"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.

Somebody's Hometown

In addition to my poetry book, I have also just published an album with my band Human Shields, "Somebody's Hometown." The title of the album comes from the first line of one of the songs, "Alisa's Bridge": "On the streets of somebody's hometown."

The album is available here on Bandcamp, where you can stream it for free or buy it as a download. Whoever wants a CD should contact me personally.

Here are Don Brown's liner notes about the album:

What are songs for?  Are they simply hummable ditties to alleviate or enhance a mood, or are they little tales that captivate us with their implications?

On "Somebody’s Hometown", Human Shields invest songwriting with the poetic, philosophical, and storytelling content found in the work of the best songwriters.  Like the oldest forms—those found in the folksongs of almost any culture—the songs on this collection take lyrics seriously.   From songs that play off familiar poetic figures—the birds in “Land Without Nightingales,” to the burning tiger (or tyger) in “Rumpus”—to songs that evoke folkloric content—the pale rider, the pirate, the face cards—to songs relevant to our times—“Abottabad”—to songs that engage with a philosophical outlook—“Better Never Than Late,” “You Know I Know”—the songs of Somebody’s Hometown repay attention to lyrics that far too few songwriters can command.

That’s not to say you can get all the value from this disc by reading the lyric sheet.  Not by a long shot.  The songs themselves partake of many aspects of folk music, but crossed with jazz and rock and other forms that best suit the song.  When “Abottabad” begins, we could be listening to someone singing about life in any year of the modern period.  As the sound begins to blend into what might be a cry-in-your-beer confession, we come to something closer to home, passing through a hint of Country  to attest to an American moment.  Or consider the Violent Femmes-like strum of “Rumpus,” or the complex solo in “Sundowning,” or the vocals late in “You Know I Know” where a Tim Buckley-like impassioned abandon comes into play.  Everywhere there are echoes, hints, suggestions of the musical background that gives the work of Human Shields its rich context.

The songs on this disc are stately, thoughtful, varied, surprising.  The simple instrumentation of Andrew Shields, Dany Demuth, and Christoph Meneghetti articulates the songs’ structures with fascinating clarity, and Demuth’s vocals are always graceful, able to punch us with punkish blues belting in “Better Never Than Late,” or lull us with the lovely lyricism of “Long Enough”—a song that starts by evoking one of my favorite paintings, by Vermeer.

The best records invite much replaying—songs the listener wants to learn or memorize, performances that offer a definitive treatment.  "Somebody’s Hometown" is a place to settle down in.

Thomas Hardy Listens To Louis Armstrong

My first full-length poetry book, Thomas Hardy Listens To Louis Armstrong, was published on 1 July 2015 by Eyewear Publishing in London. You can order it any local bookstore near where you live (it has an ISBN and all that). It's also available directly from Eyewear, from Amazon, and soon from Small Press Distribution.

The book has three blurbs:

You’ll find sundry sorts of life that touch Andrew and you as well, in all sorts of verse: brief or long, quick or deep, free or meter, filled with experience. What’s more, you may well want to speak them to family and friends. His last poem’s last line tells us “verses did what verses mean to do”—a truth that’s worth to check back on!

John Felstiner

Andrew Shields is maestro of the sympathetic and the savvy.  He writes with unapologetic lyricism and with a narrative self-awareness that is anymore too rare in contemporary poetry.  The poems in the volume are entirely composed—and I intend that word in all the ways one might employ it: composed in the manner of a piece of music, composed in the way one might describe someone as being emotionally pulled together.  The simple stoicism of “Sundowning” will break your heart; “Blackbird” is a masterwork.  Everything about this collection sings.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

Andrew Shields is a musician himself. If you have not heard him play, read his poems. The scene in which Thomas Hardy listens to Louis Armstrong could only have been arranged by someone like him.

Durs Grünbein

*

Plus, it was summarized in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin as follows:

 Music swells from Andrew Shields' debut collection, from anonymous buskers "whose words have long been drowned out by the year" to Osip Mandelstam's 'Tambourine', from soaking in 'Monk's Dream' to hearing "unfinished poems in radio static". Rhythm and melody consume this poet, "spoken words [his] only instrument" yet conjuring verse "for the dancers / and the dance, unnoting, unwitting, unwrit" in a sweeping collection of symphonic depth and detail.

  "Symphonic depth and detail"! That makes me smile. :-)

Jerry Garcia at a Los Lobos concert, 1987

When I saw Los Lobos in the summer of 1987 at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, Jerry Garcia was in the audience. After the opening act, I had a little chat with him about the lyrics of “Lady With A Fan”: I wanted to know if it was “his job is to shed light and not to master” or “share light.” He said, in his inimitable voice, “Some people hear shed; some hear share. Hunter wrote shed, but whatever you hear is okay by me; I’m just the singer, you know.”

During the Los Lobos set, a roadie came out and gave David Hidalgo a cherry-red Telecaster, and David strapped it on to play “Come On Let’s Go,” which he dedicated to Jerry.

A week or so later, I met a guy who had been backstage at the show, and he told me about that guitar: Jerry had come backstage with a guitar case before the show, looking for Hidalgo. When he found him, he gave him the guitar: a mint-condition vintage Telecaster. Hence the dedication!

Luther and Apocryphal Attribution

In April 2005, A. E. Stallings published "Triolet Apocryphally Attributed To Martin Luther" in Poetry:

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,   

The booze and the neon and Saturday night,   

The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?   

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?   

Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons   

And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?   

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,   

The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

When I read the poem in the magazine, I immediately grabbed my guitar and began strumming around, and in a few minutes, I had set the poem to music. 

In the meantime, the song has become a staple of my band Human Shields. It's a very short and punky song, and you can watch a video of it on Facebook here.

The other day, I linked to that video, and a Facebook friend wondered about the attribution to Martin Luther. It was not that she disputed the quotation's apocryphal nature, but that she had never heard the line attributed to Luther. She also said that it did not sound like Luther to her.

Now, I can never resist pursuing the attribution of a quotation, and I am very sympathetic to my friend's sense that it didn't sound like Luther – many false attributions can be detected by how the quotations do not sound at all like anything Mark Twain or whoever would actually say. But first I just wanted to find a few cases of people attributing the line to Luther.

I found quite a few, with the interesting caveat that every single case of attribution to Luther mentioned that the quotation is surely apocryphal. But one case found something in Luther's Table Talk that sounded a bit like the line; more precisely, the passage that follows is from Richard Friedenthal's 1967 biography of Luther:

Luther's intentions were strict; he wanted to eliminate the profane songs entirely. How had it happened, he asked, that in the secular field there 'are so many fine poems and so many beautiful songs, while in the religious field we have such rotten, lifeless stuff?' What is undeniable is that he injected his own fire into the genre, wherever the tunes and words may have come from. 'The devil has no need of all the good tunes for himself,' he remarked, and took them away from him.

 
The reference is to "WA TR 5, no. 5603" (Werkausgabe Tischreden), so I found the original in a 1919 edition:

Wie geht es zu, das wir in carnalibus so manch fein poem und so manch schön carmen haben, und in spiritualibus haben wir so faul, kalt ding?

(Translation here.)

As is so often the case with apocryphal attribution, there might be something that has led people to make the attribution (though of course attributions are also often just made up out of whole cloth). So in the case, Luther did say something that contrasted "carnal" art and "spiritual" art, and he did so in the context of music. But he didn't put it the way that the apocryphal attribution puts it, and the devil was not involved.