Hardscrabble

Okay, I admit it: I'm a sucker for any collection of poems that mentions my favorite band, as in Kevin McFadden's poem "Die Satan!", from his collection Hardscrabble:

(The Stones alone show him sympathy,
the Grateful Dead call him friend.)

But McFadden's collection is worth reading even for those who aren't Deadheads. The only reason to avoid it would be if you hate puns and anagrams, because the book is full of them, and is also full of reflections on punning and anagramming.

Here's a taste from "Famed Cities," one of the three longer pieces in the book:

My friends I teased about the leave in Cleveland;
they teased back Brunswick's run. Home not,
as the saying goes, a place to hang your hat—
home where the hat, by name, by chance, hangs you.

McFadden's attention to the letters that make up his words might seem to get out of hand at times, but he relates his interest in letters to his own biography, as in this passage from the long prose section, "It's Tarmac," that is the second of the longer pieces here, in which he talks about his mother's name: "Her maiden name (Bretmersky) was a clerical error on a baptismal certificate (Pretmersky)."

His attention to letters and anagrams even colors his brief comments on poetics, in this later passage from "It's Tarmac":

Contemporary American poetry is fond of dichotomies. I'm feeling a little punchy, so I'll hazard my own one-two: those interested in who and those interested in how. Cults of who and schools of how.

The third of the long pieces here is called "Time"; section XV ("Another, Cleveland": yes, McFadden is from the Cleveland area) begins with a line that recalls a theme I appreciated in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude ("The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't"), and then it ends with a bit of philosophy and a bit of deflation:

What are we, but what we mistake ourselves for?
The brashest fact of my childhood—was I five?—
learning there were other Kevins. Might have said seven
for the rhyme, but you'd probably think I was slow
("Second grade, the lad hadn't grasped that?") and
good thing, too, since you're counting, I wasn't named
Nate, the temptation would be too (don't say it)
powerful. Do you even believe a syllable of this?
This life is a living remembered over a shoulder:
breadcrumb trail remapped into meaning years after
from crowshit cairns which pigs mistake for truffles.
Three days in your life that no art will recapture:
the day you were born, the day death sank in deep,
and the day you divined you weren't so damn special.

Thus, even when he's playing with anagrams and puns (pursuing the "how" of poetry), McFadden never turns fully away from a biographical approach centered on epiphanies (or the lack thereof), the "cult of who."

One feature of the book that I have left out until now is its focus on the theme of America, from anagram poems built around lines about America from Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg to a poem about the Statue of Liberty that outlines his mother's peculiar use of idiomatic phrases like "brand spanking new" to a poem about being "At Rushmore" that also deflates its subject in the conclusion, though here the deflation is also an opening up of the monumental subject at hand:

... Near the base, rubble remains—
a talus of blasted stones, dropped names—
the part of the image we may come closest to.

Buddy Holly

I wanted to find a video of Buddy singing "Not Fade Away," but there does not seem to be one, at least not on Youtube (just a video that shows the record playing). So here's "Peggy Sue" on American Bandstand.

So (hat tip to Marc Krebs) Buddy died fifty years ago today. "February made me shiver ..."

Humoresque

"Humoresque" is a chapbook by E. Tracy Grinnell, published by Blood Pudding Press. (Tracy is the publisher of Litmus Press.) It's a series of Sapphic quatrains circling around Moreau's painting of Sappho. It's a quick and beautiful read that also deserves a second reading right away. It made me smile the "archaic smile" that Grinnell refers to (doubling the title of A. E. Stallings's first book, Archaic Smile), with its "tangled" music:

Betrayed or awash in a mere while tides are
Slow to tempest, slower unleashing songs of
Tangled instruments and the faceless cries for
Precision, collapse

The sequence's "operatic I" puts a new spin on Descartes: "I think therefore I cannot see undoubtless."

A. E. Stallings on rhyme

Here's an energetic manifesto about rhyme
by a favorite poet of mine!

(A. E. Stallings, that is.)

The best bit:

"Translators who translate poems that rhyme into poems that don’t rhyme solely because they claim keeping the rhyme is impossible without doing violence to the poem have done violence to the poem. They are also lazy."

I would not say they are lazy, but it would just bore me to translate rhymed verse as unrhymed verse.

Song & Dance

John Fuller's previous book, The Space of Joy, triggered a lengthy post from me back in 2007. I don't have as much to say about his new book, Song & Dance, but then I don't think he expects one to have a lot to say about it: it's a collection of light verse and occasional poetry, something read for the pure pleasure of his humor and his technical skill.

So I especially enjoyed "Florio's Drinking Song," with its verses all ending with similes with wine, for example, "the wine like a widow remembers the grape."

"Song of Absence" describes what it's like to miss somebody, concluding with the worst time of all when it comes to missing somebody:

But worst is the stillness of night-time,
For ever a quarter-past-two
When dwelling on shapes in the darkness
Is no nearer to sleeping, or you.

"Rights," the first of "Two Secular Hymns," concludes with a punch:

And the silence of the wretched
Drowns the drivel of the damned.

"How Far?," with its opening line (repeated throughout), "How far is it to Carcassonne?", made me laugh because of the game Carcassonne. (An excellent game.)

The couplets of "At a Distance" spin out a response to an epigraph from André Maurois ("We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity—gunpowder, and romantic love"). It includes a couplet about couplets:

Couplets were shelved with a Romantic curse
In favour of blank, free, Projective verse.

(You can find the whole poem in this PDF.)

"Variation on Shapcott" is a sexy version of the Fall from Eve's perspective. I googled it to see if it was on-line somewhere, and it was once posted on a Guardian blog, but now it's been removed from there!

"A Dozen Victorian Autograms" are sort of like anagrams: each of the poems is written in the style of a particular poet using only the letters in that poet's name. I recognized Emily Brontë, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a hilarious Oscar Wilde.

"Laurel-Crowned Deceptions" responds to a Czeslaw Milosz poem in which he envisions finding himself in the encyclopedia "Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse." (Strange alphabetization there.) Fuller teases Milosz for apparently complaining about being famous and concludes:

But Czeslaw, pause before those pearly gates:
St. Peter keeps two keys. The first is God's key.
The second (help!) belongs to Joseph Brodsky.

Finally, I also really enjoyed the sinister "The Captain's Galop," a poem in the voice of a sea captain who first seems to be celebrating the passengers' dancing and later seems to be forcing them to dance:

Keep the dancing line unbroken, dance together, never stop.
Dance the Captain's dance. The bouncing, hectic, thunderous Galop!

Bernstein on poetry

I've sometimes wondered whether poetry's closest relative is stand-up comedy. Here, in sixty seconds, Charles Bernstein seems to agree (hat tip to Al Filreis):

The Beauty of the Husband and poetry's "layered elusiveness"

To say Beauty is Truth and stop. Rather than to eat it. But even if beauty is truth, the beautiful person—here, in Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, "the husband"—may still be a liar, even a compulsive liar. "All poets are liars," Carson quotes the ancient Greeks: And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things? But it is not the lies of poets that are the issue here, but the lies of the husband: My husband lied about everything. And the horror of the compulsive liar is that he cannot recognize his lies as lies (as reported to the narrator by her husband's friend Ray): Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied. The lie is not in the speaker, then, but in the words, according to this theory. From this perspective, the poet's lies are in the words, too, not in the poet. But this way madness lies, or at least the abyss of irony: Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. Or beneath the strata of figurative language: Waiting coils inside her and licks and licks its paws. Or this: A cold ship moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife and slides off toward the flat gray horizon, not a bird not a breath in sight. Or this: But words

are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend

to the ground. Carson's Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece of similes; here, the comparisons are rarer, and metaphor abounds—the poet's "lies" to counteract the husband's, each apparently compulsive, the latter's surely more damaging, as more truly lies. "No doubt you think this a harmless document," the narrator says of the (now ex-)husband's brief letter accompanying Ray's obituary: "Why does it melt my lungs with rage?" * One of the passages quoted above deserves some further consideration: Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. Or to abbreviate the claim in a perhaps oversimplifying way: "Poets prefer to be layered and elusive." This might provide a tool for understanding differences between poets about what poetry's aims should be. All poets with any kind of ambition (from Ted Kooser to Ron Silliman, say) want to produce work with several "layers," work that "eludes" the reader in some way ("resists the intelligence almost successfully," as Wallace Stevens put it, though I might be misquoting the phrase). One important difference between poets lies right on the surface: how "elusive" is the immediate sense of the words? Many poets (and I number myself among them) want the top "layer" of the poems they write to be relatively transparent; their ideal is to create the "elusiveness" of poetry by allowing for further "layers" in the poem that can be explored further on the basis of that initial transparency. Many other poets (and Dieter M. Gräf, whose work I translate, is surely among them) produce a top "layer" that is in itself elusive. Instead of producing a transparent surface that can be seen through in elusive ways, they produce an opaque surface whose meanings are immediately elusive. For me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is transparent is whether or not the poem generates any elusive "depth" at all. If all there is to it is the immediate meaning of the words, without any "strata" (whether of irony or of something else), then the poem is a banal failure. In contrast, for me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is itself elusive is whether or not that immediate "layer" provides any sort of compensation for the absence of such immediacy of meaning, be it musical (metrical energy, alliteration, rhyming), paradoxical (counterintuitive moments, for example), allusive (distorted but recognizable variations on cliches or quotations, say), or formal in the most general sense (Ernst Jandl's "ottos mops," say, whose only vowel is "o"). In either case, if the poem does not offer some kind of immediacy to me, then it cannot draw me into its layers; it cannot lead me to chase down what eludes me. It is not enough for the surface to promise depth; the surface itself needs to make me interested in pursuing whatever depth is there. That's why—to choose a poet famous for his "obscurity," and one of my favorite poets—I love the poetry of Paul Celan: the surface meaning of a Celan poem may not be immediately apparent, but his poems always offer some sort of immediacy to the reader, as in the opening of "Corona" (with Michael Hamburger's translation): Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde. Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn: die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale. Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. The immediate "meaning" of the lines may, in a narrow sense, be obscure, but the poem offers so much to the reader at an immediate level: the vivid, powerful image of "autumn" seen as an animal eating from the speaker's hand; the alliteration of "frißt" and "Freunde", of "Hand" und "Herbst"; the assonance of "lehren" and "kehrt"; the cyclical quality of the image doubling the cyclical implication of any reference to seasons. I may not immediately know what Celan is talking about, but I am immediately drawn into the poem, and I want to pursue what initially eludes me. Or to put it another way, I feel something when I read the poem, and the feeling derives from its "immediacies," and the feeling is what makes me want to understand the poem with my intelligence. But as a reader, it's often enough to just be able to feel it, to sense that the poem promises more without necessarily actually pinning down what that more is. And since responses to poems are grounded in feelings (which includes the feelings one has when using one's reason), the "layered elusiveness" of any given poem rarely opens up for all its readers. "From the nuts, we shell time": before we shell a poem, it has to make us want to shell it, and all readers choose different poems to shell. And the best poems of all are like Celan's "time": after we have "taught them to walk," they "return to the shell."

John Martyn

My friend Dave turned me on to John Martyn's "Live at Leeds" CD ten years or so ago. And Sarah just told me he died and posted him doing "May You Never," which I did not realize was one of his (I only knew the Clapton version before). Check that one out, with his beautiful solo-guitar work and sad, mumbling singing, by going to Sarah's post on Martyn's death.

Then check out this one, "Solid Air," which I cannot embed here because Youtube says "embedding disabled by request." The tune is on "Live at Leeds," too, with Danny Thompson on bass there, too. I did not know he had written it for Nick Drake!

Out of the Blue

Up until now, the best poems I have read about September 11, 2001, have been Martin Espada's "Alabanza" and Glyn Maxwell's verse novel The Sugar Mile. But now I can add a third item to that list: Simon Armitage's "Out of the Blue."

In a 24-page sequence, Armitage puts himself into the head of an English trader who works at the World Trade Center. In section 4, he presents a catalogue reminiscent of Günter Eich's "Inventory":

Arranged on the desk
among rubber bands and bulldog clips:

here is a rock from Brighton beach,
here is a beer-mat, here is the leaf

of an oak, pressed and dried, papery thin.
Here is a Liquorice Allsorts tin.

A map of the Underground pinned to the wall.
The flag of St. George. A cricket ball.

Here is calendar, counting the days.
Here is a photograph snug in its frame:

this is my wife on our wedding day,
here is a twist of her English hair.

Here is a picture in purple paint:
two powder-paint towers, heading for space,

plus rockets and stars and the Milky Way,
plus helicopters and aeroplanes.

Jelly-copters and fairy-planes.
In a spidery hand, underneath it, it says:

'If I stand on my toes can you see me wave?'

Section 7 is a prose poem of the responses of the World Trade Center workers after the planes hit the buildings. Shortly before I got to the end of it, I realized that it reads the same backwards as forwards, trapping the people in the poem, as it were, along the lines of how they were trapped in the doomed building.

The sequence's timing is excellent—it is just long enough to make you forget section four, so when you get to the list of things found in the rubble in the final section, the return of the items from section four is all the more powerful.

And then the sequence concludes (reminding me, as I typed it in, of this):

Five years on
what false alarm can be trusted again,
what case or bag can be left unclaimed,
what flight can be sure to steer its course,
what building can claim to own its form,
what column can vow to stand up straight,
what floor can agree to bear its weight,
what tower can vouch to retain its height,
what peace can be said to be water-tight,
what truth can be said to be bullet-proof,
can anything swear to be built to last,
can anything pledge to be hard and fast,
what system can promise to stay in place,
what structure can promise to hold its shape,
what future can promise to keep its faith?

Everything changed. Nothing is safe.

More Dieter M. Gräf on Lyrikline

I have three more translations of poems by Dieter M. Gräf up at lyrikline:

Vézelay Jihad
The Naked Ginsberg
Zuni NY

I especially like "The Naked Ginsberg"!

Two Readings

I'll be reading in Edinburgh on February 8 as part of the Poetry at the Great Grog series organized by Rob Mackenzie. Rob has posted a poem of mine on the Poetry at the Great Grog blog. He's also put together a Facebook event page for the reading if you want to tell us in advance that you can come! Also reading that night are Tim Turnbull, Jane McKie, and Alan Gay (see the Poetry at the Great Grog blog page for links to their work).

I'll also be reading at the Literaturzoll in Basel on February 22. My reading will be in English (mostly); the other readers will be reading in German. The event is hosted by Guy Krneta, Katrin Eckert, Martin Zingg, and Andreas Mauz; the other readers are Daniel Berner, Martin Gelzer, and Regula Schröter.

Comments on blogs

Arnold Zwicky on Language Log:

I resent the idea that Language Log should not only be expected to provide blogging space to everyone who wants to write — if you enable comments, then the space belongs to the commenters, not to you, as any number of people have explained to me now, contemptuously — but should also allow commenters to conceal their identity, even from the bloggers.

I fully agree with Arnold here: the comments on my blog are part of my blog, of which I am the editor, and I decide which comments I accept and which ones I delete.

I am lucky, I guess, in that I have never had to deal with offensive comments, but if I ever get any, they won't make it onto my blog!

Alexander on Colbert

This is truly wonderful, but I have one question: why couldn't Elizabeth Alexander have read her poem the way she talks here? She talks so beautifully, so fluently, so smoothly, with wit and charm, but she read the poem so flatly. In my previous post, I talked about the lack of oratory in her presentation, and I suspected that few contemporary American poets would be able to be "oratorical" in the way Obama and Lowery were. But EA's speaking on the Colbert show suggests that she could well have presented her poem in an oratorically more satisfying way!

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Elizabeth Alexander

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

On Elizabeth Alexander's reading of her poem

Reb Livingston has once again thrown water on the fire of pettiness that burns through contemporary American poetry, this time in connection with criticisms of Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the inauguration and her reading of it. I recommend her post highly.

Here was my comment:

Thanks, Reb, for pointing out the absurdity of the criticisms of EA and her poem. I enjoyed the poem, myself, both as she read it and when I saw it with its correct lineation on Mark Doty's blog.

As you correctly point out, contemporary poets don't stand a chance when reading their work before or after politicians or preachers. But I also noticed that both Obama and Lowery are not shy of being *orators*, while EA (like just about any contemporary poet who might have accepted the gig) completely avoids anything "oratorical" in her presentation.

It made me wonder how the poem might have sounded if read by someone experienced in public oratory. I think it would have held its ground much better then.

That's not EA's fault, of course; the miniscule audience for contemporary poetry is quite shy of oratory.

Silliman takes his terms too far

The other day, Ron Silliman suggested that what the "School of Quietude" (as he dubs it) needs is someone who will "take on the responsibility for describing with much greater accuracy its mand sub-tendencies and internal points of contention."

Fair enough. But he later goes on to say that this "conservative tradition ... extends back not to Dickinson & Whitman, but to Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Sidney Lanier & their peers. One of the great questions for the School of Quietude is why does it let its history languish so?"

This is nonsense. The poets Silliman derides as quietists did not grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier. Among American predecessors, they read Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, as well as the same Modernist poets that Silliman presumably read. In fact, the Modernists themselves were the last generation of poets to grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier; the success of the Modernist overthrow of such poets was so great that both "the School of Quietude" and "the Post-Avant" (or as Bill Knott puts it, "the School of Noisiness") derive from the Modernists.

It's not completely persuasive to argue that there are two fundamentally opposed strains of work in contemporary American poetry; it is utterly ahistorical to project that opposition back onto the history of American poetry.

Whisky, by Ciaran Carson

Sometimes literature can make you thirsty. The late fifties and early sixties novels of Marguerite Duras (such as Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia) all made me want to get drunk on whatever the characters were drinking, even before I found out Duras was an alcoholic.

I don't recall ever reading something that made me want to get stoned or do other illegal counterfactuals. (Not that I was unable to find other reasons ...)

This one from Ciaran Carson's 1996 collection Opera Et Cetera made me want to drink some whisky, among other things (it also made me want to try to interpret it, but I'll leave it at typing it again to see how the lines feel under my fingers):

Whisky

Of how the life of water is distilled to liquid gold; how the water of
The Liffey becomes Guinness; how explosive cocktails take the name of Molotov;

How the wild mountain thyme blows around the blooming heather, and the perfumed smoke
Of poteen rises high into the azure sky; how turf is the conducive agent, and not coke;

How coke is crack, not heroin, nor smack; how marijuana is La Cucaracha,
Maryjane, or blow; how many States of mind there are in Appalachia;

How you turn into an insect overnight, or after-hours, from eating
Magic mushrooms; how the psilocybin got your brain and led to some 'Strange Meeting';

How the tongue gets twisted, how 'barbarian' is everyone who is not Greek;
How things are named by any other name except themselves, thereof I meant to speak.

While I was typing, the associations began to flow:

The wild mountain thyme brought to mind Penelope Houston, whose punky folk I loved so much in the early to mid nineties (shortly before I read this book for the first time, in September 96): she did a burning cover of that song.

Poteen made me think of Brian Friel's Translations, which I played a small part in and co-directed in Saarbrücken in 1994.

Turf made me thirsty for Laphroaig.

The Appalachian States of mind made me think of Brad Mehldau playing "New York State of Mind" as solo jazz piano. Far-fetched? I don't care!

Turning into an insect overnight? You know what I thought when I read that; you thought the same thing after all.

But after-hours made me think of the movie "After Hours", whose basic idea I would like to steal for my long unwritten tale "The Clerk," which started being pondered in the main Basel Post Office years ago.

For me, Strange Meeting is a tune by Bill Frisell I once began to write some words for.

barbarian is everyone who is not Greek: this idea always reminds me of Adorno's claim about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being "barbaric"—"not Greek"?

Perhaps this is all free association; perhaps this is "naming things by any other name except themselves."

Turned in Time live at Parterre

Turned in Time


Here's a tune from my Human Shields duo gig at the Open Mic at Parterre in Basel on January 14.

This one was written by my friend Markus Bachmann. He wrote it in Basel German, then recorded it with me in High German on our CD "Noch und noch." I did the English version two or three years ago.

(Added later for easier surfing: a video of "Rumpus," another song from the same gig, is here.)

Rumpus live at Parterre

Rumpus


Here's a tune from my Human Shields duo gig at the Open Mic at Parterre in Basel on January 14. (Without our bassist, unfortunately. You just have to imagine the contrabass ...)

This tune is a survivor: I wrote it for my band Petting Zoo at Stanford in about 1985!

(Added later for easier surfing: a video of "Turned in Time," another song from the same gig, is here.)

Lieder gegen die Kälte

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

Human Shields at Parterre Open Mic, January 14, 2009

Two-thirds of Human Shields played at the Parterre Open Mic last night (January 14, 2009). The setlist:

Raining (With the Sun in the Sky)
Turned in Time
Third Base
Better Never Than Late
Rumpus

More photos here (of the other groups as well).

The Toss of a Lemon 3

So Hanumarathnam has laboured to create a middle ground: a detailed map of the holdings for Sivakami to walk through with her eyes and mind. Hanumarathnam has accurately portrayed those properties: real and perceived distances, sizes, and productive capacity of each plot. It is not simply a matter of drawing a map to scale; one must choose what sort of scale: physical? psychological? This map has to show how a property relates to its owners, to itself, to tenants, to the community. This is business—not geography, not math.

(Padma Viswanathan, The Toss of a Lemon)

As in my previous post about The Toss of a Lemon, the context is astrological: Hanumarathnam's horoscope has predicted his death, and he is preparing his wife Sivakami for her widowhood.

The "detailed map of the holdings" described here is for someone who will never see the land described by the map: at the time when the novel begins (around 1900) a respectable Brahmin widow remained in total seclusion from the public eye, so Sivakami could not walk the lands to inspect them.

The reader of a novel is not forbidden by custom to inspect the landscape a novel describes, but the novelist is no less involved in an "accurate portrayal" of the "real and perceived" and the relationship between them than Hanumarathnam is. The novelist may not do so for "business" purposes, but here, the novelist is closer to the businessman than to the geographer or the mathematician.

There are echoes here of the starting point of my last post on this novel: "He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance." But I'll just let them remain echoes for now.

Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama

This picture was in the International Herald Tribune this morning and it almost made me cry. There's Obama, and he's really going to be President in 12 days. It was the first time since election night that the full impact of that fact hit home again. I felt like Jesse Jackson, moved by the whole thing once again.

There's Probably No God

This was in the New York Times today (I read it in the International Herald Tribune, with a different photograph). I like the idea that a comedian came up with the idea for the campaign, after seeing something like this:

My take on athletes who thank Jesus is here; my own militant Darwinist convictions are here. Full disclosure: I'm an atheist who had his kids baptized!

The truth about teens and sex

That's the title of this article by Ellen Goodman, whose narrow focus is the effect (or lack thereof) of abstinence pledges on the sexual activity of teenagers, but whose broader point is that politically-motivated programs that are demonstrably ineffective should be discontinued!

I also like the amusing way she connects New Year's resolutions and abstinence pledges by pointing out that the latter are about as likely to be successful as the former.

She also mentions that Sarah Palin is for abstinence pledges—which did not keep her daughter from getting pregnant, of course.

All this reminds me of this article from a recent New Yorker, "Blue Sex, Red Sex," which develops similar points in greater depth. One point I had meant to quote from the article but forgot to is this:

Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

A Grateful Dead Analysis

Deadheads will enjoy this statistical analysis of the relationship between the Grateful Dead's performance of songs and the fans' listening habits. (Thanks to Ron Silliman for the link.)

One thing I noted in my comment on Silliman's blog is that the most-played songs are all Weir tunes, but the most popular tunes are largely Garcia tunes. This might not be statistically significant, though, since Garcia simply had more tunes in the repertoire, so he did not have to repeat songs as often as Weir did.

The Toss of a Lemon 2

He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance.

I posted this as my Facebook status while reading The Toss of a Lemon, by Padma Viswanathan, because I could identify with this, too (as with the moment of identification I already commented on).

The context: the Brahmin Hanumarathnam, a man who is both a healer and an aristocrat with lands to manage, has read in his horoscope (and that of his wife) that he will die soon. He has found a boy in his village, Muchami, to train as an overseer of his lands after his death.

Knowledge is more interesting than ignorance: the immediate point of the statement is that both Hanumarathnam and Muchami enjoy the work of keeping track of the goings on on Hanumarathnam's lands—all the information about their tenants, who they are, how they work, what they are growing, which plots should be fallow, and so on.

But a further nuance of this for Hanumarathnam is that he prefers to know that he is going to die, because then he can prepare things for his wife and children. This nuance is ironized for the contemporary reader, however, by the fact that Hanumarathnam's knowledge of his forthcoming death comes from astrology; that is, his knowledge is based on superstition, which we now consider ignorance.

That irony is further ironized by the fact that he does die at the predicted time! So his knowledge may have been based on ignorance, but because he knew he was going to die, he was able to prepare the administration of his wealth for his family.

Hindsight

I don't remember where I came across this the other day, and I was unable to find out who put the image together (sorry, whoever you are), but I laughed out loud about it:

Phil Lesh on the Grateful Dead

"All we did was steal what jazz musicians did and apply it to rock 'n' roll. If we didn't do it, someone else would have," he says.

That's Phil Lesh from this interview about the Dead's forthcoming tour. His comment reminded me of the reaction of Deadheads when Branford Marsalis first sat in with them on March 29, 1990.

The Deadheads were blown away by Branford's brilliance, and by the fact that he seemed to play along so well, even though he openly stated that he had never heard the Dead's music before.

And all I could say was, "Duh!" Of course Branford fit in with the Dead; any jazz musician would have, because the Dead applied jazz methods to rock and roll, which is admittedly harmonically and rhythmically simpler than jazz, and thus a piece of cake for jazzers!

The Toss of a Lemon

Today, I finished two novels. This afternoon, I finished was my friend Padma Viswanathan's The Toss of a Lemon, and this evening I finished Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg. I had started the Ransmayr first, back in December, because it is one of four books I'm teaching in my verse novels course next semester, but I put it aside over Christmas and New Year's because I had been planning to read Padma's novel "between the years" since she sent it to me in September.

There is a great deal of say about the excellent Toss of a Lemon, but let me begin with one small, very personal response:

Rukmini ... is tall, with broad shoulders, and an exceptionally good cook, which her in-laws appreciate, though they're more likely to tell others this than tell her.

That was the first thing I marked in the book, right near the beginning, a description of one of the novel's minor characters (the neighbor of the main character, Sivakami). The phrase that struck me was the last bit I quoted; it reminded me of my father's tendency to never praise his children directly, but only indirectly, by praising them to others. My mother (my father's second wife) is not like that; she praises openly—but apparently, my dad's first wife is just like him, and over the years I heard at least one story about her praising her children and concluding by explicitly asking that the praise not be passed on to the children in question.

Human Shields, Parterre Open Mic, January 14, Basel

My band Human Shields (well, part of it, singer Dany Demuth and I will be performing as a duo, without our bassist Christoph Meneghetti, as the Open Mic is only for duos or solo performers) will be playing at the Open Mic at Parterre in Basel on Wednesday, January 14, along with several other performers:

Phil Dolby
Evelyne Péquignot & Raphael Neubauer
Julia Grütter
Angel
Blauson
Kelly and Micha

The concert is free and starts at 8:30 p.m., with the order of the acts to be determined shortly before the show starts.

Parterre is at Klybeckstr. 1b in Kleinbasel!

Virgil's Sixth Eclogue

One theme in Horace's poetry is that he does not want to write epics, but only his poems of everyday life. Since I read Virgil backwards (first the Aeneid, then the Eclogues and Georgics), I found it especially amusing to come across Virgil making the same claim in the Sixth Eclogue:

When I began to write, my Muse did not

Disdain to play Sicilian games nor did

She blush to live in the woods, and when I thought

Of singing of kings and battles, the god Apollo

Tweaked my ear and said to me, "A shepherd

Should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song."
So now—since there are plenty to sing your praise
And plenty to celebrate grim deeds of war—
I'll study how to play the pastoral reed
And win the favor of the country Muse.
I'll will not sing what I'm not supposed to sing.

But of course Virgil went on to write a great epic of praise of the Muses and the "grim deeds of war," so this is probably more a matter of "sing what you want to sing now and don't force yourself to sing things that aren't really what you want to sing now just because you think you ought to." :-)

David Ferry's translation again.

Top 5 songs of 2008

Once I factor out the Grateful Dead tunes, here are my top five tracks from my last.fm charts for 2008:

Greg Brown, Canned Goods
World Saxophone Quartet, Hattie Wall
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
Greg Brown, If I Had Known
Greg Brown, Cold and Dark and Wet

The next highest one that is not by one of those guys/bands is Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," followed by Chris Smither's "Leave the Light On."

An old Deadhead who loves jazz and folk, that's me. :-)

Virgil's Third Eclogue

One of my posts last summer about Virgil's Aeneid was about trash talking, and his Third Eclogue begins with a vigorous exchange of insults between Damoetas and Menalcas, before concluding with their singing competition, which their judge, Palaemon, ends up calling a draw. Here's a nice example of the trash, from Damoetas:

Maybe it was the day, right here, near these beeches,
When you broke Daphnis' bow and his arrows, too,
Because you couldn't stand the idea, you prick,
That that boy was given them as a song prize.
You were dying to get back at him.

As for me, I vote for Damoetas as the winner (which will of course lead Menalcas to shower me with insults), for this couplet:

Pollio loves my songs, however clumsy;
Muses, offer a calf to placate readers.

All this in David Ferry's translation, by the way.

Dead people voting

This cartoon from the New Yorker in November made me wonder how many people who voted early were dead by Election Day. Shouldn't the Republicans have been up in arms about that? Did Obama's grandmother vote for him before she died the day before the election?

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Some people are disappointed by Obama already, and he's not even in office yet! I'd rather be disappointed by Obama than surprised by McCain any day.

Anne Blonstein reading in Basel, January 8, 2009

Vernissage with Poetry Reading

ellectrique press is proud to invite you to a vernissage with poetry reading and apéro. The poet anne blonstein will read from

correspondence with nobody

Date Thursday, 8 January 2009
Time starting 18:30, reading begins at 19:00
Place Quartierzentrum Bachletten, Bachlettenstrasse 12, 4054 Basel

correspondence with nobody is a project in notarikon with the twenty-one sonnets of Shakespeare translated into German by Paul Celan.

“Blonstein’s text is thus produced by a double process like the one that transcribes DNA into RNA and translates RNA into protein – the stuff of life. This double process can be seen as analogous to the Kabbalistic transformation of thought into word, and the Christian doctrine of Word become Flesh. correspondence with nobody begins with the expression «words and silences». If we track this back to Celan, we find that the first word of his Einundzwanzig Sonette is «Was», German for «What». . . . Interpreted not word-for-word, but word-for-letter, W-A-S gives «words and silences». This, then, is the end product of Blonstein’s formula; it is also an apt beginning for her latest sequence.” Diana Collecott

There will be a book table at the vernissage (CHF 38). As of 9 January 2009 correspondence with nobody can be purchased via www.ellectriquepress.com.

(*Cover image Grace (1952) by Sonja Sekula, courtesy of kaba roessler / margrit schmid)

Seven years ago today

It was a Friday. I was driving back from shopping in Lörrach, the Wiese river to my right. I was listening to a Grateful Dead tape, one I had not listened to in a long time, from my first pair of shows (so either October 9 or 10, 1982). At that time, "Touch of Grey" was new not only to me but to all Deadheads, as the band had debuted the song only shortly before. When the chorus started, with Jerry singing "I will survive," I became so sad about his passing (then only six years previously) that I had to pull over, because I was crying.

On Monday morning, I read in the Basler Zeitung that W. G. Sebald had died in a car accident on that same Friday afternoon. I later found out that the accident was at around 4:30 p.m. or so—that is, about 5:30 in the Basel area. Pretty much the same time when I pulled over to cry.

To me, this is another example of the kind of "touching but meaningless" coincidence that Sebald referred to in Austerlitz. Others may want to interpret it more mystically.

National Disaster

From TPM:

Obama's poll numbers are up to 79/18 approve/disapprove, prompting CNN's Bill Schneider to quip: "That's the sort of rating you see when the public rallies around a leader after a national disaster. To many Americans, the Bush Administration was a national disaster."

Cosell on Lennon

I saw this 28 years ago yesterday. Shocked, I turned on KFOG. Beatles song. Could be a coincidence. Tried another station. Beatles song. A third. Another.

Back to KFOG, waited. More Beatles, then the announcement. But it was only when it became clear that a madman had done it that I flipped out and, in a fit of anger, kicked a metal filing cabinet by the front door. I was jumping up and down, laughing and crying, and holding my toe (yes, I was jumping on one foot)—and my Dad walked in the front door.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"John Lennon was murdered," I sputtered.

"But what does that have to do with your foot?" he asked.

Dylan in Basel

What more do I need to say? I am very excited that Bob Dylan will be playing in Basel on April 14! I'll be there!

Another Random Walk

So Luisa was drawing a picture of a Pilzhaus (a mushroom house), whatever that is, and she took an orange pencil and scribbled all over it, and said, "Feuer!" "Fire!" made me think of REM's "The One I Love," whose chorus I misunderstood as "I am!" when the song was first out, back in, what was it, 1987? I went to see the "Green" tour with my friend Linda Christie from KZSU that fall in Oakland, and boy did they blow the house down. Their jangly, somewhat light sound in the studio was complemented by their incredible power on stage, especially Peter Buck's electric guitar. But my favorite tune was and is "You Are the Everything."

Back then I did not know that Michael Stipe is gay. In fact, I only found that out earlier this year. And just this week, Facebook got me back in touch with Linda. Now if I could only find my KZSU buddy Clint.

Don Brown on Seidel

Readers of Frederick Seidel might enjoy Don Brown's post about Ooga-Booga. I've only read the occasional Seidel poem here and there, but Don's comments whet my appetite!

Brand New Dodge

Whenever it's November 22, and I happen to notice that it is, I think of Greg Brown's "Brand New '64 Dodge":

Money comes out of Dad's billfold.
Hankies come out of Mom's purse.
The engine hardly makes a sound
even when you put it in reverse.
It's got a push-button transmission,
hardtop convertible, 4-door.
It's November of '63
and the brand new Dodge is a '64.

And we're rolling slow down Main Street.
The asphalt and gravel crunch.
Church is finally over
and we're going to have our Sunday lunch.
And then I will play football
with my buddies down in park.
Later I'll dream about my girlfriend
as I lie alone in the dark.

She's got short red hair and blue eyes
and her swimsuit's also blue
and her little brother is retarded,
but Jesus loves him, too.
And Jesus loves our president,
even though he is a Catholic.
There's a lot for a boy to think about
as he walks along the railroad tracks.

And my sister won't get carsick
'cause we're going only half a mile
and the car still has that new car smell
and dad looks like he might smile
and the world is big and full of Autumn
and I'm hungry as can be
and we're in our brand new '64 Dodge
in November of '63

(If you are into Bob Dylan or Neil Young, and you don't know Greg Brown, then do yourself a favor and check him out! This one's from his wonderful CD "The Poet Game," but almost all of his CDs are wonderful; you can hardly go wrong.)

A Random Walk

I just picked up Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams, which was recommended on Language Log a while back. After reading the first chapter, I wondered about the author and looked through the book for a bio. There was not one, so I checked the acknowledgments, which were signed "South Haven, Michigan." That's where my Dad grew up, so I was amused by that, and I thought I would see if Williams has an email address online anywhere. Google led me to the Wikipedia page linked above, and I found out he had died in February. He was born in 1933, the same year as my Dad, so I briefly wondered if my Dad might have known him, but Williams was born in Cleveland, and only died in South Haven, so he may have only moved to South Haven as an adult. My Dad has the good fortune of having been born in South Haven and of probably not dying in Cleveland, assuming he doesn't make the mistake of moving back to Ohio after having finally escaped Toledo in 1999, nineteen years after I managed to get away from there.

Twins

My sisters are twins (though not identical), and one is gay and one is straight, so the image that C. Dale Young posted today means a lot to me (especially given the fact that it's also my sisters' birthday today!).

Floyd Skloot's "The Snow's Music"

My review of Floyd Skloot's The Snow's Music is on-line at Eyewear.

Lost submissions

Am I the only poet submitting work to magazines whose submissions get lost on a semi-regular basis? So I send in an inquiry about a submission and get told (as I just was this morning) that "We have no record of your April submission."

I have not kept statistics (who would want to?), but it seems to happen to me several times a year that an inquiry leads to a result like that. I wonder sometimes if it's a matter of rejections that don't make it from North America to Switzerland for some reason (am I not putting enough return postage on the envelopes?), but this last one was an email submission!

Feltrinelli's Ashtray II

Yet another of my translations of poems by Dieter M. Gräf is up at lyrikline. This one is called "Feltrinelli's Ashtray II".

Someday I'll make some time to update my links on the right of this page!

More Obama photos

Here's a great set of photos of Obama during the campaign, from the Boston Globe website.

November 9

As George Szirtes reminds us in a post today, November 9 is the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

A very ambiguous day in German history:

In 1918, there was Revolution. (With Kaiser Wilhelm abdicating.)

In 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch (the date chosen because of 1918).

In 1938, Kristallnacht.

In 1989, the opening of the Berlin Wall.

A day to ponder many things ...

Not enough marriages in CA now

I would have been amused by the irony of this article in the Herald Tribune this morning (from the Times), if I weren't so upset about the passage of Prop. 8 in California: "Demise of Same-Sex Weddings Disheartens Business."

Obama's Slideshow

Anyone excited about Obama's election should check out the slideshow that has been posted on the Obama Flickr page!

Le Roi des Cons

I wanted to find Georges Brassens doing this himself, but I couldn't find one on Youtube of an original performance by him. But this is close enough for this week (the Tonton Georges Trio): Obama proved that you can "dethrone the king of fools"!

Election Poetry

The Times published five poems for the election, on the opinion page. The McClatchy poem was in the International Herald Tribune. I hope they continue to publish poems!

I've only skimmed the poems, but their different approaches made me wonder about how they might be received by those who do not otherwise read poetry. Since I do read poetry regularly, the poems are all in styles that are relatively familiar to me, but I can imagine that August Kleinzahler's poem will leave a lot of people who do not read contemporary poetry shaking their heads!

Inside Straight

On Tuesday morning, William Kristol wrote in the Times about McCain's chances: "It’s an inside straight. But I’ve seen gamblers draw them."

The metaphor was not quite right, though. Drawing an inside straight means you've got AKJ10 and you cut the Q, say. But McCain was only holding the Ace and the Ten, and he would have to draw the Jack, the Queen, and the King.

I can't help quoting the Dead here:

Everybody's bragging and drinking that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on an inside straight
Well I got no chance of losing this time

And that song is called ... "Loser."

Fired Up and Ready To Go

November 4, 2008

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

A man is waking up in some hotel
this Tuesday morning, well before the time
he set his clock for. Pulling back the curtain,
he looks across the city, wondering
if this will be the day he's waited for.

There are so many men like him, who wake
in some hotel on yet another morning.
They wonder if today will be the day
that they've been working toward for months or years.

The sky begins to lighten with dawn's question.
If there's an answer, it won't come 'til dusk.

Count Me In as a Socialist

Justin Evans's post "Kall Me Karl Marx" vigorously addresses the idea that Barack Obama is a "Socialist."

The Aughts

I've often wondered what to call this decade, so I was struck by Sasha Frere-Jones's use of "the aughts" to refer to it in his article on Timbaland in the Oct. 6, 2008, issue of The New Yorker.

Interestingly, he seems to waver on the issue; first, he writes this:

A duo called the Neptunes, childhood friends of Mosley’s from Virginia Beach, gave Timbaland a run for his money at the beginning of the aughts but have been harder to find in the past few years ...

Later, he writes this:

There is a long list of fervid, breathtaking productions from the nineties and the early two thousands ...

So just when Frere-Jones is going to refer to both the nineties and the aughts, he chickens out, as if he did not really like the name after all!

Feltrinelli Gives an Ashtray as a Wedding Present

Here's Feltrinelli Gives an Ashtray as a Wedding Present, one more of my translations of Dieter M. Gräf, just up on lyrikline. Here's some information about Feltrinelli.

Election Interview

Raphael Albisser, a student of mine, interviewed me for his radio show. The topic: the American elections. He got the idea for interviewing me because of my Obama baseball cap!

The interview is in German and will be broadcast on Radio 3fach this evening (October 30) from 9 to 11 p.m. More info (all in German) is available here.

You can do a live-stream of the broadcast here. It will be repeated on Saturday, November 1, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Obama's Mental Dexterity

Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia. (David Kurtz)

Leonard Cohen, Zurich, October 25, 2008

I got a ticket for Leonard Cohen at the last minute because someone couldn't go with my friends Peter and Sophie. I had heard from many sources that his concerts this year have been extraordinary, and all the sources were right.

I have long liked Cohen's songs without particularly liking the albums of his that I have heard (except for the first one, and I admit to not having heard them all). The production of "The Tower of Song," for example, made me not like the song very much, even though it was clear what a great song it is.

But the arrangements with his current band are fabulous, always serving each song so wonderfully, and without any leanings toward the "poppiness" that I found annoying on some of his recordings.

And (in Zurich last night at least) the lyrics were mixed just right, so you could hear all the words really well. Cohen articulates quite clearly when he sings, and the mix and his clear articulation made the poetry of his work come through all the more powerfully.

Further, the concert was enough of a "show" to be satisfying, without its getting too "showy." The "show" side of the concert never got in the way of the music. In this, it was reminiscent of the early eighties concerts by Talking Heads that were turned into the movie "Stop Making Sense": the show served the music.

And finally, there were the songs I knew well already, especially "Suzanne," which has long been one of my favorite songs to play on the guitar and sing (despite my weak voice).

What can I say? I've seen a lot of great concerts, and this was one of them.

Other great memories: those Talking Heads concerts in the early eighties, Grateful Dead at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in July 1984 (and the two shows at Ventura County Fairgrounds the following week), the World Saxophone Quartet and the Dave Holland Quintet at the Great American Music Hall in the mid-eighties, various shows by the Paul Motian Trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano (especially in Berlin in 1992), the Tom Harrell Quintet in Basel in 1996, Dylan in Freiburg in 2003, Lovano with Hank Jones in Basel a couple years ago, and several Dave Holland Quintet shows in Basel over the years. And then there was Chris Smither and Greg Brown at the Great Waters Folk Festival!

I'd go see Holland in Zurich next week, in fact, if I weren't exhausted from the events I attended this week: FC Basel against FC Barcelona on Wednesay, the Swiss Indoors on Thursday (with Nalbandian, Blake, Del Potro, and Federer winning), and Cohen last night. Time to focus on work! :-)

James Fallows on "Obama's Steadiness"

James Fallows of the Atlantic (whose blog I recommend in general) has some insights into Obama's "steadiness," with this final, tangential remark:

And, as a subject for a later day, I remember how often, how vehemently, and with what certainty Obama's detractors during the Democratic primaries said that he could not, possibly, in any way, in any real world, withstand the onslaught of GOP negative campaigning once it geared up against him.

A very interesting post overall!

lyrikline update for October

Among the many new poems and translations on lyrikline in the past few months have been the following English translations of poets:

Ali Abdollahi (Iran), Dieter M. Gräf (Germany) and Nâhid Kabiri (Iran)

And I just found this list of new poets who write in English:
Erín Moure
Karen Solie
Paul Vermeersch
Ken Babstock
Suzanne Buffam
Tim Lilburn

Dropped Gs

Next time you notice Sarah Palin "drop a G"—read this post from Language Log. And start listenin' to the way you talk, cuz you're droppin' Gs, too—and you're doing it just as tactically as Palin is!

(Wouldn't it be great if linguistics were taught in high schools?)

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Coda: More on the etymology of -ing in a more recent Language Log post here.

Talk To Your Parents About John McCain

The satires of McCain and Palin are just too good to be true! (Of course, they would not amuse me as much if Gollum, I mean McCain, were ahead in the polls.)



Somebody should do "This is your brain. This is your brain on John McCain." :-)

(Thanks to PWADJ for posting this.)

Krugman

Well, at least one writer whose work I have read a lot of won a Nobel Prize this year: Paul Krugman!

McCain and Gollum

This is only one of the passages from Gail Collins's column that made me laugh out loud this morning:

Remember how we used to joke about John McCain looking like an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn? It’s only in retrospect that we can see that the keep-off-the-grass period was the McCain campaign’s golden era. Now, he’s beginning to act like one of those movie characters who steals the wrong ring and turns into a troll.

During that last debate, while he was wandering around the stage, you almost expected to hear him start muttering: “We wants it. We needs it. Must have the precious.”

Credit where credit is due: apparently, Jon Stewart first made the comparison on the Daily Show.

Household Finance

A tip of the hat to C. Dale Young for posting this one:

Poetry Calendar 2009

Alhambra Publishing in Belgium has just announced the publication of their wonderful poetry calendars for 2009. This year, they are available not only in English, French, and German (as they have been for several years), but also in Italian and Spanish! I've finally gotten around to ordering the French and German calendars (I'd order the Italian and Spanish ones, too, but I can't read those languages!); like the English calendars, I'm sure they will be a great way to come across names one has not encountered before.

The 2009 calendar in English includes my poem "Final Exam," so get yourself a copy now!

The Sound of the Shots on Lake Como

There's another of my translations of poems by Dieter M. Gräf up at lyrikline: "The Sound of the Shots on Lake Como." Click on the English title in the right-hand frame to see the translation.

My Daughter Considers Her Body

Recently, I said I wanted to get myself a collection of poems by Floyd Skloot. Then I ordered three of his books (two collections of poems and a memoir). This is from his Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (Tupelo Press, 2007):

MY DAUGHTER CONSIDERS HER BODY

She examines her hand, fingers spread wide.
Seated, she bends over her crossed legs
to search for specks or scars and cannot hide
her awe when any mark is found. She begs
me to look, twisting before her mirror,
at some tiny bruise on her hucklebone.
Barely awake, she studies creases her
arm developed as she slept. She has grown
entranced with blemish, begun to know
her body's facility for being
flawed. She does not trust its will to grow
whole again, but may learn that too, freeing
herself to accept the body's deep thirst
for risk. Learning to touch her wounds comes first.

Two things struck me about this poem. First, it reminded me of my daughter Luisa. And when I showed it to my wife she just now, she said, "That's Luisa."

Secondly, only after I read and enjoyed the poem did I notice that it is a sonnet. According to some understandings of how rhyme and meter should work, that makes this an excellent sonnet: the claim is that one should not notice rhyme and meter while reading a rhymed, metrical poem; one should not notice the artifice. So my not noticing that this is a sonnet until I looked at it a second time would be great praise.

Now I do think this is a wonderful poem, and in particular a wonderful sonnet. But why is the idea so prevalent that one should not notice a poem's artifice?

*

I wondered about posting Skloot's poem without asking him for permission, but the poem was already online (here, among other places), so I figured it would not be a problem to quote it in full again.

That One That One That One

This is so funny!

Nobel Prize comments

B. J. Epstein was one of the first to post something about Le Clézio, and I wrote the following comments on her post:

Comment 1:

Americans: I certainly don't think Americans are too insular to deserve a world-literature prize. Many poets think John Ashbery would deserve the Nobel, and given his influence on poetry in other languages (French and German being the two that I know about), that would be justifiable. Then we always hear of Roth and DeLillo and Pynchon as candidates, and all of them would be worthy. If Engdahl explicitly said that Pynchon is too insular, then he gets an F in Pynchon class; I may not be a Pynchon fanatic, but his work is global in its reach and its ambition.

As for Le Clézio, that is a nice surprise (even though he was listed at 14-1 on the odds list that Jonathan Mayhew posted on his blog)! I've never read his work but he is a major figure in France.

Comment 2:

Well, the Academy seems to agree with Engdahl: since the last American won the Prize (Morrison in 1993), only three prizes have gone to non-Europeans (Oe, Xingjian, and Coetzee), unless you say that Pamuk is not European.

Morrison, though, was the last of an eight-year run in which only Cela was European (unless you count Brodsky as European).

Engdahl could also say that poets are not doing good work, at least as far as the Academy is concerned: the last writer who won it for poetry was Szymborska in 1996. BUT before that there was a small semi-cluster of poets: Heaney, Walcott, Paz, and, if we go back a bit further, Seifert in 1983 and Milosz and Elytis a few years earlier.

I just spent more time thinking about that than I should have! :-)

Poems at Nth Position

I've got six poems in the October issue of Nth Position. I like the range of work represented: the oldest one is from the early 1990s, and the most recent from last year. My thanks to Todd Swift for showcasing so much of my work!

White Privilege

Here's my favorite line from a post by Tim Wise on "White Privilege":

"White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America."

(Hat tip to Poet with a Day Job!)

Poem sort of in Sports Illustrated

A poem has appeared in Sports Illustrated, at least in the online version. Well, at least as a link in Jon Wertheim's online column! Page down a bit! (Thanks to my Mom for pointing this out.)

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

John Gallaher tipped me off to the new David Byrne & Brian Eno CD Everything That Happens Will Happen Today a while back, and I just thought I would openly thank him for the great tip! Get yourself a copy here. A must for all fans of Talking Heads, Eno, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts!

Susana Gardner and Nicholas Manning: A Poetry Reading in Basel, November 19, 2008

[Click on the image to see the poster in a larger format.]

Official American Sadism, by Anthony Lewis

This is from Anthony Lewis's "Official American Sadism," an essay in the September 25 issue of the New York Review of Books. The book he is referring to here is Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power. Hamdan is the plaintiff in the famous Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Bush's military commissions were unconstitutional.

One of the remarkable facts exposed in this book is that Hamdan was first questioned in Guantánamo by an FBI agent who carefully built up a relationship with him and, in time, got detailed statements from him about al-Qaeda and some of its leaders. The agent had ample evidence for Hamdan to be prosecuted in a federal court; he thought he could persuade Hamdan to testify against more important al-Qaeda figures in return for a reduced sentence. But to his dismay Hamdan was designated for trial before a military commission; the FBI was immediately cut off from him and lost a potentially important witness.

This confirms something I started being worried about in September 2001: the militarization of the "war on terror" meant that criminal trials would not be one of the principal means used to combat terrorism. And this proves it: the military commissions clearly hinder the battle against bin Laden and company!

Lewis also quotes Major General Anthony Taguba:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

Taguba, "who was appointed to investigate the torture at Abu Ghraib and found that there had been 'wanton criminal abuse' of detainees, was forced into retirement."

Gopnik on Magic

Magicians are, in their relations with one another, both extremely generous and extremely jealous. Just as chefs know that recipes are of little value in themselves, magicians know that learning the method is only the beginning of doing the trick. What they call “the real work” isn’t the method, which anyone can learn from a book (and, anyway, all decent magicians know roughly how most tricks are done), but the whole of the handling and timing and theatrics of the effect, which are passed along from magician to magician and from generation to generation. The real work is the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas. The real work is what makes a magic effect magical. (Adam Gopnik, "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," The New Yorker, March 17, 2008)

Of course, I really should have commented on this back in March or April, but this article is not as timely as the Hilary Clinton article in the same issue of The New Yorker!

Anyway, this was an excellent article by Adam Gopnik on magicians and how they understand what they do, and it was full of passages like this that seem to touch on the magic of other arts as well, including poetry. The "real work" is what separates the great magicians from the decent ones, and one could argue that it is a similar "real work" of "handling and timing and theatrics" that makes a great poet.

And that "real work" involves not just the timing of the individual performance (read, the individual poem), but a sense of "the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas"—that is, an understanding of what magic (or poetry) has already done, and what one's own contribution to that activity, that practice, that tradition, and its ideas is.

*

In the process of looking up that article, I discovered that one of my all-time favorite New Yorker profiles is also online: this one about the magician and actor Ricky Jay, from 1993. Now if only they had the David Mamet profile online, too (and there's a connection here, since Jay was in at least two of Mamet's movies, "The Spanish Prisoner" and "House of Games").

"Man is the animal who dreams. And when he dreams, he dreams of money." (Ricky Jay in "The Spanish Prisoner")

Slavery as Basis for an Ideology of Deregulation

The following is from "Jefferson's Concubine," Marie Morgan and Edmund S. Morgan's review of Annette Gordon-Reed's book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (the review is in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, dated October 9, 2008—as usual, the NYRB is published in the future ...):

What is important to the Hemings family's story is the harsh and nearly inescapable nature of the "peculiar institution" in the time of Thomas Jefferson. Racial identification was its sine qua non, and specifically race as legislated by slave masters, whose primary goal was "the maximum protection of property rights—with little or no intervention by the state or other third parties." (The quotations are apparently from Gordon-Reed's book.)

What struck me here is something that I perhaps should have noticed ages ago, but it is something that I have never seen commented on: the historical starting point for an ideology of deregulation and non-intervention by government is slavery. More precisely, it is the attempt by slave-owners to defend their property rights.

I would be an idiot if I had not noticed that "states' rights" derives from the defense of slavery, but this is the first time I have ever noticed the connection between deregulation and the defense of slavery.

So from now on, when I hear someone support "deregulation," I'll think "slaveholder ideology," just as I long have done on hearing "states' rights."