Gerald G. Ford

I remember that John Denver song, the full text of which is:

"This is the ballad of Gerald R. Ford,
And all the things he's done."

Now take a look at Paul Constant's article from The Stranger:

"What Gerald Ford saved us from was a nation where Richard Nixon went to jail or committed suicide, a nation where politicians would have to face real legal consequences for their actions, a nation where politicians are responsible for the people under them, and to the people who voted for them. What Gerald Goddamned Ford gave to America is the wave of cynicism that has dominated politics and ensured wave after wave of ever-worsening Republican presidents, preying on our basest fears."

A Barred Owl

The I-shuffling of my CD collection (largely on my external hard drive) just offered me Richard Wilbur reading "A Barred Owl." You can listen to this stunning little poem, too, at the Poetry Archive link I just added to the title.

New Yorker cartoons

Here's a fun article from the Washington Post about how cartoons are chosen for the New Yorker.

The article mentions Matthew Diffee's acceptance rate: 1 cartoon out of 10 in a good week. Otherwise none. That reminds me of what Ted Williams supposedly said when asked about how it felt to hit .400: "How would you feel if your boss gave you ten jobs to do and you did four of them successfully?" I always wanted to add, "And how would your boss feel?"

No old haunts

We go to Kassel at Christmas, to Andrea's parents. Where would I go in the U.S.? No old haunts: Detroit, where I was born? Nobody there. Palo Alto, where I lived the most before moving to Europe? No family there. Toledo, of the late seventies? God forbid (at least since my Dad finally escaped there to go to Seattle). Ann Arbor? My Mom moved to Wisconsin.

So wherever I would go, it would not be to haunts from childhood and university!

Year in Review

Birdchick posted a version of this, which comes from Faux Real Tho: collect the first sentence of the first entry of each month of one's blog.

January: Welcome.

February: Miles: T-Rex was a bad guy.

March: I got Geoffrey Hill's "Without Title" from the Poetry Book Society right before I went to the United States ten days ago, and finished it on my trip.

April: Two poems by my friend A. E. Stallings were on Poetry Daily on Monday, April 11.

May: The April 17, 2006, issue of The New Yorker contains a wonderful coincidence in its profiles of Maurice Sendak and Pete Seeger

June: Since class did not take place on Tuesday, May 23 (as I was on paternity leave after Sara's birth), the votes for week 7 (Tuesday, May 16, to Monday, May 22) and week 8 (Tuesday, May 23, and Monday, May 29) both took place in class on Tuesday morning, May 30.

July: The vote for the 12th and final week of the Daily Poem Project (poems on Poetry Daily from June 20, 2006, to June 26, 2006) took place on Tuesday morning, June 27.

August: I have been meaning to make more comments about verse novels since March, when I bought quite a few new ones while traveling in the US.

September: A student of mine sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody of Intelligent Design that has taken on a life of its own: the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

October: In another entry from the category of misheard lyrics, there are these lines from "Touch of Grey"

November: Miles and I don't play cribbage any more since we invented doublage, which is kind of "double cribbage."

December: On a September evening in 1987, I watched the television broadcast of the baseball game when the San Francisco Giants clinched their place in the playoffs.

Goodnight Mush

I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert's article "Goodnight Mush" in the Dec. 4 issue of the New Yorker:

'If, as Joan Didion famously put it, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” why do we tell stories to our children? In my experience, mostly it is to get them to shut up. A book read to a toddler who, after running around the house all day, has had to be stuffed, quite literally, into his pajamas, may traffic in imaginative freedom and wonder, but it is still an instrument of control. I will read this to you, and then you will go to sleep. End of story.'

The article lives up to this opening (and it is nice to see that EK can write well about other things, and not just about her usual terrifying topic, global warming).

Lying in submissions

C. Dale Young writes, in his post "Lies and Garbage" (and in his role as poetry editor of New England Review):

"Why do writers lie in their cover letters? I mean, they not only lie but they lie like dogs. Not all of them. Not even the majority of them. But the ones that do just about kill me. It is never a good idea to lie about something like having work in The New Yorker and POETRY. These can be checked in less than a minute. And even if your lie gets your work past the screeners and into the hands of the poetry editor, s/he will know almost immediately that you are lying. So weird."

My comment to him:

1) I, too, am astonished that somebody would lie about the really biggest names, where it is, in the age of the web, astonishingly easy to be caught in one's lie.

In composition classes and academic work, it is easy these days for students to steal essays from the web (or essay-like texts from blogs), but it is also incredibly easy for their teachers to find them, too (and the stolen material sticks out like a sore thumb, because of the change in style—and, with my students, the sudden absence of the common mistakes made by German speakers). In fact, the English Seminar in Basel subscribes to a service that can identify plagiarized texts—the flip side of students' buying essays from web services.

2) Why do editors need bios at all? I just read the guidelines page at NER. It does not ask writers to submit a bio in their cover letters. Have you thought about asking people to NOT send bios?

What is the purpose of a bio with a submission to a literary magazine, anyway? If the editors are really serious about the idea that they look only at the poems themselves and not at the names of the poets who wrote them, then a bio should be superfluous. If a good bio increases the poet's chances of being published, then the editors are looking at more than just the poems themselves, aren't they?

Of course, even without bios in cover letters, editors will still recognize the names of many of the poets who submit to them. But short of blind submissions (as in prizes), there's nothing to be done about that.

Early Comics

Thanks to Pierre Joris, I came across this stunning site: Andy's Early Comics Archive. Endless browsing pleasure: ancient Bible illustrations, tapestries, even Roman-era illustrations.

Walt Disney

Anthony Lane's article about Walt Disney in the Dec. 11, 2006, issue of The New Yorker is worth checking out. Lane makes a wonderful comparison between Disney and Dickens, by way of G. K. Chesterton:

'As G. K. Chesterton wrote, irrefutably, "Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted."'

But Lane (a writer I have been enjoying for years now) does not need Chesterton to heighten the insight of his own writing: "[Disney] became an industry, but the one thing that links the industrialist, whatever the product, with the auteur, whatever the form, is obsessive pedantry—the will to get things right, whatever the cost may be."

One especially interesting factoid in the article has to do with Disney's decline after the end of his peak period in 1942. His last five films at the time had been "Snow White," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Dumbo," and "Bambi" (not a bad run!). But the decline was not purely creative: Disney's animators went on strike in 1941. The resulting changes in his relationship to his animators meant that the intensive labor that made those five movies so deep and brilliant became too expensive.

Nicholas Manning on Celan

Nicholas Manning made some interesting points about Paul Celan and interpretation (with three beautiful photos of Celan, one with his wife Giselle). My comments:

1) The worst thing you can do when teaching Celan is what Gerhard Sauder did on the first day of an otherwise wonderful Celan seminar I sat in on in Saarbrücken years ago: "Es freut mich, dass so viele gekommen sind, um diesen schwierigen Lyriker mit mir zu lesen." Once you declare Celan difficult, you've closed off the students to direct access to the poems' beauty. Perhaps I say this because when I first read Celan in a "Literature of the Holocaust" course with John Felstiner, John did not say anything about difficulty, and I read Celan, and the stunning effect of the poems was utterly clear. In terms of reference, the poems had opacities, of course; but as I was able to get right to them as works of art.

2) I find that Celan can be read using careful close-reading techniques as long as my starting point is that I take things literally. The poems may not be referential in the sense of describing realistic scenes, but they do describe scenes.

Poetics

Multiple blogs (Silliman from Wed., Dec. 13; Jonathan Mayhew, from Dec. 14) led to this, from John Gallaher:

"... to me the idea of a poetics is best left to someone other than a practicing poet."

Which led me to comment on JG's blog:

Generally, the best theorists of poetry are not the poets themselves. Or as my friend Geoff Brock once said to me, "One does not need a degree in Comparative Literature in order to write poems."

The irony of this, of course, is that Geoff and I both have degrees in Comp. Lit. (though we both wrote our dissertations on novelists), and even that we became friends in grad school. :-)

In the starting point of this discussion, Ron Silliman wrote this about Alice Notley: "She may choose to deny that what she does constitutes a poetics, but that denial, it seems to me, is not just a part of that poetics (as surely it is), it’s also part of the conscious loneliness that makes Alice Notley’s work instantly unmistakable, regardless of the forms it may take."

I would agree that the work of Alice Notley (or any poet) can be analyzed in such a way as to describe that poet's "poetics" (as something ever mutable, in the case of a living poet, as something complete and potentially even fully describable, in the case of a dead poet), but it is certainly not necessary for Alice Notley herself to do that analysis in order to write poetry.

Style is culture-dependent

As I just wrote to a student here in Basel:

I had a student once in Saarbrücken who wrote a seminar paper in English after taking my class and was praised for the dramatic improvement in his writing skills. Then he wrote a seminar paper in German, again putting my suggestions into practice. I don't remember the professor's exact words (this was over ten years ago), but basically the student was told that the paper was too straightforward, too "thesenhaft."

Jeet Thayil in Softblow

I enjoyed Jeet Thayil's poems in Softblow, especially the poem "To Baudelaire":

To Baudelaire

I am over you at last, in Mexico City,
in a white space high above the street,
my hands steady, the walls unmoving.
It’s warm here, and safe, and even in winter
the rain is benign. Some mornings I let
the sounds of the plaza—a fruit seller,
a boy acrobat, a woman selling
impossible fictions—pile up in a corner
of the room. I’m not saying I’m happy
but I am healthy and my money’s my own.
Sometimes when I walk in the market
past the chickens and the pig smoke,
I think of you—your big talk and wolf’s heart,
your Bonaparte hair and eyes of Poe.
I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you when
I open a window and light fills the room
like water pouring into a paper cup,
or when I see a woman’s white dress shine
like new coins and I know I could follow
my feet to the river and let my life go
away from me. At times like this,
if I catch myself talking to you,
I’m always surprised at the words I hear
of regret and dumb boyish devotion.

*

Or, as Greg Brown put it:

I'll be happy happy happy happy happy, just by myself.

Other than that

There's the old line that you say when somebody had a bad time somewhere: "And other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

Once, my wife, my sister-in-law, and I started playing around with that: "Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, how was your stay in Dallas?" We went through a lot of variations, and then came up with something from an event that, at the time, had just occurred: "Other than that, Mrs. Rabin, how did you like the demonstration?" It was only then that we realized how truly morbid the joke is.

Maxwell's color photo

I enjoyed this article about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist famous for "Maxwell's equations," which explain light, electricity, and magnetism in four lovely formulas. I especially enjoyed the bit of trivia that Maxwell produced the world's first color photograph.

Patterns in book manuscripts

A while back, C. Dale Young made some comments about the patterns in submissions to the New England Review (he is the poetry editor). Just now, he made some comments about patterns in book manuscripts (I take it he is working as a reader for a prize):

"Over the past 2 days, I screened 100 first book mss. What did I learn?

1. people seem to love the word "ochre"
2. the simple, present-tense sentence is still the choice of most poets out there
3. Abortion is a fairly common topic for poems (I saw no less than 20)
4. a good story does not always make for a good poem
5. many seem capable putting together a 90+ page ms. without difficulty
6. Rothko is making a comeback
7. most poets are like me in that they come up with god-awful titles for their mss. (I always have to have friends guide me to a better title)
8. a lot of people must visit Italy (I mean A LOT)
9. many poets use spell check but don't check the spell chack changes!
10. God and religion is everywhere in these mss."

I stopped submitting my book manuscript for a year (though I am going to start again in January), so all I can do is take Dale's comments as advice, rather than respond with a list. So I will avoid "ochre" and Italy. :-)

But seriously, the most important of these points is number two: so many poems today are written in the present tense when they would surely work better as the past-tense narratives that they "really" are (but see number 4!).

Becoming a neurosurgeon

I posted this as a comment on the post 'Tis the Season on Of Looking at a Blackbird:

Rosellen Brown told me that she was once at a dinner party where she was sitting next to a neurosurgeon. When the neurosurgeon found out that she was a novelist, he said that he was considering taking a sabbatical in order to write a novel. She said something like, "That's interesting. I've been considering taking a year off from writing in order to do neurosurgery."

As she commented, once in a while you say the right thing at the right time.

Why German-language poets don't write blogs

I wrote this as a comment on a post on John Gallaher's blog:

I recently tried to locate German-language poets who have blogs, and I was unable to find any. So I wrote to my friend Ulrike Draesner, a poet and novelist who lives in Berlin, to ask her if she knew of any German poets who write blogs. In my note to her, I wondered if German poets might avoid writing blogs because most of them are making a living as free-lance writers; she agreed that that might be the case when she wrote me back to say that she knew of no German poets producing blogs.

In other words, to put in the crudest terms, the German-language poets don't write blogs because they have to sell as much writing as they can to make a living, while many poets in North America do not have to sell writing to make a living (because they teach writing instead), so they can write blogs just for the pleasure and community of it.

"Humanity's Place in Nature"

"... the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified."

Steven Pinker, "Less Faith, More Reason"

No Man's Land

No Man's Land is a new, Berlin-based journal of German literature in English translation (the English version of lauter niemand). I translated three texts for the first issue: Nina Lucia Bußmann's story "The Tree" and two poems by Florian Voß. It's all done with frames, so I can only link you to the NML website. From there, click on "Issue #1" to check out the work they are publishing.