Heideggerian?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, as I tried to render it:

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

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

January 20, Büchner and Celan

"Den 20. Jänner ging Lenz durchs Gebirg."

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

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

The original German is available here.

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

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

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

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

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

Caleb Crain on his article

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

Working with Paper

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

WORKING WITH PAPER

Every poem can be made
into a swallow.

But you have to fold it right.

Every poem, you know,
even the failures.

Now imagine a sky for them.

Jürgen Theobaldy, tr. Andrew Shields
Smartish Pace 11

How Would a Fool Do It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richter on the web

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

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

The Valley

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

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

Eagle-Flown Sky

An eagle-flown sky, almost empty.

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

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

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

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

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

The Fortress of Solitude

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

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

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

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"'Let me see it for a minute.'

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

River

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

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

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

Hamlet, Müller, Mühe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omnivore's Dilemma

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

Talk Party & Book Discussion:

The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan

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

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

Depths and Surfaces

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

And if you cannot, celebrate surfaces.

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

Insect Lab

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

Wednesday, Ash

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nadia Leonti

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

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

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

Check out the super graphics of the flyer!

The Beekeeper

My poem "The Beekeeper" is up at qarrtsiluni.

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

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

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

Birds seen from trains

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

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

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

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

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

Viruses in genes

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

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

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

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

Measuring the Temple

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

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

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

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