002 and revised it a bit last week.]

In the summer of 2001, while we were planning our trip to Upper Michigan to visit my grandmother, everyone kept saying that Lake Superior is too cold to swim in. So we didn't plan our trip to include a stop there, especially as my grandmother lived close to the Michigan-Wisconsin border, a long drive both from Lake Superior and from Lake Michigan. But as we flew into the Marquette airport, we did get close enough to the lake to pay it a quick visit on the afternoon of my 37th birthday.

We had left Basel the day before, by train to Zurich, where we caught a flight to Newark and then to Boston, where we spent the night in a hotel near Logan Airport. Miles was then twenty months old and new to jet lag, so when he woke up at 2 a.m. (eight a.m. Basel time), he was ready to start the day. We managed to keep him in bed with us until 3:30, by which time we, too, were wide awake. We passed the time until the hotel's breakfast room opened at 6 a.m. by opening a couple of small presents Andrea had brought along for me and by reading books and playing games. Breakfast took long enough, then, that it was time for us to go to the airport to catch our next flight, to Detroit, where my mother met us at the airport and joined us for the next leg of the trip, the flight to Marquette. (As her children and grandchildren never ceased to point out to her, my grandmother was then living in the middle of nowhere, and it took a long time to get to her place for a visit!)

At the Marquette airport, we were met by my Aunt Marge, my mother's younger sister, who had come to pick us up for the trip's last leg, by car to Iron River. It was a beautiful August afternoon, and after we had realized that we would probably not get another chance to see the lake, we decided to go into Marquette to look for a beach — not with the intention of going swimming but only to look.

We found ourselves on Lakeshore Drive (echoes of high-rent Chicago penthouses) and parked by a beach separated from the road by a small brushy dune. The beach was nearly empty, but there were a few people around, including two guys in baggy swim trunks throwing a Frisbee back and forth while standing in the low waves. The water looked cold, but it didn't seem to bother the Frisbee players, so I slipped off my sandals and waded in a little bit. At least at this beach in the bay in Marquette, the lake belied both its reputation and its appearance: while the water was not really warm, it was not freezing cold either, and on such a warm, clear day, it was positively inviting.

But there was a slight problem: our swimsuits were packed away in the trunk of the car, and it had been hard work to get all the luggage stowed there. So, despite the lure of the low waves, Andrea did not want to get her swimsuit out, and I didn't really want to get mine out, either. Skinny dipping was the obvious solution, but there were just a few too many people around.

But it was my birthday, and I wanted to celebrate, and I wanted to be able to say that I had swum in Lake Superior on my 37th birthday. (The day was already becoming a story.) So I took off my jeans and my T-shirt and charged into the water in my underpants —which had a plaid pattern that, from afar, made them look like a Speedo bikini swimsuit.

Oh, the water! So much for the story that Lake Superior is too cold for swimming! I was so exuberant that my shouting and splashing almost upset Miles, but Andrea managed to keep him calm. Our camera was also stowed away somewhere, so I have no photographic evidence of my birthday swim, but wife, mother, and aunt were witnesses. (Miles was, too, of course, but I can't count on him to remember it later, except as a story his father likes to tell.)

When we walked back to the car, I solved the next problem by putting my T-shirt (which had also just served as a towel) on the car seat and sitting there in my "swimsuit" to dry off while we began the drive to my grandmother's house. About halfway there, Marge stopped at a little tiny crossroads gas station, so I took the opportunity to change out of my wet "trunks." I put on my T-shirt and sandals, grabbed my jeans, and headed for the toilets, which were inside the station's little shop. And then came the story's unexpected punch line: there, on the door, was a sign that had not anticipated a case like mine: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.