Talking to Plants

This is the first poem in John Agard's Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009):

TALKING TO PLANTS

Always talk to your plants.

Sit back and watch them flourish.

Good advice. Of course we presume

that all plants speak English.

Speak slowly, watch them bloom.

If necessary shout each syllable.

Their little ears are ready vessels

for a shower of the Queen's vowels.

Never mind if it's a China rose

or an African violet.

Better yet, recite a bit of English lit.

See abundance spring at your fingertip.

So I spoke like an Oxford don

to my wilting rhododendron.

It wilted more. As for my drooping shrub,

my words only seem to draw more slugs.

O plants, what is it that makes you grow?

I watch my immigrant neighbour's patio

with a sense of distant envy.

Tell me, plants, must I address you in Punjabi?

My first approach to this poem is quite simple: Agard makes fun of "talking to plants" by considering various issues about how to go about doing it (the appropriate language and volume, for example). It's a neat bit of mockery of a rather silly idea.

Given that one person who is associated with the idea is Prince Charles, this poem also takes a poke at him, whose speech is relatively close to "the Queen's vowels" (though not necessarily the same as that of an "Oxford don," who may or may not be from Britain these days). This part of the poem's humor is taken further by the contrast with the "immigrant neighbour," who is a better gardener than the speaker. That is, the poem touches on issues about what it is to be British, and what characteristics the British can be said to have. The immigrant speaking Punjabi turns out to be more connected with the environment he lives in than the speaker is, with his efforts to speak like the elite. Agard, himself an immigrant from Guyana, turns this poem about a silly idea into a serious reflection on identity, nation, and location that disrupts the standard conception of the relationship between those three categories.

*

My second approach to this poem involves how it does its work. Its five quatrains are quite regular in shape, but they never settle down into an established rhythm, nor do the end-rhymes establish a pattern like ABAB or ABBA. It does have a shape, though, that one could even imagine writing further poems in. It involves the pattern of words that develop the poem's "argument." The basic frame of the pattern involves the words "Always" (in line 1), "So" (13), and "O" (17): first comes a description of a situation (with "always"), then comes a consequence of the situation (with "so"), and then comes a final commentary on the situation, in the form of an exclamation (with "O"). This could be an exercise in a writing workshop: use these three words as the starting points of three parts of a poem; the parts need not be the same length. In fact, it's important here that the parts do not have the same length: insofar as this poem is a joke, it depends on its comic timing for its effect, and the brevity of the last two parts (the last two quatrains) is essential to its timing.

The first part of the poem's argument has internal details that are important as well: the expressions "Of course" (3), "Never mind" (9), and "Better yet" (11) relate the parts of the description of the situation to each other. In fact, they make it clear that calling this the poem's "argument" is perfectly appropriate; these are, after all, the kinds of phrases that one might use in an argument (or a speech) to develop one's points. Again, this could be the basis of a writing exercise (whether a poem or an essay): begin three successive points or perspectives with these phrases.

The argumentative structure of the poem thus looks like this (with a few more things highlighted that I have not discussed):

Always talk to your plants.

Sit back and watch them flourish.

Good advice. Of course we presume

that all plants speak English.

Speak slowly, watch them bloom.

If necessary shout each syllable.

Their little ears are ready vessels

for a shower of the Queen's vowels.

Never mind if it's a China rose

or an African violet.

Better yet, recite a bit of English lit.

See abundance spring at your fingertip.

So I spoke like an Oxford don

to my wilting rhododendron.

It wilted more. As for my drooping shrub,

my words only seem to draw more slugs.

O plants, what is it that makes you grow?

I watch my immigrant neighbour's patio

with a sense of distant envy.

Tell me, plants, must I address you in Punjabi?

*

A third approach to the poem involves looking at some of its verbs. Among others, the first stanza contains "talk," "watch," and "speak." The rest of the poem runs through variations on talking and watching: "speak," "watch," "shout," "recite," and "see" appear before the turn at the beginning of the fourth quatrain, many of them in the imperative (appropriately, since this is a set of instructions, and instructions are often given in the imperative). If the seeing theme is not as explicit in the last two quatrains (only "watch" in line 18 is a verb of seeing), the speaking theme continues to be central with "spoke" (13), "tell" (20), and "address" (20).

All this relates to the poem's titular theme: talking to plants. When one talks to plants, one wants to see results. More generally, the poem considers speech and language as having possible effects, as working a bit of magic, as it were. The content of what is said to the plants is not as important as the fact of saying something at all, and the possibility that the act of speaking can produce the desired effect. From this perspective, the poem is about "how to do things with words." And how one does things with words is related to social, political, and cultural hierarchies: it is the voice of authority (of "the Queen's vowels" and an "Oxford don") that is supposed to be able to produce the desired effects, along with "a bit of English lit."

Yet the poem undermines this authority; after all, the "proper" voice does not help the plants "flourish." Only Punjabi appears to do so—an underprivileged language, at least in a British context. Still, the poem does not privilege Punjabi as some kind of mystical "other" that actually does have the magical qualities attributed to language by the idea of talking to plants. If Punjabi were being celebrated here, it would ruin the joke by reducing the poem to a bit of exoticism.

In the end, it's necessary to remember that the poem is primarily making fun of talking to plants. By extension, it also makes fun of the beliefs behind the hierarchies it touches on: the royal family as privileged figures, contrasted with immigrants; the Oxford don and English lit as representatives of privileged culture; prestigious varieties of British English contrasted with Punjabi, an immigrant language. Insofar as these hierarchies represent sites of sociopolitical tension, the poem does not propose ways to resolve such tensions. Instead—to use a Britishism—it takes the piss out of the idea that they can be defused if we just figure out the right way to talk about them.

"They don't know that we know"

This is the first poem in Fleur Adcock's collection Looking Back (Oxford, 1997).

WHERE THEY LIVED

That's where they lived in the 1890s.
They don't know that we know,
or that we're standing here, in possession
of some really quite intimate information
about the causes of their deaths,
photographing each other in a brisk wind
outside their terrace house, both smiling
(not callously, we could assure them),
our hair streaming across our faces
and the green plastic Marks and Spencer's bag
in which I wrapped my camera against showers
ballooning out like a wind-sock
from my wrist, showing the direction
of something that's blowing down our century.

Who are "they"? Either they are famous people, or they are relatives of "us"; otherwise, "we" would not know the intimate details of "their deaths." The latter is more likely, as famous people might actually expect people a hundred years later to remember them; hence, they would "know that we know." So "they" are quite likely "our" ancestors.

The present tense in "they don't know that we know" is quite striking; a more straightforward version of the sentence would be this: "They didn't know that we would know." It's possible to object to that formulation; after all, people at least hope that their descendants will remember them, will be on familiar terms with them, will know "where they lived." But of course that hope is different than knowledge; to rephrase it again: "They couldn't know for sure that we would know."

The double present tense that Adcock actually uses, though, collapses a century into a moment of simultaneity, as if we and our ancestors live in the same moment, separated only by knowledge and ignorance: we know the rest of their lives, and all that has happened since, and they don't. This knowledge is vague in the poem; at two key moments (in lines 4 and 14), specifics are absent, replaced by "some" and "something." The "intimate information" is not specified, nor is the implicitly more public information "that's blowing down our century." In the frame of the poem (the first five lines and the last line-and-a-half), information is referred to but not spelled out.

In contrast, the scene involving "us" that begins in line 6 is much more specific. Even as "we" take photographs of each other, the poem itself becomes much more like a photograph, with the visual details of the terrace house, of hair and faces, and of the elaborately described plastic bag. The house and the wind in "our" faces are images "they" might have experienced when they lived here; these images confirm the double present tense that connects them and us. But the plastic bag separates ancestors and descendants, as something the former would not have known. The camera is more ambiguous, as cameras were invented much earlier in the 19th century, but the camera of the late 20th century (even if not yet digital) had become an object with quite a distinct set of associations than it would have had in the 1890s. Even though Eastman Kodak was founded in 1889, the personal camera was certainly not yet an everyday object back then, the kind of thing anybody would have had available to take along when going to look at "where they lived." (Marks & Spencer, by the way, was founded in 1884.)

These traces of social and technological development put some content into the distinction between then and now made in the conclusion by the phrase "something that's blowing down the century"—it is a century of plastic and images. The very vagueness of the phrase makes it somewhat sinister, too—it is the "long twentieth century" in which the world of the 1890s was rent asunder. This undertone, combined with the wind, connects the poem with Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (see part IX of "On the Concept of History"), its back turned toward the future, its wings caught in the wind blowing from the past, the ruins of the past piling up in front of it.

But Adcock's poem is not as ark about the progression of history from past into future. There is a wind blowing, but it is "brisk," not stormy and threatening, and we are smiling (and "not callously"). And as line 2 suggests, "we" are not wholly separated from "them" by time; in fact, the poem as a whole traces the complex ambiguity of being both connected and separated at once. We do not see anything that specific when we look back, but it is also not ruins that we see. The Angel of History may be around the corner, and even the aura of Benjamin's understanding of photography might be hovering around the pictures taken in the poem, but the present is vivid here, both in itself and in its relationship to the past.

"Where They Lived" does not deny that the "something" of the last line has a sinister side, but it does not reduce the century to that. We know things they don't know, but our knowledge of their ignorance does not make their world either a ruin or even something to be nostalgic about. We are here, sympathetically aware of the past, while also enjoying the present, as the time in which we live.

Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality

The following is the first paragraph of the chapter "The Good Samaritan" in Tim Parks's novel Goodness. It appears about two-thirds of the way through the novel. George (the narrator) and his wife Shirley have a seriously handicapped daughter, Hilary, who cannot speak and has hardly developed beyond infancy:

January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can't.

Like many a novel's narrator, George does not always have a very accurate vision of himself, but here he is right on target: he does swing between a "ruthless realism" that asserts his clear understanding of the world's difficulties and a "cloying sentimentality" that would conceal those difficulties in favor of an easier perspective.

The "change" he would like to "get out of" Hilary refers to childhood development: a puppy would develop faster than Hilary would. Since George had not wanted to have children, the reference to a puppy also recalls couples who stereotypically get a dog when they are "not ready for children." But what he and Shirley actually have to "get out of her" is her constipated shit, and it is in terms of shit that the contrast between realism and sentimentality is most fully realized here.

In a sense, "realism" appears here in the very fact that shit is mentioned at all, and it becomes "ruthless" in the explicitness with which George describes the "levering out" of the "turds." In contrast, George's "sentimentality" is somewhat concealed, only becoming clear in the final contrast between Shirley and himself: it is not both of them ("we") who do the dirty work but just Shirley. George wants to be a "ruthless realist," but when it comes to shit, he "simply can't" handle it.

The "realist," then, is beaten by the sentimentality his demonstrative "ruthlessness" is meant to combat. In his memoir Youth, J. M. Coetzee writes that "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn." (See also this post.) Here, in Parks's novel, "ruthless realism" also ends up looking like a trick, and a relatively easy one at that: if you make a nasty joke and talk about your handicapped daughter's shit, then you are being "ruthless," even if it is your wife who actually cleans up the mess.

The "realistic" and the "sentimental" are also literary categories. Chronologically, the "sentimental" novel came first, in the eighteenth century, while literary "realism" emerged in the nineteenth century. In a simplified version of literary history, "realism" trumped the "sentimental" precisely by being "ruthless" rather than "cloying," and that is precisely the tendency of the "trick" of "ruthless honesty": it aims to produce a "realism" that trumps feelings.

But the slippery nature of this "hard trick" is clear in this passage. George plays tough, but is not really tough enough to face up to the challenge posed by his handicapped daughter. From the perspective of Parks's novel, the history of the genre is not the replacement of the sentimental by the realistic; rather, fiction "alternates" between the realistic and the sentimental. "Realism" would like to be "ruthless" enough to defeat "sentimentalism," but its tricks are never-ending attempts to conceal its own sentimental side. Let's talk tough about shit, but someone else has to actually dispose of it -- and the people who have to do so are those otherwise dismissed as "sentimental."

Shirt

A little something from Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka, lifted from here:

In a Hasidic village, so the story goes, Jews were sitting together in a shabby inn one Sabbath evening. They were all local people, with the exception of one person no one knew, a very poor, ragged man who was squatting in a dark corner at the back of the room. All sorts of things were discussed, and then it was suggested that everyone should tell what wish he would make if one were granted him. One man wanted money; another wished for a son-in-law; a third dreamed of a new carpenter's bench; and so each spoke in turn. After they had finished, only the beggar in his dark corner was left. Reluctantly and hesitantly he answered the question. "I wish I were a powerful king reigning over a big country. Then, some night while I was asleep in my palace, an enemy would invade my country, and by dawn his horsemen would penetrate to my castle and meet with no resistance. Roused from my sleep, I wouldn't have time even to dress and I would have to flee in my shirt. Rushing over hill and dale and through forests day and night, I would finally arrive safely right here at the bench in this corner. This is my wish". The others exchanged uncomprehending glances. "And what good would this wish have done you?" someone asked. "I'd have a shirt", was the answer.

A wish expressed through a story.

Friend of the Devil

My band Human Shields made a video last night of "Friend of the Devil" in memory of Jerry Garcia, who died on August 9, 1995. In our practice room, with the bookshelves in the background.

Apollo Killing the Cyclops

I like a bit of comedy when I visit an art museum. Such as this picture, one of four frescoes at the National Gallery in London, Domenichino's "Apollo Killing the Cyclops," with a dwarf in the corner peaking out from behind a painted curtain, as if the fresco were a painting of a tapestry:

Or Jan van Huysum's "Flowers in a Terracotta Vase," with its wonderful detail of a fly so realistic that one could think it was a real fly that had landed on the painting:

It's down on the pedestal of the vase, slightly left of center. Here's a closeup of it:

Paintings with bookmarks

When I visited the National Gallery in London last month, I found myself fascinated by minute details in paintings. One type of detail that kept coming up was the bookmark, as in this painting by Lorenzo Lotto:

Holbein the Younger's portrait of Erasmus features not only a stunning depiction of a glass container but also another book with a bookmark in it (in the upper-right corner):

A book alone is apparently not enough to mark a figure as being a humanist (or what we would today call an intellectual?); it takes a bookmark to show that the person is an active intellectual.

Two poems at Hobble Creek Review

I have two poems up at the Hobble Creek Review: "Eagle (Letter from My Aunt)" and "Rain from Cloudless Skies." Thanks to Justin Evans for publishing my poems!

The Lammas Hireling as poem and film

Filmmaker Paul Casey made this striking movie of Ian Duhig's equally striking poem "The Lammas Hireling":


The Lammas Hireling from Paul Casey on Vimeo.


And here's the poem:

After the fair, I'd still a light heart
and a heavy purse, he struck so cheap.
And cattle doted on him: in his time
mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream.
Yields doubled. I grew fond of company
that knew when to shut up. Then one night,

disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife,
I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form.
Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,
stark-naked but for one bloody boot of fox-trap,
I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.
To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,

the wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled
and blew the small hour through his heart.
The moon came out. By its yellow witness
I saw him fur over like a stone mossing.
His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered.
His eyes rose like bread. I carried him

in a sack that grew lighter at every step
and dropped him from a bridge. There was no
splash. Now my herd's elf-shot. I don't dream
but spend my nights casting ball from half-crowns
and my days here. Bless me Father for I have sinned.
It has been an hour since my last confession.


My favorite moment in the film is at 7:10, when one of the cattle pees.

A Severed Head in Tim Parks's "Destiny"

In the following paragraph from Tim Parks's novel Destiny, the narrator, Chris Burton, is in the office of one Doctor Busi, the director of a clinic where Burton's schizophrenic son Marco had been confined until his recent suicide. At the beginning of the novel, Burton and his wife (an Italian) had been in London, where they heard the news of Marco's death. The novel presents Burton's train of thought as he and his wife head back from London to Italy (where he has lived most of his adult life while working as a journalist). The paragraph is typical in its abrupt, often unmarked shifts through various levels of narration and Burton's introspection. In particular, two issues are distracting Burton from his conversation with the doctor: first, he has just learned that he had been offered a pardon for tax evasion, but the deadline has already passed; secondly, the doctor's office in the villa the clinic is in has the remains of an old fresco on the wall. At the beginning of the paragraph, Busi mentions Burton's adopted daughter Paola, whose testimony about Marco's violent behavior towards her and their mother had led him to be confined to the clinic:

Your daughter was a frequent visitor, Busi acknowledged. He had been getting round to this, he said, but it seemed important to consider the nature of the deceased first, to clarify the question of suicide. Please do sit down, Signor Burton, Dottor Busi said. You are understandably fraught. Actually, I had imagined that at this point your daughter would have told you about all this. I wasn't aware you didn't know. But it's quite straightforward. Your daughter was a frequent visitor, Signor Burton. Marco was her brother after all. However, we, the staff here, in liaison, I might say, with Dottor Vanoli, since he has a longer experience of the case than any of us, agreed with her, your daughter, and her husband, that it would be best not to let you know of these visits, since it was felt your wife might intervene in some way. She might not approve. I sat down. Paola hadn't said a word. She was hiding things from me. I had been offered a pardon, I thought. A pardon! But the deadline has lapsed. We were concerned about your wife's reaction. I watched Busi speak. I face prosecution. The fresco must have been one of those jumbled crowd scenes where a saint is martyred. There was a head by the doctor's left shoulder. A woman's hand, a man's head. Will they pursue me if I return to England? Then on three occasions recently, Busi said, when we felt Marco was stable enough, we allowed him a day out with your daughter, if and only if accompanied by her husband, of course. I stared at the supine head. As I said, we agreed that these outings would be strictly confidential as it was clear that given the animosity between various members of the family this development might upset someone, Marco's mother in particular, and perhaps prompt her to intervene in some way, or even to return to Italy before the experiment of your absence had been properly explored. It was impossible to say whether it had been severed. Our assessment was that that experiment was yielding results. In particular, I should say -- perhaps it was just the broken surface of the fresco -- your daughter was concerned that your wife would feel that in taking Marco out she was deliberately exposing him to situations which would put her in a position to make false accusations that he had assaulted her. How real that convoluted worry was, I don't know, but under the circumstances and given what happened in the past I felt it wise to accept your daughter's request for confidentiality. (pp. 172-173)

"The broken surface of the fresco" includes a man's "supine head," but it is "impossible to say whether it had been severed." The fragment of the fresco that is left does imply something about the fresco as a whole ("must have been one of those jumbled crowd scenes where a saint is martyred"), but the part cannot be taken as standing for the whole. The "severed head" becomes a figure of the impossibilitiy of metonmyic reading, in which the interpretation of part of a work allows one to draw conclusions about the whole of a work. This paragraph, then, cannot stand for the whole of Destiny. The metonymic reading of details cannot provide a reading of the book as a whole. In its attempt to use individual details of the work to stand for the whole, close reading must fail.

This is reinforced by the paragraph's emphasis on the clinical interpretation of the schizophrenic. Just as Burton cannot draw conclusions about the fresco on the basis of the "severed head," Busi can only speculate about his patient, Burton's son Marco. The symptoms of schizophrenia represent tantalizing fragments that imply the whole "scene" without actually fully presenting that scene. 

Still, a metonymic reading of this paragraph as a depiction of the failure of metonymic reading falls prey to a simple paradox: how does this metonymic reading escape the critique of metonymic reading? But this paragraph is not a "severed head" that is all that is left of the novel. A metonymic reading depends on the "unread" parts still being present; they must still be there as potential confirmation of what one is claiming about the part one has focused on. My discussion of the paragraph began by contextualizing it; I filled in the absent details that make it possible to make sense of the paragraph. This metonymic close reading is not so critical of its own method after all.

The paragraph's overall structure confirms this. The juxtaposition of details from the dialogue with the details of Burton's thoughts also creates a metonmy that leads one to read from the part to the whole: the details interact suggestively as if they might belong together after all. The problem of Destiny is finally not that there are too few details in a "broken" fresco but that there are too many details. It is the surplus of detail, not the lack of detail, that prevents close reading of selected individual details. The diagnosis of schizophrenia through a reading of a set of fragmentary symptoms (of "severed heads," as it were) may be subject to the critique of interpretation figured in Burton's distracted comments on what is left of the fresco, but the novel as a whole is not.

A metonymic reading of a fragment, then, can only follow convention, what one expects to be the case ("must have been one of those jumbled crowd scenes"). But the problem of a metonymic reading of a complete work lies elsewhere, in the excess of detail that could be drawn into an interpretation, and in the necessary contextualization of those details in paraphrases like the one that began this discussion.

Fleet Foxes

"Helplessness Blues," by Fleet Foxes, is an impressive record with a rich sound full of harmonies and unusual arrangements of instruments. It is good enough to be disappointed: why does it leave me cold? Perhaps it celebrates its sources too openly, too proudly: a late-60s psychedelic folk sound I associate with Donovan, Fairport Convention, or the Incredible String Band. "Lorelai" even explicitly cites Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde," specifically "Fourth Time Around."

These are all great sources, so this might well grow on me. And the wild saxophone on "The Shrine/An Argument" shatters the sweet sounds with dissonance. In short, a recognizably brilliant album that still falls short of truly moving me, though I'm still hopeful that it will. (Hat tip to DMB.)

Christopher Reid's sheep

I went to the first show that Katy Evans-Bush writes about here. In fact, those are photos she took with my iPhone. Christopher Reid's variations on the form of "Baa, baa, black sheep" inspired me to write one for him. His didn't have titles of their own; mine does:

READ REID

Hey there Christopher,

have you any verses?

Yes sir, yes sir, 

three good curses.

One for Abel,

and one for Cain,

and one for the evil twin

who lives in my brain.

It's a cool form to play with. Similarly, I occasionally write poems whose stanzas have a form I call the "wheelbarrow," after "The Red Wheelbarrow," which is actually quite structured: three words in one line, one line in the next, new stanza, repeat:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

There's a visual pun here, too, in that the three-one structure makes each couplet look a bit like a wheelbarrow.

Talking Heads

James Verini's "The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads" describes how "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" exemplifies (and marks the end of) the brilliant series of songs and albums that Talking Heads produced from 1977-1983. I recommend the article to all Talking Heads fans, and the band to anyone young enough to have never heard (or perhaps even heard of?) them.

Verini appears to be young enough (he refers to "the late nineties" and "when I went to college" in the same paragraph) to not understand something important about Talking Heads: for a certain kind of person who was a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, they were the ultimate band. What kind of person? Going to college, somewhat intellectual, a bit left-leaning. And they were the only band that everybody agreed about, in this sense: if there was a stereo war going on at a party (with people going over to the record player, or later CD player, and arguing about which songs to play), there was one perfect solution: put on Talking Heads and everybody would dance.

But Verini is also right about something: no matter how present the band was in the early 80s, those born later often have not heard of them. I have finally gotten over being surprised when the most musically literate of my students (the ones who are in bands; the ones who write music criticism for local papers) not only don't really know Talking Heads but in some cases haven't even heard of them. I simply tell them to check out this band as something to look forward to, and when they do, they report back to me, and they inevitably say something along the lines of, "Oh my God, how could I have missed these guys?"

And last but not least: you gotta love the lamp:

My reading at LEX-Icon in Mulhouse, June 10, 2012

I had the pleasure of reading at the Ballades event that concluded the LEX-Icon conference in Mulhouse on Sunday, June 10, 2012. The reading was organized by the indefatigable Jennifer K. Dick; she invited over a dozen poets to be part of a mobile reading that went to a variety of locations in the city. My reading took place in the middle of a square outside the Mulhouse offices of the Parti Socialiste.

At the last moment, I decided to begin with a bit of Ernst Jandl, "fünfter sein", followed by my translation of it. If you know the poem, you know that it's easy to memorize!

That got me good and warmed up, and from then on, the adrenalin carried me through the reading. Since I was doing an open-air reading without a microphone, I made a point of speaking as loudly as I could without shouting. That was quite exhilarating; it felt good to put my full voice into the poems. I wonder how that would work indoors with a microphone.

Here's my setlist:

1. fünfter sein (Ernst Jandl)

Ernst Jandl, who could not be there, sadly

2. fifth in line (my translation of the Jandl; I didn't sing it, though!)

3. The Seven-Year-Old Atheist

4. Expat

5. City

6. Slide

7. Cabinet d'Amateur

Many thanks to Jennifer for inviting me and to all the other poets who read for making it such a wonderful afternoon! I'm definitely interested in doing something similar in Basel, with a mobile group of poets wandering around reading! And I might well steal Jacob Bromberg's idea of crumpling up each poem after reading it.

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