What Kind of Times Are These

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo

Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist

Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!

(Bertolt Brecht, "An die Nachgeborenen"; Brecht reads it here)

What kind of times are these, when

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many atrocities!

(Bertolt Brecht, "To Those Born Later," my translation)

The "conversation about trees" that Brecht refers to in this poem from the 1930s has often been associated with poets who were then writing about nature rather than about the "atrocities" taking place even before the Second World War began. In this (entirely justified) reading, Brecht is setting up an apparently exclusive alternative: write about nature, or write about politics.

Adrienne Rich's 1991 poem "What Kind of Times Are These" (video here) takes up Brecht's imagery directly both in its title (a translation of "Was sind das für Zeiten") and in its concluding lines:

… why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

Brecht addresses "those born later"; in contrast, Rich addresses her contemporaries: those readers or listeners who "still listen." This first phrase seems like praise of the addressee, but what follows has a critical edge: "talking about trees" is a lure that is "necessary" to get "you" to listen at all. In a reading of these lines in terms of the reading of Brecht sketched above, a "conversation about trees" becomes a way for a poet to trick someone into thinking about "atrocities" rather than a way of avoiding doing so. Writing poetry about nature, here, does not exclude writing poetry about politics; in fact, "in times like these," only poetry about nature can engage the listener in such a way as to get poetry about politics heard at all.

Unlike Brecht, who mentions trees only once, and only indirectly ("a conversation about trees" and not the trees themselves), Rich actually does write about trees. In keeping with the poem's conclusion, the first stanza already makes a move from trees to politics:

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

Rather than politics in general, this is a history of a "revolutionary" politics engaged in by "the persecuted." It is also a history of failure: the path of the revolution "breaks off into shadows"; the "meeting-house" for the revolutionaries was "abandoned." In this light, the odd formulation that "the grass grows uphill" makes sense: the revolution is an uphill battle with many setbacks and many obstacles.

The obstacles to revolution include the atrocities referred to by Brecht. The "disappearance" of South American leftists during the 1970s and 1980s may only hover in the shadows of Rich's first stanza, but the idea of someone "being disappeared" by the authorities appears explicitly at the end of her second stanza:

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

The reference to a "Russian poem" comes quite unexpectedly; is it the "mushrooms" or "the edge of dread" that is supposed to make it necessary to insist that we "not be fooled"? Along with her use of Brecht's poem for her title, Rich's note to the poem includes another reference: the juxtaposition of "truth" and "dread" echoes the conclusion of W.S. Merwin's translation of a poem by Osip Mandelstam: "the earth’s moving nearer to truth and to dread." It's not the mushrooms that might have been "Russian," then, but the "dread." 

So this is not Russia, where Mandelstam was "disappeared"; nor is it a South American military dictatorship whose actions led to the coining of the transitive sense of "disappear" (usually in the passive voice as "Jorge was disappeared last week"). For some American readers, all the words describing this "place between two stands of trees" might well have pointed to such an "elsewhere," a country whose distance from the reader's own makes it easy to condemn. But this is "not somewhere else but here"; this is "our country," which we readers cannot distance ourselves from.

Still, the poem does not name the country in question. The author's name and biography tell us to think of it as the United States, and that specificity is very important to her work. At the same time, the lack of specificity is important to the poem itself, because it does not allow non-American readers to distance themselves from their own countries' atrocities, their own societies' "ways of making people disappear."

In the third stanza, Rich makes her lack of specificity explicit by refusing to identify the place in question:

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

If Rich told us where this "paradise" is, the specificity would relieve anyone from "somewhere else" of responsibility for the "disappearances" the poem refers to. But this refusal to identify the place also protects it from capitalist exploitation, even if the attempt to do so has already failed, just like the revolutions that left the "ghosts" behind at the "crossroads." After all, if she knows who is going to "buy it, sell it, [and] make it disappear," then her concealment of the location of this place will not actually protect it from "development."

For Brecht, a poem "about trees" is a poem that is explicitly not about politics and "atrocities." Rich implies that a nature poem can be a way to draw people into a consideration of politics. But in this third stanza, she makes clear that a poem "about trees" can also be quite explicitly political. The first two stanzas understand politics in terms of revolution and political history; this third stanza criticizes how capitalism aims to turn everything into a commodity to be bought and sold; in the process, the small "paradises" that can be found in out-of-the-way places are "disappeared."

This reading of the last line of the stanza in terms of political economy can be complemented by an "environmentalist" reading. By the late 20th century, after all, it had become clear that "a conversation about trees" might well involve speaking about "atrocities," as landscapes all over the world are destroyed in the name of economic progress. In this light, Rich's poem completely overturns Brecht's stark distinction between nature poetry and political poetry. Nature is not just a tool to get people to think about politics, as the final stanza implies with its variation on Brecht. In fact, nature itself, commodified and potentially "disappeared," is already as much a site of politics as any "revolutionary road" or "meeting-house" for "the persecuted." 

Feminists in the 1970s insisted that "the personal is the political," and much of Rich's most famous poetry explores the implications of that claim, which challenged the idea of the private sphere as an apolitical space. "What Kind of Times Are These" extends this challenge by implying that "the environmental is also the political." And it demonstrates how a "political poetry" can address the full range of politics while still being a poem "about trees."

Electing the Assassin-in-Chief

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.

(Tom Englehardt)

As far as drone attacks and civil liberties are concerned, it does not matter who wins the election in November: Obama's policies have either continued or extended those of his predecessor (which means he explicitly broke promises he made while campaigning), and neither he nor Romney will reassert the civil liberties that the "war on terror" has at best limited and at worst eliminated. If you're looking for a way to choose between the two, you'll have to look somewhere else.

For me, this means voting for Obama (health care and same-sex marriage being two issues where the choice is clear). I don't see this as a "lesser of two evils" approach to voting. That rhetoric only applies if you expect one of the two candidates to be "good" rather than "evil," but the point is not a moral issue to be seen in black-and-white terms. Rather, it is a consideration of which candidate supports which policies that you support, and then weighing them in the balance. Since Obama and Romney are part of the "war on terror" consensus of American politics, there's nothing to weigh when it comes to that issue.

But supporting Obama in general does not mean I will stop criticizing him on civil-liberties issues and drones. He deserves to be condemned for the policies he has implemented  in these areas, even if I am under no illusion that anything will change along those lines in 2013 ... I wish I had the slightest reason to be optimistic, but significant numbers of "my fellow Americans" (oh no, I sound like Reagan) will have to begin to challenge the government on these issues. Despite the 99% idea, that's not going to happen soon.


UPDATE: Garry Wills provides good reasons for thinking there's more to this election than I've suggested. It would be more convincing if his argument at least addressed the fact that Obama's war footing also serves the "plutocracy" that he is justifiably critical of.

Pink Floyd

I just listened to Pink Floyd's The Wall for the first time in a long time. In contrast, I listen to their Dark Side of the Moon, Animals, and Wish You Were Here more often. And now I think I know why.

The Wall is brilliant on the whole, but in order to tell the whole story, it has to end up containing more filler. Some of the songs are not really songs but just "stage business," as it were. (Actually, The Who's Tommy suffers from the same problem.) The other three Floyd albums I mentioned above are all pretty much filler-free: every track is a great piece of music in its own right, and not just part of the storyline.

Two poems online in London Grip

I've got two poems online in the latest issue of London Grip. You can see a list of all the poets in the issue here. My poems are "Waltz" and "Transplant."

Memorial Day

Remember the conscientious objectors who stood up for what they believed in.

Remember the civilians who died as "collateral damage" while the armies fought in the name of one thing or another.

Remember the gays and lesbians who wanted to fight for their country but weren't allowed to.

Remember those imprisoned for speaking out against unjust wars, or even just talking truthfully about the horrors of war. They weren't shouting "fire" in a crowded theater; they were standing outside a burning cinema telling people they shouldn't go inside.

Remember all those who struggled to retain their humanity and dignity during wartime, pity those who tried and failed to do so, and disdain those who did not even try.

Fleck and the Bank

The Chinese character for 'crisis', he reads,

binds together danger and extreme

caution, averse to risk and opportunity.

("The Bank" III)

Even before the Internet (remember that?), vaguely attributed quotations from "exotic" languages (for our purposes, "non-Western") made the rounds as tidbits of wisdom that could be used as guides to good living or success. Here, Rob A. Mackenzie bitingly mocks the spurious idea (see Victor Mair's dismantling of it here) that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of "danger" and "opportunity."

The "he" in question is the main character of Fleck and the Bank, a banker friend of "Rob" (to whom a letter in the book is addressed) who disappeared in August 2011. These lines rebuild a cliché of contemporary "management wisdom" so as to turn it on its head: "danger + opportunity" becomes an aversion to both. 

Such dismantling appears most strikingly in a prose poem called "Now and in the Hour of Our Death," which is ostensibly the note that Fleck left behind when he disappeared. Near the end of it, there is this wonderful sentence:

There's too much in life: you can't describe it, yet he who dares to speak of it, bears witness, and calls to witness him to whom he speaks.

In the notes at the back of the book, this poem is described as "a collage of cut 'n' pasted sources from the first and/or last lines of books stacked along a single shelf in Fleck's kitchen." Before the Internet, research on this would have involved a trip to the library (and one with as wide-ranging a collection as Fleck), but now I was able to quickly discover the source here—or rather, sources: "There's too much in life: you can't describe it" is the last line of Les Murray's verse novel Fredy Neptune, and the rest comes from Martin Buber's I and Thou. The "it" in Buber refers, however, to "God's existence," not the "too much in life" that can't be described in Murray. Mackenzie's revision of the orientalist cliché about "crisis" turns it upside down; here, he disorients both Murray and Buber, finding a new opportunity in their juxtaposition.

Translation Workshop in Switzerland, October 2012

Here's an announcement from the Looren Translation House in Switzerland:

October 17 – 24, 2012

ViceVersa - Fifth German and English workshop at the Translation House Looren Workshop

leaders: Karen Nölle (Germany) and Shelley Frisch (USA)

We invite translators from German to English and English to German to apply for our fifth translators’ workshop, which will provide the opportunity to present and discuss their translations-in-progress.

In addition to the work on texts, the program will include meetings with literary movers and shakers.

Applications deadline: June 30, 2012

For the application form, see the Looren web page here.

A Ground-Up Millipede

Thomas Willis was a 17th-century English doctor who, among other things, coined the term "neurology" and collaborated with Christopher Wren (who did the drawings) to produce the first accurate description of the structures of the human brain. The story of Willis's research and medical practice is told in Carl Zimmer's book Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain ... (there's more to its title, but it's just marketing ...).

Zimmer talks a great deal about the historical context of seventeenth-century England, not just to add color but because Willis's biography (like that of anyone living through it) was strongly influenced by the English Civil War. After the Restoration and the Great Fire of London, Willis moved his practice from Oxford to London and became the most famous physician in England (in part because of his work with Wren describing the brain). Zimmer writes of his medical practice as follows:

His theories about how people became sick and how the body worked were hugely popular. Yet his remedies remained, as ever, generally useless. He continued prescribing his eclectic blend of medicines—a blistering plaster for one patient, a ground-up millipede for another—and claimed success when his patients recovered and escaped blame when they didn't. If they recuperated, they usually did so in spite of his attentions.

The popularity of a medical treatment bears no necessary relationship to its effectiveness. Its popularity might well be based on other things—in this case, the fame of Willis's research—or on logical fallacies, such as the clear post hoc, ergo proper hoc moment in the above passage. Perhaps ground-up millipedes are good for something, but no matter how much he had discovered about the structure of the brain, Willis was probably just making it up when he decided that millipedes would do the job.

Germ Theory

It's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that there might be people out there—doctors, even!—who dispute the germ theory of disease. But there are, and some of them are trying to provide medical treatment to terminally ill patients (and anyone else they can convince to put themselves into their hands), as is shown by this post about such a case.

David Gorski writes of the era when the germ theory was first developed:

Béchamp, as you may remember, was a contemporary of Louis Pasteur and proposed a competing hypothesis for the cause of infectious disease, which he dubbed the pleomorphic theory. The concept he championed was that bacteria do not cause disease but are rather a manifestation of disease. In other words, diseased tissues produce bacteria, arising from structures that Béchamp called microzymas, which to him referred to a class of enzyme. Béchamp postulated that microzymas are normally present in tissues and that their effects depended upon the cellular terrain. Of course, as we all know, ultimately Pasteur’s ideas won out based on evidence, experimentation, and clinical observation, relegating Béchamp to more or less a historical footnote. In fairness, it should be remembered that, 150 year ago, it wasn’t entirely clear who was correct, Pasteur or Béchamp. Given the technology and tools of the time, it was not a trivial matter to determine where bacteria arose, although it didn’t take long before experiments and methodology were developed that pretty much put Béchamp’s concepts to bed for good.

The point is well taken: when Pasteur was first developing his ideas, there were many other ideas in the air, and his ideas "won out" not because of some conspiracy to make them win out, but because they fit the evidence best.

If you're looking for an "alternative" doctor, at least try to find one who does not dismiss the germ theory and claim, among other things, that HIV "is not a virus but an alkaline antibody to buffer acid or antigens."

I'm not sure what I'll do when somebody comes along and says, "But Pasteur was wrong!"

How There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

This article by Sean Carroll, "A Universe from Nothing?", is a very clear explication of the two primary explanations in contemporary physics of how it is that there is something (the universe) rather than nothing. Carroll begins by referring to Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing" and David Albert's negative review of Krauss's book in the New York Times. Carroll also nicely lays out how Krauss and Albert are talking past each other, as they are addressing two different versions of the questions they differ on. 

But the real reason to read Carroll's article is independent of its occasion (the dispute between Krauss and Albert). Even those for those with little or no background in physics, Carroll lays out the issues so clearly that you can get a sense of what possibilities are established by contemporary physical theory. I cannot recommend the article highly enough!

Persuasion

The article about Camus in the April 9 issue of the New Yorker (which is unfortunately only online for subscribers) contains this quotation from Camus:

We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.

How does one talk to those who are so sure of themselves that they never doubt the validity of their actions, no matter what the content of those actions may be? If you perceive someone as being so full of certainty and completely unwilling/unable to be skeptical about their own beliefs, then perhaps the only thing to do is not to talk to them, but to talk to others who are not as uncertain, to help them avoid being persuaded by abstract certainties that lead to "lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture."

Still, it would be nice if the people in power were not engaged in those activities quite so unreservedly.

*

Near the end of the article, Adam Gopnik paraphrases Camus's position on place as follows: No human being is more indigenous to a place than any other. This rootless cosmopolitan applauds such a point, but Camus's basis for it is quite convincing: his mother may have been a French colonist in Algeria, but she worked as a cleaning lady; she had none of the privileges of the colonial. And Camus, born and raised in Algeria, was as Algerian as anyone else born and raised there.

Speak Softly ... no, Whisper

I was planning to write a rather scathing takedown of this article by Constance Hale from the NYT Opinionator blog: "Make-or-break verbs." But Geoffrey Pullum beat me to it: "Not Rage So Much, But a Modicum of Fear." As I wanted to, Pullum went after Hale's complete misuse of the terms "active" and "passive." But he did leave me some points to make.

Hale writes: "Picking pointed verbs also allows us to forgo adverbs. Many of these modifiers merely prop up a limp verb anyway. Strike speaks softly and insert whispers." If Teddy Roosevelt had followed that advice, he would have made himself ridiculous: "Whisper and carry a big stick." Beyond that, "speaking softly" is something quite different than "whispering" anyway. And finally, there's absolutely nothing wrong with adverbs anyway!

Further, Hale also has trouble with grammatical categories that Pullum does not take her down for. She uses the opening of a short story by Jo Ann Beard to talk about "static verbs": "Here is a scene. Two sisters are fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake ..." Apparently, Hale sees "is" in the first sentence and "are" in the second as "static" verbs that should be used carefully so as not to make one's writing too static. But the "are" in the second sentence is part of the phrase "are fishing", and "to fish" is surely not one of her "static" verbs.

So all in all, if you want good writing advice, avoid Constance Hale. On the evidence of this article, she does not know what she is talking about.

A Statement of Accounts

Samuel Beckett wrote about Kafka (specifically, The Castle, which he stopped reading three-quarters of the way through): I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts. (I came across this in a footnote to John Banville's review of the second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett in The New York Review of Books.) He may have been wary of Kafka, but Beckett nicely captured one feature of Kafka's work: the lack of drama with which its dramas are presented.

I find myself increasingly put off by the way the word "Kafkaesque" is used, and Beckett's formulation makes the reason clear: all too often, the term is used to refer to events that are strange, surreal, and nightmarish — disastrous — but which are also presented as disasters, as oddities, surrealities, nightmares. But what makes Kafka's work so singular and striking is precisely its cool presentation of what others would present as dramas, or perhaps more precisely, as melodramas or tragedies. References to the Kafkaesque ought to include what they never do: the absence of the affect of disaster.

"The Lyric I"?

The other day, one of my poet friends on Facebook (I don't remember who, unfortunately) used the expression "the lyric I". This clearly derives from the German expression "das lyrische Ich", and I have always told my students and colleagues here in Basel that an appropriate translation would be "persona." But I have begun to see the expression used occasionally by English speakers far from the German-speaking world. I wonder if it has entered some parts of poetry discourse in the English-speaking word through translations of Adorno.

In any case, I am curious how my friends, acquaintances, and fellows in the poetry world in English find the expression:

• Do you use it?
• Have you heard others use it?
• Does it sound odd you?

And behind all this, of course, is what, for me, is the ultimate question: should I stop telling my German-speaking colleagues to avoid the expression?

... was gesagt werden muss.

Günter Grass has written a bad poem. Andreas Heidtmann's analysis hits all the right points about what makes it a bad poem (in German).

But here's a little linguistic supplement to Heidtmann's remarks:

sage ich, was gesagt werden muss.

The passive voice, it is said, can be used to conceal agency. But here it's not the concealment of agency that is the problem, but the use of the passive to allow one speaker to claim to speak for many.

As with the concealment-of-agency issue, the question is who the active subject of the passive verb "gesagt werden" is. There are two valid interpretations: one is that the speaker (the "ich") is the one who "has to say this." The other is that an indeterminate group of people (in German, you could say "man"; in English, "they" or "people") "has to say this." This latter is probably the salient interpretation for most people, but it also makes clear how Grass makes his complaint seem like something that many people agree with: by not saying "sage ich, was ich sagen muss" but "sage ich, was gesagt werden muss", he lets his claim slip from something personal to something that many people will agree with. 

So the passive here is not a tool of concealment of agency, but a tool for making the claims of an individual sound general, a way to make yourself sound like you speak for a silenced minority that is afraid to speak.

*****
Afterthought: The salient interpretation of the "was gesagt werden muss" construction is actually a third possibility: the implied active subject is "jemand", as in "somebody has to say it, so I will."

There are two further implications: nobody else was willing to take on the risk of saying it, and "I am the one who is courageous enough to sacrifice himself by saying it."

This is connected to the overall tenor of the poem, which focuses less on the critique of Israel than on Grass's perception of himself as a victim of the criticism that he expects to receive for having written the poem.

In this respect, all criticism of the poem for its representation of Israel fulfills one of the poem's goals (I would say "implicit" goals, but in fact, it's pretty explicit): that Grass will be criticized for it. One could call this masochism, but what it really is a rhetorical use of the passive voice to stylize oneself as a victim of the criticism one expects to attract.

The rhetoric is quite powerful, in fact, as it defuses all criticism of the poem's contents by anticipating it and putting those who do criticize the contents in the position of protecting taboos that only Grass has had the guts to break: somebody has to say it, and I will say it, and if you criticize me for it, then you are part of the reason that nobody had said it before.

Gullible Dolts?

The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit, writes Charles Simic in "Age of Ignorance."

But I wonder about how his discourse comes across to those who hold the beliefs he condemns as examples of ignorance (see the list at the end of the article, including "Global warming is a hoax"). They will most likely see him as yet another liberal elitist (like me, presumably) who is talking down to them and not treating them with respect.

As an American living abroad who has little contact with the kinds of people who hold such opinions, I wonder about how I would talk to them if I did have contact with them. Simic tries so hard to say "we" throughout the essay when he talks about who is being "ignorant." But at the end of the essay, even that approach breaks down: "Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest." I know for myself that I react very negatively when people suggest that I am being duped in some way (say, by acting like I am a fool for not agreeing with them that vaccination is a bad thing); I can imagine that such a remark will simply end any chance of conversation.

Still, Simic is right: the ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state is a gullible dolt. But the real problem here is not the production of gullible dolts; it is the cycle of political corruption.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, part 5

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.

(Adrienne Rich, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," part 5)

*

A woman makes her legs "gleam" like ivory. This makes her beautiful, but the resulting beauty is "like petrified mammoth-tusk." The ivory this gleam is compared to comes from a mammoth (an extinct pachyderm) and is petrified (turned to stone by the passage of time). The gleam is uncanny in its lifelessness.

This tercet begins with a bit of Latin that is often translated as "sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking" and identified as a reference to Horace (Ode XXII, from the first book of the Odes). This makes the woman here more lively, vivacious and charming in her laughter and speech. If the words used to describe her are from a dead tongue, and a man's words, they still carry the magic and charm of beauty, for in the poem in question, Horace claims that a song he had written about his beloved kept a wolf from attacking him.

Yet even as the three lines celebrate the woman's beauty, they act out how the ideal of that beauty traps women in ancient patterns (represented here by Latin, the mammoth, and petrification). The woman in the middle line of the tercet is vividly present, but she is framed by terms that she has not defined for herself.

But go slowly if the old dog wakes up

In A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum pose the following problem:

Leaving aside interjections, the eight parts of speech (as defined by H and P) are nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, determinatives, coordinators, and subordinators. Is it possible to construct a sentence that contains one and only one of each of the following parts of speech?

As many of my students figured out, the key problem is the "subordinator" (traditionally, a "subordinating conjunction"): a sentence with a subordinator will necessarily have two verbs (one in the main clause, one in the subordinate clause).

I have come up with a sentence that contains two verbs and one of each of the other parts of speech:

But go slowly if the old dog wakes up.

Some people might argue that the coordinator "but" should not be at the start of a sentence like this, and the presence of a coordinator in a sentence does raise difficulties for the problem stated above, precisely because coordinators mostly coordinate two things with the same form (noun and noun, verb and verb, etc.). But a sentence-initial coordinator overcomes this difficulty, and, as Huddleston and Pullum argue in their book, there is no descriptive justification for the "rule" that says you cannot begin a sentence with a coordinator.

In class, though, I discussed a different problem: which parts of speech can appear in one-word sentences? I assumed that the answer is that only verbs can stand by themselves as sentences, and then only in the imperative form: Stop! But students made two other proposals that intrigued me:

Fire!

So?

This is not the verb "fire" but the noun: it's what you shout when there's a fire in a crowded theater (or what you don't shout when there isn't one).

At first, I wanted to say that "a sentence has to be a main clause with a finite verb in it, or it's not a sentence." But I was immediately suspicious of this: that's a conventional definition, but perhaps there's a more interesting definition that takes the two possibilities above into account.

I had hoped that Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language might help me on this score, but they make short shrift of the concept of "sentence" and instead focus their attention on the concept of "clause" (as is always the case with their unconventional moments, the discussion of the point is lively and fascinating).

So I turned where we all turn these days, to Wikipedia. The page is called Sentence (linguistics). The first definition there focuses on something that had crossed my mind: a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words that bears minimal syntactic relation to what comes before and after it. To me, that implies that "Fire!" in the above sense can be considered a sentence, because it can stand on its own without any other context, and it will still be understood. In contrast, "So?" might not be a sentence, as it cannot really be fully understood unless you know what it calls into question (that is, what preceded it). — But that argument is not very satisfying.

The second idea of the sentence provided on the Wikipedia page is that a sentence is anything that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period/full stop. This pretty much wipes out the whole issue of which parts of speech can be one-word sentences, because now anything can:

Me.

Stop!

Definitely!

Green.

Up.

So?

This.
If.

A Winter Night

Here's Robin Fulton's translation of Tomas Tranströmer's "A Winter Night" (which I have in New Collected Poems, Bloodaxe, 1997):

The storm puts its mouth to the house

and blows to produce a note.

I sleep uneasily, turn, with shut eyes

read the storm’s text.

But the child’s eyes are large in the dark

and for the child the storm howls.

Both are fond of lamps that swing.

Both are halfway toward speech.

The storm has childish hands and wings.

The Caravan bolts towards Lapland.

And the house feels its own constellation of nails

holding the walls together.

The night is calm over our floor

(where all expired footsteps

rest like sunk leaves in a pond)

but outside the night is wild.

Over the world goes a graver storm.

It sets its mouth to our soul

and blows to produce a note. We dread

that the storm will blow us empty.

I came across this poem today (thanks to my friend Allen) and was struck by how it takes up issues of inside and outside that I addressed recently in my post on Adrienne Rich's discussion of Wallace Stevens's "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm." Tranströmer approaches the issue from a completely different angle, of course: "the night is calm" but the world is not.

Any time I think about Tranströmer I also love to recall this.

The Lure of Lyrics

I'll be teaching this songwriting workshop in Basel on Saturday, March 17, as part of the BScene Festival's new workshops.

The Lure of Lyrics: A Songwriting Workshop 
Workshop 
A workshop on lyrics and songwriting from a "creative writing" perspective. (In English)

When
17. March, 10 am - 4 pm (with lunch)

Where
To be announced

For whom?
Songwriters, Lyricists, Rappers, Poets, Writers of all kinds and every age. A group of six to twelve participants is hoped for.

Register by March 9 at:
workshops@bscene.ch