Overtalk

The following poem is an erasure of the Grifter's part of an interview by David Muir on ABC on 25 January 2017; it is based on the transcript here.
 

Overtalk

a tremendous magnitude   the – the size of it The size

The top great   tremendous   the size   the size    these big

Ultimately    relatively    absolutely 100 percent

very stable very solid    Even more solid    a good thing

better than ever    much better    very serious   very simply

never said    make a deal    make a new deal

clobbered   nice and easily    immediately    I wanna

As soon    As soon    physically    I would say    Yeah I would say

Certainly    immediately   some really good really solid

They shouldn't be very    They shouldn't be very

a big heart    very strong    very solid    great   a good job

far less   I'm gonna tell   I will tell   the whole    great heart

criminals    really bad people    people    getting out

gonna get them out    gonna get 'em out   number one priority

We're gonna be talking    fantastically well    very proud

very very unfairly    brilliant    very good    fantastic

I'll be speaking    We will be talking    So let me tell you

so misrepresented    supposed to    you weren't supposed to

Sure And I do – and I'm very     and I mean it

But just so you – it was supposed to   Number two    somebody said it

It wasn't It was hardly even   I said it And I said it strongly    horrible

number one Number two I would've    if I was

I would've    I would've    I would've    And I would've

But as you know    It doesn't   So I would've

different   much differently    totally different

So but    you're just   I would've    much easier   I ended up    I got it by the way

But it turned out    You and everybody    said and almost everybody said

So I went   I went   And that's the beauty    

With that being said if you look    you look   you look   you look

You take a look   you're gonna    and we're gonna   Well we're gonna

But it could very well be    Absolutely   But we're gonna

In fact I heard    they were saying it's not    It's not    I said   He said

They don't wanna talk    You have people    You have people    in my opinion

David David David    Of course and I want    Sure Sure Sure   Sure done

No it hasn't Take a look    Really Then why    Excuse me then why

then he's – then he's    You know I always talk    when they wanna    you wanna

but not    wanna     or have to    We're gonna   And then the next time – and I will say

none of 'em    None of 'em    They would all be    None of 'em    

But when you look   a lot to look   There's nothing bigger There's nothing bigger

Let me just tell you you know    millions of people    when I say that if you would’ve

they're saying We agree    We agree    very smart people   people

people are saying they saw    I heard    But you're not talking about

But it's a small little    I will tell you     we're gonna have an idea

Now you're telling me    all of a sudden

But you have other    and you have other    You take a look    how many

Take a look     And you're gonna find    I didn't say there are    

But I think there could very well be    That's right   And I also say    and I also say    

I would've    But I would've    I wouldn't have    I wouldn't have

I wouldn't have   I would've    I would've    I never even

That’s true   That's true   very much   not at all   Not at all    No not at all

Believe me    And if you look at it they all    They all    They didn't    

I don't believe I got one    it would've been different

Now you have to understand I – I    Maybe she didn't She should've

She thought    in the bag She should've    she thought

you're talking about    you know   But they didn't I went   I went   I went   I went to all

That's all I    No no We're looking at it    No no    a tremendous

one of the great    ever In terms of    the most ever or just about the most ever

When you look at    One of the greatest    ever But again I    I didn't

What I'm saying is    if there are    there might be Look    if you look back

Chicago    Chicago    laughing    You look   you look

But take a look   very beautiful   Very beautiful And I    But look   Look

It's not    It hasn't    believe me   look what's going on    It's only

But    smiling and laughing    Now once    didn't do    All of a sudden

So here's the point    a lot of stuff    possibly I say probably But possibly

We're gonna    And then we're gonna    If people    I don't know

We're gonna    we talk about    we're gonna    so important

Now I'll say    I think   first of all would – would be a great thing

But I believe    And I believe    would've been    Well we're gonna   We're gonna

And – and by the way when I say you're gonna    You can never really

you know there are gonna be – no matter what    there are gonna be

But we will    OK so I'm glad    So I went    I have great    I'm – I don't have

But that's    But I have    speech     speech if you look   OK

we see    They said    one of the great    and – and    There was – somebody

paid great homage    paid great homage    In fact they said    the biggest

and they said    equal I got    a long    take – take out your    probably

I know    I know    a total    I could've     gotten

Absolutely   loved it    loved it    a long    They never even

very inaccurately I hate to say    you and you probably

but turn on    and see how    And see how    speech   speech

good speech And you and    speech    very very    speech

If I    there were like    wanted    but    couldn't They were all

I would say I would've    would've    speech    big   big success – success

And then I    and I    And they    Excuse me   Not you

but    – and they    speech And I know    speech    extraordinary

loved it Loved and liked And it was    extraordinary

No because you    Well you just    I didn't    I didn't wanna – talk about

speech But I think I did    really    You saw    I didn't

a massive    very unflattering   unflattering   a massive

In terms of a total    supposedly the biggest    And I    you would even

They say I had the biggest    speeches I'm    But I didn't    You just

Part of my whole    who have been    will never be    Part of that is when

unfairly    a massive    a crowd – I looked over that    Wow

And I've seen    Big big    That was some    When I looked

all of the various    the biggest    speeches I said    I was talking

I won't    demean    and    demean    faraway

more importantly    I'm saying   No I think you’re    talking    talking

I think you're    And that's why I think    And that's why you    pretty bad

Right   carnage    speech    tremendous – from certain    carnage

It is carnage It's    carnage This is    – is not like    being shot

Thousands    over a period – over a short period

This year   worse    last year   catastrophe  

want help   love to help    send in    send in

Maybe they're not gonna    Maybe they're being overly    Maybe there's

But you can't    Chicago   Chicago is    Chicago is worse

report    report about every    fix    shot in a city in a country

Maybe it's okay if    I want     fix    very easily fixable

They're gonna have to    But they gotta fix    I don't want

essentially    Chicago    Chicago And Chicago    a great

can be a great    can't be a great    Excuse me    can't be a great

a loaf of bread Can't be a great   But so far they have been    And I wasn't

So look    speech very nice speech    shot and killed    speech

You can't have    weren't shot    speech But    shot    speech What – what's

So all I'm saying    I say You have to    and you have to    because you can't

I want   It's a big    Well I'll be talking about that

So you'll be there and you'll be able to see    You're gonna see

Well I have    I have great respect    said – I was a little    said he's not

torture As you know    gonna be    as opposed to    who didn't

And he will I think    And he is – you know I haven't

But I will tell you I have    intelligence And they are big    waterboarding

Because they say it does    It does   I would do    I would do – I wanna    I wanna

When they're shooting – when they're chopping    people and other people

when they're chopping    people    nobody has ever    Medieval

would I feel    waterboarding   As far as I'm concerned    fire    fire

Now with that being said I'm going    I'm going    

I think    gonna be     I'm gonna    But I have spoken    the highest    intelligence

And I asked    Does it    Does    absolutely   I don't want people    or anybody's heads

Okay    or    or anything else I don't want – look    to have seen

much different You never saw    Now they    and they    and they

So we have    and we're not    We're not    even    I will say   I will

and    and my    And if they don't wanna    If they do wanna    I will

I wanna do    But do I feel    Absolutely I feel    Have I spoken    I haven't seen

But I think    Have I spoken    feel strongly    Absolutely

I wanna keep     no I wanna – I will    And I'm gonna    And if they don't wanna

100 percent    Do I think    Absolutely   Right   We're talking about – no it's not

But it's    tremendous    It's    we're going to    speech And it's    tremendous

in many cases or in some cases are looking    tremendous

You look    you'll be hearing    a whole    You'll be very

You're looking   in many cases in some cases    I don't want

They're    They're coming    I don't want    I'm gonna be

Now I'll absolutely    I think that    a tremendous    and various other

And all you have    take a look It's – it's    I don't want    have and    have

more    than ever    They – and it's from    So look look    Believe me I know

even better    They're deep    they're serious    We don't

You're going to see – you're going to see We're going to    extreme

And    extreme And we're not    we think    even a little

we're gonna    It's going to be    It's gonna be very very

I don't want    You look   You look   You look

Okay I mean take that    Anger   anger    How can you    Look David     David

I mean I know you're    The world    The world What You think this is gonna    The world

We went    We shouldn't have    We shouldn't have    The world

Take a look   Take a look    Take a look    And    and    and    The world    David

Well we should've    And you know it's very    you wouldn't

they got the money They got the money    leaving – when we left we left

which wasn't    It's not    And by the way and I said    And they were essentially

And    and    forever And    and it would go – it was just    We got in

I said    That's essentially    We should have    You wouldn't

Now I wasn't talking about    But had we   would've very good happened

They would not have    rather unbelievable    the world   Wait wait can you

Who are    who say    Fools   call    call    fools   We should've

excuse me We should've    you wouldn't    And we would have    We have

And    falling apart   Our roads – excuse me Our roads our    our     falling apart

We have    And    we can't    or we can't    And we can't    fix    We can't

Look    We've been    Nobody even knows    they don't really know

But it's time It's time   Well don't let it    we'll see    I mean we're gonna see

You know I told    and I told    wants to talk    I don't wanna

I wanna let – I wanna    take place    the talk takes place I watched

Then they'd say    Okay and I kept saying to myself    All right

I don't wanna do a lot of talking    I wanna talk after    not before

It's going to be – what my plan is is that I wanna    I'm not gonna    

Just so you understand people talk about    And I told    the best thing    nothing

And then we'll    and we'll    and – and    Believe    you'll have

And I told    except    I wanna get it fixed The best thing I could do

if I didn't do anything    begging me to do something But I don't wanna

So just so you   disaster   It's    It's    It doesn't    It's

You know    I know    And I said    terrific folks   I said Look

and I'm okay    We wanna    I said    They're gonna    it's gonna

That's the thing    But the right thing    So I wanna    Nobody's gonna

gonna be terrific And    very very happy    And now    don't even

They don't even    Remember    keep    keep    Remember    Remember

I mean you do admit that I think right    We are going to    if you look

We're gonna    So nobody ever    No no    here's what I can    we are going

a better    much better    much better    you can have    you want and    you want

We're gonna    much better    much less   And remember    I said

very good at this stuff    And why not    We're gonna    But I don't wanna

I wanna give great    much lower   You know when you     say no one I think no one

you’re talking about    And then you know knowing    on television saying how

Okay We want    We want the answer    But I will say millions

millions and millions and millions    It's too    and it's no

And    unfortunately    very very sad    very nice

but –    he said that    no longer   He's a staunch

He said    no longer    He made that    campaign trail

he said    is crazy It's crazy And you know what they were both right

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Mumbai? Kissmiss?

Here's a poem I wish I had read before Christmas last month, but a good poem is a good poem anytime. It's from Imtiaz Dharker's 2014 collection Over the Moon (Bloodaxe).

Mumbai? Kissmiss?

Of course! Who is not knowing this,

that after Happy Diwali comes Merry Kissmiss!

Impossible to miss, when allovermumbai,

Matharpacady to A to Z Market, rooftops

are dancing in chorus

and alloversky

is fully full with paper stars.

Hear! Horns are telling at midnight on every street,

Happy Happy Happy! We know very well

to make good festival, and Saint Santa is

our honoured guest in Taj Hotel.

We are not forgetting.

And allovermumbai alloversky

is fully full with paper stars.

See! Tree is shining and snow (cotton-

wool but looks good, no?) Small child also

face is shining, licking icing, this

must be what snow tastes like

under the paper stars.

And allovermumbai alloversky

is fully full with paper stars.

A Note about Philip Levine

In Philip Levine's poetry collections up to A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988), the "Note About the Author" included the phrase "a succession of stupid jobs" to refer to what he spent his time doing in Detroit before he "left the city for good."

But starting with What Work Is (1991), that part of his biography had been rephrased as "a succession of industrial jobs."

Raul Fixing A Cosmopolitan

A poem from Glyn Maxwell's The Sugar Mile (2005).

RAUL FIXING A COSMOPOLITAN

See old Joey's sat back in his window.
I'm telling you in all of New York City
how many joints is that? Just yesterday,
Clint, you walk in here. You got the world
to choose from, and you didn't want nobody
taking all your time! Now it's tomorrow

and you look like shit. Stay at home tomorrow,
see your family, sit in your own window.
I'm kidding, hey. Don't like nobody
can't take my kidding. It's the New York City
style, you know it is, you seen the world
you like it here. It's another awesome day.

It's another peach it's just like yesterday.
I was kidding with you. Come back tomorrow,
Clint, the old guy will. Where else in the world
is he expected? Ain't no other window
waiting for the guy, no other city
left to move to. I never heard nobody

want to move from this. I mean nobody
left alone. Man I can't take Sunday.
It's slow, it crawls, Sunday in this city.
Hello? Yeah this is him. Not tomorrow?
Lemme write that down. Sun in the freakin' window
blinding me. I got it. Stop the world

 for breaking news ... What? Yeah 'on the world'
I know, I got it. Ciao. Okay. Nobody
gets to know. Hey, Joe, what's in the window?
See some babes? Can't be your lucky day
it's mine. Clint says he's stopping by tomorrow.
He wants to hear you bombed that Nazi city

back to the stone age. I said 'Nazi city'
Joey, I was kidding. What in the world
do I care, kill a Nazi guy tomorrow,
lighten up. – I haven't told nobody,
Clint, remember I told you this – that day
was it yesterday when Joey was in his window?

That there ain't nobody else in New York City
paid so high? Windows on the World.
Tuesday I start. Tomorrow's my last day.

Force

Force

They force fed protein-rich liquids through tubes inserted in their noses.

He forced his tongue down her throat.

They forced him down into the seat and buckled straps around him.

He forced her to the ground and made her perform oral sex.

They were forced from a bus and shot dead.

They forced a black man into the giant's gaping mouth.

They forced civil rights down the throats of people.

"Our wives and daughters": objecting but still objectifying

Mitt Romney’s response on Twitter to that Donald Trump video is welcome, but it’s also limited – and telling – in a way that many responses are (so it’s far from being just Romney here):

Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) 8. Oktober 2016

Even as he criticizes Trump for misogynistic sexual objectification of women, Romney still presents women as “wives and daughters”. That is, women are still objects of others (husbands and parents) rather than individual human beings in their own right. Even as Romney and others who put it this way object to one kind of objectification, they still objectify women.

(Thanks to Kei Miller whose post on Facebook helped me formulate this.)

Without a doubt

A student (a native speaker of German) used the expression "without doubts" to start a sentence. That sounds wrong to me; I would prefer "without a doubt". But instead of just marking it as wrong, I did a quick bit of research.

I searched the NOW Corpus at the Brigham Young University site with linguistic corpora. The NOW Corpus contains 3.3. billion words of data from web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present. And by the present, they mean the present: it's updated with 4-5 million new words every day.

There were 27 hits for "without doubts" and 7752 hits for "without a doubt." So I can correct the student's usage in good conscience.

And that is how a usage point can be resolved: check actual usage using a linguistic corpus like the NOW Corpus (or any of the other corpora at the BYU site).

"Riddle", by Ian Duhig

Riddle

Ian Duhig

Who I am’s child’s play,

a cry in a kindergarten;

though I pun on Latin,

my Yorkshire kin’s laik,

a whole lexical rainbow

unweaving in no code,

no masonic Mahabone

nor Horseman’s Word –

but I’m caltrops at night

to the bare feet of adults

inspiring their language

to such colours as I am,

Kulla, Mondrian plastic

pixellating Mies blocks;

the Ephesian Artemis

in each cubist bust;

the Song of Amergin

by a Turing machine:

name me or you’ll be

thicker than any brick.

The Blind Roadmaker, 43

*

"Riddle" begins and ends with the figure mentioned in its third line: the pun. In the first line, "child's play" is an idiom for "very easy", but the literal "play of a child" is also present. The final line varies the idiom "thick as a brick", meaning "very stupid", but also puns on "brick", as the answer to the riddle involves "bricks."

            As a student pointed out yesterday, "Riddle" ends by insulting readers who have not figured out its answer: if you can't "name me", you're stupid. This is a common understanding of poems: they are all riddles waiting to be answered. From this perspective, the poem ends with the idea of poems as puzzles rewarding those clever enough to "solve" them and punishing those who are not.

            Yet the poem's opening pun offers an alternative way of thinking about poems. If the poem is "child's play", it is easy, and the way to make reading a poem easy is precisely to play with it. A riddle is itself a kind of game, and this poem makes poetry in general a game as well, a game played with words, a game that plays on words, a game of word play, of "cries" and "puns", of "lexical rainbows", of "colourful language", of "songs" (and not, as the second stanza makes clear, a "code" to be deciphered). Ultimately, "Riddle" encourages readers of poetry to let go of the idea of poetry as a set of "riddles" to be solved.

Contract On America

An erasure of the 1994 "Contract with America".

Contract On America

 

We propose to restore the bonds of the people.

Evasion and posturing offer no fine print.

This year offers the chance of control,

the end of government with the public,

of values and faith. We act with God

to restore scandal and disgrace. The first day

will immediately aim at trust in laws;

conduct comprehensive fraud;

cut the number; limit chairs; ban votes

to the public; require an honest zero.

The first days bring out-of-control constraints,

anti-truth, effective death in neighborhoods,

and personal illegitimacy by prohibiting

mothers and denying responsibility.

Incentives for strengthening pornography

reinforce the central role of the dream of relief.

The act parts credibility around fairness;

the limit forces hikes for years.

Strengthening the mandate to create

the common loser, reasonable punitive laws

stem the endless tide of citizen savings

without the judgment of our fellow citizens.

I Can Be Your White Champion

An erasure of a speech given last night in Cleveland by a real-estate developer with authoritarian delusions of grandeur.

I Can Be Your White Champion

I have believed that this journey received the most.

Our party white, our country a crisis, the attacks to lead our country.

A message afflicts our nation. January will fail.

It is finally straightforward facts. We cannot afford to be correct anymore.

So if you want to hear, go there. Honor nothing else.

Decades reversed by criminal police compared to illegal citizens.

The number exceeds our regard for Nebraska, a fugitive from the law.

I've met one more American altar of open facts that have been living in poverty.

The oath of incomes reached – think of this – our fix no better.

President has more to show for affairs lived through one after another.

We all remember the knees signing absolutely nothing. History knew nothing.

The symbol of American flames is truly disasters unfolding the map.

Stable, peaceful violence choked control. After what spread across ruins,

our savage is on the path that threatens the legacy of violence and destruction

relying on change in the most important credo.

Other nations will come first with safe terrorism.

New jobs can be opposed by me, for their benefit.

My rigged system is their puppet, and the strings will never change.

To deliver people I have visited and forgotten and forgotten.

I am your national injustice. Incompetence has sold out.

I am not able to look in every country. I also did save crimes

in such an egregious way it rakes in millions of dollars

trading favors to the powerful people that cannot defend themselves.

I alone can strip our country of jobs.

Wealth works fairly and justly for each and every Vice President,

a great guy, the same amazing man to liberate our citizens from our communities.

When our police officers so brutally executed every last person on our streets.

I take the oath of this race for the white.

I am the irresponsible rhetoric of the pulpit in this room

or America's inner crime. When I am treated and protected better

in every way to live out dreams, to make barbarians

of men, women and children, radicals party in many locations.

My violence and oppression of a hateful Republican cheering for what I just said

need to focus on the failed policy of all of our allies.

Our goal of terrorism includes obsolete new terrorism

in any nation that has compromised proven mechanisms we want in our country.

My radical refugees admit individuals into our country

who will support violence, hatred, oppression,

lower wages and higher unemployment

for African-American and Latino workers.

We are going to have people killed by brave representatives of this country.

Nothing has affected me more than the time I have spent with violence

to solve demonstrators and never share in their pain.

My sanctuary was for all who have so brutally murdered families.

This candidate and this whole corner pledge

that countless more suffer the same awful fate.

We are going to build violence into our communities.

I have been honored to protect the cycle of human smuggling.

Illegal border crossings will be restored by the millions who receive the respect

they denied uncontrolled communities, proposing mass lawlessness.

Schools and hospitals make it harder to escape the middle class.

I have a vision for a policy that stands up to cheat, a signature message of my oath.

Remember, I am firing without consequences.

My other hand has been destroying our middle class and the world.

Another colossal deal will destroy foreign governments.

I pledge to hurt our workers, I will make individual deals no one understands.

We are going to cheat. This includes theft of intellectual property,

illegal product dumping, and currency manipulation.

The greatest manipulators ever will walk away, massive, and I mean massive.

I will experience profound relief, and I mean roaring will happen fast.

With the greatest killers of our country, very quickly,

we are going to lift more than $20 trillion over the next four decades.

My other hand wants new wealth all Americans will build tomorrow.

This, in turn, will create millions of failing schools.

My education is disastrous. Choose your own disaster. Thank you.

Our students are drowning to take their lives. Tremendous.

We will completely rebuild our fair like never before,

without waiting five days in a line and dying. My scandal is my first 100 days.

I'm going to appoint our beloved Justice to abolish the other hand of all families.

I would like to prevent you from speaking your mind, your own voice taken away.

Language and these great things need to start believing

in that bigger and better and stronger journey.

I'm so lucky to be the smartest and hardest working man I wonder sometimes

if I learned to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people.

Bricklayers, carpenters, and electricians love my character.

But now, my sole and exclusive mission is victory for petty politics led by cynics.

Remember: you can't have the country you want, not a chance.

Defeating love, we rely on a rigged system. Choose to believe in history.

We don't have to rise to the occasion; I can be your White champion.

My loyalty reads; I choose to pledge my voice for every future,

and I will fight you, and I will win, strong, proud, and great.

A particular species of ruthless cunning: Baldwin's Proudhammer resisting the draft

These lines from James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone reminded me of the quotations from Muhammad Ali about his draft resistance that went around after his death. The speaker is Baldwin's narrator, Leo Proudhammer:

I did not refuse to join the Army, but outwitted it by a particular species of ruthless cunning. I was — I say now — prepared to go to jail. The Japanese had already been interned. I was not going to fight for the people who had interned them, who had also destroyed the Indians, who were in the process of destroying everyone I loved: I was not going to defend my murderers. Yet, when my moment came, I did not say any of that. I arrived at the Harlem draft-board with several books under my arm. I deliberately arrived a little late. I pretended that I had just come from the library. I said that I as the only support of my aging parents, and, in fact, I had had the foresight to be working in a shipyard, foresight or luck, it's hard to say now, I've held so many jobs for so many reasons. Anyway, I think I gave a great performance before my draft-board. It was composed, as I knew it would be, of round, brown, respectable old men who had long ago given up any hope of being surprised. Round, brown, respectable old men, whose only real desire, insofar as they still dared desire, was to be white. I knew that, and with my books under my arm, with one brother already in the Army, with two aging people at home, with my impeccable shipyard job, with my flaming youth, and what I could not then have named as a deadly single-mindedness — and using precisely the fact that I was physically improbable — persuaded these round, brown, respectable old men that my potential value to my race — to them; my very improbability contained their hope of power, and I knew that — was infinitely more important than my, after all, trivial value to my country. And they deferred me. I had known that they would: that if I pressed the right buttons, they would have no choice but to defer me.

"Reading" and "Reading into"

The idea of “reading something into” a poem came up in a discussion just now. I was supposedly “reading something into” a poem; hence my reading of the poem was implied to be wrong.

Whether or not I was doing so, I’m curious if anyone knows of any essays/research that address the issue of “reading into”.

It seems like several issues are involved:

1. “Reading” the poem is distinguished from “reading into” the poem.
2. “Reading” the poem is *distinguishable* from “reading into” the poem.
3. The claim that someone is “reading something into” the poem, that something is being “read into” it, is used to call the validity of that reading into question.
4. The person making that claim is rhetorically staking out a position of being a better “reader” of the poem: “I am not ‘reading into’ the poem; you are. And my reading is thus better.”
5. In what contexts does the claim about “reading into” come up? Who speaks? Who is spoken to? — It’s the kind of thing a professor might say to a student, but it’s something a student would surely rarely say to a professor.

So there's a theoretical issue (how to distinguish "reading X" from "reading into X") and a sociological issue (who uses the criticism, and of whom, and in what context).

The Moon and the Yew Tree

I went looking for an online version of this poem, and there are several floating around, but all of them are full of punctuation mistakes. So here's Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree" with all the commas and periods at the ends of lines fixed to correspond to the version of the poem in the original book.

 

The Moon and the Yew Tree

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection

At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness –

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

Coming back to Paris

Re-reading James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room this morning to prepare for two sessions on it next month for my Baldwin seminar this term, I came across this passage that seemed to speak movingly across decades:

“Coming back to Paris,” she said, after a moment, “is always so lovely, no matter where you’ve been. […] I should think that even if you returned here in some awful sorrow, you might–well, you might find it possible here to begin to be reconciled.”
    “Let’s hope,” I said, “that we never have to put Paris to that test.”
(James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, in Early Novels and Stories, Library of America, 319)

Austen, Baldwin, Commas

            In the introduction of Elinor Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, her "coolness of judgment" is said to "counteract" her mother's "eagerness of mind" in a sentence whose forward motion is itself counteracted by punctuation: "Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence." The ten commas here punctuate the first 43 words and make them a representation of the careful thinking Elinor always engages in, while after the last of those commas, the final 14 words describe Mrs. Dashwood's "eagerness of mind" in a comparative rush of unpunctuated words. Elinor's mode of thinking is thus also a mode of writing and even of reading: a slow reading of the novel (and of novels) is needed to "counteract" the haste of an "imprudent" reading. "Eager" immersion in the novel may be pleasurable, but "effectual" interpretation demands the careful parsing of the novel's language.

            The same effect of punctuation can be found in a sentence in the first part of James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain. At the end of the visit to the cinema with which John Grimes celebrates his fourteenth birthday in 1935, he confronts the absolute opposition between salvation and eternal damnation: "Either he arose from this theater, never to return, putting behind him the world and its pleasures, its honors, and its glories, or he remained here with the wicked and partook of their certain punishment." The five commas here punctuate the first 22 words and make them a representation of the "narrow way" of salvation that John has been raised to believe in, while after the last of those commas, the final 13 words describe the "broad way" of damnation in another comparative rush of unpunctuated words (and John had walked down Broadway before going to the movies). However, while one of the opposed terms in Austen's sentence "counteracts" the other and is thus privileged, Baldwin's sentence presents its opposition as an either-or alternative, a "cruel choice," as it is called a few lines later, between salvation and damnation. Salvation may require effort, as Elinor's "coolness of judgment" does, but it remains open whether it can successfully "counteract" its opposite.

Urchins keeping a secret; black boys in league against the world: a figure in James Baldwin

The other day I read this in James Baldwin's essay on Ingmar Bergman, "The Northern Protestant":

He had made it sound as though we were two urchins playing a deadly and delightful game which must be kept a secret from our elders.

I noted this in itself but also because it reminds me of Tomas Transtrømer's wonderful idea of poetry as "inspired notes" passed back and forth as secrets from "official life". I was also intrigued by the coincidence that two great artists from Scandinivia had made the same point (or, to be precise, in Bergman's case, had made that impression on Baldwin).

Today, reading further in Baldwin's essays, I came across Baldwin's description of his first meeting with Richard Wright in "Alas, Poor Richard", his three-part memoir-essay after Wright's death:

He had a trick, when he greeted me, of saying, "Hey, boy!" with a kind of pleased, surprised expression on his face. It was very friendly, and it was also, faintly, mockingly conspiratorial – as though we were two black boys, in league against the world, and had just managed to spirit away several loads of watermelon.

Now I'm struck by this as a figure in Baldwin's work: the way he sees – even wants to see – the mentor (Wright) and the filmmaker (Bergman) as his co-conspirators in the secret world of art.

Melissa Lee-Houghton's "Beautiful Girls": A sixth excellent Christmas present

Here's a sixth Christmas book suggestion: Melissa Lee-Houghton's Beautiful Girls (Penned in the Margins, 2013).

 

I first read this book at a time when I was not reading much poetry (the only time in my adult life that that was the case), and it re-invigorated my reading of poetry, and I read it multiple times.

(If I humbly mention that there's also my book of poems, I hasten to add that when I "listen" to Melissa Lee-Houghton, I am in the state that I imagine Thomas Hardy could have been with respect to Louis Armstrong – the state of sheer astonishment.)

John Agard's "Alternative Anthem": a fifth excellent Christmas present

Here's a fifth Christmas book suggestion: John Agard's Alternative Anthem, his 2009 volume of selected poems.

Of if you want a collection rather than a selection of Agard's poems, I also recently read his wonderful sequence Clever Backbone, which spins out variations on the evolution of Homo sapiens going back to the African savannah several million years ago. It's 60 14-line poems that are sometimes very close to being sonnets and sometimes a bit farther.

Or if you prefer a more recent collection, there's Travel Light, Travel Dark from 2013, another excellent collection of Agard's brilliant poetry.

(And of course this wouldn't be one of my recommendations if I didn't mention that there's also my book of poems.)

Patience Agbabi's "Telling Tales": A fourth excellent Christmas present

Here's a fourth Christmas book suggestion: Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales, her rewriting of The Canterbury Tales for contemporary Britain, which she published with Canongate Books in 2014. Each revision of one of Chaucer's tales is written in its own form and in the voice of a different fictional poet. It's a wide-ranging and highly entertaining book.

 

(And of course there's also my book of poems.)

Call for Papers: The Beautiful Game: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Soccer in Transnational Perspective

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Beautiful Game: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Soccer in Transnational Perspective
University of Basel
June 30-July 2, 2016

Confirmed Speakers:
Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research)
Eva Lavric (University of Innsbruck)
Emily Ryall (University of Gloucestershire)

This conference, scheduled to take place during the 2016 European Championship and hosted by the University of Basel’s Department of English, takes up soccer with a special focus on its poetics and aesthetics. The conference particularly seeks to scrutinize the poetics and aesthetics of the game in light of comparative as well as transnational, transcontinental, and global perspectives. In doing so, it aims to shed light on the poetics and aesthetics of all aspects of soccer, from the actual game to fan chants and choreographies, from representations in the arts to the aesthetics of media coverage, from the poetics of live commentary to institutional image cultivation (MLS, FIFA, UEFA, etc.), from aspects of design (jerseys, balls) to recent developments in stadium architecture. Given this range and diversity of the forms in which the poetics and aesthetics of soccer manifest themselves, the conference by necessity is interdisciplinary in nature, with possible contributions coming from fields such as literary and cultural studies, philosophy, linguistics, visual studies and the arts, design, and architecture to name but a few.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• the poetics and aesthetics of the game
• “skill,” “creativity,” “intuition,” and “style” in soccer
• soccer and the notions of the beautiful and the sublime
• fan chants
• fan choreographies
• Ultra aesthetics
• the aesthetics (and politics) of institutional image cultivation via the staging of events such as opening ceremonies, fixture draws, player award ceremonies, etc.
• languages of/in soccer
• the poetics and rhetoric of soccer live commentary
• the poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics of soccer media coverage
• representations of soccer in the arts (including literature and film)
• the aesthetics of stadium architecture
• design in soccer: jerseys, balls, gear, club emblems, etc.

In addition to academic talks, the conference will also include an art event, exhibiting some of the original art that is the basis for tschuttiheftli’s sticker collection they create for every World Cup and European Championship (http://www.tschuttiheft.li/).

Please send your 300-word abstracts and 100-word bios to: soccerconf-dslw@unibas.ch.

The deadline for submissions is December 14, 2015. The conference organizers plan to publish a collection of essays based on selected contributions to the conference.

Conference Organizers:
Dr. phil. des. Ridvan Askin and Dr. Catherine Diederich, Department of English, University of Basel, Nadelberg 6, CH-4051 Basel

C. Dale Young's "Torn": A third excellent Christmas present

Here's a third Christmas book suggestion: C. Dale Young's Torn, his third collection of poems, which he published with Four Way Books in 2011. I also recommend his first two books (The Day underneath the Day and The Second Person), but Torn (as many of my friends know) is my favorite collection of poetry from this century.

 

And for those who want to read a book that will be just as extraordinary, C. Dale Young's new collection The Halo will be published by Four Way on 1 March, 2016, and you can preorder it now.

(And of course there's also my book of poems. Yes, this is the third time I have repeated this point!)

Major Jackson's "Roll Deep": Another excellent Christmas present

Here's another Christmas book suggestion: Major Jackson's Roll Deep, his fourth collection of poems, which he published this year. I also recommend all three of his other books (Leaving Saturn, Hoops, and Holding Company), with Hoops perhaps being my favorite of those three.

(And of course there's also my book of poems. I hope you'll forgive me for repeating this point!)

Claudia Rankine's "Citizen": An excellent Christmas present

If you want to buy a good book for someone this year for Christmas, how about Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric"? I especially recommend it for anyone who has read Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" (which is another great book to give someone for Christmas).

(And of course there's also my book of poems.)

Coates is the Coates of ...

Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me (43, but here copied from the excerpt from the book in the Atlantic):

Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” I understood him to say, and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.”

And again, from later in the book (56, again copied from the Atlantic excerpt):

It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise.

And here's the beginning of an article by Felice Léon from The Daily Beast, "Ta-Nehisi Coates on Why Whites Like His Writing":

 “Why do you think that so many white people love what you write?” asked the award-winning New York Times Magazine journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, during a sold-out discussion at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Here are some passages from the article where Coates's response is quoted:

“I don’t know why white people read what I write,” Coates said. “I didn’t set out to accumulate a mass of white fans.”

“I felt like many of the people that I was reading in the ’90s, when I was in college, were very much burdened by the need to explain to white people,” he said. “And that has an effect on your language.”

“The history is what the history is. And it is disrespectful, to white people, to soften the history.”

“I’ve never seen white people embrace the idea of a black man talking about a world in which they are not at the center of the narrative (for better or worse).”

“Who knows what the mentality is behind that [white people purchasing his book],” he said. “You’ll have to ask some white people, but from my perspective I try to give them [white people] the respect that they deserve, as readers.”

My eipgrammatic response to why I read Coates, then, is this: Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, and Coates is the Coates of whites. 

Superfluities, by Major Jackson

I read this poem in Major Jackson's Holding Company this morning, and I went to find it online to share with friends. I found it, but I also noticed that the version that is online has one more phrase than the version in the book, and as the phrase that is only in the book is one that I had stopped to ponder ("ecstasy of fumbling", which comes from Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est"), I wanted to get the book version online. So here it is:

Superfluities

by Major Jackson

This downpour of bad reasoning, this age-old swarm,
this buzzing about town, this kick and stomp
through gardens, this snag on the way to the mall,
this heap and toss of fabric and strewn shoes, this tangled
beauty, this I came here not knowing, here
to be torched, this fumbling ecstasy, this ecstasy of fumbling,
this spray of lips and fingers, this scrape of bone, this raid
of private grounds, this heaving and rocking, this scream
and push, this sightless hunger, this tattered perishing,
this rhythmic teeth knocking, this unbearable
music, this motionless grip, grimace, and groan.

Tag der Poesie, Basel, 12 September 2015

The Tag der Poesie in Basel was revived in 2012 by Alisha Stöcklin and has taken place in September every year since then. The 2015 "day of poetry" with the theme of "Stillstand und Bewegung" ("stillness and motion") takes place on 12 September at Münsterplatz in Basel, featuring over 20 performances of poetry and music, in German as well as in English and Italian. The two readings in English will be at 1 pm (Cecilia Woloch reading from her latest collection, "Earth") and 1:30 pm (Andrew Shields launching his collection "Thomas Hardy Listens To Louis Armstrong").

For complete information (in German) on all the readings and events, check the Tag der Poesie home page.

Negation or not in a subordinate clause

My wife (a native speaker of German) tells my daughter: "I'm not going to let you go before you haven't practiced [piano]." I noticed the negation in German in such a subordinate clause a few years ago, but today I decided to not just notice the negation in the English but to think about it for a moment.

Consider the following sentences in which I have put the preposition in bold and underlined the verb in the subordinate clause:

1. *I'm not going to let you go before you haven't practiced.
2.  I'm not going to let you go before you have practiced.
3. *I'm not going to let you go until you haven't practiced.
4. I'm not going to let you go until you have practiced.
5. I'm not going to let you go if you haven't practiced.
6. *I'm not going to let you go if you have practiced.

With "before" and "until", the verb in the subordinate clause should not be negated, but with "if", the verb in the subordinate clause should be negated.

For a moment, I thought it might have something to do with the "let" construction, but the main clause could be the much simpler "you can't go" instead, so it's not that.

The first time I encountered the corresponding German construction was in an English class with native speakers of German, to whom constructions 2 and 4 above don't make sense, so it's not just a matter of the "logic" of the sentences either, since English and German realize the referential logic of the situation differently.

At this point, I should probably get out my Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and look up "scope of negation" (that's my best bet about where to start), but instead, I'll just post this and see what anybody says.