Interview with Larry Grenadier

On Friday, May 6, the Overtone Quartet played at the Jazz Festival Basel, but with a different line-up than usual: instead of Dave Holland (whose name was on the tickets and the posters), Larry Grenadier was on bass, with Chris Potter on saxophones, Jason Moran on piano and keyboards, and Eric Harland on drums. After the fabulous concert, I had a chance to talk to Larry for a few minutes, and he agreed to do an e-mail interview with me about the show and his time in the Overtone Quartet.

AS: You replaced Dave Holland in his own band for the Overtone Quartet's recent European tour. How did this unusual situation come to pass?

LG: Dave has had some family matters to deal with lately that have kept him from going on the road. At the beginning of January, I subbed for him with the Overtone band in NYC at Birdland for a week. So this tour in Europe was the second time playing this music. It is an unfortunate circumstance but a great opportunity to play with this band.

AS: How much time did you have to rehearse the material? Was Dave involved in the rehearsals? If so, how did that work?

LG: We rehearsed for a few hours before the first NY gigs, just the four of us. The way the band works is that they play everyone's compositions. So we ended up playing songs by Chris, Jason, Eric and Dave as well as a song of mine. Like most bands I play in, rehearsal time is fairly minimal. After the particulars of the songs are worked out, like form, most of the development occurs on the bandstand. This is the way I like it.

AS: Did you play Dave's own parts in his compositions? Did his style influence how you played the improvised parts? (And by the way, was he one of your influences when you were younger?)

LG: Dave Holland was absolutely a major influence on me. He was and remains for me a great example of a modern bass player with all the attributes of the tradition. In the songs we played by Dave, there weren't specific bass parts. The parts I came up with were a reaction to what I felt the music needed with this particular group of musicians. This is my MO for all I do. I am using the bass to make the music sound the best I can. It all depends on the context.

AS: Had you played with Jason Moran, Eric Harland, and Chris Potter, the other members of the Overtone Quartet, before? If so, what was different, if anything, about playing with them in this context?

LG: I have played with all of them in a variety of situations. Chris I met soon after moving to NY in the early 90's. We played a lot together in the bands of Renee Rosnes, Al Foster and others, as well as playing on some of his early records. I have played with Jason and Eric with Charles Lloyd and some other contexts as well. They are some of my favorite musicians around, and in this group, the Overtone Quartet, it felt very natural to slip into the vibe. They are all completely open musicians, willing to let the music flow as it will.

AS: Do you think that "being Dave Holland" in his band will have any influence on your playing in the future?

LG: Every musical situation leaves some residue. This one being a completely positive one has left me more than a fair share of inspiration. Because this group is truly a collective, I never really felt like I was replacing Dave. I just took it as a gig with Chris, Jason and Eric. All I can hope for in the future is that I can play more with these great musicians and wish Dave and his family all my best.

*

AS (follow-up to the second question): How does this "development ... on the bandstand" work in practice? Was there a particularly memorable or striking example of such development in this particular gig with the Overtone Quartet that you could use to describe the process?

LG: What is happening on the bandstand with this group, but can also be said for all the bands I play in, is that a high degree of focus and perceptive listening enables almost telepathic exchanges to occur constantly. All music has this, but in my opinion, jazz music has it on the highest level. We are constantly feeding off each other. Musical decisions that worked last night might not be applicable the next night. Anything preplanned often leads to disaster. As William Burroughs said, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." For example, on Dave's tune "Four Winds," after the melody is played, anything can happen. The solos, the feel, the length are going to be different each performance. I'm not sure if audiences always understand this. Sometimes a listener's expectations get in the way just as they can for the performer. A certain amount of openness is essential to stepping out of the way and letting the music be what it wants to be that night. If someone wants to hear the same thing played the same way each night or just like the record, there are plenty of better ways to experience that then to go to an Overtone Quartet concert.

*

My thanks to Larry for his comments—and to him, Chris Potter, Jason Moran, and Eric Harland for a fantastic concert. I hope to see them all again live soon!

And I hope that Dave Holland will be able to tour again this fall, as he is scheduled to appear in Basel in November with Pepe Habichuela.

Here's the Overtone Quartet in Wolfsburg a few days before the Basel concert:

Nonrepresentational dolls

The girl plays with nonrepresentational dolls. Her games are devoid of any narrative content, amusements that depend upon their own intrinsic form. If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy. Her favorite toy was a notion about color. She lost it in the snow. (Ben Lerner, "Angle of Yaw")

This prose poem from Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw lightly stakes out and ironizes an aesthetics that is not its own: the aesthetics of "nonrepresentation," of the absence of narrative, of a formal game played for its own sake and not for the sake of expressing anything. This is the kind of art that leads to discussions that begin with the phrase "it's about ..." and then can apparently go anywhere they like without reference to the dolls, toys, or snow that make up the work. All that's left are the containers the work is or was in, and "a notion about color" that has in fact been lost.

A reading of this poem along these lines could begin with "it's about ..." and then talk about the aesthetics it describes. But the poem itself is representational, and it does have narrative content. So if it is "about" its aesthetics, it is not about the aesthetics that it describes—or at least it is about the limits of such an aesthetics. The poem celebrates the girl's play and thus apparently privileges an emphasis on form over content, but in its own shape, it is about both the box and the toy: its shape and form are fun to play with, but what really makes them fun to play with is their content, and the wonderful "representational" image of the creative girl.

As such, the poem "is about" the necessity of content, or perhaps the necessity of a relationship to content even in its absence: the nonrepresentational, the lack of narrative, the empty box, the notion of color lost in the snow—all these "forms" depend on their absent content. And what they once contained is also important: they have to have contained something worth playing with; otherwise, they themselves aren't worth playing with either.

On Bob Dylan the Poet

Martin Schäfer and I were interviewed by Eric Facon for Swiss Radio DRS2 in honor of Bob Dylan's birthday. You can listen to the interview here (in German).

Richard Harvell, Padraig Rooney, Human Shields

ESP and The Basel Irish Club

present

AN EVENING OF FICTION, POETRY, AND MUSIC

with

Richard Harvell, Padraig Rooney, and Human Shields

7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 26

Grosser Hörsaal, English Seminar, University of Basel

Nadelberg 6, Basel

Sponsored by the Basel Irish Club

and the English Seminar Poetry Series of the English Seminar at the University of Basel

For more information, click on the flyer below.

Theories of the Mainstream

No mainstream, whether literary, artistic, or political, has any need to come up with a theory to explain itself. Theory is necessary to explain things that do not go without saying, and mainstreams cannot even see that they have assumed that they go without saying.

From the inside of the political mainstream, radicals appear in need of explanation, but the inside is that which does not need to be explained. A generation later, the old mainstream does require explanation, and hence theory and historical analysis. As a result, the contemporary mainstream can be quite critical of its historical antecedents, but the idea of turning such critiques upon itself remains unthinkable.

This can also be applied to poetry: the contemporary mainstream reads the Modernists, not the poets who were the mainstream back then.

[Revised version of comments on this post by John Gallaher.]

Part of the Ritual

I remember a Stanford professor (Mark Mancall) asking a roomful of freshmen if we were nervous about the exam the next day. (The course was the wonderfully titled "Structured Liberal Education," SLE for short; the students in it all lived in the same dormitory, and we were all a little bit crazy.)

So he asked us if were nervous about the exam, our first in the course.

"Yes," we cried.

"Good," he said. "That's part of the ritual."

The Quarry and the Lot

"Maybe writing is a hobby, you know? I might as well build shelves or go fishing."

So says Luke Owen, a poet and community-college teacher who is one of the four narrators of Mark Wallace's novel The Quarry and the Lot. He clearly uses the idea that writing might be a "hobby" as a negative point: "hobbies" are merely (to quote a definition) "something that one likes to do or study in one's spare time" and are of little importance to anyone else; a further definition at the same link says that a hobby is "engaged in primarily for pleasure." And Luke would not be writing just for his own pleasure.

Yet I have been pondering for quite a while the idea that considering writing a hobby might be a good idea. The rest of the first definition of hobby that I quoted above adds that a hobby is a "favorite pastime or avocation"—and it's the word "avocation" that is interesting here. One sense of the shorter word "vocation" is that of a calling, as to the priesthood, and that is, of course, what writers like to think of their writing as. A "vocation" is something serious; an "avocation" is apparently less serious.

But if I play briefly with the idea that Luke Owen is a real person, I'd have to conclude that he would find the idea of writing as a "vocation" in a spiritual sense ridiculous—I don't think he ever makes any explicitly anti-spiritual remarks, but his great skepticism about so many things (especially the suburbs he grew up in) would surely apply to such an idea as well. But if such a writer cannot see his writing as a "vocation," then what's left but to consider it an "avocation"—a "hobby."

But that would make it as apparently insignificant (from Luke's perspective) as "building shelves or going fishing." My immediate thought is to wonder what's wrong with either of those activities (and Nick, one of the novel's other narrators, does in fact run a furniture and carpentry shop he inherited from his father). It reminds me of my recent post about ham radio and hardcore. And in fact, in the novel, when Luke was first active in poetry in the DC area, he was also part of the hardcore scene, which suggests that he would see hardcore (if he were a musician rather than a writer) as something worthwhile that is more than "just a hobby."

Near the end of the novel, Luke has shifted ground on this issue. In a discussion with his father, he surprises his father by using the word "duty" ("I've never heard you use the word duty before") in a reference to "the duty of the artist." He explains what that duty is: "To keep doing what you're doing and let other people know." It's the second phrase there that makes "artistic" work (slightly) "more than just a hobby": you let other people know what you're doing not because you want to sell them shelves or go fishing with them or exchange codes on your shortwave radio, but because you want to communicate with them.

And in this sense, I'm grateful to Mark Wallace, because he "kept doing what he does" and also "let other people know" by publishing his book. There's much more to it than just Luke's crisis as a writer, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to ... well, to anyone whose hobby is to read thought-provoking novels.

An Operation

Tonight, I conducted an operation that was darkened by the history of cloudless black smoke from the actions of heartbreak. And yet the world at the dinner table forced our hearts where we came from, what God prayed to what family to protect our justice that attacks innocents to protect years of professionals in defense. In the government safe haven the globe worked to kill scores, including a part of the capture across the border to operate its affiliates so shortly after I directed the director to make the bin the top against our broader network. Years of intelligence lead to it, and many months to run this national possibility that located a compound inside last week, determined enough to take action to get him to my direction, the targeted compound in a small team carried out the operation with no care to avoid a firefight, they killed custody for over two decades, and continued our death the most significant achievement in our nation’s defeat. Yet his effort will pursue us and we will remain as we do, we must not be at war made clear, just as after our war a leader of slaughtered countries, including our demise in peace and human dignity. Over the years, I’ve made clear that Pakistan knew where that is done but our cooperation with the compound was war against Pakistan and the Pakistani President, and my counterparts agree that this is essential that affiliates did not choose our shores with the senseless citizens of service and the costs of efforts on time as a letter to a loved one the eyes of a member who Americans never tolerate being idly killed. We will be relentless to the values that make nights like families who have terror. Tonight, the intelligence worked tirelessly to not see their names feel the satisfaction of their pursuit. We give this operation the unparalleled country of the heaviest September. Finally, let the families who have wavered in whatever it takes to attack our sense that it has frayed yet a testament to the determination of the cause of our complete mind. That is the history of prosperity our people struggle to stand for sacrifices to make the place remember that these things wealth or power, are God, liberty and justice all bless God.

Poems in Nth Position

I have three poems up in the April selection of poetry in Nth Position.

The first, "A Thousand Times Too Many," derives from this.

The third, "L'art pour l'art," is about this guy:

Elvis Costello with Furthur

I've been on a serious Elvis Costello kick for several months now, and I am even using four of his albums as material for a course this term. And I have been avidly following Furthur, the band started in the fall of 2009 by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, to the point where I have listened to every show they have played (from the Live Music Archive and the digital downloads of their shows that they are selling).

So of course I was thrilled to hear that Elvis had sat in with Furthur on Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall. His wife Diana Krall even sang "Ripple," and that's Larry Campbell on violin in the photo (whose wife Teresa Williams also sat in).

From Tennyson to today

Robert Archambeau has just posted a long discussion of tensions between aestheticism and morality (or politics) in Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot. He starts with a discussion of a tension in Tennyson's work between "cryptic, symbolic, ambiguous poems ... that resist being converted to moral messages" and poems that "told the bourgeoise reader what he wanted to hear about decency, self-sacrifice, and the keeping stiff of the upper lip." By the end of the 19th century, then, the market for the latter kind of poem had dried up, and Symbolist poets and their Modernist successors focused their attention on aesthetic issues, while still being drawn to such extra-aesthetic issues as Irish politics (Yeats) and the renewal of community (Eliot; through a return to pre-twentieth-century Christian values).

Archambeau's discussion of these issues is fascinating, and it led me to ponder the extension of his point about tensions in the work of these poets into the contemporary era. These days, many poets in North America, Great Britain, and Ireland have put a lot of energy into pondering how the audience for poetry can be increased. Since the loss of the market for moralistic poetry in the course of the nineteenth century and poetry's subsequent aestheticist turn, very little poetry has managed to reach a wider audience. Those poets who want to do so could theoretically try returning to the kind of moralism that characterizes "The Charge of the Light Brigade," but given developments in poetry since then, it is highly unlikely that they would find such a project at all interesting—and in any case, as Archambeau makes clear, there's little or no market for such work anymore anyway.

The main aestheticist strains of contemporary poetry tend to be pretty disdainful of those poets who do achieve modest success (meaning more sales than most poets, but still very small blips on the radar of whole culture), such as Billy Collins and Mary Oliver in the United States and Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy in the United Kingdom. (With Armitage, at least, I could provide a defense of the aesthetic quality of all of his work, as I could with parts of the work of Collins and Duffy—neither of whom I have read all of—but that is something for another day.) But what is there for them to do, the poets who feel tensions like those felt by Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot while also finding that the work of Armitage, Collins, Duffy, and Oliver lacks such productive tension between aesthetics and some kind of public voice? The very fact that I use the vague phrase "some kind of public voice" points toward a solution and highlights the problem at the same time: poets need to create a market for poetry to have a public voice, but it is not clear what kind of public voice that ought to be.

But here is where I return to a point I have made frequently over the years (probably somewhere on my blog, but definitely often in conversation): even if there is little market for poetry in the contemporary English-speaking world, there is a huge market for verse—it's called pop music. Now some might immediately dismiss this point by saying that song lyrics are not poetry, but I hope they would at least agree that "page poems" and song lyrics are both examples of "verse" in a broad sense that is completely consistent with the traditions of both poetry and popular song (written in lines, often with meter and rhyme). And it is worthwhile for poets to consider what it is that makes the verse of popular music so popular.

Generally, pop music does not aspire to the kind of moralism that shaped one side of Tennyson's work (although it does contain a strain of that moralism in such songs as "We Are The World"—things that make you feel like a good person when you sing along with them). And of course it is hard to generalize about all pop music without people jumping in with counterexamples. But one relatively consistent feature of pop music is that it does not impose itself on its listeners: the lyrics tend to be simple, even vague, so that they are open enough for listeners to relate them to their own lives in general and their own particular experiences.

In contrast, one relatively consistent feature of contemporary poetry in English is that it does impose itself on its readers: it makes the reader listen to the voice of the poet, instead of providing, as pop lyrics do, a space for listeners to fill with their own voices, as it were. This focus on the poet's voice is in keeping with the Romantic-aestheticist tradition that Archambeau discusses, and I am all in favor of being imposed on by poets, since I am part of that tradition. But poets who feel tensions between the privacy of aestheticism and the possibility of a public voice might well consider the ways in which pop lyrics, the contemporary verse with the broadest popular appeal, relate to the audience that consumes them.

There was / were a huge number

I was preparing a grammar exercise from a book, and I came across the sentence "there were a huge number of mosquitoes." The sentence was not actually testing the number of the verb, but I stumbled over it, as I would spontaneously say "there was a huge number of mosquitoes." But I also noticed that I would say "a huge number of mosquitoes were there."

So I spent a few minutes digging around in grammar books and found several confirmations of the latter point ("number of" + plural verb) but no discussion of the number of the verb in such a construction with "there." So there's always a nice Google test:

"there were a huge number of" = 381k hits
"there was a huge number of" = 15.5m hits

You can't always count on Google to do your linguistic research for you, but this one seems pretty clear! Over 40:1 in favor of the singular "was" here, even though the reverse is true without "there" (though only just under 9:1):

"a huge number of people were" = 1.36m hits
"a huge number of people was" = 156k hits

Take out "huge" and the ratio is over 100:1 in favor "there was a number of", but about 20:1 in favor of "a number of people were."

So the descriptive conclusion is that in contemporary English, "number of" usually takes a plural verb, but "there X a number of" usually has a singular verb.

(Just trying my hand at a little linguistics.)

"Lacks a concept of lack"

In one of the prose poems in his book Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner puts a new twist on the popular "No Word for X" meme when he refers to "a culture that lacks a concept of lack." The wonderful irony of that phrase is something to keep in mind whenever you come across a claim that a particular language "has no word for" a particular concept, such as the recent claim that "Japanese has no word for 'looting.'" (For a discussion of that, see this Language Log post; for a list of the many LL posts about the issue, see this post.)

White Egrets

Derek Walcott can spin out a long phrase as well as anyone, as in this poem, number V of part 10 of White Egrets, "In Italy":

Those hillsides ridged with ramparts and bell towers,
the crests of olives, those wheat-harvested slopes
through glittering aspens, those meadows of sunflowers,
with luncheon napkins like the mitres of popes,
lanes with long shadows, wide open retreats
guarded by leaping cypresses, shade-splashed ochre
walls, then the towns themselves with streets
as close as chain-mail, named after some mediocre
saint, coiling as one road down to the hazed sea.
All of those little ports, all named for saints,
redeem the sadness that was Sicily
and the stupidity of innocence.
It is like Sicilian light but not the same
sun or my shadow, a bitterness like a loss.
Drink of its bitterness to forget her name,
that is the mercy oblivion allows.

Look how the first nine lines play out phrases of varying length against the relatively even lengths of the lines. Look how the nouns that are the heads of those phrases run through those lines: hillsides, crests, slopes, lanes, retreats, walls, towns. Look how the feel created by the incomplete sentence of the first nine lines contrasts with the much shorter, complete sentences of the last seven. It's a poem that always knows where it is—in Italy—and yet it begins with a breathlessness that leaves you hanging somewhere before it sets you down there. White Egrets is full of writing like this.

But it is also full of poems that stumble rather than take off. Contrast the above with this poem, part III of section 13 of the book, "The Spectre of Empire":

The docks are dark and hooded, the warehouses
locked, and his insomnia rages like the moon
above the zinc roofs and spindly palms; he rouses
himself and dresses slowly in his small room:
he walks to the beach, the hills are brooding whales
against them drift the flambeaux and the lanterns
of the crab fishermen, the yachts have furled their sails,
he goes for this long walk when guilt returns;
indifferent to a constellation's Morse,
his resignation no longer sends
out fleets of power, an echo of that force
like dissipating spume on the night sand.
To the revolving beam of the Cyclopic lighthouse
he hears the suction of his soul's death-rattle,
but his is a history without remorse.
He hears the mocking cannonade of battle
from the charging breakers and sees the pluming hordes
of tribesmen galloping down the hills of sand
and hears the old phrase "Peccavi. I have Sind."
Think of the treaties signed by the same one-ringed hand,
think of the width its power could encompass
"one-seventh of the globe," we learnt in class.
Its promontories, docks, its towers and minarets
with the power that vanished as dew does from the grass
in the rising dawn of a sun that never sets.

Many of the things I am going to say in what follows could be dismissed as quibbles, except for the fact that there are so many of them.

The poem begins with a simple sentence, and then a simple elliptical phrase that implies the use of the same verb: "The docks are dark and hooded, the warehouses / [are] locked." This is perfectly fine, of course, but I find it quite clumsy to continue with an "and" after that ellipsis, followed by a clause with a new verb.

Eith that elliptical construction and then a longer, complete main clause, the semi-colon in line three (instead of a new sentence) makes things even more imbalanced. All the phrases in the long sentence fragment that begins the first poem I quoted balance beautifully; here, in contrast, the four clauses of the first lines do not build up toward something but instead head off in a variety of directions, semantically and syntactically.

That fourth line ends with a colon. What should follow a colon? Some sort of explanation or clarification of what came before. But what follows this colon is simply the next step in a narrative of what "he" is doing. And after a short clause about him comes a short clause that shifts the focus to the hills, so that the first five lines have six different clauses. Not only are the relationships between those clauses unclear, the sentence is not even finished yet.

Now take a look back at the punctuation at line breaks in the first poem I quoted: every line that could end in a comma does end in a comma. (The next-to-last line could have a semi-colon instead, but it works fine with a comma.) But here, as line five moves to line six, there is no comma. If we take the absence of a comma here seriously, then the enjambment across the line makes no sense: "the hills are brooding whales against them drift the flambeaux" is grammatical nonsense. "Against which" would work, but it doesn't say that.

Things settle down a bit for the next few lines, but it's worth noting that the first eight lines here contain nine main clauses. It's possible to write a compound sentence with nine main clauses over eight lines without getting clumsy, but these eight lines begin with clumsy syntax and are marred by sloppy punctuation—and the sentence is still not finished!

The next four lines are one main clause, but there are several problems here, beginning with my on-going question as to why this is all one sentence. In passing, I would also note that the semi-colons are used inconsistently here. (Note that I am not trying to tell Walcott how to use punctuation marks; I am just expecting from him what I would expect from any writer: that the y be used consistently in a way that serves the poems well.)

Then there's the question of the reference of "indifferent": it's easy enough to attach it to "his" so that we read "he is indifferent," but there is a moment of hesitation when it is the resignation that seems indifferent, which doesn't quite make sense. (I am not one to make too big a deal about "misplaced modifiers" that modify a possessive like this, but it's another infelicity to add to the list.)

Then there's the question of just what it is that "an echo of that force" is supposed to be doing syntactically: I guess it is supposed to be either a clarification of "fleets of power" (an appositive) or a second complement to "sends out" (with no coordination between the two complements). But neither of those options makes much sense to me.

The next sentence is mercifully brief, but even here a syntactic problem arises: in effect, the sentence says that "he hears the suction ... to the revolving beam." The introductory prepositional phrase with "to," that is, simply has no place in the main clause that follows.

The following sentence picks up on "he hears" and adds a "sees" and another "hears." It's actually fine in terms of the flow of points and the overall grammar, syntax, and punctuation, but even here, the verb phrases are connected clumsily: "he hears ... and sees ... and hears ..." ("Everything only connected by and and and," as Elizabeth Bishop would put it.)

The two lines that begin with "think" are lines 20 and 21 of the poem; as with the end of the section of "In Italy," it would be possible to use a semi-colon at the end of line 20, but it is unnecessary.

But some punctuation mark is necessary at the end of line 21—a colon, perhaps? That would introduce an explanation or clarification of "the width its power could encompass." Or perhaps a dash? That would be more emphatic; it would make the movement to line 22 less a matter of logic than a leap of memory, in a sense. — Even a comma would be better than the nothing that is here! (Here, though, a semi-colon would be nonsense, completely inconsistent even with Walcott's own somewhat haphazard use of semi-colons in the rest of the poem.)

The last three lines are not a complete sentence, which is not a problem (see the beautiful incomplete sentence I first talked about above). But there are still problems here: the promontories, docks, towers, and minarets in line 23 are not presented as a simple list along the lines of the one I just presented them in—a straight list of four items with a final "and" before the last item and no repetition of the initial "its." I could also imagine doing this: "Its promontories and docks, its towers and minarets." That's a relatively conventional rhythm for a list of four items. (I think there's even a term for that in classical rhetoric, but I can't remember what it is.) Yet once the list is established as not using "and" and not repeating "its," the introduction of "its" before "towers" makes me stumble.

And finally, there's the question of what the prepositional phrase "with the power" is supposed to be connected to. Should this be read as "its minarets with the power that vanished as dew does from the grass ..."? What does that mean?

Why go into this poem's infelicities at such great length? Two reasons: first, there is a great deal of beautiful writing in White Egrets, as beautiful as the first poem I quoted. But there is also a great deal of clumsy writing, where I find myself having to ask basic questions about the intended grammar and syntax. If these poems had no punctuation, I would expect to be doing that work, but they are punctuated, and the poems that work wonderfully succeed in part because they carry me along in a poetic trance in which I do not have to worry about syntax and grammar. So it is extremely surprising to find the trance repeatedly broken by such questions.

Secondly, Walcott's book won the T. S. Eliot Prize in January. I was happy to hear that, as I had read all but one of the shortlisted books and I had not thought that any of the others contained any poems as downright beautiful as some of the poems in this book (like the one I began with). But Anne Stevenson, the chair of the judges, was quoted (here) as saying that the book was "moving and technically flawless." Many of the poems in White Egrets are indeed both moving and technically flawless, but as I could show with a significant number of other poems in the book besides the one I dissected here, the book is full of technical flaws—and those flaws make it harder for the poems to be consistently moving.

Perspectives on nuclear reactors

A few days ago, this article about the design of the Fukushima nuclear reactors got a lot of attention. I appreciated it for its clear, careful description of the design of boiling water reactors. When I posted a link to it on my Facebook page, the comments began to fly, and I saw many of my Facebook friends linking to the same article (and even to a German version of it).

One thing I wondered in the comment stream on my posting of the link was whether a nuclear skeptic who understood the design might also provide an analysis of the situation. Well, it turns out, according to this article in today's New York Times (and International Herald Tribune) that such an analysis has been made—and not only has this reactor design been criticized, it has even been criticized right from its earliest days. And the NYT article cites several people who clearly have the credentials to understand the Fukushima design but have also long identified potential problems with the design that are the very problems that are now causing trouble in Japan.

Given that the author of the first description of boiling water reactors linked above apparently wrote the description in an email to his family to reassure them that things were okay, it's not surprising that he did not mention the existence of long-standing criticisms of the safety of such reactors.

But once the article went public, it's too bad that the MIT people who offered to host the article did not provide that information. This is a case where the "two-sides-of-the-story" ethic of contemporary journalism (which so often leads to a "balanced" presentation of a situation where one side is, as an FB friend put it recently in a different context, "batshit") actually does serve a purpose.

Just One

So I wanted some chocolate with my cup of coffee after lunch, but we're out of chocolate, in part because I intentionally did not buy any so that I would not overindulge.

But we have a box of Walker's Belgian Chocolate Chunk Cookies, so I thought I would eat just one. Then I wondered whether I would be able to resist eating another after eating the first one.

It seemed like that would be a really hard thing to do, as these cookies belong to the category of "you can't eat just one" (one of the many old advertising slogans still slithering around my brain). So I thought about giving myself a reward if I managed to eat only one.

But all I could think was this: "If I manage to eat just one, then I'll give myself another as a reward."

The Garden in Dream

Here's a stanza from David Harsent's "The Garden in Dream" (from his new collection Night):

VII
This flower's baby blue seems almost bland
except, when you hold it close, you get the true
depth; and when you look away, you're blind.

I'm struck by how this stanza seems to summarize the logic of a great deal of poetry. Perhaps if I highlight a few words, I can make my point clear:

This flower's baby blue seems almost bland
except, when you hold it close, you get the true
depth; and when you look away, you're blind.

The logic is that something seems to be one way, but a closer look reveals that it is not what it first appeared to be. (And as I type up this note I wrote the other day, it strikes me that I am using the same logic when I highlight those phrases: look closely and you'll see something else.)

What takes this stanza beyond the logic of "look deeper and you'll see the truth" is this: what is revealed is not something about the flower. In fact, what is ultimately revealed is not "the true / depth" but one's own blindness—as if the result of revelation were the impossibility of further revelation.

So maybe what this post reveals is also not something about the poem but something about me: I am always seeing the ways in which seeing becomes indistinguishable from blindness. (So what it reveals is that I read Paul de Man back in the day? Blindness and Insight and all that.)

Skills

I saw a headline in the local free daily newspaper the other day that said that children today are better at playing computer games than they are at tying their shoes. I did not read the article (I saw the headline over someone's shoulder on the bus), but I can imagine someone saying that this is another sign of how things are going downhill. But frankly, it's no surprise at all: children know how to play computer games because they play computer games, and they don't know how to tie their shoes because they have velcro shoes. If a skill disappears, it might just mean that people don't need that skill anymore.

Horizon Review, Issue 5

Issue Five of Horizon Review is up, and it's a pleasure to have four poems of mine featured alongside the work of such a strong line-up of poets, including Mark Granier, Alison Brackenbury, Ian Duhig, and Rob A. Mackenzie.

Land of Marvels

The main character of Barry Unsworth's 2009 novel Land of Marvels (reviewed in the New York Times here) is John Somerville, an archaeologist doing an Assyrian dig shortly before World War One begins. At one point, he ponders the reign of Ashurnasirpal II, in a passage that makes clear what contemporary issues were on Unsworth's mind as he embarked on a novel set in what would one day become Iraq (which, it turns out, is the novel's last word):

Some change in the human spirit here, not in the doing but in the telling, the pride, some ugly twist of soul towards a new idea of supremacy. How? From where? Why among these people at this time? Bred by conquest, like an appetite that grows from feeding? With the blessing of their god Ashur to lend them a sense of mission, bloodshed would become a form of devotion. Since Ashur was above all other gods and the king was his earthly embodiment, there would be a duty to impose his cult, carry light into dark places. The light they had carried had been cast by the flames of devastation. They too, the light bearers, had ended in that same fire.

A later passage returns to the same considerations:

This story began with the second king called Ashurnasirpal, the first of them all to boast of his power to inflict suffering, the first to make this power the symbol and test of kingship, the first to aim not merely at conquest and plunder, as had his forebears, but at the permanent subjection of the conquered peoples, changing the very nature of the state, from one rich and strong within its borders and content to be so to one that gloried in dominion, ruthless in its greed for territory and vassalage, a policy that was to be followed by all his successors down to the last days, down to the fires in which the empire perished.

On the basis of these two passages, one of the concerns of Unsworth's novel is a variant of "those who don't know the past are doomed to repeat it," and the doomed party here would be today's United States, doomed to burn in the very fires of devastation that have been dominating its policies over the last nine-plus years.

But a novel that leaves it at that would hardly be worth commenting on. There is an American character in the novel, Alex Elliott, a geologist who, for strategic reasons involving oil, is pretending to be an archaeologist attached to Somerville's working party. This is a character who is marked in many ways as untrustworthy; in fact, he is even apparently selling his services as a geologist to the Americans, the British, and the Germans all at the same time. And this ambiguous figure is the one who actually states the principle of history: "As someone wiser than I has said, if we ignore the lessons of the past, we will be condemned to repeat our mistakes." He says this at the end of a dinner-table soliloquy about the Hittites—but of course he is not really an archaeologist at all, but a geologist who has boned up on archaeology in order to be able to pass as an archeologist, and he is not interested in the mistakes of the past but in the possibilities of the future, a future that, as he foresees, will be dominated by oil. This quotable quote from "someone wiser than" Elliott is thus deeply ironized in the novel, and any straightforward reading of Unsworth's implicit comparison of the Assyrians and the Americans is called into question by the novel as a whole. The comparison stands, of course, but Unsworth is both establishing the parallel and fictionally exploring its implications and imprecisions.

August Peonies

There's a good study to be written about one-sentence poems (or perhaps it has been written already). Here's the one-sentence poem on Poetry Daily today:

AUGUST PEONIES

Lallygagging on bent stems, late
this year because of the snow
in May, their rag-tag magenta
cluster-heads freshen the still heat
like a rush of wind in the leaves
or the cool brush of deep sea
crinolines as the ripple kiss
of a breeze opens their bunched petals
just enough to let them breathe
before they ease back
into light repose, poised
at the edge of time-lapse
attention, like us, who lose
momentum in the heavy air
rich with the scent of ripening
wheat that drifts in from the fields
over the slow-moving river
as the afternoon nods and lengthens
into shade, into thoughtfulness,
and the sky deploys an argosy
of softly tinted clouds, fresh
blooms without stems
that sail where we cannot
go, all the way to the edge
of everything where daylight looks
back, once, then disappears.

George Amabile
The Malahat Review
Fall 2010

And here's a favorite one-sentence poem of mine, by a poet, Sarah Wardle, who is particularly good at one-sentence poems:

HERE AND THERE

When I'm walking in the city

past banks of offices and shop windows,

noticing the leaf-fall of litter,

as I'm swept along by a stream of feet,

I imagine I'm strolling in the country

past crowds of trees and parked hedgerows,

hearing the breeze change up a year

and the river roar, like a main street.

I See Alps

In the summer of 2003, we took Miles, then three and a half, on a boat tour of the Seattle harbor. As the boat turned back towards the harbor and gave us a great view of Mount Rainier, Miles exclaimed, "Look, Mommy! I see Alps!" This amused not only his parents but also all the people within earshot. The others probably did not know that he is a resident of Switzerland.

I found this photo the other day while going through old photos to put them on a memory stick for our new digital picture frame. It reminded me of Miles's exclamation, of course, but it also reminded of the gigantic cranes that can be seen in the photograph, which were designed and built in order to be able to load and unload the gigantic container ships that the Seattle harbor specializes in serving.

Seen up close from the tour boat, they were huge; from this perspective, they are dwarfed by the mountain in the distance. Someday, the Seattle skyline will surely be gone, and with it the cranes, but the mountain will remain.

Werner Herzog reads

It's a bit late for the season, but I just came across this rendition/adaptation of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Werner Herzog:



And there's a whole bunch of other "Werner Herzog reads" videos to watch, too, including "Madeline" and "Winnie the Pooh."

(There's a footnote somewhere that says it is not really Werner Herzog ...)

A wonderful curse poem

The first of today's three poems on Poetry Daily is a wonderful curse poem by Paul Zimmer:

Zimmer's Head Thudding Against the Blackboard

At the blackboard I had missed
Five number problems in a row,
And was about to foul a sixth
When the old, exasperated nun
Began to pound my head against
My six mistakes. When I wept,
She threw me back into my seat,
Where I hid my head and swore
That very day I'd be a poet,
And curse her yellow teeth with this.

A curse poem that is also a bit of an ars poetica, in fact: here's why I became a poet, and here's what poetry is for.

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

Cameras as metaphors

In John Fuller's latest collection, Pebble & I, there is a poem called "Small Room in a Hotel", which begins with this quatrain:

In this cool cube of marble
I am valid but invisible
As an image caught in a camera
But not yet reproduced.

This reminded me of another passage about photography that I recently came across, in "Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)" on the Bright Eyes album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. (There are a bunch of videos of live performances of the song on YouTube, but mostly pretty low quality audience shots.) After a first verse about a demonstration, the second verse reads:

We left before the dust had time to settle,
And all the broken glass swept off the avenue.
And on the way home held your camera like a bible,
Just wishing so bad that it held some kind of truth.

And I stood nervous next to you in the dark room
You dropped the paper in my water,
And it all begins to bloom.

So what happens to how the taking of pictures is used as a metaphor when one moves from developing film to processing digital images? Fuller's quatrain could be digital, but the way in which an image in a digital camera has not yet been reproduced is quite different from how an undeveloped image waits to be developed in a film camera. And the Bright Eyes lyric is, in a sense, already out of date, since almost anyone attending a demonstration these days would have a digital camera in hand. So you would not have to wait to develop the pictures to see if "it held some kind of truth," since you could look at the pictures on the camera's screen on your way home.

Cats of the Temple

A theme that runs through Brad Leithauser's poetry is the position of the mind in the world, or the relationship between the mind and the world. There are three moments in his 1986 collection Cats of the Temple that stake out the territory at issue here. The poem "On the Lee Side (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia)" concludes with a description of the mind's desire to see the world as being there just for itself. Leithauser describes the mind (or this part of the mind) as an "elusive but unavoidable, queer / but predictable inner companion":

... who's
neatly, snugly sure

just how this splendid
show of weather's to be accounted for:
ingenious exhibitions exclusively intended
to entice and entertain him here.

From this perspective, the mind is sure that the world is there for it, as "irresistible grist / for the fabulist," as the book's opening poem, "Two Suspensions against a Blacktop Backdrop," puts it.

Here, the mind (or this part of Leithauser's mind) feels that the world is there for its delectation, but near the end of the book, this perspective shifts significantly. First, in "Seaside Greetings (Oki Islands, Japan Sea)," the penultimate poem in the book, after describing how "the crest of a bluff" looks like Japanese armor, Leithauser carefully considers that surprising similarity, and others:

Of course given the scale Nature has
to work with, all of these uncanny,
and often funny, resemblances
(the ancient trees

wrung like buxom women, whales
in the clouds, bights like laughing
horses' heads, potatoes bearing profiles
of generals

dead now for centuries) are
statistical certainties, nothing
more, and yet they do appease our
appetite for

play at the heart of things ...

The "ingenious exhibitions" of the earlier poem are now "uncanny ... resemblances" that are "statistical certainties, nothing / more"—and that line break after "nothing" briefly makes those "resemblances" and "certainties" into "nothing." That "nothing" then calls forward to the "things" of the next clause, the "and yet" clause that gives us something back from that "nothing / more": the satisfaction of a desire for play. The "ingenious exhibitions" may not be "ingenious" and they may not be "exhibitions," but the mind can still be appeased by them—not with meaning, but with playfulness.

The final poem in the book takes place in the same location: "On a Seaside Mountain (Oki Islands, Japan Sea)". At the top of the mountain, there are horses in a pasture, and the poem concludes:

The sun's pace
is perfectly theirs, and the planted ease
they are breathing, are breeding, in this place,
while not meant for us, lightens us anyway.

The "ease" of the horses is "not meant for us," but it "lightens us anyway." Again, the mind seeks something in the world, but in these last two images, Leithauser's "elusive but unavoidable, queer / but predictable inner companion" has been tempered by a realism that still leaves room for that companion to be "enticed and entertained." The world may not be "exclusively intended" for us—it may even be devoid of meaning—but it "appeases" and "lightens" us anyway.

Aroma

A few lines I particularly liked from Durs Grünbein's new book Aroma:

Die Städte traumen alle voneinander. ("Corso Trieste")

"The cities all dream of each other": behind this evocative image is the simple fact that streets and squares in one city are often named after other cities, but that does not reduce but rather enhances the evocativeness of the line.

Dies ist der Platz mit den glücklichsten Tauben der Welt. ("Piazza San Marco")

"This is the square with the happiest pigeons in the world": I read this quick translation of the line to my mother, and she immediately knew which square it referred to. I had not told her the title of the poem!

Werbung macht müde. ("Aroma," XXII)

"Advertising is exhausting": Or perhaps "wears me out," but Grünbein is, as usual, more general than personal. The title poem, "Aroma", is a 53-poem sequence about a year spent in Rome at the Villa Massimo. Looks like a nice play to stay:

Übersetzerhaus Looren

Literary translators looking for a good place to finish up a commission might be interested in the "Translation House Looren" in Switzerland. There's information about residency for a "working stay" at the house here.

The Day's Announcement

Here's a poem from Brad Leithauser's Curves and Angles that made me burst into tears (with my own father mostly fit but still worse for wear after two strokes in the past five years). Looking at it again, I am particularly struck by the two different meanings of "gone" in the first two lines.

If you like this one, there are several more at the link if you click the book's title above.

THE DAY'S ANNOUNCEMENT

The family’s hope? That he was too far gone
to notice she was gone. But when he asked for her
for four weeks running, it didn’t seem quite fair
to reassure him with—She’ll be back soon.
So when, pale blue eyes jumping in his head, he said
again, Nurse, where’s my Meg?, as if she were a stranger
(her, his own Bridget, sixth child and sole daughter!),
she told him—Poppa, listen: Momma’s dead.

The news plunged deep into that drowned brain.
He bowed his weighty head. She took his hand—
Had she made a mistake? Could he understand?
. . . Maybe, for when he raised his face again,
he wore a look of rationality triumphant:

I knew it. Otherwise, she would have come.

Fishing for Amber

Ciarán Carson's Fishing for Amber contains several passages that indirectly describe how the book works. Here's one:

For one thing leads to another, as it does in Holland. The cities, by means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from town to town, and from them to villages, which are themselves bound together with these watery ways, and are connected even to the houses scattered all over the country; smaller canals surround the fields, meadows, pastures and kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge and roadway; every house is a little port, in which you might hear stories from the seven seas. One can drift from any place to anywhere. (152-153)

While reading Fishing for Amber, I kept thinking of W. G. Sebald's books, so I was pleased to come across a reference to St. Sebald in Carson's Shamrock Tea (which I read immediately after reading Fishing for Amber). But when I was done with both these Carson books, I no longer thought of Shamrock Tea as being "Sebaldesque"; it ends up being quite different than anything Sebald wrote (except perhaps Austerlitz, which, like Shamrock Tea, is held together by a continuous narrative more than any of Sebald's other books, or than Fishing for Amber).

Instead, it is Fishing for Amber that actually feels Sebaldesque, with one significant difference: Sebald's work is very melancholy, even pessimistic, while Fishing for Amber uses similar associative techniques (encapsulated in the quotation above) but takes a much different kind of pleasure in those techniques, not the pleasure of melancholy that pervades Sebald but a pleasure in how full of wonders the world is. There is darkness in Carson as well (otherwise, the books would not be interesting), but the experience is of pleasure most of all, while in Sebald, the darkness is foregrounded, and the joy of reading his work comes in spite of the darkness, as it were.

In both Fishing for Amber and Shamrock Tea, Carson repeatedly contemplates paintings, especially Dutch paintings (the Arnolfini Double portrait by Jan van Eyck plays a crucial role in Shamrock Tea). But it was his description of a Vermeer painting in Fishing for Amber that struck me most, in part because I had just read another description of the same painting in Michael Donhauser's Nahe der Neige. Here's Carson on the painting:

... one of the essentials of comfort for a Dutch lady was the vuur stoof, a square box open on one side to admit an earthen pan filled with embers of turf, and perforated to allow the heat to ascend and warm the feet; it served as a footstool, and was concealed under the dress. The use of it was rarely dispensed with, whatever the season, indoors or out—the citizen's wife had it carried after her by her servant to church or at the theatre.

This, indeed, is the object depicted in the lower right corner of Vermeer's Woman Pouring Milk ... She's pouring white milk from a red earthenware jug into a brown glazed bowl and there's a loaf of bread in a wicker basket on the table and a lidded pitcher and other bits of broken bread on the tablecloth. (99-100)

What struck me was Carson's emphasis on the "vuur stoof" in his description of the painting, in contrast to his merely passing mention of the bread on the table. Donhauser emphasizes the bread, and mentions the stove only in passing:

Der Raum, worin das geschieht, ist ein Neben- oder Zwischenraum, der nicht wirklich als Küche erkennbar ist—es hängen da ein Korb und ein Messingbehälter, ein Stövchen steht auf dem Boden ... die Magd, die schaut nicht auf, sie bereitet ein Gericht namens Wentelteefje, wofür Brot gebrochen wurde und wofür die Magd nun Milch in eine Schüssel schenkt; das Brot wird dann etwa eine Stunde in der Milch eingeweicht werden ... (19-20)

I don't have anything to add to these two descriptions; I just enjoyed the (Sebaldesque?) coincidence of reading them both within a few days of each other, as well as how each author emphasized one thing while only barely mentioning the other, so that the two descriptions end up wonderfully complementing each other.

First Rain in Delhi on Whale Sound

Nic Sebastian reads my poem "First Rain in Delhi" on Whale Sound here. Thanks, Nic!

Introduction to the Songs of Innocence and Experience

I read this just now on the Poetry Foundation iPhone app, and I don't think I've ever been quite as aware of just how brilliant the poem is. And then I found it in all its illuminated glory at blakearchive.org and thought I'd share it with you. A perfect example of how complex simplicity can be.

"World's greatest bass line"

I put a link to my post about The Smiths on my Facebook profile, with this comment:

The Smiths as "the commodification of the critique of commodities." Oh shut up and dance! :-)

That led a friend to say, "What difference does it make?" And that reminded me of this story: It was sometime in the mid-eighties. I was at a party at Synergy, a co-op at Stanford, and the band was playing "Mystery Achievement," by The Pretenders. Jack Sayers was on bass, but I don't remember which of the specific bands he was in that was playing that night (Missy and the Boogiemen; The Heptiles?). And while that killer bass line was throbbing along, I found myself next to my friend Paul G., and I said to him, "World's greatest bass line!" And he agreed. A few moments later, I asked Paul, "Do you think the bassist knew it was the world's greatest bass line when he came up with it?" And Paul stopped dancing for a moment and said something like, "That's the question, isn't it? Did Rilke know how good 'The Duino Elegies' were while he was writing them? Or was he just writing them, so caught up in the act of creation that he did not think about how good they were? Does the genius know when he has produced a masterpiece?"

And then we went back to dancing!

"The Smiths"

Simfy listening: The Smiths, The Smiths

My joke about The Smiths and The Cure back in the eighties was that I liked their guitarists, but not their singers, which was not a problem with The Smiths, with Morrissey on vocals and Johnny Marr on guitar, but was a problem with The Cure, with Robert Smith on guitar and vocals. In either case, it came down to that I was impressed by the bands but found the singers so annoying that I could not stand them.

Over the years, I've come to like The Cure after all; the turning point was probably the use of their song as the title song of the brilliant film Boys Don't Cry. But I've still never gotten into The Smiths, nor been taken with Morrissey as a solo artist. But Simfy led me to give their first album a listen while running recently.

The first thing I noticed is that Morrissey's voice does not annoy me as much as it used to (though I still don't like it much). In contrast, Marr's guitar work doesn't seem as impressive as it once did! (Perhaps I need to listen to later Smiths albums to get what I remembered.) While running, I began to ride a train of thought that took me back in several ways: the eighties fans of The Cure and The Smiths felt spoken to by their music and by their lyrics of disillusionment with the world, even despair at its emptiness. And this album does communicate such feelings effectively—the paradox being that such feelings derive at least in part from dissatisfaction with the consumer world but their artistic expression takes the form of consumer goods (albums). So there I was, jogging in 2010 and, as if I was back in the eighties, thinking about "the commodification of the critique of commodities." At the same time that I was off on this high-falutin' philosophy trip, I was also struck by how funny Morrissey can be, in his deadpan way, as in "Still Ill":

For there are brighter sides to life,
And I should know, because I've seen them,
But not very often ...

Back home, listening to the end of the album, I was drawn back to Morrissey's lyrics by a line from "Suffer Little Children": "Manchester, you have a lot to answer for." This made my digression away from the album seem very appropriate, what with Manchester having to "answer for" the global commodity capitalism it was, in many senses, the birthplace of. It was not a surprise to me that The Smiths generated such a train of thought; I had always recognized them as a band worth taking seriously, despite my dislike of them. And this round of listening to their first album does make me want to check out the rest of their catalog, as well as at least a bit of Morrissey's, even though I doubt I will become a big fan.

(Note to Smiths fans: By now I know that "Suffer Little Children" is not a critique of capitalism but a response to the Moors murders, so you don't have to make fun of me for not knowing that!)

Ian Seed, "From a Long Way"

Here's a poem from Ian Seed's Anonymous Intruder (Shearsman, 2009):

FROM A LONG WAY

Sometimes I asked: how do I reach
this truth? Each time I was surprised
by the pictures they painted of you
as if day or night could be framed.

So I stepped out and journeyed
not to learn your secrets but to see you
tying your shoe laces beside the path
which cuts into the mountain as it climbs.

If it hasn't been done already, someone should write a study of such eight-line, two-quatrain poems with a hinge between the quatrains (here, a causal hinge with that "so"). One approach to such a study would be to consider how the form created by the lines interacts with other patterns created by the words. The most obvius one is that the first quatrain has two sentences, while the second only has one, and the poem's three sentences get longer and longer. Here's another pattern, highlighted in bold:

Sometimes I asked: how do I reach
this truth? Each time I was surprised
by the pictures they painted of you
as if day or night could be framed.

So I stepped out and journeyed
not to learn your secrets but to see you
tying your shoe laces beside the path
which cuts into the mountain as it climbs.

I could imagine other poems making the exact same argument, but with different themes, Sometimes something happens, each time it had this feature, as if ... So I did not something, not with one intention but with another.

Or there's this shape, too, now highlighted:

Sometimes I asked: how do I reach
this truth? Each time I was surprised
by the pictures they painted of you
as if day or night could be framed.

So I stepped out and journeyed
not to learn your secrets but to see you
tying your shoe laces beside the path
which cuts into the mountain as it climbs.

The first pattern is the shape of the argument; this is the argument's content, but one could imagine a poem that addresses the same issues in the same order with the same words while having a different shape. The interaction of the sentences, the quatrains, and the two patterns I highlighted work together to establish the poem's emphasis on pictures and seeing over against truth and learning.

Both these patterns within the lines are striking, of course, in that they "stop," as it were, before the final two lines. These lines are the only ones in which there's no shifting around, no contrast, no staking out of territory—just the image being seen "from a long way." "Secrets" and "truth" are rejected, then, in favor of a picture, of something "seen"—not by them, but by the poem's speaker. As Seed writes in the prose poem "A Cry Permitted": "There is nothing you need to understand. Shake hands and surrender to another vision." (For some reason, both when I wrote notes on Seed in the back of the book and when I typed this up, I first produced "version" there instead of "vision.")

(For another example of the shifting, contrasting, staking-out-of-territory style of the first six lines of Seed's poem, see my quotation from John Gallaher here.)

Mozart's Third Brain

Göran Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser) is a long poem of a restless, dissatisfied mind pondering problems ranging from the global to the most intensely personal. Here is all of an unusually short section that struck me (LXXVII):

Not in vain do you give me your rose The transparent forms
are reborn; from them everything arises All leaves, birds
All the images Growing quickly, quickly destroyed

I will not let you down A flower opened your heart
Now you open mine, again, with your rose, shining dark red
The yellow pollen from eternity's sunflower falls on the table

This recalls the T. S. Eliot of Four Quartets, while also being utterly independent of Eliot as it shifts rapidly between image and abstraction. (Eliot hovers in the background at other moments throughout the book, as does Wallace Stevens; I kept hearing echoes of "The Man with the Blue Guitar.")

A passage from the previous page (section LXXV) seems to me to represent how this poem works. This does not contain any of the specific references to events of the time of the poem's writing (early to mid 1990s) that pepper the poem (especially the genocides in the Balkans and in Central Africa), but it is otherwise exemplary of how Sonnevi thinks and writes:

... I pledge allegiance to the contaminated
world, such as it is, in its luminous right . . .

What sort of imaginary community do I seek? Which one
is active, est agens, within me? I project the collective Sade!
The collective Mozart! As if there were no difference!
Summed up in the Gödel-face, dark Beneath the real Gödel's
shy gray shadow In which group do I seek protection? Whom am I
excluding? Which flame of self-forgiveness consumes me?
Societies float gently, like ashes An architecture of smoke

I love the first sentence quoted here, which reminds me of Greg Brown's wonderful song "Two Little Feet": "It's a messed-up world but I love it anyway."

Sonnevi addresses this "allegiance to the contaminated / world" in more specifically political terms later in the poem: "The right to say no is the basis of democracy But only within the matrix of / a deeper yes" (section CIX). There's a philosophical point here resembling Nietzsche's insistence that one must affirm all of existence in order to affirm even one moment of one's life. But the political point is even more startling: democracy provides a space for dispute, for negation, for expressing a choice between options—but it does not (and cannot?) provide for the rejection of that space itself. You have to affirm the system of democracy in order to "say no" to some issue within that system. More specifically, you have to say yes to the result the system produces even when you do not like the result.

That's why I get very angry about claims that one's taxes should not be used to pay for things one doesn't agree with—whether the claim that school vouchers should be provided for private school or that pacifists have a right to refuse to pay taxes because of military spending. (An example from both sides, but it is usually "conservatives" who ask for the right to be exceptions to the system, in my experience.) — That's not a point about Sonnevi's poetry, but it shows how far his work takes you when you follow its leads.