Pop and Classical

Kyle Gann has written a pair of fascinating posts in the past few days about the relation between pop music and contemporary classical music. Many poets navigating the boundaries between the "accessible" and the "difficult" might be interested in his remarks about the similar boundaries between types of music. The two posts are "The Unapproachable Sacredness of Pop" and the followup post "The Myth of Pop Hatred."

From the former:

"I don't believe, as some of my contemporaries have claimed to, that pop music is kind of a neutral vernacular with the same status as folk music: i.e., that borrowing pop influences is analogous to Haydn inserting rustic folk songs in his symphonies. Far from being anonymous, pop music is drenched in the personality of its performers; every byte of it is owned by someone, and often valued exactly for its personal associations."

Pileated

The big question about this wonderful series of photos of Pileated Woodpeckers is:

If this is a Pileated Woodpecker lunch date, as Birdchick speculates, and if the male is going to be on third base soon, then what constitutes "third base" among woodpeckers?

Oh, I just began to imagine it. Ouch.

Bob on guitar

After several years of playing only keyboards (for reasons which were never explained, as far as I heard), Bob Dylan opened his European tour last night on electric guitar, in Stockholm, with "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)." He switched back to keyboard halfway through the show. Oh, those walls of electric guitars!

You say my kisses are not like his,
But this time I'm not gonna tell you why that is.
I'm just gonna let you pass,
Yes, and I'll go last.

Spring afternoon

What's an old Deadhead to listen to on a beautiful spring afternoon? "Scarlet Begonias"?

I had to learn the hard way to let her pass by.

"Eyes of the World"?

Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.

"Let It Grow"?

What shall we say, shall we call it by a name?
As well to count the angels dancing on a pin.

Well, it's March 26, so how about CD 2 of "Dozin' at the Knick," shows recorded March 24-26, 1990: "Playing in the Band" / "Uncle John's Band" / "Terrapin Station" / "Mud Love Buddy Jam."

Some folks up in treetops, just looking for their kites.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Cyril Wong

Back in January, I read the Singaporean poet Cyril Wong's like a seed with its singular purpose. (Full disclosure: Wong is the editor of Softblow and has published my poems.) It's quite a memorable book, with several highlights that I keep coming back to. There's a lovely poem, "that day," about the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. (It's available on-line here.) As every good collection should, this one has some great lines:

"Happy the atheist that buys the poor man a meal, no thought
of your kingdom in her head."
(from "walls, loss of light")

[about an argument with a lover]
"Sorry is, once again, insufficient."
(from "before the afterlife")

"If squatted on the table and peed into our food, while we
ate as a family without once looking at each other, tasting
something sharp in our mouths."

"If my self is a shadow, at least I made a dent in the light."
(both from "if ... else")

"Before the afterlife" is the really memorable sequence in the book, about two gay men living together in Singapore, where a certain circumspection is still necessary, at least with the families of the two men. Several of the poems in the sequence are quite striking, including the one I quoted from above, but this is my favorite longer passage, from section 7:

................................ Two men dancing

naked in their own home, bodies pressed
against each other and swaying unhurriedly

to that unspectacular rhythm, in the light
of an ordinary Saturday afternoon.

Hunch and Hope

Here's one poet-translator's guess about what translation is—George Szirtes again:

"Half of translating is simply trying to understand what a poet is up to from the inside. The rest is hunch and hope."

I love that: "hunch and hope." And then somebody tells you the translation was good, and you're not quite sure anyway, but glad that somebody liked it.

Six? Ten!

George Szirtes mentions that Frigyes Karinthy was the first proponent of the concept of six degrees of separation (as confirmed by Wikipedia).

I thought about this once. Let's imagine two farmers, each of whom lives far out in the country in two different very large countries that are on opposite sides of the world from each other. Now, we can't be sure that each of these farmers knows the mayor of a town near where the farmer lives, but it's safe to assume that each farmer knows somebody who knows such a mayor. So we've got farmer-somebody-mayor on each end.

Now, we can't be sure that the mayor of a small town in the country in a large country knows the president of that country, but we can be pretty sure that said mayor knows some politician who knows the president. So now we've got farmer-somebody-mayor-politician-president on each end.

And the two presidents may not know each other, but each president knows his or her ambassador to the other country. So even with these two completely rural farmers (who may never go further than a few miles from their farms, say), the longest chain from one to the other is farmer-somebody-mayor-politician-president-ambassador, and then back down: president-politician-mayor-somebody-farmer.

So, six degrees of separation, perhaps. But you don't need more than ten degrees of separation to get from yourself to anybody else on earth.

Americans abroad

A comment I wrote on a post by Sarahjane, an American in Frankfurt, about vulgar young Americans abroad:

Right after I first moved to Berlin in 1991, I became extremely aware of the American junior-year-abroad students traveling on their rail passes. Even when they were not vulgar (and they weren't vulgar that often, at least back then), I noticed how they always seemed to believe that they were where they belonged, no matter where they were. Or to put it another way, that they had a right to be wherever they were, and to behave in the same way that they would have behaved if they had been in New York City or Minneapolis or Oberlin or wherever. The young Americans traveling together did not seem to have much respect for the countries they were traveling through; it was almost as if those places did not exist as separate cultures, but just as place for Americans to travel through.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

"A day may come when you will be very glad you saved Pettigrew's life," says Dumbledore to Harry at the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (That was the line that stuck with me when I finished book three earlier this month, as part of my project of re-reading all of HP before volume 7 is published in July.)

In the light of that line, it doesn't surprise me that the Wikipedia page about Peter Pettigrew says that "J.K. Rowling has hinted that Pettigrew will make additional appearances in the final novel, and it is speculated that Pettigrew will repay his life debt to Harry."

But what this really reminds me of is Gandalf's response to Frodo when Frodo asks why Gandalf did not kill Gollum (here quoted from reading Lord of the Rings twenty-five or more years ago, so don't make fun of me if my paraphrase is off): "Many that die deserve life. Many that live deserve death. Who are you to deal out death in judgment?"

The first time I read The Fellowship of the Ring, I asked my Dad about that one, and he gave me a smile that, in retrospect, I found out was knowingly ironic, and he said something like, "Gollum may still have a role to play." (My Dad read Tolkien in the late fifties, long before the books become popular; in fact, he checked the books out of the Yale University library when he was there as a graduate student in mathematics!)

The other thing I rediscovered on reading volume 3 of HP is something I noticed about Rowling's skill with plot when I first read that volume. When I was about halfway through the book, something came to mind about the first two books: the exciting passages at the end of each book had depended on explanations of how particular bits of magic worked—and the explanations were always introduced earlier in the books, but without the slightest hint that any foreshadowing was involved. Hence, the exciting passages never had to be slowed down with explanations.

Right after I thought that, though, I came to the passage in Prisoner of Azkaban where the action stops and characters begin explaining things (the scene in the Shrieking Shack). It seemed to me that Rowling had just slipped up—but of course I read further and discovered that that scene was not the climactic scene at all, but a false ending, which made the barrage of explanation part of Rowling's own conscious toying with suspense. It was at that point, at the latest, that I ceased to feel any "high-culture" qualms about considering Rowling an excellent writer.

King Dork

A friend of mine from college sent me a novel by a friend of hers from high school: King Dork, by Frank Portman. It turns out I had at least heard of Portman indirectly in college: he is a member of the band The Mr. T. Experience, which got a bit of airplay back in my student radio days at KZSU. And the band still exists.

King Dork is billed as an anti-Catcher in the Rye book. At the beginning, I found several nice bits to underline or mark, but decided not to, as it seemed like the kind of book that would keep coming up with good quotable bits. And it is. I did ended up marking a few things, though. Here's one of them.

The narrator, Tom Henderson, has a few books that belonged to his father when his father was a teenager; the books are of great interest to Tom because, when Tom was eight, his father died. One of the books is Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead:

"I had originally shied away from this book because I was worried it had to do with the Grateful Dead and nudity, and, well, let me put it this way: if you can imagine a more alarming combination, your imagination is quite a bit better than mine. Then I realized it was about war, and it was more like naked people and dead people, two of my favorite subjects, so I thought I'd give it a try.

"Now, this book was by a guy named Norman Mailer, and he was a piece of work. You know how Holden Caulfield said 'giving her the time?' Well it was the same with Norman Mailer. He said 'fug.' I kid you not. Like 'this is a fugging nightmare!' or 'go fug yourself.' You know, it's no wonder everyone was all crazy and weird in the sixties, if everything was being run by prissy grandma types like Holden Caulfield and Norman Mailer."

I was once at a Dead show at Boreal Ridge, in the Sierras, and during the second set a naked woman climbed up on the barrier in front of the stage and dove back into the crowd. It was pretty alarming. (It was also the worst Dead show I ever attended, out of 82 or 83.)

Tom Henderson is sort of in a band with his friend Sam Hellerman; their main activity as members of a band is to think up new names for the band, for themselves, and for their first album (so much fun!). The book also contains a glossary, with two entries that I thought worth noting here:

"The Velvet Underground: you can tell how badly someone wants to come off as a hipster by how fervently he or she pretends to have been into this group since early childhood. They were my favorite band as a zygote."

"Franz Zappa: it all hippie music had been this weird and good, maybe that subculture wouldn't have been such a total waste of brain cells."

Later Coda: This is supposed to be "teen fiction" (the hero is a sophomore in high school). It's good that the book did not win any awards; there are worse things to explain here than the word "scrotum" on the first page!

Forest Whitaker

I saw The Last King of Scotland on Saturday, and as I expected to be, I was overwhelmed by Forest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin. (As I just noticed in a New Yorker commentary on another film with James McAvoy in it, McAvoy was not bad either!)

But my love of Whitaker's acting comes from Ghost Dog, by Jim Jarmusch, a movie that provides the pleasure of watching Whitaker develop a character without any music-video-style editing. The editing in The Last King of Scotland reminded me of the editing of the key scene in Philadelphia. In that scene, Tom Hanks, wearing a bathrobe and hooked up to a walking IV, explains opera to a flabbergasted Denzel Washington. But instead of letting Hanks dance with his IV and blow the audience away with his acting, Jonathan Demme pretended it was a video and did all kinds of swooping and cutting and general messing around with the images.

At least in Philadelphia it was only the one scene that was almost ruined by such editing. In The Last King of Scotland, almost every scene with the brilliant Whitaker was cut to pieces, as if Whitaker's acting were not more than enough to communicate Amin's frightening blend of charisma and brutality.

I'll take Jarmusch (or Jacques Rivette, another director who lets his actors act) over Kevin Macdonald any day!

And something happened at the cinema that I have never experienced before: the movie was interrupted, during the climactic scene, by the house lights, because someone was having a medical emergency. We had to wait 10 or 15 minutes until an ambulance came and took the stricken person out. Then the movie started again!

March 21 reading

Wednesday, March 21, from 6:30 to 9:00 pm

Thin Raft 10th Anniversary Reading

Rümelinplatz 19, Basel, Switzerland

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.

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. For more information, contact Andrew Shields at Andrew.Shields@unibas.ch or check the TR website at http://www.centrepoint.ch/thinRaft/.

Warlocks

The old story of the origin of the Grateful Dead's name is given a new twist in Mark Greif's "The Right Kind of Pain," a review of Richard Witts's book The Velvet Underground. Greif's most striking conceit is a long comparison between the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (striking because the members of VU hated the Dead; I don't know what the GD's members thought of VU). He begins by arguing that "the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead started out, in an odd way, as basically the same band. In fact, both bands started with the same name in 1965: the Warlocks." As Greif later points out, "they both had to choose a different name because it turned out that a third band had already put out a record as the Warlocks."

But I wonder: what if there was no third band? What if each band changed its name because of the other?

In any case, Greif's article is a wonderful essay. I got to it through Jerome Weeks's referral to it at Bookdaddy.

Five new translations

My translations of one poem each by Mara Genschel, Nadja Küchenmeister, Norbert Lange, Bertram Reineke, and Johanna Schwedes are on-line here.

German Poetry anthology

A few weeks ago, I finally received my contributor's copies of Michael Hofmann's Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology (FSG, 2006; Faber & Faber, 2005). I contributed two translations of poems by Lutz Seiler.

The anthology is superb. J. B. Leishman's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is worth the price of the book alone, and then there's his co-translation (with Stephen Spender) of the Ninth Duino Elegy.

But I also like this little tidbit by Paul Klee, translated by Harriet Watts:

WATER

Water,
topped by waves,
topped by a boat,
topped by a woman,
topped by a man.

Christopher Middleton's translation of Gottfried Benn's "The Evenings of Certain Lives" (the lives in question being Rembrandt's and Shakespeare's) makes a fine introduction to Benn for those not familiar with a poet ranked by many in the German-speaking world as the equal of Rilke and Paul Celan. Michael Roloff's version of Nelly Sachs's "Chorus of the Rescued" will probably open a few eyes as well, not to mention her "Two hands, born to give" (translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead and Michael Hamburger).

There's a generous selection of Bertolt Brecht; it's always nice to be reminded how wonderful a poet he was. Middleton's version of "Thoughts on the Duration of Exile" was my favorite here, but John Willet's "To Those Born Later" also deserves mention.

One of the great post-war German poems is Günter Eich's "Inventory," here translated by Charlotte Melin. This is surely new to most English speakers who have no German, and it, too, makes the book worth getting.

For me, the highlight of the selections from Celan is John Felstiner's version of "Deathfugue," which means that translations of mine have now appeared in an anthology with some by my mentor. His version of "Tübingen, January" also struck me here, with its resonant conclusion:

if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble,
ever- ever-
moremore.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

The last Celan poem is the positively accessible "Don't write yourself," again in Felstiner's translation:

Don't write yourself
in between worlds,

rise up against
multiple meanings,

trust the trail of tears
and learn to live.

The Ingeborg Bachmann selections are also on target, the highlight being Peter Filkins's version of "Departure from England," with its surprising conclusion: "I have never set foot on its land."

Michael Hamburger's version of Günter Grass's "The Egg" is the highlight of the Grass section. But he gets short shrift compared to Hans Magnus Enzensberger; although I love Enzensberger, the poems in the lengthy selection here did not strike me. Perhaps it was just the wrong day for them as I read them; perhaps he is a poet whose hard-earned lightness in German does not translate well?

My two Seiler translations include one of the poems in the sidebar: "my birth year, sixty-three, that."

My only very small complaint is that the poem chosen to represent Oskar Pastior's work is likely to turn off quite a few people who might otherwise like his work. But that is my only quibble with this excellent anthology.

Hung Jury

If Hamlet were put on trial for Polonius's murder, and you were on the jury, what would your verdict be?

Personally, I'd go with guilty. He was only pretending to be insane!

Thrill Me

Reginald Shepherd was kind enough to send me his essay on "Some Issues in the Teaching of Creative Writing," which he has been quoting from on his blog recently. One passage that he did not put on his blog struck me (I hope he does not mind my quoting it here): "When I read a poem, by a student, in a literary journal, in a collection of poems by a single author, or in an anthology, I want to enjoy the poem, to immerse myself in the poem’s world."

This reminded me of my time at the Spoleto Writers' Workshop (summer 1998). On our last full day in Spoleto, the writers went to the master class of the Spoleto workshop on bel canto singing, which we had been invited to observe.

In the singing workshop, each singer would sing an aria or a song which he or she had prepared, then the teachers (Judith Coen for the women, Bob Shewan for the men) would comment on the singing and work with the singer for a while. They would grab the singer's face in mid-song; they would have them sing while flapping their arms like birds; once, Bob even made faces at a singer in the middle of his aria! (We couldn't actually see Bob's face because his back was to us and his face was literally in the singer's face.) What was most striking to me was the metaphorical meaning of all this for writers who had just been workshopping for ten days: the workshop leaders had been doing the same to us the whole time — but the writers (including myself) tended to respond differently to our teachers' proddings than the singers did. If they seemed to take it all in a fairly professional way, we would often take it all in a very emotional way, as if the teachers' criticisms were personal. As Judith Coen said to one of the singers: "I'm pushing you so hard because I want you to thrill me."

I have told that story to students over and over again in the past nine years: if I criticize their writing (whether creative or scholarly), it is because I want them to thrill me.

Reginald's essay also reminded me of another anecdote. Reginald wrote: "One student rather disarmingly admitted during a class discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets that 'I can understand this when I work at it, but I don’t like having to work.'" I had a similar disarming remark once: while I was discussing essay writing with students (quite advanced ones), one of them said, "So what you are saying is that you want us to think about we write." Bingo.

For trials, not tribunals

From the Boston Globe, an editorial that voices something I have been thinking and saying since September, 2001:

ELEVATING A TERRORIST KILLER

March 16, 2007

IN HIS Guantanamo hearing, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed embraced the "enemy combatant" label that President Bush invented for Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects. That ought to make Americans wary of the novel judicial process there.

Mohammed, the self-identified military operations chief of Al Qaeda, admitted during a recent hearing before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he organized the Sept. 11 attacks and many other terrorist actions. In the transcript, he describes himself as a man at war, for religious reasons, with an enemy who has invaded Muslim lands. In his fractured English, he compares Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks to World War I, World War II, and the American war for independence against the British.

Killing, he argues, is the language of all wars. His implication is that his murdering of children and innocent civilians in the World Trade Center and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing is no different from the conventional wars waged by nation-states.

Mohammed's attempt to normalize his despicable acts should be laughable, but it is furthered by the Guantanamo hearings -- a process outside both the American civil legal system and the Geneva Conventions . The special tribunals that Bush has conjured up are harmful not only because they deprive the accused of the fair trials guaranteed in American courtrooms and of the rights that a court-martial grants to US soldiers and foreign prisoners of war alike. The Bush tribunals also are misconceived because they elevate deluded fanatics like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into the imposing military foes they would like to be -- instead of the vicious political criminals they really are.

This is how Mohammed justified his terrorism: "We consider we and George Washington doing same thing. As consider George Washington as hero. Muslims many of them are considering Osama bin Laden. He is doing same thing. He is just fighting. . . . So when we say we are enemy combatant, that right. We are."

The guilt of the terrorist known as KSM could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in any civil courtroom or military tribunal sanctioned by the Geneva Conventions. By not giving him and other detainees a fair trial, Bush makes their case for the hypocrisy of the secular democracies. Many detainees picked up in Afghanistan had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, and it is particularly embarrassing for Americans that Mohammed has to be the one to plead for them. Americans should not have to be told about injustice by a creature like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Good Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd's "One State of the Art" is yet another fine piece of prose from the pen or keyboard of RS:

"Reversing Pound's dictum that technique is the test of a poet's sincerity, many contemporary American poets seem to believe that technique is instead a sign of insincerity, that something too apparently shapely cannot be deeply felt, or that the urgencies of feeling are necessarily at odds with the imperatives of form."

"... what Allen Grossman has called the four tasks that the significant poet must be expected to perform: to point out what is significant in the world of common experience; to defeat given expectations with respect to how things are assembled (and poems themselves are very much in the category of 'things'); to make clear how difficult it is to make meaning; and to make clear how interesting the world is."

I also liked this tidbit from D. W. Fenza's "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?", a link I found thanks to John Gallaher:

"Poets often allude to other poets, not because they like to show off or generate footnotes, but because they love to enter that mysterious communal place where the dead, the living, and future generations exchange their gifts with one another. Poetry is the loveliest of all conversations, for it seeks to belong to no one person but to overlapping and concentric circles of self, friends, family, tribes, communities, and humanity."

Latin

Miles and I are reading Missee Lee (our eighth "Swallows and Amazons" book by Arthur Ransome). Chapter Five is called "Hic Liber est Meus." Miles asked me what it meant.

I told him it was Latin and that I did not know what it meant, but that we might find out in the chapter.

"It must be about God," he said. "Latin is always about gods."

Kingfisher

Mark Merritt's post about birding and a kingfisher sighting led me to dig up a haiku I wrote about one of my kingfisher sightings:

sitting still beside
the pond waiting for the king
fisher to return

The pond in question is on a small plot of land owned by my wife's cousin Manfred Delpho, a German wildlife photographer and one of my birding mentors. You can check out his extraordinary photos on his website.

Auden as an intellectual reference point

It almost does not count when Christopher Hitchens uses poems as reference points for his discussions of issues—he does it ALL the time. I know of no other journalist who so frequently refers to poetry and clearly has vast swathes of it memorized.

But he does it again in an article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Slate: this time with not Yeats, but Auden. And yes, it is "September 1, 1939." The line that he uses as a motif in his article is "the enlightenment driven away."

The article is one of many responding to Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma, who independently wrote about Ali (see links provided by Pierre Joris).

The part that really struck me about Hitchens's argument is a passage from Ali herself:

"I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values."

Those who criticize Ali for the vehemence of her critique of Islam should keep this in mind.

(See also "Auslandsreise oder Flucht?" in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Nawal as-Saadawi has been forced to leave Egypt because of serious threats to her life. She, too, grew up in the "world of faith [and] genital cutting.")

Coterie Writing

David Damrosch's article "Trading up with Gilgamesh" (in the Chronicle of Higher Education) refers to how academic writing can be considered similar to "coterie writing" in the Renaissance:

"In 16th-century England, for instance, small groups of aristocrats such as Sir Philip Sydney, his sister Mary Herbert, and their circle would compose poems for their mutual entertainment, circulating them privately from one country estate to another. Scholars today may reach a somewhat larger circle, but most academic writing is part of a continuing conversation among a coterie of fellow specialists with common interests and a shared history of debate."

The concept of "coterie writing" is useful for thinking about contemporary poetry (in North America, in Great Britain, in the German-speaking world): poets today write for the coterie of their fellow poets. Is this something to be lamented? Many do lament it, but one should keep in mind that Sir Philip Sydney still wrote some pretty great poetry, and that the Earl of Rochester also did so in a similar milieu a century later.

Damrosch's conclusion is also interesting in this context:

"The lesson I would draw from my Goldilocks experience is that it is neither necessary nor desirable to dumb our projects down when writing for a general audience. At the same time, we need to write quite differently when we want to reach beyond the comforting confines of our disciplinary coteries. It is good to have a clear and vivid style, but equally, we have to retrain ourselves to write for readers who don't already know what we're talking about, and who need to be shown why they should care about the things we know and love so well. The trade market can bear an impressive degree of scholarly substance if we can teach ourselves to reach out to a substantial nonscholarly clientele."

Replace "our disciplinary coteries" by "our poetic coteries"! Those who want to be read by people who are not part of their own poetic coterie need:

a) to be clear and vivid
b) to retrain themselves about their own assumptions
c) to convince others to care about the things that the poet cares about
d) to maintain the high standards of their own coteries

As Damrosch argues, this is not a matter of "dumbing down" at all (he refers to scholarly authors who called what they did to their "popular" books "dumbing down"—and those books did not do well!).

Those who want to talk to the members of their own coterie need not worry about all this, of course.

Mora or less

For German speakers, an interesting article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Terezia Mora, "Die Dichterin in ihrer Zeit."

Mora begins by saying that when she worked on a novel for four years, almost none of what she wrote during the first three years actually ended up in the final book!

She also mentions reading Ulysses when she needs perspective on her work, because a) it is hilariously funny and b) she enjoys the freedom and courage and poetic power of the book. Joyce as an antidote to one's own limitations?

Finally, she also says that before she wrote her first story (which ended up in her first book), she was not sure whether she would ever write a successful sentence. But before she wrote her second book, she already had a definite and rather rigorous image of a) what literature should be like, b) what, within literature, her own literature should and could be like, and c) what, correspondingly, her second book should be, both as a whole and in the details.

That says a lot about how writers have "systems" even if they do not want to define them, but also about how such systems derive from one's own experience of writing. Writers best define their own worlds through the work they produce, not through their theoretical statements about that work.

Cabinet d'Amateur

My chapbook cum art book Cabinet d'Amateur is very hard to get a hold of, given that the publisher does not do any distribution. As I recently ran out of copies (but for my own), I ordered 20 more from the publisher, which I now have. Anyone interested in buying a copy should contact me: the book costs 23 CHF or 15 EUR or $15. Most of the copies I had from the 50 copies I originally got from the publisher, however, I traded for other books! So if you have a collection of your poems to offer in trade ...

More details: Cabinet d'Amateur, poems by Andrew Shields with German translations by Ulrike Draesner and photographs by Claudio Moser, Cologne: Darling Publications, 2005 (from the Kunst zu Texten series edited by Dieter M. Gräf).

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

Poetry Idol

For those who write poetry, can't sing, and love American Idol and the like, there's always the option (discussed here) of learning Arabic, moving to the United Arab Emirates, and participating in Millions Poet. The only other condition is that your poems should praise the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. The prize is one million dirhams (about £140,000, according to the article).

The other twist in the article is that poetry is apparently considered "manly" in the UAE (although women also participate in the Millions Poet competition). Being more a wimp than a he-man, more a nerd than a jock (and probably an involuntary member of the School of Quietude to boot), I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Change Your Lifestyle

"No, the admonition of Rilke's archaic torso would not be quite same if it were merely: You must change your lifestyle!" (George Szirtes, "Brain Noise")

"... for here there is no place / that does not see you."

Rilke's German here.

Energy

Dushko Petrovich's article about "a practical avant-garde" contains this nice passage about what an avant-garde is:

"Fairfield Porter, the great midcentury painter and critic, ... said the avant-garde was always just the people with the most energy."

He also has a nice summary of how the art world works (at least how it worked a couple years ago):

"The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career."

Not a What, But a How

Jazz fans should take a look at Terry Teachout's essay "All That Jazz," a review of Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz. Teachout emphasizes that the history of jazz should not be seen in terms of brilliant individuals alone but in terms of groups of people developing the music together.

He closes with a great quotation from Bill Evans: "Jazz is not a what, it is a how." Which reminds me of this great quotation from Thelonious Monk: "It's not the mistakes that count, it's what you do after them that counts."

(Poetry fans should note that the Ted Gioia referred to in Teachout's article is Dana Gioia's brother, who is a jazz pianist and historian. I heard him play a long time ago in Palo Alto.)

Chiasmus

A nice example from an article about what pediatricians say about toys for kids:

"It's better for a child to tell the toy what to do than for the toy to tell the child."

The same pediatrician (one Deborah James) is quoted at the end of the article, too:

"In her office last week, James says, 'A 9-month-old had the time of her life playing with the exam table paper.' She learned about cause and effect (crinkling caused a noise); trial and error (gentle crinkles made a less satisfying sound); constancy (crinkling produces some noise every time); and limits: Mom said 'No,' every time it went in her mouth.

"'Now that's an educational toy,' James says."

Gabriel

"Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It must have been September 1986. At some point that month, I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude (whose author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, turns 80 today), read the first sentence, and stopped when I got to the word "ice": I wanted to savor that sentence. So I memorized it, and for a few days, I walked around quoting it to people.

This led to two distinct responses. Some people said, "Oh, you're reading One Hundred Years of Solitude." I always said that no, I was not reading it; I had only read the first sentence and stopped. To which they always said, "You're weird, Andrew."

Others said, "Wow, what's that?" When I told them it was the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, they said, "Are you reading that? Is it as good as people say it is?" I always said that I did not know, as I had only read the first sentence and stopped. To which they always said, "You're weird, Andrew."

I did go on to read the whole book (and again a few years later). That opening sentence is still my favorite opening sentence of a novel, but the first sentence of Love in the Time of Cholera (which I have read three times) is almost as good:

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

It does not end with a little bomb like the word "ice," but otherwise it's great. And that novel has a final sentence that I could only agree with when I read it:

"'Forever,' he said."

That's how long I wanted the book to go on when I finished it.

Gregory Djanikian

In our household, a line from a poem by Gregory Djanikian occasionally gets quoted: "My shin, my shin!" I was surprised to discover just now that I don't own the book the poem is in (Falling Deeply into America) and that it is not from the title poem of the book (but from a poem called "How I Learned English"). We use the phrase to refer to moments when one uses the wrong word by accident (especially if that word is in one's non-native language: my German, Andrea's English). In Djanikian's poem, he describes being hit in the head by a baseball shortly after his arrival in America, upon which he clutched his forehead and shouted, "My shin! My shin!" His playmates were so amused by this that he began to feel included in their group.

All this came to mind with G.D.'s poem on Poetry Daily a few days ago, "My Name Brings to Me a Notion of Splendor," in which it is the name "Djanikian" that generates the narrative of exclusion as an immigrant and then inclusion at the end. Here's the poem's conclusion:

I would have to unravel the tangle
of circumstances that put me in a small
landlocked lumber town in Pennsylvania
face to face now with Joe Schunk and having
to explain the D was silent easy enough
to say once you got the hang of it but Joe didn't
and it was five or six fast blocks of losing him
down Hawthorne and across to Pine my heart
thumping and beads of sweat glistening
on my arms before I heard Louisa Richards
suddenly call out DeeJay to me from her porch
in a way that stopped me in my tracks
because nothing had ever sounded so good
and nothing came easier than to walk
up the stairs and sit down by her
and begin telling her who I was.

Sport and Art

George Szirtes wrote, in a comment about Ryan Giggs:

"It is hard to explain to those who have no taste for football that it can be exciting in exactly the same way as art can."

For me, it is the narratives in sport that make it so fascinating. I remember sporting events the way that I remember plays, novels, or movies that are successful because of their well-made plots. And within that, then, the moments of grace: Jerry Rice swerving around the sideline marker to score a touchdown in a Super Bowl back in the late eighties, for example (26-21 for the 49ers, if I remember correctly). That memory is not quite as vivid as the lip twitch that Kevin Spacey produces in The Usual Suspects (where the first time you see the movie, it means nervousness; and the second time, it means amusement) or the similar twitch Jennifer Ehle produces near the end of the BBC Pride and Prejudice (which to her family would mean she hates Mr. Darcy, while to the audience it means she loves him)—but I've seen each of those lip twitches several times, and I only saw Rice's touchdown once.

Thomas Hardy

Two interesting reviews of Claire Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy have appeared recently: by Adam Kirsch in the New Yorker and by Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books (not available on-line). Kirsch's appeared in the January 15 issue, and I noted the following to comment on at the time:

"His novels, and especially his poems, describe a world from which God has already absconded, and for good. Because this is still the world we inhabit today, he remains one of the most vital and relevant of English writers—more modern, in some ways, than the modernists who succeeded and disdained him."

This was not my experience reading Jude the Obscure a few years ago. I came to it after having read all the Harry Potter novels that were then available. One effect of this was that I wanted to read some nineteenth-century novels—for the plots and subplots and all the social details (the kind of narrative J. K. Rowling writes). First, I read A Tale of Two Cities, and then I read Jude. I loved both, but I was also struck by how much Hardy's novel seemed trapped in a particular time period: it could not have been written much earlier, and its concerns were no longer important within a few decades after its publication. Jude's exclusion from higher education on class grounds is, happily, no longer an issue in England or the United States, and the impossibility of divorcing Arabella is also a dated problem. I feel closer to Stephen Moss's comment: "Hardy's mindset and the moral vision of his characters are alien to us."

Kirsch's review also contains a lovely quotation from Hardy: "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."

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?