Without Saying, Richard Howard (Turtle Island, 2008)
[34/100]
Richard Howard writes dramatic monologues, sturdy & subtle, historical or literary characters telling little stories. It's not work I seek out, or linger over; I always read his poems with pleasure, but am rarely moved. Sometimes I find myself comparing them, to their detriment, with Guy Davenport's stories: I'll take Guy's "Aeroplanes at Brescia" (Kafka almost meets Wittgenstein) over Howard's "Only Different" (Henry James almost meets L. Frank Baum) any day. The best piece is "Pederasty," a leering little sonnet after Proust.
She Kept Birds, Geraldine Monk (Slack Buddha Press/La Purruque Editions, 2004)
[33/100]
A dandy little chapbook from one of the most reconditely interesting contemporary English poets, She Kept Birds is something of an avian 80 Flowers. Each of these 21 short-lined (often one word per line) poems is titled with the Linnaean binomial for a particular bird, & the text that follows is culled in various ways – I take it – from a birding handbook. It's wonderful how Monk plays registers & derivations off one another, giving the reader – in a remarkably spare text – a sense of the history & vernacular weight that these birds carry in the British Isles. English as birdsong.
As I've said, August Kleinzahler's kneecapping of The Poem of a Life in the London Review of Books some weeks back has become little more than an ugly memory (as one friend puts it, "who cares what a grumpy old poet thinks about a cranky old poet?"). Still, it's nice to see Charles Bernstein weighing in in the letters column of the latest LRB:
Is the ‘L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’ to which August Kleinzahler refers in his piece on Louis Zukofsky (LRB, 22 May) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine Bruce Andrews and I edited from 1978 to 1981? Probably not, since his description of our work and relation to Zukofsky does not fit. And is it ‘A’, Zukofsky’s best-known work, that Kleinzahler has in mind when he refers to A? Probably not, since his review misses the delight it provides to ear, eye and intellect. In the 165 small-format pages allotted for the Library of America edition of Zukofsky’s Selected Poems, I endeavoured to present all aspects of the poet’s work. I wonder why Kleinzahler feels Zukofsky’s work would be better served by someone who, like himself, appreciates only a small part of it? Isn’t that the kind of appropriation for which he scolds me?
You go, Charles!
I guess it only makes sense: if you assign a biography to a reviewer who just plain doesn't like the work of the poet under discussion (and, I'd guess, the poet himself), & who's got a whole buttload of grudges against his contemporaries who value said biographical subject, then that reviewer's unlikely to produce a very well-balanced assessment of the book in front of him.
(Thanks to Vance for drawing my attention to this, away from the endless annotated promotion tables & charts...)
I feel a bit like a condemned man at the moment; at the end of the week, we're leaving town for a full seven weeks. It's not that I don't like to travel, it's just that I don't like to leave home. I can bitch a blue streak about south Florida's cultural wasteland, unbearable heat, horrible traffic, oafish inhabitants, etc. – but when it comes right down to it I'm awfully reluctant to leave my books & CDs & musical instruments behind for more than a few days. Home is where your stuff is. We'll be in New York for pretty much all of July (any New Yorkers want to hook up, I've got time on my hands...), during which time I'll manage to plan my fall courses & finish the last of the dithery paperwork associated with this promotion business. And write a few things I've promised to various editors. (I've pretty much given up the plan for knocking out a 6-week brief book on "Biography: Theory and Practice" over the summer.)
***
Sound Swarms & Other Poems, Daniel Bouchard (Slack Buddha Press/La Perruque Editions, 2004)
[32/100]
What sticks in my mind from the poems in this chapbook of Daniel Bouchard's is a kind of wonderful serene thoughtfulness that places in lyric suspension the minute particulars of nature – some very keenly observed birds here, & a good deal of weather – & the human environment of roads, houses, & familial relationships. The last 3 poems – "Some Mountains Removed," "Sound Swarms," & "The Fancy Memory" (walk-ons by William Blake – "get your damn feet off the sofa" – FDR, & Abraham Lincoln) propose, in a quietly surrealist idiom, an entire theory of the relations between vision (poetic, political) & power. "I asked Lincoln how he felt about being called 'Captain.'"
I've a decent amount of trepidation about the "Intro to Lit Studies" course I mentioned in the last post. It's a fairly new course, so there's not a particularly deep history within the department of how to teach it, what to do & what its aims are. The course description in the catalogue is a committee-composed camel: all it specifies is that we're to introduce 'em to the 3 genres (which of course leaves out the whole range of nonfiction – including its crown jewel, biography – tho one of my colleagues, bless her heart, is doing nonfiction anyway) & throw at least 2 or 3 "critical methods" at them.
Well, my goodness, as Archie Ammons used to say. That's more than just a little to cover, & of course there's massive overlap with what other courses in our major are doing. I don't think – though I'm not sure of this – that it's possible to get thru our English major without doing at least two of the big three genres; & our students are already required to take a "critical theory" course in which they get a guided tour of postwar literary theories. I'd rather not give them another potted summary of theory (tho there's no harm in getting them used to at least the names of various critical approaches), especially when what's most sorely needed, so far as I can tell, is an acquaintance with the expectations of various genres, a knowledge of the "textual condition" of literature in general, & the beginnings of the ability to historically contextualize texts from other eras.
So – with no small degree of fear & trembling – I've opted for the minimal approach: three "primary" texts, & three texts only. Wuthering Heights, Macbeth, & Lyrical Ballads. Ultracanonical works; nice, heavily annotated, massively contextualized editions (Norton, Bedford, New Riverside); probably some sort of secondary text giving an overview of critical approaches (Bennett & Royle's Introduction to Literature, Criticism & Theory on my desk at the moment, tho I welcome other suggestions); & a slow dogged, recursive working-thru of each book, letting the critical / textual / historical issues emerge more or less "organically."
We'll see what happens come the fall. This space may become a regular arena for anguished howls of frustration.
Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New Riverside Editions, 2002)
[31/100]
I've almost certainly read all the poems in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, some of them many times indeed, but this is the first time I've read them straight thru in the order of their first, anonymous collection, as presented in this handy New Riverside Edition edited by William Richey & Daniel Robinson (it also includes about 300 pages of background materials & contemporary critical reactions). I think I'll be using this book for an "Introduction to Literary Studies" course this fall, so expect ongoing comments on the editing, its strengths & shortcomings. For the nonce, however, I get a "Tintern Abbey"-like sensation of pleasurable homecoming at returning to these poems. Consider me a wholly uncloseted Wordsworth fan, as much for the (mawkish?) ballads as for the personal, pseudo-philosophical blank verse things.
Monaural, Joel Felix (Answer Tag Home Press, 2007)
[30/100]
This chapbook of poem & drawings (very fine ones, by Wallace Whitney), out of the Chicago-based Answer Tag Home Press,* is in what I believe is known as an "accordion" binding, where a couple of sheets of paper are folded again & again to make successive pages. It's a thing of beauty to hold, & look at. And, one might add, to read & re-read. "Monaural" is, as JF explains, "a single output from multiple inputs," & I'm impressed & amused by the sensibility that will splice together ancient Roman epitaphs, the results of a children's questionnaire on the afterlife, & the Blues Brothers (of all things). Expansive but lapidary.
*Obviously, judging by the number of books I'm reading from such presses as Answer Tag Home & Flood Editions, I'm still living on things fallen in my lap from last month's visit to Spertus in Chicago. (As well as trying to clear the cholesterol from my veins from the cookouts arranged by Los Hermanos O'Leary...) Consider it an extended shout-out to my homies in Chicagoland.
Four Fables, John Tipton (Answer Tag Home Press, 2007)
[29/100]
4 poems on ancient themes in this very brief, very beautifully-produced chapbook. "Medea" & "Ajax," sonnets in 7-word lines that update their subjects Christopher Logueishly, bookend. In between are "The Mark," spoken in the voice of Cain, & "Chased," a gripping bit of Herodotus. Tipton's prosody gets sparer & sparer, & his voice more & more resonant.
***
Reading Tipton's version of Sophocles' Ajax gave me a jones for Greek tragedy, which I haven't read at all seriously since undergraduate days. And eBay furnished me with a mint-condition box of the 4 volumes of the Grene/Lattimore Complete Greek Tragedy. Just read Agamemnon, & can confess only astonishment & creeped-out delight. This might be the side-reading project of the fall semester.
Manifest; And Furthermore, William Bronk (North Point, 1987)
[28/100]
This may be my favorite of the Bronk books I've read so far. Okay, sure, it's still obsessed with the "big" questions of the meaning of life (meaningless), the reality of the world (indeterminable), the place of humanity (an infinitesimal specklet); and he's still given to positing it all in terms of a "we" that I instinctively draw back from (we who?, Mr Bronk, I keep saying). But there's a coy humor & a variety of voice in the poems of Manifest thatseem to fade from WB's later volumes, & even – mirabile dictu – the intimation of other human beings, as if the whole exercise might be part of a dialogue or conversation, rather than heroic & despairing Bronkisms uttered in the face of the unechoing void. In "Manner of Speaking" –
So much of what we say is, as we say,
a way to say it. Those not content with that
may begin to believe what is said. Even, at times,
the speakers do. Better is what they should know.
– one even gets a taste of the inimitable wisdoms of that diminutive Zen master Yoda.
***
Blogging my way thru 100 poem-books is really a pretty damned arbitrary exercise, no? But it's turning out to be rather more fun that I thought it would be. Trying to avoid obiter dicta & blurbisms (with varying success): perhaps merely reading notes to myself, in the end.
Civilization, Elizabeth Arnold (Flood Editions, 2006)
[27/100]
The classics are everywhere these days. (In my parents' house, I took down from Dad's shelves CM Bowra's The Greek Experience, consicous again of what a foreign country Greek & Latin culture is to me.) Elizabeth Arnold flirts with the classics – a bit of Archilochos & Apollonius, various archaeological digs & Mediterranean landscapes – & juxtaposes those fragments of a lost world with the crumbling edifice of individual human memory: of a father in a nursing home, sliding down the long, painfully gradual incline into complete amnesia. Civilization itself is really no more than group memory, jealously guarded, fought for & passed down. Memory, individual & collective, what makes us human. Perhaps it's just me – the sadness of these precise, careful poems is almost too much to bear.
Feeling rather old these days, for various reasons. We had something of a going-away dinner for a dear colleague last night, a chap who's off to a rather fantastic job at a highly-ranked Texas university, & the course of conversation revealed that he's a solid four years younger than I am – I who seem mired in a kind of career & intellectual doldrums at the moment. The maddeningly finical business of pulling together paperwork for the promotion process doesn't help matters. Did I actually teach that course? What was I thinking? (No wonder the evaluations are so dreadful!) And looking back over things I wrote 6 or 7 years ago too often gives me the sense that hey, I used to write (& think) pretty well – what the hell happened?
Notables: Michael Heller has just published his collected writings on George Oppen (just in time for the Oppen Centenary) with the excellent Salt Publishing. Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen is going to be an indispensable collection on Oppen, John to Zukofsky's Paul (or Paul to Zukofsky's John, hell I don't know – tho I do know who's Ringo) of the Objectivists. Go thou & read.
Jerome Rothenberg, one of the central poets & anthologists of the last century, is still hard at it, now with a blog – Poems and Poetics – that republishes hard-to-find texts of his own, as well as – we're promised – various new works. Tasty stuff up there already.
***
Walking Theory, Stephen Vincent (Junction Press, 2007)
[26/100]
When I was in Ithaca, & later when I was in suburban Virginia, I used to take seemingly endless, aimless walks – a clearly or focusing of the mind, a leaving-behind of the problems on my desk to immerse myself in the atmosphere of outside, & in a steady physical rhythm. The South Florida heat, a full-time job, & 2 small children have largely put an end to that habit, but Stephen Vincent's Walking Theory makes me hanker to strap on the New Balances & head out in no direction in particular.
The "walk poem" is something of a subgenre all its own, as my old Cornell pal Roger Gilbert explored in his Walks in the World. For a lot of people, AR Ammons's "Corson's Inlet" is the epitome of the species, but I've always thought of Zukofsky's "A"-13, with its stroll along the Brooklyn Promenade, conversation between LZ 7 his son interspersed with all manner of current events, concrete observations, & the general kitchen-sink bolus of cultural materials that Zukofsky brings to bear on the quotidian. Stephen Vincent's walk-poems lean more towards the Zukofskyan than the Ammonsesque end of the spectrum, but they're more rooted in his surroundings, more alive to the immediate impressions around him than the myopic, astygmatic LZ ever was: "site/sight" is a repeated mantra here. Astonishingly how capacious the walk becomes in Vincent's poetics, capable of being the vehicle for celebration, for painful elegy, for painful rumination. Impressively human poetry. Somebody I'd enjoy taking a walk with.
A couple of things well worth reading: Peter O'Leary's beautifully researched & balanced essay on the making of the "'Objectivists' 1931" issue of Poetry magazine, on the Poetry Foundation's website: this will be the definitive account for some time to come. And for the strangely melancholy occasion that is Father's Day, an essay in The American Scholar by Jim McConkey – an old Cornell acquaintance of mine who carries on the EB White tradition of graceful essayism – on the uncertainties of fatherhood.
***
Poem About Music, Anthony Barnett (Burning Deck, 1974)
[25/100]
Altho I have a handful of his books, I know little about Anthony Barnett. He seems to have been instrumental in promoting – or introducing – Zukofsky's work to the French poets back in the day (the first page of Poem About Music, I'm convinced, is a nod to LZ); he published Prynne, & the collected poems of Veronica Forrest-Thomson; he's a jazz violin aficionado, & runs a jazz fiddle (& poetry) website which is one of the very few sites that Paul Zukofsky's record label site links to. Poem About Music is a long poem with very few words, sometimes only one word to a page; & many of those words aren't Barnett's but Charles Olson or Charles Montagu Doughty's. The Doughty, at least, gives long stretches of the poem – if one can speak of "long stretches" in a work this delicate & evanescent – a somewhat archaic, "literary" flavor. The whole thing reminds me strongly of early John Taggart or mid-period Theodore Enslin: the pursuit, at all cost, of the poem as literal music.
Ever notice how rare it is these dark days to come upon a book of really happy poems? I get a sense from Night Scenes that Lisa Jarnot is at a really good place in her life, & the poems that have resulted – some of them rhymed, some sonnets, a few oulipian procedural things, an "imitation" or two – make me really happy, make me smile. Her afterword – nodding to three of the best of her contemporaries, Elizabeth Willis, Lee Ann Brown, & Jennifer Moxley – makes it clear that Night Scenes is out to recapture some of that early joy & excitement in poetry that I for one sometimes feel I've lost. And it's a success.
***
Possibly related moments of recent poetic delight: P. (aet. 6), at J.'s instigation, reciting snatches of Stein's The World Is Round; Peter O'Leary reading – with relish – Ginsberg's autumnal ode to his sphincter.
The Tenor on Horseback, Christopher Middleton (Sheep Meadow, 2007)
[23/100]
Everything I said about CM the other day – particularly the part about his just getting better & better – still applies. Tenor is a somewhat less hefty collection than Tankard Cat – considerably shorter, many of the poems more ostensibly "slight" – a number of them almost "found" bits of dialogue, short observations, or anecdotes. But the poem-by-poem density of language & sharpness of thought is very high indeed. The title piece is of all things a meditation on theodicy, the problem of existence & of human suffering; it's an amazing performance, a perfect thing of its kind.
Damn, William Fuller is one weird, fascinating poet. My own tendency is towards the musical, the lyrical, whether in the complex, baroque musics of Bunting, the bare dissonances of Zukofsky, or the super-lush organ-tones of Ronald Johnson, Swinburne, or Milton. Fuller's poems are so dissonant that I want to call them not just alyrical, but anti-lyrical. Nonetheless, for all their syntactic dead ends, their strange & abrupt shifts of register, their abstractions resting cheek-by-jowl with their vivid images – or perhaps because of all those things – the poems of Watchword are as imperatively readable – that is, they force you to read, & read on, & read again – as anything I've opened in the last year. I find this stuff hard to describe: maybe imagine Thomas Traherne crossed with some 17th-century philosopher, crossed with a particularly eloquent writer of legal briefs – but with an extraordinarily loose sense of syntax, & a keen eye for the visible & invisible worlds.
So I'm back from a long week in God's Country, in heat somewhat hotter tho less humid than Florida's, tending to not particularly fun familiar business. As always when I'm staying in the old homeplace, I find myself pawing thru my Dad's shelves & taking things down (& back here). This time around, I found myself engrossed in CM Bowra's The Greek Experience & a crunky 1940s-era biography of Freud. Also reread Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I must have gone thru a dozen times in childhood. It still reads well; funny, I didn't remember all the Christianity, which now slaps me across the face. And read thru a bunch of volumes of poetry, which I'll try to blog over the next few days.
***
The Church – The School – The Beer, chris cheek (Plantarchy, 2007)
[21/100]
The method by which these transcribed talk pieces were produced is almost too complex to go into. chris cheek spent an hour a day walking around downtown Norwich in a nice gray suit, talking into a hand-held CB radio transmitter while listening to various texts piped into his earphones; simultaneously, he was being filmed from across the street, where auditors could listen to his live transmissions & watch a video feed. (There's much more, which I won't even try to describe...) At any rate, the published transcriptions – no doubt a pale shadow of the several-ring media circus this project was – a wonderful mingling of overheard conversation, sociological speculations, immediate observations, & sheer rambling, are a wonderful read. No-one composes on his feet like chris cheek does. Is it "poetry"? Who the hell cares.
Ballad of Jamie Allan, Tom Pickard (Flood Editions, 2007)
[20/100]
I've always cherished & respected Tom Pickard as the young chap who jump-started the elderly Basil Bunting's career, but I've always felt that there was an element of special pleading in the Baz's extravagant praise of Pickard's early work. Some of it, it's true, was a wonderful kind of drug-era updating of the Northern ballad tradition; a lot of it just didn't move me. The recent run of Flood Editions Pickard titles – a new & selected poems, The Dark Months of May, & now Ballad of Jamie Allan – have changed my mind: count me in with Bunting's shade as a full-fledged Pickard booster. Jamie Allan is really quite wonderful: the reconstruction of the life of an 18th-century Northumbrian piper, horse-thief, & general ne'er-do-well, told thru a collage of legal documents, newspaper reports, impressionistic 1st-person lyrics, and wonderful ballads. It's a mixture that constantly seems on the verge of falling apart into scrapbookery, but which miraculously hangs together, & rings in the mind afterwards.
So, back from Chicago this afternoon – a lovely time with old friends, a high degree of meat consumption, some very satisfying mandolin-strumming, & even some talk about poetry – just in time to leave tomorrow afternoon for Tennessee (ie, God's Country). There may be a weekish hiatus in the blog, not that anyone's on the edge of their seat.
***
Apostrophe, Elizabeth Robinson (Apogee, 2006)
[19/100]
Robinson is prolific – I know I've read several of her books & chapbooks, there are at least a half-dozen I've never laid eyes on. I suppose for me one of the most compelling elements in the 2 or 3 generations of poets that have come in the wake of Language Poetry has been the attempt to reinvent the religious poem, the poem addressing the numinous. (Cf. the "Apex of the M" phenomenon, and maybe that's one of the big things at stake somehow in the celebrated Watten/Duncan dustup of 1978.) Robinson does it as compellingly as anyone I know. The poems of Apostrophe seem to breathe a kind of oblique faith, an openness to the divine less Christian or even Buddhist than simply, delicately gnostic. Few big gestures here – an unruffled surface of language chosen with almost obsessive care – but very lovely nonetheless.
Off at the crack of dawn for Chicago, to talk to Spertus about Louis Zukofsky. Looks to be a good time, tho much of the academic community has breezed out of town; there're still be enough poets & old friends to make this a fine & dandy outing.
***
Tankard Cat, Christopher Middleton (Sheep Meadow, 2004)
[18/100]
Anthony Cronin subtitles his Beckett biography "the last modernist" (a phrase I savagely wanted for the LZ book), but of course neither LZ nor SB is the "last" in the modernist tradition. Me, I have a deep fondness for poets still working in the knotty, poly-referential, full-blown hi-octane modernist tradition. Not all of them are named "John," but John Matthias and John Peck are 2 of the best. And Christopher Middleton, who must have recently turned 80, just keeps getting better & better. The poems of Tankard Cat range from simple & pellucid to mid-strength dense, but they're all shot thru with the same musicality & sharpness of eye, nose, & palate, & informed by the same keen intelligence. Cosmopolitan – "world citizen" – poetry at its best.
Coming to the end of a biography is always a sad prospect, given that one is fairly confident of how the narrative will conclude. We each of us come into the world in much the same way, & while there are lots of different manners in which a life can conclude, conclusion itself is pretty much inevitable.
The last 20 pages or so of Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist make melancholy reading, but Cronin does a delicate job of balancing between presenting Beckett's last days – mostly debilitated, in a spartan nursing home, most of the friends & companions of his youth & middle years dead – as the grim endgame of perhaps the majority of us in the post-industrial west – in short, a commonplace scenario, remarkable here only for the artistic identity of the protagonist – &, on the other hand, as a kind of blackly ironical playing-out of the plots of so many of Beckett's writings: Molloy, Malone Dies, the ashbin parents of Endgame, the buried Winnie of Happy Days.
Chicagolanders take note! I'll be in town next weekend to give a talk at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies (that's their fantastic new ultramodern building in the photo, at 620 S. Michigan Avenue).
The talk – "Louis Zukofsky: The Modernist Poet as Jew" – will take place at 2 pm on Sunday June 1st. I'm assured there'll be books for sale, and of course I'll be on hand to sign them (in case you want to destroy their resale value).
I'll be around for much of the Saturday beforehand, as well, so backchannel me if you'd like to arrange some sort of gettogether. Looking forward – oh how I'm looking forward – to getting out of the oppressive heat for a while.
***
Flying solo with the girls this Memorial Day, as J. is out of town. Aside from the unearthly hours at which preschoolers seem to wake up – haven't they ever heard of the snooze button? – it's been going pretty well so far. Nobody's sick, nobody's damaged themselves irreparably.
***
The Kleinzahler LRB review has begun to assume the aspect of a mere ugly memory, rather than an immediate anguish. It seems to have in part prompted Nicholas Manning (who wrote that fab, perspicacious review in Jacket) to reflect a bit on the ethos of book reviewing in general, & bad reviews in particular. His term for Kleinzahler's piece – a "knee-capping job" – seems about right to me. And Jonathan Jones over at Belgianwaffle puts his finger on how hilariously vague & inaccurate The K's version of Language Poetry is.
Hey, but we're the London Review & August Kleinzahler; we can't be bothered to get the equals signs into "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," or to get the capitalization right on "Poem beginning 'The,'" or even to spell "A" correctly. (Bitter, me? maybe a little...)
Dreary, clammy, rainy day – pouring down in buckets, sheets, all sorts of domestic animals. Poking at books: Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (having just finished The Field of Cultural Production), Detlev Claussen's Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (full, jam-pack'd, bursting with interesting sociological, historical connections, but absolutely, aridly devoid of any narrative drive), Beckett's Murphy (whose 1st line definitely makes the top ten of such things: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."). Feeling myself a kind of Murphyan intertia, the desire to do nothing – or perhaps the desire simply not to do anything.
***
Familial pressure, now that P. (aet. 6) has begun to show a real aptitude for the violin (yesterday's grand expotition, thru sheeting thunderstorms, purgatorial traffic, to acquire her a new quarter-sized fiddle), to take up a string'd instrument – in anticipation of turn-of-the-last-century style domestic quartets. And the pressing question: viola or 'cello? Viola pros: lovely moody sound, portability, always seats in the local community orchestra, John Cale. 'Cello pros: lovely moody sound, getting to sit down (cf. incipient middle-age back problems). Suggestions, votes?
Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, trans. Burton Raffel (Modern Library, 2004)
[17/100]
I seem to be on a classics/translations track lately. Nothing offensive, but very little memorable either about these version of classical Greek lyric. Indeed, there seems to be a strong scent of "sweepings," which is perhaps explained by Raffel's professed desire to avoid redoing poems more strikingly translated by Dudley Fitts, Guy Davenport, Mary Barnard – in other words, to try to find some decent leavings in an already pretty well-glean'd field. Drinking, death, bravery – not nearly enough sex. Guy D. contributes a scattered introduction, a fair specimen of his late, unfortunate essay style – all over the place but very occasionally to the point. Heart not in it.
I think I read chunks of Beowulf in high school; I'm sure I read a least a graphic novel adaptation of it (or "comic book," as we used to say), & as well John Gardner's novel Grendel, narrated from the monster's point of view (tho I remember nothing of that but the cover art). I recall learning about kennings & ring-givers, but – laboring under the disadvantage of being an American – I never had a go at the Old English itself, even in college, where I read the thing thru at some point (not for a course) in Burton Raffel's translation.
Seamus Heaney's version of the poem won prizes & praises, & I gather is now the text for the Norton Critical Edition. I'm sure he needs the money. Its sounds pretty Heaneyesque to me thruout, which moves me neither one way nor the other. I'd forgotten what a wonderful subject-jumper the Beowulf-poet is, how much trouble he has keeping his attention on the matter at hand. Guy Davenport did Old English with Tolkien at Oxford, which he would later recall in nightmares. Haven't seen the movie yet.
I keep telling myself, stiff-upper-lippishly. But that doesn't mean receiving a 3500-word panning – nay, spanking – nay, drubbing – from August Kleinzahler (now known as "stinky-feet Augie" to two small girls in my household) in the 22 May London Review of Books doesn't hurt. Man, it does.
(And no, I'm not giving you the link. Look it up your own bad self.)
Casting my mind back to the Kübler-Ross "5 Stages of Grief at a Bad Review," I suspect I'm somewhere on the "depression" side of the passage from "depression" to "acceptance," having passed thru the stages of "denial" (surely they sent him the wrong book?), "anger" (cf. Franz Wright, passim), & "bargaining" (but even a bad review in the LRB will surely sell some books to masochistic types?). But the sting is still too real & immediate for me to say much coherent about what's wrong with Kleinzahler's take on the book, and what might be right about it.
Suffice it to say, for those of you who might be taking up pens & cudgels on my behalf, that Kleinzahler's version of Language Poetry makes Tom Clark's (remember "Stalin as Linguist"?) look sophisticated, & that while he spends the better part of a paragraph excoriating my final appendix, he seems to have entirely misread it. Man, I have so many other nasty things I want to say that I've just gotta close now.
Expressions of sympathy – flowers, bonbons, bottles of booze – entirely welcome.
Google Alerts alerts me that August Kleinzahler has reviewed The Poem of a Life in the London Review of Books; but hey, I don't subscribe, so I can't access the piece online; & while I get the sense that this isn't a good review by any means – one anonymous commenter to Culture Industry calls it "mean-spirited" – I still wanna read it. Anybody able to backchannel me the text? (mw dot scroggins at gmail dot com) *** UPDATE: Many thanks, Jonathan. So now I've read it, & am smarting all over. More later. Ouch!
A bit of spring cleaning, including weeding out the string'd instrument collection (okay, partially so I can justify the next impulse guitar purchase). Nothin' special – an Epiphone (that's the downmarket brand of Gibson) Les Paul with the nifty tremolo arm that one doesn't encounter too often these days on Les Pauls. I bought it in a fit of Neil Young-worship, then realized that getting the Crazy Horse sound has less to do with having a guitar that looks like Neil's than it does with the single-coil pickups & just the whole amplifier/effects stack. But this one's way cool, & is going for a song: "fit & finish," as they say, are to my eyes comparable to the Gibsons. And mention Culture Industry if you win the auction & I'll give you a break on the shipping. *** After many back-&-forth e-mails, my department chair has finally lined up external reviewers for the promotion process. Three real doozies, I must say – all I can do is fall on my knees like Wayne & Garth & moan, "I'm not worthy!" (Tagline from my days of obsessive Sir Walter Scott-reading: "Party on, Gurth! Party on, Wamba!") *** Reading, desultorily. Malcolm Bowie on Lacan; Jacques Derrida on the Freud archive (which I thought I ought to have read before teaching the biography seminar, but have decided I didn't need to); Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, which makes me wonder why nobody writes middlebrow literary history anymore – it would be great fun to do for 20th-century poetry what he does for 20th-c. music; a half-dozen books of poetry; Dashiell Hammett, who might just be God; & Bourdieu, who is. *** This is Culture Industry's 500th post. Golly. Long strange trip etc...
Okay, I'm feeling a bit rough today, the aftereffects of a few Newcastle Browns & standing on a concrete surface for two hours bopping along to the opening show of Radiohead's American In Rainbows tour last night. I can't say I've been to many arena rock concerts in the last decade or two – most of the acts I like these days are hard-pressed to fill a large club space or medium theater – but Radiohead's show reminded me of just how exhilarating a large-scale pop music show can be.
I'll admit to being a big Radiohead fan; the band seems to me to have filled the space in popular culture that the circa-1969 Beatles did: an outfit of really fine melodic sensibilities (read: "catchy pop songs"), but pushing the envelope with innovative arrangements, oblique approaches, & really hard-to-get-on-the-1st-few-listens songs – dragging a mass audience along with them to new places.
Nifty pictures & a complete set list here. If there're tickets available for a show in your neighborhood, by all means don't miss. *** Ajax, Sophocles, trans. John Tipton (Flood Editions, 2008)
[15/100]
I haven't read my way thru the corpus of Greek tragedy, & Ajax was new to me before picking up John Tipton's energetic, precise new version of the play. Tipton's lodestars here are Christopher Logue's wonderful, anachronism-laden versions of the Iliad (tho Tipton has the advantage over Logue of actually knowing Greek), Louis & Celia Zukofsky's "homophonic" translation of Catullus, & (tho Tipton oddly doesn't mention it in his afterword) Zukofsky's five-word-per-line version of Plautus' Rudens ("A"-21). Tipton renders the Greek hexameters into six-word lines (except of course for the choruses, whose various meters he shifts into other word-counts): there's not the slightest hint of translatorese here, just a muscular, sensitive contemporary American English that packs an emotional impact I've only rarely encountered in translations of classical drama (one gets flashes of it in Pound's Sophocles versions). The story itself – which opens with Ajax, possessed of a divine madness, having slaughtered a herd of domestic animals, proceeds to his offing himself midway thru the play, then ends with a debate over his burial – is weird enough to be compelling in the most prosaic rendering. Tipton's late-modernist idiom makes it oddly magnificent.
I got a bunch of these boss stickers here, & now they're going on the car, the computer, the guitars, the kids, wherever.
C'mon folks, let's get those library orders rolling! Seriously, tho – a plea specifically addressed to blogreaders who have access to academic or public libraries, inside or outwith of the US: Somehow The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky got passed over by the library-directed review magazines (Choice, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, etc.), & it's not getting picked up by libraries the way it ought to be. Tell your librarian to buy the book! Request it at the front desk! Ask why they don't already have it! *** Is it my imagination, or is my iBook running about 2/3 faster now that I cleaned – in a half-hour devoted to avoiding grading – something like 85 items off of the desktop? *** Grading 2/3 done: only the hardest bits yet to go. *** Go read Craig Bryant's boss new blog devoted to his read-thru of the new Oxford Thomas Middleton.
New and Selected Poems, Samuel Menashe, ed. Christopher Ricks (Library of America, 2005)
14/100]
Samuel Menashe's preface to this volume in the Library of America's "Poets Project," winner of the Poetry Foundation's "Neglected Masters Award," underscores what I've suspected for a long while: that SM's been getting a hell of a lot of mileage out of his own "neglected" status – this despite the fact that he's been well-published in England, & that Talisman House brought out a "new & selected" volume almost as compendious as this one no further back than 2000. Stop whining, I think: Blake had it a lot worse.
But Menashe's undeniably got an idiom all his own, a mode that I find more impressive in long stretches than in brief batches (pace Christopher Ricks's overclever introduction, which wants to show us that every Menashe lyric holds "eternity in a grain of sand"). Menashe's little poems aren't quite epigrams, nor do they have the gloomy gravitas of William Bronk's little poems; they certainly aren't haiku-like, nor do they have the slipshod, tossed-off likableness of many of Cid Corman's poemlets. They're uniformly clever, & sometimes – rather often – quite moving. Still, for micro-machines made out of words, give me
the desire of towing
any day. *** NB: My own copy of The Niche Narrows, the 2000 Talisman House new & selected Menashe, was picked up a summer or two ago at The Strand. It's inscribed to a prominent English critic-biographer, & contains about a half dozen poems added on the endpapers in Menashe's hand. Shame on you, J––– T–––, for tossing this one out! And shame on you, G––– H––– (prominent American poet), for discarding the copy of John Peck's Poems and Translations of Hi-Lo I found in Eugene, Oregon, in which Peck had entered a dozen or more tiny, meticulous corrections.
Hymns to the Night, Novalis (trans. Dick Higgins) (3rd ed., MacPherson & Co., 1988)
13/100]
Apart from Schlegel's fragments, a couple volumes of Hölderlin, & a few of Goethe's lyrics, German Romanticism is terra incognita to me. Who woulda thought that Dick Higgins, Fluxus artist & the guy behind Something Else Press, had translated Novalis's gloomy prose poetry & free verse set of death-meditations? The translations strike me as solid enough, if not particularly felicitous sometimes; Higgins translates into a kind of colorless contemporary English, rather than the ersatz "Romantic" diction one encounters way too often in this field, but he's no Richard Sieburth or Christopher Middleton. And my cold fish inability to buy into the Romantic excess of it all leaves me a bit chilly – tho I'm intrigued by some of Novalis's reworkings of mythological & Christian material.
Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press, forthcoming)
[12/100]
Hey, this one's a set of uncorrected proofs – how often do you see that in the poetry world these days? – so don't look for the full color version until Turtle Point releases the book in September or so. I'm keen to see what the omnipresent Jeff Clark has done with the cover, but the interior design & typesetting is exquisite as usual. Johnston is of course one of the movers behind the always excellent Flood Editions, & the poems of Sources are almost a continuation of the aesthetics of Flood books: clean, lithe, spare, & quirky. "After Propertius" is tremendous. "The Pipe" amused me at first as a reprise of Mallarmé's prose poem "La Pipe," in which the accidental discovery of a pipe throws the Frenchman's imagination back to his London days – then I realized, from its "charred bowl and thatched screen," that DJ's is that kind of pipe, not the tobacco sort.
In the interests of shameless self-promotion, & cuz I just can't quit rereading the thing & grinning, once again here's the link to yesterday's Michael Dirda Washington Post review of The Poem of a Life. Any reason your local library – public, academic, etc. – hasn't ordered this yet? *** Antiphonal, Patrick Pritchett (Pressed Wafer chapbook, 2008)
[11/100]
An odd rush almost of nostalgia reading this nicely-produced, cleanly laid-out, & precisely but passionately written chapbook – a sense of the idioms & concerns of the Apex of the M crowd back in those "how the hell do we get out from under the shadow of the Language Poets?" days, that heady mixture of post-Black Mountain, post-Objectivist poetics, Jabès- & Derrida-inflected nrratives of loss & deferral, & Levinasian (or Samperian) reachings towards the numinous, the spiritual. My inner Zizek (or Hume) snorts: my inner Robert Duncan, enthralled by the cumulative music especially of the latter poems of Antiphonal, is delighted, just delighted, & moved.
Way back in the day in Ithaca, MN was one of the poets of "my" generation that Ted Pearson kept telling me to read. So I read Civil Noir (Roof, 1991), & enjoyed it. Bits of Natural Facts (love the r&b resonance of that title, combined with the RW Emerson of Nature) are explicit sequel to Civil Noir; other bits make use of some of the same overtyping and manuscript presentation. A big sense of humor here, a willingness to indulge in some serious slapstick among all that disjunction. And not that kind of allusive, highbrow-political Benjamin-quoting that starts the chuckles among the brow-furrowing reading-audience crowd, either. Real guffaws. All senses in play here.
Much of yesterday was burned up in a university level promotion "workshop." A little background (consult last post if necessary): when one applies for promotion to a higher grade at Our Fair University, one's massive packet of materials ascends thru a number of bolges: a review at the department level; at the college level; at the university level; by the Provost; and then by the President himself. (By the way, just to make things the slightest bit more uneasy, every one of these reviews up to & including that of the Provost is technically merely "advisory": one is promoted, that is, at the will of the President – who of course is more than willing to take the Provost's word for it, happily.)
Anyway, this "workshop" consisted largely of a recap of the procedures that had been far more usefully spelled out at the college-level meeting last week, & an opportunity to get to see & hear from the university Promotion & Tenure committee, which consists of representatives from every college in Our Fair University. And they seem to be mature, level-headed folks, for the most part, all looking to make fair decisions. The one really unsettling moment of the proceedings, however, was when the representative from another college rather grandiloquently announced that he made a habit of never reading the lengthy self-evaluative narratives that candidates are supposed to produce: you know, those walk-thrus of one's work that serve the purpose precisely of explaining the value & relevance of your intellectual labor for members of other colleges who might have no idea of what you're doing. Oh my, I thought; I can't wait until I get on this committee, so I can judge the physicists & biochemical engineers without bothering to listen to their explanations of what they do. *** On a far happier note: Michael Dirda reviewsThe Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky in tomorrow's Washington Post Book World. This one's a dandy, paying attention (if perhaps too briefly) to both LZ's career & poetry & to the form & strategy of the biography itself. The money words this time around: "splendid"; "speed, clarity and zest"; "scholarly yet down to earth, full of good sense and useful information." Now who wouldn't want to buy that book?
Astonishingly slumpish depression today – occasioned largely by a morning spent reading bureaucratese documents from the various administrative levels of Our Fair University about how to become fulfilled – er, how to go thru the procedures for promotion to Full professor. So far as I can tell, it's much less a matter of having written books & articles & essays & taught classes than it is of getting about 5 million documents in the right format & order in the right kind of ring binder. The very prospect of spending a couple of 40-hour weeks putting this paper & plastic simulacrum of myself together – & by the beginning of August, to boot! – is deeply disheartening.
And then, casting my eyes over one page of criteria, I see a requirement for "2 recent letters of evaluation of teaching," & think, Oh crap, I haven't had a colleague visit one of my ramshackle excuses for a class in half a decade or more; I gotta line up visits – in the next three meetings, before the semester is over!
But mostly, on a lovely spring day, I'm feeling kind of quiet, becalmed, bored, & directionless. *** Wishing Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Madeline Kahn, & Bob Creeley were still alive. *** "We can now understand in what precise way – and paradoxical as it may sound – Malevich's 'Black Square', as the seminal painting of modernism, is the true counterpoint to (or reversal of) 'L'origine [du monde]': with Courbet, we get the incestuous Thing itself which threatens to implode the Clearing, the Void in which (sublime) objects (can) appear; while with Malevich, we get its exact opposite, the matrix of sublimation at its most elementary, reduced to the bare markings of the distance between foreground and background, between a wholly 'abstract' object (square) and the Place that contains it. The 'abstraction' of modernist painting should therefore be viewed as a reaction to the overt presence of the ultimate 'concrete' object, the incestuous Thing, which turns it into a disgusting abject – that is to say, turns the sublime into an excremental excess."
–Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute – or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for?
Can't really explain the hiatus in blogging – no heavy-duty reading series planning, literary foundation-laying, or newish child duties, like the estimable Josh Corey – not much productive reading gotten thru, certainly no writing to speak of (save for the first poem of a series that I'm still too superstitious to say much about, but have high hopes for). We're in the throes of having a new roof installed, after 6 or 7 years of running about with towels & buckets whenever it started to rain.
Roofing – I'm not sure I'd wish it upon an enemy. They spent a full day ripping off the old roof, sending clouds of grit & ick down thru the slanted tongue-&-groove ceilings of several rooms, in the process discovering acres rotted wood that needed replacing. (A rather unsettling experience to arrive home after having gone out to dinner – who wants to cook & eat among such racket? – and find a 4'x4' hole in the ceiling of the den – late afternoon sun streaming thru – & a highly competent fellow with a soul patch named Israel assuring us that it'd be closed before it was too dark.
The next day – Friday – they installed what they call "paper," but which I gather is actually some sort of watertight composite covering. You install it by nailing. Suffice it to say nobody spent much time around the house that day. This weekend it rained: it rained four 14 hours straight, buckets & poolfulls, which promptly came trickling thru the "paper" in about a dozen different spots.
All this, I've been assured, is a thing of the past, since they came Monday and painted the whole damn'd thing with hot tar & laid down another layer of something or another. All that's lacking now is installation of the tiles, which will give us perhaps another two days of relentless noise. And then there's a decent chance much of it'll get blown off come the hurricane season in a couple of months, & we can start over from scratch. *** I've been working my way slowly thru The Poem of a Life: my first real reading of the book in print. Mostly looking for errors – typos, misstatements, things that might get changed if I live long enough for a second edition to be needed (I fool myself – I'll be lucky if the things goes into a second printing). A number of helpful people have sent me corrections & suggestions, which I heartily welcome. I may, I fear, be entering the stage of post-partum depression with the book: that sense that the thing, like so many other things I do, has fallen off the edge of the world, & said world has nothing to say to me but "what have you done for me lately?" *** In the interstices of my days, I've been seriously ripping my CD collection onto a hard drive, discovering scores of disks I didn't know I owned, had perhaps listened to once or twice then shelved. Much listening these days to old P-Funk things, to the jangly alt-rock things of my youth, to vast blocks of Beethoven quartets. Don Share (himself a native Memphian) reminds me of one of my youthful enthusiasms, the twisted post-rockabilly of Tav Falco's Panther Burns, one of the strangest phenomena to crawl out of the Memphis region during my high school years. The fact that I only own a vinyl copy of Behind the Magnolia Curtain, which features not merely the godlike Alex Chilton but the Tate County, MS Drum Corps – the closing apocalyptic version of "Bourgeois Blues," which ends with Tav ranting the first lines of "Howl," is one of the grandest moments in recorded music – is at the moment my greatest spur to unpacking J.'s USB turntable & figuring out the software for converting LPs to MP3s.
Mostly tho I've been rediscovering the many faces of bassist/producers/impresario Bill Laswell: his work with John Zorn's Painkiller; the funky Material; his various dub remixes (Miles Davis & Bob Marley on heavy rotation) & collaborations with folks like Jah Wobble. A stroll thru a Boca thrift shop yielded surpringly enough a copy of the first Praxis album, a sort of metal-funk supergroup put together by Laswell that includes P-Funk veterans Bernie Worrell & Bootsy Collins & the pretentiously masked but undeniably virtuosic guitarist Buckethead. Here's a later version of Praxis, with Buckethead on guitar & Laswell himself on bass:
And here's Laswell really laying it down in a live performance of Zorn's 3-piece Painkiller outfit. (Turn down your speakers, ye of tender ears...):
Come to think of it, I haven't seen a picture of Laswell without headgear in 20 years or more, & it's a look I rather like. So a year hence, look for me in stocking cap. (I don't think I'll go for the pointy beard, tho.)
I have a limited stock of anecdotes, so I've probably already told the one about my undergraduate philosophy professor, newly arrived in southwest Virginia & dating a local girl, introducing himself to her backcountry farmer father: "I'm a philosopher." To which the father responded – beautifully – "Ain't that somethin'? What er some o' yer sayins?" & thereafter Nick would tell folks that he was a "professor of philosophy." Or as Thoreau writes in Walden, "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers."
My colleague Richard Shusterman has explored in some detail how between antiquity and modernity the conception of the philosopher shifts from one who leads a life of integrated thought & practice to one the conduct of whose life is incidental to the power of her or his thought. Thoreau expresses the ideal of the pre-Sokratic philosopher, or of Sokrates himself –
Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
– and along the way he manages to denigrate our own anemic generation of mere "scholars & thinkers."
It's I suppose even a further shift to go from Thoreau's armchair thinkers to contemporary professors of philosophy, many of whom spend their careers writing commentaries on earlier thinkers, never venturing to produce anything that might be mistaken for a "new" thought. I had a semi-savage argument with my father-in-law over this some years ago: He held that one who merely writes on earlier thinkers shouldn't be called a philosopher at all; I argued that commentary & assessment of previous systems of thought was one of the basic modes in which philosophy gets done. Was I playing devil's advocate, or was I simply besotted with Derrida on Rousseau, Deleuze on Spinoza, Cavell on Emerson?
At any rate, one of the lovely threads in the vast shaggy tapestry of Walter Kaufmann's Hegel book was a series of quotations from Hegel's latish letters addressing the issue of studying philosophy. I won't actually quote, but simply render the gist: Hegel argues, repeatedly, that if one truly studies philosophy – not just absorbing potted summaries (like Kaufmann & Peter Singer) but actually working one's way thru the primary texts with all the sweat, tears, & blood that sometimes requires – one isn't merely studying thought: one is actually doing thought, is repeating the process by which the world-soul becomes conscious of itself. Original, new thought is highly overrated, & far rarer than one supposes; almost as rare is the spectacle of a student of philosophy transforming herself, by submission to the great works of earlier philosophers, by thinking alongside and through them, from a student into a thinker herself.
Excuse me; now I'll get back to another reading of the Preface to the Phenomenology. *** On the earbuds: John Zorn/Naked City, Torture Garden
A momentary lull, before the next round of assignments due & department meetings. I have vague hopes of trying to wrest my study into some sort of order, or to get down to actually writing a mid-length poetry project I have planned out – but I suspect the best I'll do is to reply to perhaps 2/3 of the score emails that need to be answered. *** Finished Walter Kaufmann's Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Anchor, 1966). Not sure who I'd recommend this to – dedicated Hegelians won't need or want it, neophytes are better off with Peter Singer's OUP introduction – but I enjoyed it immensely in a rather perverse way. Kaufmann trawls thru the entire body of Hegel's career & works, providing one of the most perverse running commentaries I've ever encountered. It's almost like the t-shirt: "I don't have an attention problem – hey, look! a chicken!" He'll start talking about the Logic or the Preface to the Phenomenology, then tack off on a two-section tangent about how Royce misread Hegel, & how Wm: James's essay on Hegel is really an essay on Royce, then wander into a discussion of how poorly the various posthumous editions of something have been edited. An endless session of foreplay, it seems at times. Let's discuss the Encyclopedia: but before we can actually talk about the contents, we need to lay out the detailed contents pages of the 3 volumes; oh, look – Hegel changed some of the contents between editions, & he combined some sections – how fascinating! 20 pages later, the patient reader gets 3 pages, not summarizing, but pronouncing on the significance of the Encyclopedia.
Long discursuses on how Goethe didn't influence the Phenomenology, how Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Schleiermacher, & Kierkegaard got it wrong. And a lovely packet of letters & reminiscences at the end, including this jewel from Heinrich Heine:
One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: "The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky." For God's sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: "So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother?" – Saying that, he looked around anxiously, but he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to play whist...
*** On the earbuds: Gavin Bryars, Cadman Requiem; Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Third Decade; Praxis, Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis)
If this blog has retained any regular readers, they will no doubt have noticed the paucity of any sustained discussion of – well, anything serious lately. It's just been a really snowed-under moment of the academic year, a feeling of continually treading water merely to keep up with one's responsibilities. I can barely say I'm staying abreast of the reading for my own classes (tho I have managed to make dents in Mansfield Park and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son lately, both "pleasure" reads, & the sinuously weird divagations of Walter Kaufmann's big Hegel book keep me returning to that volume, rather like the Solitaire game on my iPod keeps distracting). *** The last of this spring's thesis defenses is tomorrow afternoon – well, later today, that is. The defendant in question has opted to schedule for 1.00 pm on Good Friday, which I can only read as a severely inauspicious time-slot. One of the committee members should bring the nails, another the hammer; I'll pack the crown of thorns. (Or as Shane MacGowan says, "They're gonna crucify me / in those old cotton fields back home...") *** Bob Arnold runs Longhouse Poetry, a bookshop & poetry press in Vermont; I only have one or two of their publications, but am impressed by their attention to detail & clean design. Arnold seems to be the primary torch-bearer of the Cid Corman legacy – he has a stack of Corman titles in print, & in fact has been at the helm of a sixth series of Origin, the groundbreaking poetry journal that Corman edited for so many years, & which was so instrumental in the careers of Olson, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Bronk, & others.
So I was pleased to see The Poem of a Life receiving sustained and generous attention in the 2008 edition of Arnold's "Woodburners We Recommend" (scroll down about halfway): the money phrase this time around? – "Leon Edel caliber scholarship."
And whoever writes copy for the Strand bookshop in Manhattan has called the book "compelling" and "very readable."
Education is a rhizomatic affair – or at least mine has been, a matter of following leads in all directions, running down stray references & following intriguing names. I can date one of my own most important introductions to 20th-century writing to around 1985 or '86, when Tom Gardner handed me his copy of Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, knowing I was interested in Pound, & said "I think you'll enjoy some of these essays." To say the least. I think I've followed up maybe two-thirds of the scores of leads Guy proffered in that collection: one of them, Louis Zukofsky, has proved personally & professionally absorbing; another, the poet, publisher, photographer, & all-round cultural cheerleader Jonathan Williams, turned out to be almost a fruitful as Davenport himself.
I was lucky, reading Guy's essay on this latter-day backwoods North Carolina Catullus, to be at Virginia Tech. One of the art professors there, Ray Kass, was a member of the foundation of the Jargon Society, Jonathan's exquisite publishing outfit (does one need to run thru the names he published?: Zukofsky, Olson, Ronald Johnson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Paul Metcalf, among many others), & Jonathan was wont to make Blacksburg a stop on whatever promotional tour he was pursuing, whether he was showing slides he'd made of British poets' gravesites or curating shows of wacko-spiritualist-outsider artists. (He knew Howard Finster before R.E.M. & the Talking Heads had ever heard of him.) I was walking downtown one day when I almost ran into the tall figure I recognized from the jacket photo of Rues & Bluets/Blues & Roots. "You're Jonathan Williams," I said; "Why yes I am, young man," he replied, "And do you know where I can buy a cigar?" A year or two later my then girlfriend bought a copy of his Portrait Photographs, where I first saw the stunning portrait of Zukofsky that I sometimes imagined might one day appear on a book of mine. (That particular imagining came true – tho Shoemaker & Hoard, quite rightly, opted to put the rather benign full-face photo on the front cover of The Poem of a Life, reserving my own favorite – the mantis-like profile – for the back cover and frontispiece.)
I bought practically every Jargon book I could find, & have collected JW's own books for over two decades. (My copy of Get Hot or Get Out was purchased in a Memphis boutique called "Men of Leather," & was probably the only volume of poetry on display among the chaps, codpieces, & motorcycle boots.) His recent career-spanning Copper Canyon volume, Jubilant Thicket, is a treasury of well-wrought, funny, & sometimes spectacularly indecent poems, a book that just gets better & better as one reads & rereads.
I had known Jonathan was in declining health (tho his letters to me in re/ the LZ biography-in-progress were models of Williamsesque jauntiness), but I was surprised & deeply saddened to learn – from a comment by Don Share to, & then a last-minute revision of, Ron Silliman's post today on the essay collection Blackbird Dust – that Jonathan had died. It is of course a great loss to American poetry. It feels like a personal loss to me, a severing of the last link between my own experience of poetry & that generation of heroic post-war modernists (LZ, Olson, etc.). My father's generation is dying around me: Guy Davenport, Robert Creeley, & now Jonathan Williams.
It's been a bleary last few days. J's been out of town at the Shakespeare Association conference in Dallas, so I've been flying mostly solo with the girls, running thru the usual hit & miss of menu choices (palak paneer: Daphne yes, Pippa no; gumbo: D. no, P. yes; mac & cheese: both yes), trying to get to bed a trifle earlier than usual to anticipate the 7 AM wake-up visits, & in general struggling to keep the whole complex machinery of the household from falling apart. But now we're once more a foursome, & J & I can play divide & conquer when things get touchy. *** My old friend Eric – ¡Hola, viejo! – reminds me that I ought to draw attention to the just-released 30th anniversary issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Check out their website for a list of some of the goodies in this almost 700-page behemoth, including "Marrow-Bones and Turkish Delight," my own biggish career overview of Ronald Johnson's work – an essay I've been imagining my way thru for a decade or so now. Not that it turned out nearly as good as I'd like, but the beginning's pretty snappy:
While my own native greens-and-ham-hock southern cuisine is a hard sell to my friends with more sophisticated palates, my mother’s pecan pie recipe has always been well received. A simple concoction: in a single bottom piecrust (home-made or store-bought) you set out a layer of halved pecans, then pour over them an inch or so of beaten eggs and heavy corn syrup. In the oven, the pecans rise to the top to be crisped in the heat, while the syrup-egg mixture congeals into a hard gel. Crunchy pecans, flaky crust, and a center of unadulterated, primordial sugar: what’s not to love (if you aren’t a diabetic, that is)?
The poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who worked as a chef and caterer and who made most of what little money writing brought him from his excellent cookbooks, offers a variation of the traditional southern pecan pie in The American Table (1984). (My own copy has reached the stage of broken-spined, gravy-spattered dilapidation that marks a personal classic in the genre.) Instead of “the usual bottled dark ‘Karo,’” Johnson’s pie is based on a syrup made of sugar, orange juice, and the thinly sliced peels of two oranges. It’s still a pecan pie, the saccharine nemesis of dieters everywhere, but a pecan pie with a sophisticated twist, the orange peel adding a sour, slightly bitter zest like the tang of remorse.
I go on to talk about poetry, by the way, not just cooking. *** The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)
[9/100]
This one won the 2004 Griffin Prize, the big Canadian jackpot. And good for August K., I say. I've been reading him – never religiously, always with pleasure – for over 20 years now, since Guy Davenport told me (on a blurb to Storm Over Hackensack) that his poems were "structures as cunningly built as kites and canoes." I suppose some of my friends would toss Kleinzahler into whatever oubliette of their imagination corresponds to Ron Silliman's "school of quietude" – & it's true that K's working in a sturdy, straightforward idiom that's essentially similar to what WC Williams forged 85 years ago. But his ear for music is so strong, his diction is so aggressively varied, & he never lingers too much on himself: the world outside – its sights, noises, smells, songs, minute particulars – is so interesting that the last thing Kleinzahler wants to do is lamnet his own fuckups or celebrate his own sensitivity. A lot of travel poems here, & some of them it's true come perilously close to the "I'm lonely on a reading tour" subgenre. But Kleinzahler's scorn for the prima donna aesthete stance is so acidly evident that even a poem about the yearly shutting-down of an artists' colony – "The Art Farm" – reads like a savage indictment, without a single explicit word. A nature poet, but his nature's urban.
No sooner am I back in south Florida than I find myself in the midst of thesis-defense season – MFA theses, that is, the sort of documents that you can't really contest on the grounds of argumentation or density of citation, but have to find real live aesthetic critiques to make about. One down today (Monday), another scheduled for Wednesday, & I believe a couple (I'll have to check my datebook) coming up next week.
Our defenses are technically open affairs, which means that one or two friends and family members of the defendant show up and nod along with the proceedings; I sometimes hanker after the old-style European system, where one would have to defend in a big auditorium, in full academic regalia. None of this lounging around the seminar table and chatting friendly-like. *** On a more depressing note, the benighted Florida legislature seems on the verge of castrating the Board of Governors, the body that runs the state university system, & reshaping it as a rump group with no more than "advisory" powers: in short, doing away with the only body in the state capital that has a clear idea of what a university actually is & opening the state universities to direct political control from Tallahassee. This will be a nightmare, something far worse than the periodic budget crises we suffer (we're in the midst of a doozy right now). If the legislators get their way (& I suspect they will) I predict a wholesale exodus of active research faculty from the state. I imagine a lot of folks are polishing up their vitas even as I write this. *** While I was delighted that Marjorie Perloff reviewed The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (link to amazon.com on the right, if you haven't yet ordered your copy) in the TLS ("incisive") & that Dan Chiasson called it "terrific" in the New York Times Book Review, I'm majorly pleased to learn that Nicholas Manning, who edits the excellent Cosmopolitan Review and maintains the blog The Newer Metaphysicals, has written about the book – at length – in a forthcoming issue of John Tranter's Jacket.
It's not merely that Jacket allows reviewers a rather more expansive space in which to examine books, but that Manning – addressing an audience who already knows something about Zukofsky, and who doesn't need to have the salient facts of his career repeated to them – has paid close attention to the form, the rhetoric, & the procedures of the biography, & has made some really lovely points about them. It's a nice review, & I'd consider it nice even if it weren't as positive about the book as it is.
(The money word this time around: "extraordinary.")
I suppose a plurality of the folks who've moved to south Florida for the more-or-less constant warmth would consider us masochists, but we like to take in a little real winter once in a while. Got back yesterday from a rather frigid New York to be greeted by some of Florida's weirder weather – torrential rains & high winds last night, followed by a blissfully sunny (but rather humid) day today with the prospect of what they call a "cold front" moving in tomorrow.
The 4 of us squatted for 5 days in an apartment that could fit into the master bedroom closet of many of the macmansions down here, tripping over toys & books & small children at every turn. It would have been claustrophobic if it weren't New York, where there's something to do & somewhere to go all the time – & even then, it got pretty claustrophobic. The only bit of real culture – the one family outing to the Metropolitan Museum was J. & P., leaving me to take D. to the Children's Museum for the 3rd bloody time – was an evening at City Opera, where we caught Mark Morris's adaptation (reduction?) of Purcell's King Arthur. A splendidly silly early baroque musical really, with text by Dryden & really luminous music. (Michael Nyman has spun about 8 hours of music out of the "frost" scene, last time I counted.) Morris – he's more a dance guy than a conventional opera guy, I gather – opted to cut a few things: all the (spoken) dialogue, the characters, & the plot, leaving King Arthur as something of a dance revue, where dancers performed in whimsical modern costumes to beautifully performed Purcell "numbers." Great fun – for a while. But after a couple of acts, it began to feel like postmodernism lite, & I found myself hankering for the different kind of silliness that Dryden & Purcell themselves had cooked up – fairies & goblins & Saxons & all.
Stuck in an apartment full of an educated New Yorker's books, my own bag bulging with recent dense volumes of criticism I'm supposed to be reviewing, of course I ended up hauling down a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring & trawling thru it in something less than 4 days.
I snuck away one evening to The Strand, where I came away with the usual ragbag of slim volumes of poetry, volumes of criticism, & thises & thats. The real find was a recent translation of Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx's Ethics. Geulincx was a Cartesian & a close contemporary of Spinoza's, tho nowhere near as interesting as Zukofsky's "blessed" one. I suspect the only reason this rather weird tome got itself translated into English is the influence Geulincx had on Samuel Beckett, who found the philosopher's most famous quotations – Ita est, ergo ita sit ("it exists, therefore it is so") & Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (roughly, "Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing") – very congenial to his own grumpy pessimism. Cf. Murphy.
Midnight on Your Left, John Godfrey (The Figures, 1988)
[8/100]
Zap! Pow! Biff! I need an occasional shaking, like this volume of John Godfrey's, to remind me that poetry isn't all the serious exploration of historical antinomian impulse, of subterranean currents of occluded counter-speech, of the ever-deferred wanderings of nomadic cultural impulse. Sometimes it's sloppy (but precise), urbane (and oh so urban, even gritty), super-sexy, funny, & just plain fun. Godfrey's got a great ear, evident especially in his short-lined lyrics, & he's got a keen (if sometimes scopophilic) eye & analytic mind. So who's to gainsay him if the poems of Midnight on Your Left spend more time in the region of the crotch than the rafters of philosophical analysis? At any rate, I'm chalking this one down for possible inclusion in the "postmodern eroticism" project that I might get around to one of these years. The flâneur as cruiser: the poetry of (carnal) knowledge. *** Golly how time flies! It turns out, as the clock at the corner of the desktop rolled over from Thursday to Friday, that Culture Industry has been on the web for exactly 3 years now. Thanks for dropping by.
No sooner home than away again: or so one hopes. The tickets for "spring break" in NYC are ready for tomorrow, but P. abruptly manifested a 104-degree fever this afternoon, & is as limp as a rag doll, pale as Helena Bonham-Carter in her Sweeney Todd makeup. Alarming indeed. So travels might be modified, depending on what the pediatrician has to say in the morning.
A dreary department meeting this afternoon, working over the figures of what the regular bi-yearly state budget crisis will do to the university. *** Dear E – Oh yes, the times have changed, & to be called the "leading" anything makes one's beard go greyer on hearing. "Jokerman" may have been the last really first-rate Dylan song, & one of my favorite music videos of all time. If you scroll thru the "related" videos in the YouTube crawl beneath that one, you'll find Bobby Z performing it on Letterman with a black-clad bunch of punkish 20-somethings; they belt thru 2 or 3 verses, then the band vamps thru the rest of the song as Dylan futzes around looking for a harmonica in the effingright key.
I want my conversion kit, & soon. Let's get down to business, bay – by.
Dear N – A post soon on "My Paul Auster Problem." Those last two – The Brooklyn Follies & Travels in the Scriptorium – make me despair of our boy. But there's a first-rate joke in the latter (actually clean) which makes it worth the (remaindered) admission. *** Souls of the Labadie Tract, Susan Howe (New Directions, 2007)
[7/100]
Vintage Howe, in many ways: to my ears, less impressive than The Midnight but more moving than Pierce-Arrow. The method is of a piece with her earlier works, the evocation or reanimation of angular or marginalized voices form the past, whether the 18th-century Utopian Quietist (note to ND blurb-writer: not "Quietest") Labadists, or the insurance lawyer & executive (& sometime poet) Wallace Stevens. For Howe the truly obscured voices – tho I haven't lived with this book long enough to assert this with any assurance – are female: Stevens's wife Elsie (model for the Liberty dime), the women Labadists, Jonathan Edwards's wife Sarah Pierpont, a fragment of whose wedding dress the exceedingly fragmentary textual scraps of the final poem – "Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards" – circle around.
The proportion of prose to verse is lower than in Howe's earlier books, the paratexts framing the poetry proper less extensive & developed. In earlier writings such as the long poems collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (my own favorite), the "explanatory" prose sections & the more oblique verse sections had been more closely interwoven, what might be regarded as the prosaic "frames" interrupting & even impinging upon the exceedingly dense "poetic" sections. In Souls, in contrast, the proses lay the scene for each poem – the Utopian community of the Labadie Tract, Wallace Stevens's home at 118 Westerly Terrace, Hartford – then retreat before the poems proper. It is as if Howe were drawing back from the generic cross-cutting of her earlier poems, reforming her poetics – like some 21st-century Puritan – into a purer, simpler, more nakedly scriptural generic mode.
![L'origine [du monde]](http://www.escriva-art.com/courbet.jpg){kind=link}