100 Books

Ron Silliman writes: "... name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each."

Okay, Ron, I don't have time for "a little about each," but here are 100 that I could say something about without looking at my shelves:

Glyn Maxwell, The Breaking
Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems
Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level
Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast
Dieter M. Gräf, Tousled Beauty (okay, I translated that one)
Ilma Rakusa, A Farewell to Everything (and I co-translated that one)
C. Dale Young, The Second Person
Gabriel Spera, The Standing Wave
Brigitte Oleschinski, Your Passport Is Not Guilty
Anne Duden, Hingegend
Jacques Réda, L'incorrigible
Billy Collins, Questions about Angels
Simon Armitage, The Shout
A. E. Stallings, Hapax
Philip Levine, The Simple Truth
Michael Donhauser, Sarganserland
George Szirtes, Reel
Karin Gottshall, Crocus
Matthew Sweeney, Black Moon
Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas
Thomas Lux, Street of Clocks
Joachim Sartorius, Ice Memory (to which I contributed translations)
Sean O'Brien, Cousin Coat (which I reviewed)
Giles Goodland, A Spy in the House of Years (ditto)
Franzobel, Luna Park
Geoffrey Brock, Weighing Light
Mark Halliday, Little Star
James Longenbach, Threshold
John Fuller, A Space for Joy
Jane Hirshfield, After
W. S. Merwin, The Folding Cliffs
Brad Leithauser, Darlington's Fall
Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Leichter als Luft
Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
Adrienne Rich, Sources (but was that more than 25 years ago?)

That's 38 in 15 minutes of brainstorming, trying not to repeat authors and not looking up things whose titles I can't recall at the moment.

Padraig Rooney, The Escape Artist
Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel
Robert Creeley, Later (not sure about the pub date?)
Jürgen Theobaldy, Immer wieder alles
Edwin Morgan, A Book of Lives
Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan
David St. John, The Face
Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover!
Sarah Maguire, The Pomegranates of Kandahar
Selima Hill, Violet
Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife
Jill Alexander Essbaum, O Forbidden

I'll stop at 50 since I'm tired and it's time to go to bed. And I did those in 25 minutes under pretty strict conditions. If I repeated authors I'd get over 100 easily!

Not Seeing is Believing

This morning, I had to look at the little tag on the inside of the refrigerator to get the model number and other data from it. It was quite blurry, so I took my glasses off and discovered that I could see the label quite clearly without my glasses. Later in the day, for the first time, I noticed myself adjusting how far away the paper I was holding was, in order to focus more clearly. Looks like reading glasses are on their way for me! :-)

Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert in Basel

In collaboration with the Theater Basel, the English Seminar of the University of Basel has organised a James Joyce double bill:

Thursday, February 21, Theater Basel, Literatursalon, Klosterberg 6, 8:00 p.m.: Fritz Senn, the Joyce expert and director of the Joyce Archive in Zurich, will give a talk about Ulysses combined with a reading of a passage of the novel by Bastian Semm.

Friday, February 22, English Seminar, Nadelberg 6, Basel, in the room called the Cave, 10.15 - 11.45 a.m.: Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert, also an eminent Joyce scholar and editor, will have a public conversation and will also be available for questions from the audience and prepared to give students advice on a first approach to Ulysses.

A Measuring Worm; The Magic Kingdom; The Saws

By now, as far as I understand, the poetry in the latest issues of The New Yorker is Paul Muldoon's responsibility, not Alice Quinn's. So perhaps it is thanks to Muldoon that one can read this Richard Wilbur poem, "A Measuring Worm", in the February 11 issue (which I have not yet held in my hands, though, thanks to Perlentaucher, I already the poem on-line).

I love Wilbur's use of this stanza, here and elsewhere:

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Each stanza is a haiku, with the first and third lines rhyming.

*

After writing the above, I went on to read the next poem on-line from that issue, Kathleen Graber's "The Magic Kingdom." Now (assuming that Muldoon picked that one) that is a poem that, as far as I can tell from years of reading the poems she edited, Quinn would not have chosen.

*

And just to make the list complete, here's the third poem from the same issue, Robert Pinsky's "The Saws." Not a bad set of poems for once! I cannot remember the last time there were three poems in the New Yorker and I did not think, about least one of them, "why would anyone want to publish that bland piece of boredom?"

935

935 was the year King Wenceslas was murdered, he of the song.

It's also the number of a Porsche.

And it's the number of "false statements" made by "President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" "in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

So the next time somebody tries to tell you that the war was not fought on false pretenses, remember that number: the year Wenceslas died, or a good sports car, or the number of lies Bush and Co. told, as "part of an orchestrated campaign that ... led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

I am so grateful to the people who put this "War Card" together. After all, they made clear that many of the things Rummy called "unknown unknowns" were actually perfectly well known "knowns" that he was lying about.

Down By Law

Here's Tom Waits in Down By Law, having just rescued his shoes from Ellen Barkin's temper tantrum. What better way could there be to spend an evening?

"It is a sad and beautiful world."

"Yes. I ham just lucky to heven be here."

Writing Advice

This is a footnote, as it were, to my post "How would a fool do it?"

My two colleagues and I were giving the final English-language exam to students earlier this month. One student who had been having serious problems (she had failed the exam twice) had still been struggling in the exam preparation course with my colleague Joyce. Shortly before the exam, Joyce made a surprising suggestion: "Write what you think is a bad essay." So she did, and when we marked it, we thought it was fine!

The Lives of Others

At the end of "The Lives of Others," which Andrea and I watched tonight, I got all emotional. The ending has its emotional effect (to make the idea of dedicating a book to the guy who spied on you credible, you need a good story), but mostly I was sad that Ulrich Mühe died last year. What a wondrous actor. His face was as expressive as Kevin Spacey's, or Jennifer Ehle's, to name my two favorite expressive faces.

The Future

Here's another New Yorker poem, "The Future," by Billy Collins. It reminds me of one of my favorite Collins poems, "Nostalgia."

I still don't quite get why people get so riled up about Collins's poems. Like many poets who have developed a singular style, he writes some excellent poems beside many that are "merely" good examples of his style, and even a few weak poems. And like many poets who have had some success in the poetry world, he probably gets a lot of his weaker poems published, the kind that a less well-known poet would not get away with.

But that's just normal in any art form, isn't it?

Old Marx

Here's a great poem from the New Yorker, "Old Marx," by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh. My favorite lines:

He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,
reread young Marx for days on end,
and secretly admired that ambitious author.

Someone else who read "Lenz"

Mr. Jumbo has posted a long response to Büchner's "Lenz," which I recommend both to those who have read the story and to those who have not. Thanks to him for joining me in reading the novella on January 20!

Use and Mention

Here, thanks to Bill Poser at Language Log, is a distinction I have not come across before: between use and mention. A professor at Brandeis (see the links in Poser's post) was found guilty of racial harassment for saying this:

"Mexican migrants in the United States are sometimes referred to pejoratively as 'wetbacks'."

As Poser points out, the professor did not actually call anyone a "wetback"; he did not use the term. Instead, he only mentioned it.

I've made this distinction in my mind for many years, but never as concisely. It helps one think about how to talk about obscenities (for recent thoughts about that, see here).

Poser sums up the general point:

"In the absence of other information, one is not entitled to draw any inference as to the speaker's attitudes and beliefs from mentions."

It suddenly crosses my mind that this explains why one should never attribute a fictional character's ideas to the author: whatever a fictional character says is, from the author's perspective, a mention and not a use.

Gatekeeping

There's an excellent discussion going on over at Scottish poet Rob Mackenzie's blog—many UK poets chiming in on how the poetry publication "system" in the UK works.

I suspect it would be of great interest to those frustrated by the "system" in North America as well—if only for the contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic. Check it out if you have not already.

And while you're at it, order a copy of Rob's wonderful chapbook The Clown of Natural Sorrow.

Meridian

Die Kunst ... bildet ... den Gegenstand einer Unterhaltung, die in einem Zimmer, also nicht in der Conciergerie stattfindet, einer Unterhaltung, die, das spüren wir, endlos fortgesetzt werden könnte, wenn nichts dazwischenkäme.

Es kommt etwas dazwischen.

Paul Celan, "Meridian"

In John Felstiner's translation:

Art forms the subject of a conversation that takes place in a room, not in the Conciergerie prison, a conversation that could go on endlessly, we feel, if nothing intervened.

Something does intervene.

Beautifully, when Celan identifies art as "the subject of a conversation," he chooses the word "Unterhaltung" and not the word "Gespräch" (which he does use later in "Meridian"). You see, "Unterhaltung" can also mean "entertainment." Celan is not usually identified as someone whose poetry one reads and thinks about for entertainment, but I have always derived the greatest possible intellectual entertainment from reading, thinking about, and discussing his work with people. It can be a harrowing experience, discussing Celan, but harrowing experiences are part of what constitutes art—as the age-old concept of tragic catharsis makes clear.

The scene Celan is referring to is in Büchner's "Danton's Death," and the conversation involves several revolutionaries (including Danton) who have been condemned to death. So what "intervenes" here is a death sentence.

There are many ways to read this intervention, but all of them involve a recognition that although art is a matter of "Unterhaltung" in the sense of both conversation and entertainment, art works provide the best material for "Unterhaltungen" when they recognize the imminence of interruption, of "intervention," of death sentences.

Poems can be "lighter than air," but at their best, their lightness points towards something unbearable, harrowing, cathartic.

Lenz

My favorite passage in Büchner's Lenz reads like a desire for photography:

"Wie ich gestern neben am Tal hinaufging, sah ich auf einem Steine zwei Mädchen sitzen: die eine band ihr Haar auf, die andre half ihr; und das goldne Haar hing herab, und ein ernstes bleiches Gesicht, und doch so jung, und die schwarze Tracht, und die andre so sorgsam bemüht. Die schönsten, innigsten Bilder der altdeutschen Schule geben kaum eine Ahnung davon. Man möchte manchmal ein Medusenhaupt sein, um so eine Gruppe in Stein verwandeln zu können, und den Leuten zurufen."

In John Felstiner's translation (from his translation of Celan's Meridian):

"Yesterday, as I was walking up along the valley rim, I saw two girls sitting on a rock: one was doing up her hair, the other helping her; and the golden hair hung down, and the pale serious face, yet so young, and the black dress, and the other girl taking such pains. The Old German School's finest, most intimate pictures can scarcely give an idea of it. At times one might wish to be a Medusa's head, so as to turn such a group into stone and call people over."

Perhaps more precisely, this is a desire for snapshots, and not photography in general. Büchner was writing in the 1830s, the decade when photography began to emerge. Lenz, of course, lived in the eighteenth century, and Büchner's story takes place in 1778, but even then the desire for photography already existed.

My second favorite passage is not even in the text, but in Büchner's primary source, the diary of Lenz's host, Oberlin: "Er hatte eine Wunde am Fuß hieher gebracht, die ihn hinken machte und ihn nötigte hierzubleiben." Büchner does not include the fact that Lenz had a wound on his foot that forced him to stay with Oberlin. For two reasons, I suspect: first, Büchner wants to emphasize Lenz's psychic instability, and the injured foot distracts from that. Secondly, Büchner mentions three times that Lenz harms himself in order to use physical pain as a way of "returning to self-awareness" (or something like that). If Büchner mentioned Lenz's wound, then the self-inflicted pain would again not have the same dramatic effect. The suppression of the wound makes the story possible, as it were.

The third thing I want to know here is a point of contact between Büchner's story and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which I read a few weeks ago, with its emphasis on "social mimicry" as the means by which one fits oneself into unfamiliar social situations (see my post on the book). At the end of Büchner's story, before the famous "So lebte er hin" with which it concludes, comes this: "er tat Alles wie es die Andern taten."

"He did everything the same way the others did": Lenz compensates for his psychic instability, for what Lethem might call "a form of autism," with "social mimicry," and when it works, then he can "live on."

Finally, poetry as therapy, as Lenz uses poetry the same way he used physical pain, to return to himself: "er sagte in der heftigsten Angst Gedichte her, bis er wieder zu sich kam." In a state of the most terrible anxiety, he recites poems until the anxiety disappears and he is himself again.

Lenz, Büchner, Celan

I did read Büchner's Lenz today, as planned, along with Celan's Meridian. And I prepared to read Büchner by reading the original Lenz himself: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. I read his story Zerbin.

I'm too tired to think through any deeper comments than the observation that it is fascinating to read three short, intense texts in quick succession from three different centuries. Zerbin is a very eighteenth-century story, and Lenz feels very nineteenth-century (along with its "anticipatory" quality, pointing toward 20th-century developments, it is nevertheless a 19th-century text), while Celan's Meridian speech could hardly have been written before the 20th (before Modernism, to put a period term on it). A fascinating set of texts, on which I will try to comment more in the course of the week.

Have Sex!

Miles recently began to say "fuck" a lot. When I was eight years old, my parents did not try to get me to stop swearing. When my friends were over, and I swore in front of my mother, they were always stunned that nothing happened. But I had enough understanding of linguistic register to know that I should not swear at other people's houses, because their parents would get upset, nor did I swear in the schoolroom (though of course I swore, as all the other kids did, on the playground and at recess). So I could see trying to just ignore Miles's swearing, but for two things: first of all, Andrea does want to get him to stop, and secondly, I find it annoying, too. I am retrospectively impressed by my parents' patience with eight-year-old me.

One thing Andrea pointed out to Miles was that he did not even know what the word means. So of course he wanted to know! I figured, he's eight, he can handle it, it's time to tell him about babies and sex and all that stuff. So I told him that "fuck" is a word that is mostly used as a way of expressing intensities, or as a way to shock people, but that it also has to do with how babies are made, etc., etc. In the process, I told him that you can also say "make love" or "have sex" for this "real" meaning of the word.

So then a couple days later, Andrea said something to Miles that he was quite surprised by, and he responded, "What the have sex are you talking about?"

Omnivore's Dilemma 2

My response to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma starts in out-of-the-way moments. The first is a reference to Basel: it turns out that Fritz Haber "died ... in a Basel hotel room in 1934." Haber is famous for three things: first, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of how to synthesize nitrogen from the air (for "improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind," as the Nobel committee put it). Secondly, he was the leader of Germany's efforts to use poison gas in World War I. Thirdly, he was the inventor of Zyklon B, which was used to gas Jews and others in German concentration camps during World War II. But he himself was a converted Jew who had to leave Germany after the Nazi seizure of power, and he died in Basel in 1934.

The second out-of-the-way moment that struck me involved a reference to an author I have written extensive notes about here: J. M. Coetzee. I spent the summer last year reading and re-reading his novels and essays, in anticipation of the publication of his newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, and I read Pollan's book afterwards, so I was surprised and pleased to find Coetzee turning up in Pollan's book, especially as I immediately thought of Coetzee at the beginning of the paragraph that ends with a reference to him. (If Pollan had not referred to Coetzee, I would have written to Pollan to tell him about Coetzee.) Pollan's reference is to Elizabeth Costello (or, more precisely, to The Lives of Animals, which was later incorporated into EC):

Is it possible that history will someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their lives in the shadow of Treblinka? The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee posed precisely that question in a lecture at Princeton not long ago; he answered it in the affirmative. If the animal rightists are right, then "a crime of stupendous proportions" (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

The literary scholar in me wants to chastise Pollan for conflating Coetzee with Elizabeth Costello, the character he invented, but it would be too complicated, of course, for Pollan to observe the literary niceties here, and in fact, it was Coetzee who wrote that phrase, even if he put it into his character's mouth.

At first, Pollan surrenders, as it were, to the ideas expressed by Coetzee's character, as well as those of Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation (and, interestingly, a respondent when Coetzee first presented the lectures that Pollan refers to and that Coetzee later used in Elizabeth Costello). But Pollan finally concludes (referring to an organic farm he worked at for a week):

To many people even Polyface Farm is a "death camp"—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is ... To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species.

As Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: man is a "cow parasite."

Pollan hence finally sees Singer, Coetzee, and others who might criticize even a humanely run farm like Polyface Farm for its exploitation of animals as "sentimental" (something Coetzee has surely never before been accused of being!). Still, Pollan himself succumbs to the seductiveness of holocaust analogies when he comments that Haber's biography "recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture."

While preparing these comments, I took a break and chanced to be reading "On a Weekend Break in a Political Vacuum," a poem by Alan Gillis, from his book Hawks and Doves, which includes the following stanza:

She accuses herself, as it is with the food
that awaits her, served with speed in a bright
labelled box (always that first bite's stomach-
melting dream chews to cardboard and carcass,
like a drunken one-night stand's aftermath
rising to a seasickness which empties,
utterly empties, so that she winds up
seeking the comfort of warm, easy things—
the chilled blues and brightly-boxed food
that awaits her), so it is with her mind.

How perfectly Gillis captures the seductiveness of fast food: the "melting dream" that produces a dissatisfaction that, through twists and turns, leads one back to the "brightly-boxed food" even when (or perhaps precisely because) it "chews to cardboard and carcass." "She accuses herself," writes Gillis, as many of us perhaps accuse ourselves, but without changing, even if, with Pollan, we remind ourselves what "unsustainable" means: "Sooner or later it must collapse."

When I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, I began to shop differently. Did I go vegan? No. Did I go vegetarian? No. Did I start buying only organic food? No. Did I start buying only local food? No. But I began to compare things more carefully: is it organic? If so, where is it from? How much does it cost compared to the non-organic product? (It is surprising how many organic products are not more expensive than their non-organic counterparts, and how many more are only slightly more so.) I began to try to apply Pollan's conclusion:

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, simply as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

Heideggerian?

Adam Kirsch's essay "The Taste of Silence," in the January 2008 issue of Poetry, makes the claim that "the best document" of contemporary poetry's "metaphysical sensibility" is Martin Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art."

The way I phrased that might make you think that I find Kirsch's claim ridiculous, but I do not. The quoted phrases above are at the end of his first paragraph, and I am sure that Kirsch himself wanted to present the claim as being a bit absurd at first glance.

The essay argues cogently, however, that Heidegger's contrast between "poetry of earth" and "poetry of world" can be a useful heuristic in the interpretation of broader trends in contemporary poetry (whereby he seems to be referring primarily to English-language poetry). He paraphrases the concepts well, as far as I can tell, so if you want to know what those terms mean, read his essay (or, of course, Heidegger's).

My purpose here is to make four comments on Kirsch's essay (all of which assume you have read it):

1. At times, Kirsch seems to be arguing that the phrase I used above ("a useful heuristic") is all that he is getting at when it comes to saying that, as it were, "we are all Heideggerians now." That is, he is not saying that contemporary poets have read Heidegger; instead, he is saying that Heidegger is useful as a tool for interpreting contemporary poetry.

However, in presenting his three examples (Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins), Kirsch does seem to make a stronger claim when he calls Simic "another poet deeply indebted to Heidegger." At that point in the essay, he has not yet discussed Collins, so by saying "another poet" about Simic, Kirsch appears to be arguing that Heaney is one poet "deeply indebted to Heidegger."

I wish he had not put it that way. Until that moment, Kirsch's essay reminded me of Borges's essay "Kafka and His Precursors," in which Borges provides a list of Kafka's precursors, none of whom Kafka himself ever read. Kafka need not have read Lord Dunsany, for example, for Kafka's work to provide a way of understanding Dunsany's work (or vice versa, Borges implies).

Similarly, I would have been perfectly happy with the claim that Heidegger helps us understand contemporary poetry, so I prefer to read the phrase "deeply indebted to Heidegger" as simply infelicitous (since I assume Kirsch did not really mean to imply that Simic is an actual reader of Heidegger).

2. I appreciate essays that do not mark their own occasion—it gets tiresome to read essays in the German press that always begin with the justification for writing about a particular author at a particular time—but in the case of this essay, I was very curious. What made Kirsch write this essay at this time? In the absence of a context, I wondered who Kirsch felt he was arguing with.

3. For two reasons, Heidegger does not seem to me to be the most appropriate twentieth-century thinker for much of what Kirsch wants to say: first, he's too mystical and obscure, even when he is trying to be down to earth; secondly, there's all that Third Reich baggage that even Kirsch feels he has to deal with explicitly in his essay.

Much of what Kirsch wants to use Heidegger for could be done as effectively, without the mystical and political problems, by referring to Victor Shklovsky and his concept of "defamiliarization," for example.

4. I have translated Heidegger's poetry (as part of my translation of the correspondence of Arendt and Heidegger). Whenever people start using Heidegger to talk about poetry, I start thinking about stuff like this:

In Jähen, raren, blitzt uns Seyn.
Wir spähen, wahren — schwingen ein.

Or, as I tried to render it:

In rare abruptness, Being's flash of light.
We peer, protect—turn towards the sight.

Heidegger may have been a good reader of Trakl, or Hölderlin, or even of Van Gogh (as in the "Work of Art" essay), but the poetry does not show that he learned much from them.

January 20, Büchner and Celan

"Den 20. Jänner ging Lenz durchs Gebirg."

"On January 20, Lenz walked through the mountains."

January 20 is the date with which Georg Büchner's Lenz begins. I am planning to re-read the story on Sunday, and I invite anyone else who wants to read it to do so as well. If you are not familiar with it, well, it's one of the greatest pieces of prose I have ever read.

The original German is available here.

English translations are available, but not on-line as far as I can tell. See the list on the Lenz page at Wikipedia.

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"Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein '20 Jänner' eingeschrieben bleibt?"

"Perhaps we may say that every poem has its '20th of January' inscribed?"

A second text to read on January 20 is Paul Celan's "Meridian," the speech he gave on reading the Büchner Prize. If you can't read the German, look for John Felstiner's translation in his "Selected Poems and Prose of Celan."

If you do read either the Büchner or the Celan on January 20, feel free to comment here! And feel free to pass this "call for reading" on.

Caleb Crain on his article

Caleb Crain posted a long comment on my comment about his article in the New Yorker in December. You can read his comment here. It's interesting to read about the background of the articles and the research described in each article.

Working with Paper

Brian Campbell posted a Ko Un poem that reminded me of this one:

WORKING WITH PAPER

Every poem can be made
into a swallow.

But you have to fold it right.

Every poem, you know,
even the failures.

Now imagine a sky for them.

Jürgen Theobaldy, tr. Andrew Shields
Smartish Pace 11

How Would a Fool Do It?

I wonder if anyone else noticed the strange doubling of stories in two recent issues of The New Yorker. In the December 17 issue, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about "what I.Q. doesn't tell you about race." He included the following paragraph about how different cultural practices of categorization can be:

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

I took notice of this because of that wonderful question: "How would a fool do it?" So imagine my surprise when a different version of the same story came up again in the December 24/31 issue, in Caleb Crain's article "Twilight of the Books":

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer: "Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them."

The one bit of information that would connect these two stories is whether or not the Kpelle tribesmen mentioned by Gladwell were illiterate or not. If they were, then the categorization issues raised by these two completely distinct stories suggest that modes of categorization shift significantly with the spread of literacy.

But however this coincidence of stories could be interpreted, what struck me was the very fact of its existence, in two articles published in consecutive issues of the same magazine, on quite different topics, without any comment being made on the coincidence by the editors or the authors.

Richter on the web

I've been a great fan of Gerhard Richter for a long time, and a few days ago, I discovered that his website features images of hundreds of his paintings. If you like Richter, download yourself a few images for desktops and the like. :-)

Here's what was on my desktop for a few days.

The Valley

"The Valley," a striking and unique poem by my friend Padraig Rooney, is up on Poetry Daily today.

Dust was sacred, precious stones revered
and fossils read for signs of afterlife.

Eagle-Flown Sky

An eagle-flown sky, almost empty.

Yet the certitude that the sky had been flown, was soon to be flown again. Occasional sightings ...

Eagles soaring thus—visibly, invisibly—in the summit of heaven.

John Taylor, "Eagles of Fortune and Misfortune," The Apocalypse Tapestries

*

I spotted a large raptor on a fence post while driving the other day. It reminded me of the above, though the "eagle-flown sky" that I then saw was a sky in which I had never seen an eagle, but in which there must have once been one.

There's something going on here about defamiliarization—which reminds me that I recently realized that no artistic work that works with defamiliarization can completely defamiliarize the objects or events that it is referring to. If it did, then one would not be able to see the thing anew, because one would not be able to see it at all. "Make it new," but don't make it so new as to be unrecognizable.

The Fortress of Solitude

What is the difference between a toy and a machine? Here's one way of looking at it, from Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (thanks to someone for typing this in last year):

"There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box, making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled Eggs Super and Oobleck and If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch a Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care."

*

"Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down."

*

"'Let me see it for a minute.'

"Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended mostly on not letting anyone see anything.If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he'd drink what was left of it."

*

"The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't."

*

"Then realize that maybe that's all anyone does—fake it."

*

"I dedicated myself to acting as though I'd fit in this atmosphere all along."

*

"It was a form of autism, a failure of social mimicry ..."

*

I cannot help but love a novel that ends with a paean to Brian Eno's Another Green World.

But at the same time I am suspicious of my appreciation of this novel. Perhaps the main character is too much like me, and I am suspicious of identification. We were born in the same years; we have many of the same cultural references. Even the ones we don't really share, we still share as background knowledge of life in the U.S. in the seventies and eighties.

I almost stopped reading The Fortress of Solitude when the main character put on a ring that could make him fly. It seemed too weird to have something like that change in a novel after 200 pages (with 300 or so to go). But the story nicely downplays that bit of magic, until suddenly it becomes central again, in such a way that I no longer found it irritating. None of the characters seemed that impressed by the ring in the end.

And then the vividness of listening to a particular recording while driving: two tales of listening to Another Green World. I remember listening to Dave Holland's Seeds of Time at the end of a drive from Seattle to San Francisco, how Libby and I burst into shouts of joy at the irrepressible "Homecoming."

River

My poem "River" is on-line in the latest issue of Hobble Creek Review. Be sure to check out the table of contents and read lots of the poems!

If you really love one of your older poems even though nobody wants to publish it, keep sending it out. If you believe in it, somebody else will eventually! I wrote "River" in the fall of 1995, and I must have submitted it at least 25 or 30 times in the intervening years! Thanks, Justin, for finally giving this poem a home.

It was one of the first poems I wrote after moving to Basel. The Saar, the river in Saarbrücken, where I lived before, is a nice river, but nowhere near as impressive as the Rhine in Basel. I used to walk along it often to go to work (back when I had time to do things like walk to work), and the poem grew from those walks.

Hamlet, Müller, Mühe

In September 1991, I went to the Deutsches Theater in Berlin to see Heiner Müller's production of Hamlet. This production was memorable in numerous ways. Here are a few:

1. The play within the play was Müller's own Hamletmaschine instead of The Murder of Gonzago.

2. Claudius was played by the wondrous Jörg Gudzuhn, whom I had seen a few weeks earlier in Kleist's Der zerbrochene Krug. A truly splendid actor.

3. There were three intermissions: the first and third were twenty minutes long; the second was an hour long, with barbecue.

4. It was after the long intermission that the production turned to Hamletmaschine.

5. The duel between Hamlet and Laertes was staged with tennis rackets. The actors were dressed accordingly, and they moved in mock slow motion, as if they were playing tennis.

5. Hamlet himself was played by the fabulous Ulrich Mühe, whose work I had the pleasure of seeing on film several times in the following weeks, especially in Bernhard Wicki's utterly overwhelming Das Spinnennetz, a three-hour-plus film of the greatest intensity, based on a Joseph Roth novella and also starring Armin Mueller-Stahl and Klaus Maria Brandauer. Why in hell is this not available on DVD?

So it was with great sadness that I learned the other day that Mühe had died this past summer, right after earning international acclaim for his role in Das Leben der Anderen. He died right when I was travelling to the U.S. with Miles and Luisa, so I missed the news until I saw it in a year-end roundup.

Omnivore's Dilemma

Wednesday, 16th January, from 6.30 to 8pm*

Talk Party & Book Discussion:

The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan

Andrew Shields will be leading the discussion, with the help of Florianne Koechlin of the Blauen Institute and Peter Jossi of bionetz.ch. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is about what we should be eating and why. Should we choose the organic or the conventional? Local or imported? Low-carb or low-cal? It may be a simple question, but the answer has become very complicated. The astonishing findings Michael Pollan reveals in his book show exactly where our food comes from and the implications for ourselves and our planet.

Bergli Books and Bergli Bookshop
Rümelinsplatz 19
CH-4001 Basel, Switzerland
Tel.: +41 61 373 27 77 Fax: +41 61 373 27 78
www.bergli.ch

Depths and Surfaces

Peer through surfaces if you can: rock, river, fire.

And if you cannot, celebrate surfaces.

(John Taylor, "Depths and Surfaces," The Apocalypse Tapestries)

Insect Lab

Here's something else from qarrtsiluni: "From the Insect Lab." These are incredible insect sculptures made by Mike Libby. As he puts it, "Insect Lab is an artist studio that customizes real insects with antique watch parts and electronic components."

Wednesday, Ash

"Poetry may require a non-believer to love a god, or a god to love a man." (Todd Swift)

This reminded me of Jill Alexander Essbaum's poem "Wednesday, Ash," from her book Heaven. It begins with a hammer: "Nothing of me will survive." It pursues the idea by referring to a series of body parts, and how each of them will disappear when one dies, then provides a first summary: "How can that be? Nothing, nothing of us survives."

That is the first line of the fourth stanza from the end (the poem is in quatrains). Then the poem begins to address the matter of how the Christian promise overcomes this problem, concluding, in an address to "my God":

Save us to a grace we cannot ever hope to understand,
such that in our dyings—behold—somehow?—we live.

I scribbled at the bottom of the page: "A poem that makes it possible for a non-believer to feel the believer's need to believe, the source of that need in fear of death, the glory of Christ's promise to overcome death for each believer."

In general, in fact, Heaven helps this non-believer feel what belief is like. It may not make me "love a god," but it does "require" me to do so, as long as I am convinced by each poem.

Nadia Leonti

Nadia Leonti will be playing with her new band on January 12 at the Kaserne in Basel. Featuring Stefan Strittmatter of Arf, one of the best guitarists I know—but on bass!

Nadia has written two songs using texts of mine: "Eye of the Nightmare" and "He Who Hesitates." So, barring illness (or illness in my family), I'll be there.

Those who know the Basel music scene know Nadia from Shilf and Popmonster, two excellent bands.

Check out the super graphics of the flyer!

The Beekeeper

My poem "The Beekeeper" is up at qarrtsiluni.

"Tambourine," which is kind of a companion to "The Beekeeper," is still on-line after having been published in Literary Imagination earlier this year.

Both of these poems are about Osip Mandelstam, and both of them owe their existence to Ralph Dutli's absolutely superb German biography of Mandelstam, Meine Zeit, mein Tier, which, sadly, is only available in German and Russian.

If you are a publisher, or a translator from German and Russian into English, do the English-speaking world a favor and turn this wonderful book into an English book!

Birds seen from trains

"Still further on: a solitary ash-gray heron stands motionless in a misty pond formed by the backwaters of the Loire. The giant bird's long beak remains perfectly parallel to the surface of the pond, but its eyes no doubt continue to peer into the shallow water, attentive to the slightest shadow or darting movement."

This is from "Ingrandes," part XVII of John Taylor's Apocalypse Tapestries (which I already posted about here). There's a lot of train riding in Taylor's book, and then he sees birds from the trains.

There's something so vivid about a bird seen from a train: a Little Egret seen from a train in Italy, and then seen again on the way back; a Bald Eagle flying alongside the train from Bellingham to Seattle. So vivid that Taylor later refers to another bird apparently seen from a train:

"A sparkling white egret on the bank of the brackish north fork near Le Cellier." ("Oudon")

If that were in Italy instead of France, Taylor might have seen the same bird I did.

Viruses in genes

I hardly come across anyone who wants to say "evolution is just a theory." Maybe I'm lucky. Maybe I live in Switzerland. But next time I do, I'll pull out this bit from "Darwin's Surprise," by Michael Specter, The New Yorker, Dec. 3, 2007:

"Yet nothing provides more convincing evidence for the 'theory' of evolution than the viruses contained within our DNA. Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short. Endogenous retroviruses provide a trail of molecular bread crumbs leading millions of years into the past.

Darwin’s theory makes sense, though, only if humans share most of those viral fragments with relatives like chimpanzees and monkeys. And we do, in thousands of places throughout our genome. If that were a coincidence, humans and chimpanzees would have had to endure an incalculable number of identical viral infections in the course of millions of years, and then, somehow, those infections would have had to end up in exactly the same place within each genome. The rungs of the ladder of human DNA consist of three billion pairs of nucleotides spread across forty-six chromosomes. The sequences of those nucleotides determine how each person differs from another, and from all other living things. The only way that humans, in thousands of seemingly random locations, could possess the exact retroviral DNA found in another species is by inheriting it from a common ancestor.

Molecular biology has made precise knowledge about the nature of that inheritance possible. With extensive databases of genetic sequences, reconstructing ancestral genomes has become common, and retroviruses have been found in the genome of every vertebrate species that has been studied. Anthropologists and biologists have used them to investigate not only the lineage of primates but the relationships among animals—dogs, jackals, wolves, and foxes, for example—and also to test whether similar organisms may in fact be unrelated."

Measuring the Temple

"The inebriation of obtaining a solution." (John Taylor, "Measuring the Temple," The Apocalypse Tapestries)

Completing a first draft of a poem, whether in the rush of composition or over many weeks, is an incredible rush. ("Enivrez-vous sans cesse.") In "Measuring the Temple," Taylor identifies another rush: obtaining a solution to a difficult mathematical problem.

But he, too, made the turn that I did:

"You had long carried out the labors of mathematical deduction; now you withdrew from them completely."

Dock Ellis on LSD

Thanks to Ron Silliman's long post about the Mitchell report on doping in baseball, and the comments on it, I got to read this poem by Jilly Dybka.

Secret Life

Poetry has decided to put all of its poems on-line. So you, too, can enjoy this one by Li-Young Lee, "Secret Life," a nice companion to David Orr's "Daniel," which I posted a note about yesterday.

Lee's poem wonderfully captures how children will get completely absorbed in what they are doing—but as soon as they do not know where their parents are, then the absorption will disappear, making "the one who hears the dove more alone."

I read Lee's The Book of My Nights on a train from Kalamazoo to Chicago in October, 2002, and I was transported not only by the train but also by the book. "Secret Life" also creates the special effect of Lee's best work, which I am at a loss to characterize right now. Looking through that book, I found the phrase "a terrifying and abundant yes" (from the poem "The Well"). That will do nicely for now. (That phrase was cited by William Logan in his review of the book in The New Criterion as "moony silliness" and "beautiful mush." Oh well.)

*

There are some other superb childhood poems in the same issue of Poetry, in the selection of contemporary Italian poems guest edited by Geoffrey Brock: "Slide," by Umberto Fiori (trans. by Brock), "For My Daughter," by Antonella Anedda (trans. by Sarah Arvio), and "Night Visit," by Swiss poet Fabio Pusterla (trans. by Brock).

My other favorite from that selection—one definitely not about children—is the sly and startling "Hygiene," by Raffaello Baldini (trans. by Adria Bernardi).

*

Also worthy of note is "The Arrow Has Not Two Points," Clive James's dismantling of Ezra Pound and the Cantos. James writes from an interesting perspective: he once loved the Cantos (almost fifty years ago), then he later decided they were bunk. But now, he has reread them, to see if they really are bunk. His conclusion: they are bunk. His never fully stated implication: people who think they are brilliant are, like his younger self, too easily impressed by Pound's statements about his own work, as well as statements made by others, so they end up not looking closely at what Pound actually wrote, which is a bunch of tedious nonsense interspersed with "Imagist" passages that turn out to be as insipid, unspecific, or nonsensical as they are supposed to be original, grounded, and meaningful.

Now I'm waiting for Silliman's shredding of James ...

*

ADDENDUM (thanks Swiss Lounge): Check out the archival material on Pound at the Poetry website, especially the fantastic slideshow of Poetry's publication of various Cantos over the years (see the bottom of the archive page for the link). It's worth looking at just for the Tables of Contents of the issues with Cantos in them!

The If Question

Miles asked me, "What's the opposite of If?"

Since I did not know what to say, I thought I'd ask readers of my blog for suggestions. What is your answer?

Too much of anything is just enough

Here's my comment on a post by Joannie Stangeland, in which she mentioned how "At the Mighty Tieton LitFuse workshop, Kathleen Flenniken talked about how each line of a poem could (or should) contain a surprise—so that if you looked at that line on your own, even out of context, you would find something new or disturbing or delicious."

My comment:

For a while back in the late nineties, I tried to make EVERY line break in every poem as meaning-laden as possible. Two results:

1) I failed.

2) Even when I came close to succeeding, the frequency of the effect diluted the effect.

So I think Flenniken (or the idea you derived from what she said) is wrong, because if every line contains a surprise, then no line is surprising anymore.

An analogy: if every paragraph in an essay contains a rhetorical question, then the rhetorical effect of the questions will dissipate.

*

CODA: One kudo to anyone who identifies the quotation in the title of this post.

Daniel

This poem by David Orr from the December 2007 issue of Poetry really grabbed me: "Daniel."

I like the way it traces how a little joke becomes first a family story and then an emotional reality for the speaker.

The issue also contains an extensive section of Italian poetry in translation edited by my friend and Scrabulous nemesis Geoffrey Brock. Perhaps I will comment on some of those later, but I have not gotten that far in the issue yet!

The Drowned Book

Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book is a mixed bag: he works in several different forms, with several different emotional registers, and with a wide range between fairly straightforward poems and quite complicated ones. And the quality of the poems varies as well.

The book begins with extremely dense poems that only begin to work when a clearer narrative begins to drive the density, in the uniquely titled "Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins," which explores the relationship between open drains and polio in the late 1950s (and yet is much more than that). Shortly after that comes "Drains," with its rhymed quatrains. To my ear, O'Brien seems to be channeling Durs Grünbein's use of quatrains here, as a way of satirically exploring the dark side of the contemporary world (although it might be Gottfried Benn who is really in the background of all this).

"The Mere" was written in response to a threat to drain a mere and develop the land; it shows that O'Brien might well be best considered an occasional poet, not in any disparaging sense but in the sense that he writes best when he has a specific occasion to respond to with some sort of commitment (be it emotional, political, or poetic).

"Song: Habeas Corpus" shifts again into rhymed quatrains (with some variation in stanza length) to address political issues; the shift is entirely appropriate to the poem's occasion and intention. (But see here for a scathing reading of the same poem by a reviewer who is extremely harsh with O'Brien.)

"Valedictory" also uses rhyme and meter to drive home political points with satire, while effectively incorporating more of the density of the earlier, non-political poems in the book (like the "Salmon" poem).

In the end, though, despite several other poems that I like ("The Hand," "Praise of a Rainy Country," and an utterly unique one called "The Thing"), I put aside O'Brien's book wondering what all the fuss is about (Forward Prizes and all that). The book is much less impressive than much less heralded books I have read recently, and certainly not in the same league as Daljit Nagra's debut or Edwin Morgan's A Book of Lives. And the one I really wanted to compare The Drowned Book to is Matthew Sweeney's Black Moon, because O'Brien's book beat out Sweeney's for the Poetry Book Society Choice a quarter or two ago. To me, the Sweeney is incomparably better (and I am currently reveling in his Selected Poems).

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I should add that I reviewed O'Brien's Cousin Coat for Orbis a few years ago, which I was also pretty unimpressed by.

Lesung in Berlin

I cannot go (seeing as how I live in Basel and not in Berlin), but perhaps someone reading this might be interested in this multilingual poetry reading in Berlin this coming Sunday, with my man Dieter M. Gräf.

Sonntag, 16. Dezember 2007, 19:30 Uhr, 5,- Euro

In fremden Zungen
Eine vielstimmige Lyrik-Lesung in deutscher, französischer und italienischer Sprache
mit Dieter M. Gräf, Benoît Gréan, Alessandro De Francesco und Angela Sanmann

Wir stellen u. a. folgende Gedichte vor: die Pasolini-Trilogie von D. M. Gräf, Auszüge aus dem Band Monstres Tièdes (Lauwarme Ungeheuer) von Benoît Gréan sowie neue Gedichte aus dem Zyklus lavoro di emersione (Auftauchen) von Alessandro De Francesco und aus dem Zyklus Berlin. (Un-) Gleichzeitiges von Angela Sanmann. Es werden sowohl die Originaltexte als auch die Übersetzungen vorgetragen.

Lettrétage
Methfesselstraße 23-25
Telefon 030 692 453 8
10965 Berlin

David Harsent

David Harsent is a poet who is not afraid to say things that can be used against him, as in these lines from "House of Women" (in his Selected Poems: 1969-2005, Faber and Faber, 2007):

The band
was fifes and drums, or pipes and drums, or brass
and woodwind and drums, it doesn't matter much.

That last phrase struck me, on page 60 of this 133-page collection. It was the first thing I underlined or marked at all (which means I skipped the poems included here from Harsent's first books), and I thought that it perfectly identified the problems I was having with Harsent's work: there are a lot of details, and they are often richly put, but the particular details don't seem to matter much.

I soon found myself granting that Harsent can write beautiful lines:

where a fall of snow
lies over yesterday's fall
with a night of ice between.

(from "Fylfot")

A slammed door sings
in the strings of the upright grand.

(from "House at Midnight")

But even the poems from A Bird's Idea of Flight, which I had read when it came out and which had struck me as completely singular then, did not thrill me often, though they often impressed me. In my notes to "Coverack," I wrote: "A perfect example of how singular Harsent is. It's powerful and rich, but it feels as if it never offers a way in, or that if you started heading in, you'd quickly get lost. It does not resist understanding; it resists interpretation."

And here is my next note, to "The Impostor" (originally from the same book): "Narrative poems, several pages long, funny and strikingly told, but without a sense of depth. The oddity might be compared to Kafka, but Kafka's stories make a promise that they fulfill: 'This is a strange story, but if you keep looking at it closely, it will open up for you.' Harsent's don't even seem to make that promise. They seem to say, 'I am a strange poem that will resist anything you do to me.' A fairer comparison might be to Sweeney, whose poems do promise something."

And then I am tempted to use things against him again: "Didn't we decide, right away, it was a sham?" (from section VIII of Marriage). And just when I might decide that Harsent's incredible productive work "doesn't matter much," he'll knock my socks off with an image again, as in section XV:

Next, it's your face coming free

of the summer dress, as you greet
yourself in the mirror.

Section XXVII suggests that, contrary to my claims about how Harsent's poetry makes no promise of depth, there's something there if you approach it right:

If you could just step up, if you could be lured
back from in-between, if that's where it is, I could turn
the lot over to you: the glass whatnot, the seed-

pods from your nosegay, that ludic card, the Rokeby's fat backside,
these late self-portraits where the stern
gaze, set deep in the fleshless head,

seems for all the world—since you alone might learn
how they find us, these follies, and what they mean,
and whether to lay them up or watch them burn.

Suddenly, then, near the end of the book, things start to look up. Before going on, though, I should perhaps finally mention that if I am being quite critical of Harsent's work, I am aware of a certain paradox: I would much rather read Harsent than many other poets. The details may not matter much, but they are vividly presented in narratives that drive me right past issues of understanding or interpretation into the sheer experience of reading them. If I find myself disgruntled when I am done, that does not nullify the fury of the reading of the poems themselves.

So then there is "Toffee" (from Legion, copied here from this site):

There was a man who made toffee; he would leave it to cool
on a blue-veined marble slab by the open window
of his shop, which was little more than a tin-and-timber lean-to
in the Street of Songs. There was a man who made small
animals and the like — horses, mostly — from scraps of steel
the plough turned up: high-grade stuff he could fine-tool;
while he worked he would sing, as if he had someone to sing to.
There was a man who made paintings: portraits, as a rule,
of business-men in their best; though he made one, once, of a fool
wearing a crown of stars and pissing a bright arc, while behind him
the Devil herded souls through a vesica piscis, its holy seal
ruptured. I thought that if I could find him,
or one of the other two, or any in that street, I might know
what became of my house and those in it;
and what to do; and where to go.

"As if he had someone to sing to": a poetics sneaks into the poem, one elaborated further in the final sentence, which retrospectively suggests a purpose for all the details in all the poems on the previous 117 pages: if the poet can "find" these details, then he might "know." And it is this play between finding and knowing that could drive the poems (and drive Harsent's productivity).

"Ghost Archaelogy" also presents a possible figure for Harsent's poetry, the "data" in "buckram-bound ledgers" that "we" steal from "the admin block":

Such orthodoxies there, such wheels within wheels,
such a rich and full account of the dark desiderata.

But that "dark desiderata" is only appealed to, not fully spelled out, and "we" do not seem to do anything with the "data," which, though "a rich and full account," still remain mysterious.

Well, look, the reason
we turned to our bottling and sewing, to pot-luck and make-good,
is simple enough to tell: the rain only ever brings
music in mist or sweet bafflement or rain-dreams.

(from "Harp Strings")

'... and why such fuss,'
she continued, 'about who we are or what might have been
if it comes to this: cracked laughter, the world as shadow, nil by mouth?'

(from "At the Riverside")

And finally, this from "The Player," the poem that makes Harsent's Selected Poems (or Legion, where it first appeared) worth buying:

This is a story / you'll only get piecemeal.

Anagram poems

Here's my comment on a post by Deborah Ager:

One can also write anagram poems in which each line is an anagram of the first. Once, when I was very agitated and depressed (breakup blues), I did it with Dylan titles:

You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go
where eyes go. Unmake me, you, long moon on a
lake. O one, go, how you unsang me, my mere one.
Go anger, you lone omen, when you make me so
alone, our unknown game, o my eye goes home.

I was amazed by how expressive such a constraint could be.

New Year poems?

A friend writes:

"I very much want to print a New Year’s card with some lines of verse that evoke something suitably literary and exquisite and “seasonal”—these, interpreted in any number of ways, but maybe creation, beginnings, cycles, etc., but open to other possibilities."

Does anyone have any good suggestions for New Year's poems? She has already used Bishop's translation of Paz's "January First."

And I already suggested Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush."

Rain on a Still Pond

This poem by Allen Grossman struck me in a considerable number of ways. I especially noted the use of "it is as when", a figure that always reminds me of Dante. I don't think there is a taboo on such similes in contemporary poetry in English, but they are quite rare.

There's also the "just as ... so" form that appears in Dante, and is also rare in English-language poetry these days.

But I should also add that I just think Grossman's poem is beautiful.

Greg Brown in London in April

My main man Greg Brown will be playing in London on April 18 at the Luminaire.

I probably won't be able to pop up from Basel for the show, as my daughter Luisa's fourth birthday is on April 17. (Unless someone gives me an official reason to be in London, say inviting me to read my poems at a poetry reading, or perhaps to do a reading of my Dieter M. Gräf translations at the Goethe Institute or something like that. Hint, hint?)

But if you live in or near London and are a fan of excellent songwriting, then you owe it to yourself to go check out Greg, who is simply one of the very best songwriters alive.

He's also playing two nights in Paris (April 15/16 at the Pomme d'Eve) and one night in Italy (April 17 in Seveso) before London, and the Blue Highways Festival in Utrecht on April 19, so if you live in (or near) one of those places (or you need an excellent excuse to go there), check him out.

Facebook

I joined Facebook yesterday. I'm not quite sure what it is for, frankly, but my friend Geoff got me to join by pointing out that we can play Scrabble against each other with it!

One Day before His Eighth Birthday

This morning, one day before his eighth birthday, Miles finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He started reading The Philosopher's Stone back in August. We estimate that he read about 60 percent of it himself, with 40 percent being read to him by me or Andrea.

Now he wants to read Philip Pullman. There's an interesting interview with Pullman here.

Forgetful

"I know that I'm forgetful, Daddy; you don't have to remind me."

Miles said that this evening, and not only does he not understand why it is so funny, Andrea and I find ourselves unable to explain why it is so funny.

Black Moon

Matthew Sweeney's Black Moon:

"The Mission": A poem about a contract killer right before the kill.

"The Doors": A man enters a high-security building. (This one was in the Southern Review, June 2006, but is not available on-line.) Here's the last few lines:

All the eyes in the portraits
were turned my way.
I looked back at the door

heard the lock click, then beyond
another lock, then another.

The obvious response is "And then?" But I like it left hanging like this, with nothing to hold onto but the careful description of a scene. "No Sugar," which follows, works the same way: "And then?" But it's the scene that Sweeney wants to set up, not the resolution; in "No Sugar," a man being offered tea in a very peculiar setting.

"Sweatmark": a man sees a map of Ireland on his T-shirt. If "The Doors" provided a form of closure that disrupted the "And then?" by closing the doors, and "No Sugar" provided poetic closure with the reference to "no sugar" with which it concludes, then "The Sweatmark" does it by having the mark get washed out, never to return.

"The Snowy Owl": a snowy owl distracts a firing squad from the effects of their work. You can read the poem here, with a recording of MS reading it (and translations into Dutch, German, Serbian, and Slovakian; isn't lyrikline great?). This one makes clear how central the vividness of his imagery is to Sweeney's poems.

That's only up to page 9 of Black Moon (with a couple poems uncommented). On page 10 is a poem called "Excavation"; my first note is "simply one stunner after another!" The poem seems to me exemplary, without being academic or pedantic or melodramatic:

EXCAVATION

Somewhere in these woods a crashed plane
is buried in undergrowth, the wings
broken off, black crosses still visible
to anyone who'd hack down to see them,
and if this person were then to excavate
the crushed cockpit, liberate the broken
skeleton, prop it up against a pine tree,
a low humming would be heard above
the flies and bees, a humming that took on
German, that danced about on the wind
while the tail, with its black crosses,
was dug out of roots, grass, fallen branches
as gunfire once again filled these hills
after sixty years, and shells and tracer
flew overhead, but no tree would be hit,
nor would fires whoosh through leaves
to the delight of the fool in the hill castle
out with his grappa on the rooftop,
Marlene blaring through the speakers
singing to the crashed pilot in the woods.

"Sleep": a boy soldier asleep by a tank at the edge of a conflict. The scene could be anywhere, yet is rendered with the greatest detail, making it both a generalized scene and a specific experience at the same time.

"Signature": a man is being forced to sign a confession. Sweeney imagines scenes of arbitrary violence, again and again, with the greatest precision.

"Captured": a woman is captured and taken off for ... interrogation? torture? "And then?" the poems are not really narratives after all, but fragments of narratives, vividly imagined moments in which the individual's experience of arbitrary power is depicted. In "Captured," it is the moment of capture itself that is of interest. Sweeney does interrogation elsewhere (in "Signature", for example). By page 17, the book has become a gallery of scenes that cover the range of contemporary possibilities of violence and arbitrary abuse of power (from the perspectives of the powerful and the powerless both).

"Underground": a man lives "in a hole in the ground, / down a ladder, in the bottom room." Like "The Doors," in a way: all crisp and clear, but mysterious. A scene described in such a way that the scene justifies itself, without needing any interpretation within the poem itself, and thus becomes a surface to be interpreted. The depth is in the images themselves, as it were.

I have been skipping some of the poems. The ones that seem less effective seem to be most detached from historical or contemporary specificities, even though the most effective ones are as effective as they are because of their own detachment.

"String" seems like a poetics:

STRING

If ever the thought strikes you
to head off for the Arctic,
be sure to take with you
a large roll of string,
for the Inuits up there
can make string tell stories –
anyone who’s a poet
is also a string artist
and talks to the kids as well.
So you’d better practice
before you get there.
Read up on your history, too –
that fellow, Lord Franklin,
who disappeared; whose wife
liked to swing in a hammock
and who offered all kinds
of rewards for anyone
who could bring the body
back from the ice. If he’d
taken a big enough roll
of string, and trailed it
behind him all the cold way,
she could have wrapped up
and found him herself.
And even today an Inuit
string-artist tells that story
to hordes of visitors
without uttering a word.

Sweeney's idea of what poetry is: talking to kids, but without uttering a word. Clarity, but a laconic approach.

"Being Met": there are two people waiting to pick up "Cecil" at an airport, each of them "trying to persuade him / that they were the embassy driver." The scene is left unresolved, but the "And then?" does not rear its head. The poem is grounded in the literal scene while pointing towards the figurative without being reduced to it. In that sense, again exemplary.

On page 31, everything changes. "Borders": a poem about various borders Sweeney has crossed, built anaphorically around the opening line's "I have seen the Ukraine, across a river." Of course, I especially liked "I have stood at the customs in Basel / with a scribbled sign for Dublin." Here, the tone is suddenly quite different (more personal?), with less mystery, but in its own, different way perfect.

When I read the book, I wondered whether "Borders" would remain singular, but it turns out to be a hinge—gone the detached exploration of contemporary power through vividly presented scenes of greater or lesser specifity; in its place, as it were, the poet? Certainly things get more "personal" after this. Or perhaps I should say that the poems begin to develop a clearer speaking persona beyond the individual poem.

More Sarah Maguire

What do I remember? — a litany of whiskies:

Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Talisker, Aberlour,
The Macallan ...

"Uisge Beatha" (from Spilt Milk)

I've drunk all of those except Aberlour. :-)

*

Maguire's poem "Perfect Timing" (also from Spilt Milk) starts like this:

The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch:

What a splendid opening! I was quite excited to read it, but my excitement deflated immediately:

stripping off at the sea's edge, it fell into the dark

Is it just my déformation professionelle (I'm an English teacher at the University of Basel) that I notice the dangling participle? — "It" refers to "the watch", but the watch did not "strip off at the sea's edge". The poem was ruined for me.

But to be fair, I should post the whole poem, which is otherwise quite memorable (I even found it on a web page, so someone remembered it well enough to type it in):

PERFECT TIMING

The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch:
stripping off at the sea's edge, it fell into the dark
as I swam out into a night thick with stars,
with fisherman calling from one lit boat to another
of their catches and harbours, leaving for the dawn.
Imagine it now, plunged deep in cool sand, still hidden
years later, grains ticking over it one by one—
as your hands slide into me and I move to their pulse.

lyrikline in December

There have been three new English-language additions to the wonderful lyrikline site recently. All of them are translations of Iranian poets into English: Ali Abdollahi, Mohammad Hossein Abedi, and Aliresâ Âbis, in translations by Alireza Behnam and Alireza Abiz.

Pomegranates of Kandahar

I had a burst of reading poetry books the past week or so, including David Harsent, Galway Kinnell, and John Taylor (along with the books by Jill Alexander Essbaum, Edwin Morgan, and Daljit Nagra that I posted comments on already). Now I'm reading Sean O'Brien.

I also read Sarah Maguire's The Pomegranates of Kandahar (as well as her Spilt Milk, which has been on my shelf for ages). I was not very impressed by the book as a whole, but it had a couple of lovely poems, including this one, which so powerfully captures the layers of meanings that a landscape (or in this case a seascape) can have for people who look at it from different perspectives:

EUROPE

Merely an idea bruising
the far horizon, as a cold mist tightens into rain –

but at dusk we still wait
by the Bay of Tangier, on the old city walls, gazing northwards

till the night comes on,
and a necklace of light gathers the throat of the sea.

The young men burn –
lonely, intent on resolving that elusive littoral

into a continent of promises
kept, clean water, work. If they stare hard enough, perhaps

it will come to them.
Each night, they climb these crumbling ramparts

and face north
like true believers, while the lighthouse of Tarifa blinks

and beckons,
unrolling its brilliant pavement across the pitiless Straits.

*

I did find it a bit odd that the first two poems in the book that really struck me were both mentioned on the back cover, the second being "Landscape, with Dead Sea" (she's got a thing for shores and seas—or maybe I do).

All in all, Maguire's work strikes me most when something begins to push the poems to go further, whether it be the historical and geographical elements that drive "Landscape, with Dead Sea" or the anaphoric negations of "The Jardin des Plantes": "Do not go to the Jardin des Plantes." (That poem, like "Europe," is available as part of a .doc file here, though it takes some searching to find it.) In "A Village of Water," a village slowly and cinematically overflows, "as though / it had rained all night." The poem might be about the disappearance of a village because of the construction of a dam, but it leaves the literal meaning open enough to give the poem the feel of a parable. "From Dublin to Ramallah" is dedicated to Ghassan Zaqtan, "because they would not let you travel from Dublin to Ramallah," and again the external motivation lifts Maguire's writing to another level.

And then there's this, from "In Passing" (my apologies to Maguire, as these lines are supposed to be staggered):

I stepped on the platform
just as a goods train passed through.
The length of it winded me—

boxcar after boxcar after boxcar
furiously intimate, close enough to touch:
the whiplash of turbulence,

the aftershock of silence.

*

I'm deeply impressed by some of Maguire's poems, but in the end I'm not that impressed by her collection. It's up for the T. S. Eliot Prize, but so are Edwin Morgan's A Book of Lives, Matthew Sweeney's Black Moon, and Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark, all of which are much more impressive overall. (And those are the only others on the list that I have yet read.)

last.fm

I've added two last.fm widgets to the right-hand side of my blog. With them, you can check out what music I am listening to. It's mostly the Grateful Dead, with healthy doses of jazz to keep me on my toes, and bits of selected other things.

Isn't this all incredibly strange?

Blackout

A friend wrote me of travel delays caused by train strikes in Europe right now. It reminded me of my most memorable travel delay.

While en route from Seattle to Basel (through New York, Milan, and Zurich), we landed at Kennedy Airport five minutes after the August '03 blackout began. This would have been a horrible experience, but one of the two flights that left during the night was our flight to Milan, so for us the tragedy was a comedy: an extra six-hour layover with a three-year-old, but when we took off from Kennedy, it was 12:30 a.m., so Miles went right to sleep (it being 9:30 p.m. in Seattle), and he slept straight through to Milan.

Plus there was an Israeli youth orchestra stranded at the airport, and the kids serenaded people for several hours.

I did write a poem about it, but it never quite came together. Here's where it was when I abandoned it.

BLACKOUT

Rumor stumbles round in JFK,
Terminal One, International Flights.

Our flight from Seattle arrived just after the lights
went out. Deplaning was delayed:

there weren't enough mechanical stairs to go round.
AM radio was on the intercom for a few moments

of fumbling speculation: "We cannot rule out
terrorism; we cannot rule out terrorism."

Freed when our plane's turn for the stairs came,
we followed unlit TRANSFER signs here

to our puny little corner with a view
of the Alitalia check-in counter.

The bathrooms are lit by emergency power.
The toilets are still flushing; one faucet's stuck.

The travelers are sprawled across the floor like cattle
chewing cuds, only it's cake and nuts,

all that's left at the cafés and fast-food outlets
staying open to sell their perishables.

Humor mumbles up and keeps us cool
as the air surrenders its condition.

Every hour or two, we hear the news:
the power will return in three or four.

We'll connect to Switzerland; others
to Senegal or Macedonia.

Beside their great wooden boxes, two bright-robed men
from Dakar are leaning against the counter.

The Asian-American woman going to Skopje calls
the Balkans and Los Angeles on her cell.

Sudden music jingles through the hall:
"Stars and Stripes Forever," bringing cheers.

It's an Israeli youth orchestra playing
one last encore at the end of its tour.

They make their way from there to klezmer;
two leaping clarinets accelerando.

Then Alitalia smuggles us through security
and onto a midnight plane, with nobody's luggage.

After transferring to Zurich in Milan,
we will not miss our bags on the train to Basel,
Everywhere, the lights will be on.

*

I recall that I had worked further with it, and the line that I remember liking was something like this:

And nine months later, a round
of babies on the East Coast, and blackout
poems in the little magazines.

I'm not sure whether either of those statistical spikes actually happened. :-)