new poems in Marsh Hawk Review

The rather excellent Marsh Hawk Press collective has launched a new webjournal, under the revolving editorship of its various members. The inaugural issue is now up, featuring new work by 19 fine poets – among whose names I won't pick & choose, since they're all so cool – one of whom is yr humble blogger. Three pieces from the last half-decade: "Arena," "Mystic Seaport," and "Oliver Cromwell." Do read.

Wordsworth on biography

Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which stand in the way of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which are to be encountered by the Poet, who has an adequate notion of the dignity of his art. The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the Biographer and Historian there are a thousand.

–Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802

Rereading William Fuller's Watchword; wondering if Fuller isn't the closest US poetry has to JH Prynne. Fuller's poems aren't as dense, as impactedly curious as Prynne's – not by a long shot – but they have a kind of crosscutting of lexis & range of reference that reminds me very much at times of JHP's. A sort of "ventilated" Prynne, opened up to rhetorical gestures & lyricisms that are far more foreshortened in JHP's own work?

***

How much of the current success of the Obama/Biden ticket can one put down to canny marketing? That big "O" logo, for instance (as I'm reminded by Daily Kos), is a brilliant piece of design. Check out the witty variations on the O tailored for 23 – count 'em, twenty-three – different subgroups of potential Obama supporters.

***

The most surprising birthday present last week was an appearance in the "Issue 1" anthology, along with 1499 other poets, non-poets, & bits of nominal internet gibberish. Here's "my" poem (p. 1135), which I rather like, & will be adopting (or at least cannibalizing):

Like white hints

Like honest phrases

Like right years

There he might be a method even

though he thumbs like a phrase

In early spring

he scrawls her

This current may lose and glance, but

it is bitterly white

He is white

Because of everything that

is luminous

Seeing like a cover

the clean writings, lost by

a fair note,

slip

editors asleep etc.

Wearying minutiae – I continue reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (or "Ancyent Marinere") a book in each hand: in one, my course text, William Richey & Daniel Robinson's New Riverside Edition of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads (Houghton Mifflin 2002), in the other, Paul H. Fry's Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Bedford/St. Martin's 1999). Noting with amusement divergent editorial glosses. Of

The Sun came up upon the right,

Out of the sea came he;

And broad as a weft upon the left

Went down into the sea

Fry writes, "weft: Threads carried by a shuttle across the warp," while Richey & Robinson give us "weft: a large flag used on ships for signaling distress." 

On balance, I'd have to hand this to Fry: while "weft" in the nautical sense is indeed archaic, STC's language in the 1798 "Marinere" is studded with archaisms; but while the 11th Brittanica confirms "weft" as a distress flag, there's nothing about it necessarily being "large" – indeed, what makes a flag a "weft" is that it's knotted in the middle. So the weaving image seems more probable to me. (Obviously, my copy of The Road to Xanadu, which probably clears all this up, is in the office.)

But here's something truly irritating: in a edition like these – intended for undergraduate classroom use, obviously – the poem texts ought to be as reliable  & straightforward as possible, & their provenance (their "copy texts") ought to clearly signalled. Richey & Robinson are pretty good at this: in keeping with their goal of providing student with a straightforward reading text of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, they give us the 1798 Bristol "Rime of the Ancyent Marinere," & in an appendix they give us the 1817 Sybilline Leaves "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Fry's a little more ambitious: while he doesn't go so far as Martin Wallen's Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." An Experimental Edition of Texts and Revisions 1798-1828 (Station Hill, 1993), a multi-tiered edition indebted to Jerome McGann's editorial theory, Fry gives us facing page texts of the 1798 "Marinere" & the 1817 "Mariner," which is handy indeed for thinking about the differences the added marginal glosses & the de-archaicized language make in Coleridge's poem.

But as I trundled thru the poem, comparing the editorial glosses of Richey/Robinson's 1798 text to Fry's 1798, I suddenly realized that the line numbers were out of sync: Fry had somewhere added 14 lines to the poem, so that his 1798 text ends at line 672, while R/R's ends at line 658. Here's the difference: in Part III of Fry, one finds this:

Are those her naked ribs, which fleck'd

The sun that did behind them peer?

And are those two all, all the crew,

That woman and her fleshless Pheere?

And those her ribs, which fleck'd the Sun,

Like the bars of a dungeon grate?

And are these two all, all the crew

That woman and her Mate?

This Ship, it was a plankless Thing,

A rare Anatomy!

A plankless Spectre – and it mov'd

Like a Being of the Sea!

The Woman and a fleshless Man

Therein sate merrily.

His bones were black with many a crack (etc.)

Fry gives no indication of where he got that first indented (Fry's indentation) stanza (tho it's obviously a revision of the stanza it follows); the latter 6-line stanza is footnoted thus: "Lines 185-90 were first published in 1912, but Coleridge had wanted them inserted in LB 1800." (The remaining 4 of Fry's additional 14 lines are found towards the end of Part VI, where he inserts – as an additional stanza – a revision that STC had pencilled into a copy of the 1798 LB.)

All I can say, frankly, is WTF?? If you're giving us – us being undergraduates – a "clean" text of the 1798 "Marinere," why in the world are you dithering with post-1798 revisions? More specifically, why are you inserting them into the text of the poem, rather than noting them in footnotes? And why are you letting them bollox up the line numbering, so that the Bedford/St. Martin's line numbers of the 1798 "Rime" now differ from every other edition of the poem on the market?

And where does it stop, short of a variorum? Jack Stillinger claims that STC produced no fewer than 18 different versions of the poem. Why not just settle on 2 – the 1798 & the 1817 – present them cleanly, & draw attention to your favorite revisions & variations in the footnotes?

***

All this line-grubbing an indication of just what a sad funless bastard I am these days. J. & the kids off this afternoon to wave posters & shout at passing motorists while Sarah Cheney – er, Palin – visits Boca today to raise money for McBush.

editors asleep at the wheel, pt. 437

Paul H. Fry is William Lampson Professor of English at Yale, & author of at least 4 books on English poetry & criticism. He's also editor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999). I'm not teaching from this text this semester (for the record, I'm using William Richey & Daniel Robinson's New Riverside Edition of Lyrical Ballads), but I was casting my eyes over the various essays & introductions over the weekend, only to be arrested by this from Fry's opening chapter on "Biographical and Historical Contexts":

Anna Letitia Barbauld, in a famous exchange recorded in Coleridge's Table Talk, complained that the "Rime" "has no moral".... Coleridge's snappy response to Mrs. Barbauld was that there was too much moral, and then he compared the poem unfavorably in this respect with the tale from the Arabian Nights in which a merchant is subjected to an excruciating penance for having thrown a date pit over a wall and accidentally killed the son of a genie. (22-3)

So Fry's an old hand at Romantic poetry, & this is indeed a famous anecdote – so famous that even I've heard it. But there comes  a point when paraphrasing from memory is tantamount to just plain faking it. For god's sake, Fry could at least have re-read the Frances Ferguson essay he includes in his own collection, which quotes the actual anedote:

Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it, – it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a geni starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the geni's son.

Exercise: correlate the two accounts & add up Fry's misremembered details. [FOUR, by my count, in a single sentence.] Pronounce on the fitness to carry out editorial work – on an edition intended for undergraduate students of literature & theory – of an editor who commits so many easily corrected gaffes in his opening summary.

I will spare the rant – who edits these things? where was Ross Murfin (series editor) when this thing went thru proofs? who's at the wheel of these ubiquitous "teaching editions"??

***

Fry does point me towards a sentence by my critical darling William Empson, who sums up the poem's ostensible "moral" in his inimitably pithy way: "don't pull poor pussy's tail."

literary history: probably not possible

I've lost track of precisely how far we're into the semester; I just know that I'm generally overwhelmed & sleep-deprived & behind on just about everything. Blogging, obviously, has almost entirely fallen by the wayside.

***

Saddened to learn of the death of Hayden Carruth. I didn't know his poetry well, tho there were some of his mid-length narrative things that I found rather moving, but I remember his giving a reading in the chapel at Ithaca College some twenty years ago which began with an astonishingly sensitive rendition of Pound's "The Return," a reading which made the poem come literally alive. It seemed a wonderfully generous gesture.

***

Some excellent comments on that last "literary history" post, however. People pointing me towards books I hadn't thought about, or had forgotten I'd read: Michael Davidson on the San Francisco Renaissance, Alan Golding on the formation of the postmodernist "canon," Robert Von Hallberg's really very excellent half of a volume of the Cambridge History of American Literature (I imagine I'm one of maybe four people in the country who actually own that book, given CUP's monstrous prices), Jed Rasula's volumes. 

Johannes Göransson drew attention to the post over at Exoskeleton, where there were a couple of useful comments, including Jordan's: 

A general literary history is at least as desirable as a general anthology, which is to say about a 6 on the hotness scale.

A well-written highly-partisan clearly-bracketed literary history would require no intoxicants, aphrodisiacs, rationalizations, etc.

Perkins's History of Modern Poetry, for all its 1200-page scope, ends up in the "general literary history" category, & for me barely scores a 3 on the "hotness scale." I suppose the problem is comprehensiveness – that Perkins is trying to write about almost everything, in order to present some sort of global history of 20th-c. poetry. He ends up presenting potted career summaries of heaven knows how many poets, but ultimately there's little sense of larger shifts in the art, how one community of poets relates to another. One sentence for Jeremy Prynne (whose biography I will not be writing), shoved up against two sentences on Christopher Middleton (so that the 2 Middleton poems mentioned  – but not quoted – end up being indexed as Prynne's).

But I wouldn't be writing Perkins again; I think I'd definitely shoot for Jordan's "well-written highly-partisan clearly-bracketed literary history," with the emphasis on "well-written" & "highly-partisan." (The only books worth reading, ultimately, are w-w & h-p.) But then I think of Eric's thoughtful comment:

Maybe one reason there's no such book yet lies in the lack of an audience--or, at least, a recognized, institutional audience--for it? [Alex] Ross has a "general reader" in mind; so does Kenner; haven't most publishers given up on that for books on poetry, other than perhaps books on poets?

That leaves poets, profs, and grad students--all of whom might be expected to prefer the more tightly (or restrictively) focused books that do exist. Yes? Or am I looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope?

Sadly enough,  I think Eric's right. (By the way, check out the badass profile photo on his blog – and kid him about it.) Maybe, heaven help me, I should consider reinserting myself into actual academic discourse, & throw over this hopeless pining for more than 50 readers.

***

So I joined this informal CD "mix" club last year, where everybody contributes a mix every month. And it's showing me precisely how out of touch I am (not that I need reminding of advancing age, given the grim date approaching this Friday [my birthday, that is]). But here's the mix:

The Damage Manual: Sunset Gun

Naked City: Piledriver

Mekons: I'm Not Here (1967)

Naked City: Thrash Jazz Assassin

New Model Army: Here Comes the War

John Zorn: The Violent Death of Dutch Schultz

Bill Laswell: Upright Man

Painkiller: Warhead

Mekons: Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem

Eliza Carthy: Blind Fiddler

Gang of Four: Damaged Goods

Bruce Springsteen: O Mary Don't You Weep

Oysterband: Jam Tomorrow

Painkiller: Skinned

Motörhead: Orgasmatron

Naked City: Perfume of a Critic's Burning Flesh

Public Image Ltd.: Rise

Last Exit: Last Call

Art Bears: FREEDOM

Naked City: Jazz Snob Eat Shit

Naked City: Pigfucker

John Zorn: White Zombie

Oysterband: The World Turned Upside Down

Music to take to the polls.

Literary History: is it possible?

So I've been thinking about literary history – not the history of literature itself (which I'm thinking about all the time, really), but the genre of literary history: you know, those kinds of books nobody seems to write anymore, the "Story of English Literature" or the "Panorama of American Letters." Just finished David Perkins's Is Literary History Possible? (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). Perkins's conclusion is that LH is simultaneously impossible and necessary: impossible to write with anything like historical fidelity and interpretive/explanatory power, yet necessary for us to make any sense whatsoever of past writings – any sense beyond immediate subjective reactions or ideological appropriations.

This of course after Perkins had just finished his massive (I mean big – maybe 1300 pages) 2-volume History of Modern Poetry, which I'm also winding up, after reading maybe 20 pages at a stretch over the last 15 years. So there's a sense of post-praxis theoretical summing-up in Is Literary History Possible?, that the guy's just finished devoting heaven knows how many years to his big project, & is now figuring out the balance sheets on his effort. (I feel a similar brief volume on literary biography urping around Alien-like in my guts, & wonder whether I should just write the damned thing or go in for surgery.)

And I'm also reading Andrew Duncan's rich, convoluted, & often infuriating The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Salt, 2003), and dipping guiltily into Humphrey Carpenter's Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. And in the background is this year's probably most pleasant read: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, a dazzling & compulsively readable anecdotal history of twentieth-century "serious" music.

Now I'm young enough & saturated enough in post-structuralism & natively cynical enough to assent to Perkins's various laments about the oversimplifications, foreshortenings, & downright shortcuttages involved in literary history (& most of them apply to biography as well, mark you). But I'm also professionally foolish enough to wonder why there aren't more folks deeply invested in twentieth-century poetry studies who want to write lively, readable, compelling histories of the genre's fortunes over the past 100 or 50 years. Am I missing something? There've been a number of quite readable accounts of modernism (the one that sticks in my mind is Julian Symons's Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-1939), but no-one's done anything similar for postwar poetry, except David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (which I haven't read, alas).

I'm leaving aside such scholarly studies as ML Rosenthal's The New Poets, & other thematic studies that do a bit of literary history along the way, like Paul Breslin's The Psycho-Political Muse. But why isn't someone doing for postwar avant-garde poetry what Alex Ross does for 20th-c. "classical" music?

Yes, having written a massive foray into the institutional radioactive zone of biography, now I'm casting about for a next project (or maybe an after-the-next-project project). But I'd love input: What books have you found useful as baseline histories of postwar American & British poetry? Is Lehman any good? Are you writing this book right now, so I can stop wondering & sleep better? 

Rodrigo Toscano: Platform

Been having my doubts lately about this "100 poem-books" thing. Not sure, that is, what the use-value of the project is. Notes, obviously, too short to serve as serious "reviews," always in danger of falling into mere blurb-copy, the sort of stuff the TLS editors have an ongoing column feature devoted to making fun of. The fact is, I reflect drearily, that I'm too scattered to have much of substance to say about what I'm reading. Perhaps, as a bear whose very little brain is ill-fitted for pomo multi-tasking, I should spend less time watching poll sites, listening to 5 tracks apiece from 4 different albums, reading blogs, dipping into 7 different books of lit crit, scanning a chapter of Ruskin, playing the same song 5 times in a row on 2 different guitars, checking my e-mail – you get the picture – & buckle down to the serious business of mastering contemporary poetry. (We don't have cable, by the way, because we recognize it would mean the absolute end of my intellectual life, already under siege from a stack of DVDs.) What's the good of putting up a public snapshot of my futile efforts to get with it? I.e., to work my way through what was the hottest book among the cognoscenti – four years ago?

Any way:

***

Platform, Rodrigo Toscano (Atelos, 2003)

[44/100]

A biggish book of very exciting poems. RT reinvents, revitalizes the hortatory political poem in post-Langpo idiom. That is, these rousing & very funny poems are every bit as committed to a hard-Left politics as any of the soapbox-stompers from the 1930s that Cary Nelson's written about, but Toscano's a political poet who's read & absorbed his Brecht, his Gramsci, his Frankfurt School, his Hardt & Negri. Terry Eagleton's been arguing for a decade now that "postmodernism" – & what he means by the term is so broad it's almost risible, a branch to beat whatever thinker he's dissatisfied with at the moment – is politically a failure, that the multiple ironies & cynicisms of post-70s critical discourse render their users unable to gain the firm purchase of the "real" that's necessary for meaningful political interventions. (Similar attacks have been levelled at the LangPos themselves.) RT shows that it's possible to forge a new, every exciting, & very alive political poetry precisely out of the ironies & cynicisms that have become the lingua franca of the dissolving present.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the man's a brilliant satirist, in the best Jonathan Swift-Monty Python-South Park tradition. Nobody – ardent humorless working Leftists, quietist poets, armchair academic Marxists, the whole post-avant literary establishment, & of course the phalanx of ghoulist plutocrats who run our government & economy – comes out of Platform unscathed. But it's not a self-dissolving, foundationless satire, either, but one that forces a reader to think thru her/his own position, leaves a reader uncomfortable in the best Brechtian manner.

Lyn Hejinian: The Beginner

The Beginner, Lyn Hejinian (Tuumba Press, 2002)

[43/100]

Like the roughly contemporaneous Slowly, The Beginner is a short book from LH's own Tuumba Press. I like this one very much indeed. An extended meditation on how we start things out: how a piece of writing gets begun & evolves into itself, how children "begin" to be human beings thru various acts of "play," how we figure out where and what we are in the world. Passages of deep beauty.

There's no escape from these repeating units of incipience, these figs and catapulting confidences divulged by a world, one whose beginnings are arrayed all around and side by side.

I stand by the window, look out, and my "self" occurs, a manifestation of the world as that for which I yearn.

To be a self is simply to be something in the world and yet yearning for it.

Does this remind any else – as it does me, oddly, weirdly – of Ronald Johnson? 

***

I've gotten way out of sequence with this "100 poem-books" business; lots of things to dip back into the reading notebooks & catch up with.

***

So what's with this new SiteMeter? Anyone else out there who finds the new "improved" interface totally Martian & utterly user-unfriendly?

John Matthias: Kedging: New Poems

Kedging: New Poems, John Matthias (Salt, 2007)

[42/100]

Matthias is one of the last true-blue high modernists, along with a handful of others, including Christopher Middleton & John Peck. And he's the most quotational, referential, & paratactic of the lot – in short, the most Poundian (or David Jonesian). Happily, he long ago cured himself of the Poundian-Olsonian urge to Make the World a Better Place Thru Poetry, & can turn the machinery of association to the ends of instruction (we learn lots of stuff in these poems, about lots of sometimes arcane matters) and delight – and they're lots of fun, the big "Laundry Lists and Manifestoes" & "Kedging in Time," poems that form the core of this new collection. High spirits abound, but shot thru with moments of piercing melancholia.

[A shorter note on Matthias than I'd prefer, but my full-length review of Kedging will be in the next Chicago Review.]

Joanne Kyger: Not Veracruz

Not Veracruz, Joanne Kyger (Libellum, 2007)

[41/100]

Three months' worth (January–March 2006) of journal poems in this slim, generously designed book. I like Kyger's laid-back, sometimes cynical California-Buddhist sensibility, her ability to pull a joyful haiku-ish exclamation out of the clearing up of a clogged septic tank. Overheard language ("the world's sole remaindered superpower"), the static surrounding everyday life, all of it shadowed & bordered by the "war on terror" & other, more concrete wars.

glumness

I have courses to teach; I have essays & reviews to write; I have poems that cry "neglect"; I have dozens of emails & letters to answer (yes, Liz, I got yours); I have 2 daughters to raise. I cannot afford to slip back & forth into glumness deeper & sharper than my usual melancholia.

In short: I've gotta stop spending hours daily watching polls & reading editorials. There are still – what? – 8 weeks of this roller-coaster to go.

quote of the day (Orwellian version)

From a story in today's Washington Post, "As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They're Undone":

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the campaign is entering a stage in which skirmishes over the facts are less important than the dominant themes that are forming voters' opinions of the candidates.

"The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent," Feehery said. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

Remember, children: "little facts" don't matter; "big truths" do.

Peter Gizzi: The Outernationale

The Outernationale, Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2007)

[40/100]

Still rife with image & sound, but sparer, more tentative than Gizzi's previous volume. Notes of love, of celebration, yes, but more notes of disquiet, even despair. The syntax halts, takes a step beyond previous simplicity, not into a heightened Prynneian complexity or a Zukofskyan indeterminacy, but into incompletion, or truism. The Watts Towers, triumphant emblems of the homegrown bricoleur – focussed in their glory on the cover of Ronald Johnson's ARK – appear on Gizzi's cover at a precarious angle, brought down to earth in their scrubby context: a pickup truck, a panel van, an electrical pole, prefab buildings.

***

And check out Rodney Koeneke's thoughtful pokes at my last Gizzi post.

republican demographics

Last week I watched Michelle Obama's, Hillary Clinton's, and Barack Obama's speeches at the Democratic Convention. Life is too short to spend much time with the GOP, but I just took a 10-minute break from lecture notes to catch a bit of Sarah Palin's red meat address to the Republicans. She'll make a great student body president, folks. What struck me, however, in light of contemporary American demographics, which are abundantly evident in my own classes – the Census Bureau assesses the overall American population at 68% non-Hispanic white, 15% Hispanic, 12% African American, and 5% Asian American, and projects that the non-Hispanic white population will be only 46% of the total by 2050 – is that over the 10 minutes I wasted on Palin, during 6 1/2 of which the camera trawled over the rapt and slavering faces in the packed convention hall, I saw only one African American.

Why, 5 1/2 years after we invaded that country, are so many people still unable to pronounce Iraq? Whatever the proper pronunciation may be, it's not "EYE-rack," Governor Palin.

***

Update: And it's not just my cynical eye, either: this morning's Washington Post has a precise count – out of 2380 delegates at the Republican Convention, a whopping 36 are African American.

Peter Gizzi: Some Values of Landscape and Weather

Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2003)

[39/100]

A splendid extravagance of language, a brilliant eye for colors & for details, the objects/detritus/treasured things of the visible. Yes, the reinvention of the "lyric," whatever that means – or a loving caress of the body of the sensual world. A splendid extravagance of forms, as well, from reinventions of the cante jondo to love songs built on syntactic games. A far better elegy for Gregory Corso than one would expect – or than he perhaps deserves. (Yeah, go to it, Ed.)

***

Obviously, I've got a lot of catching up to do in this "100 poem-books" game, a lot of scattered notes from the past month or so. Entries will no doubt become shorter, as my attention finds itself diverted by, you know, classes to teach, actual assignments to write, job searches to run, etc.

***

So we seem to have missed the brunt of Fay, Gustav, & Hanna, tho heaven knows what Ike is up to out there. We have it's true been spared a direct hit for some years now, since Wilma in in 2005, and I'd forgotten, over the months since the last hurricane season, the whole fingernail-biting business of watching the National Hurricane Center website, trying to gauge whether or not (and when) to put up the shutters, making sure the flashlights are batteried up & the pantry is full of bottled water. An evolutionary adaptation, the ability to forget perfectly valid reasons that human beings shouldn't settled in particular parts of the world. And I'd forgotten, hoofing it all over Manhattan & Stockholm thru July and August, how dreadfully difficult it is to walk anywhere in South Florida without soaking one's clothes with sweat. 

Swedish style, Swedish design

I guess I mentioned we spent a couple of weeks in Stockholm at the tail end of the summer (now officially over, due to the start of classes this week). I'd love to earnestly say that it's one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen – and I think that's the case, only it was raining about 80% of the time, so it was kind of hard to tell. Beautiful cobblestones, tho. A wonderful change to be spending time in a city that dates back to the Middle Ages, & looks it, here where a house that was built in the '60s is likely to be on the historic register, & one can drive 30 minutes in any direction without seeing a single structure that wouldn't have made Ruskin puke.

I was thinking a lot about Swedish style & design while I was there. On the one hand, there's the "traditional" style, what gets marketed as "Scandinavian Country" – muted yellows, greens, & blues, whitewashed pine furniture, lovely detail painting. A certain amount of that in people's interiors, tho not nearly as much as you'll find in US antique shops. (We never visited anyone's country home, however, so I can only vouch for the urban interiors – admittedly, it's pretty hard to place an 8-foot armoire in one of those 400-square-foot apartments.)

Far more common – indeed, ubiquitous – is the high modernist, Bauhaus-derived Ikea style. Not just Ikea style, either, but literal Ikea. Everybody, but everybody, seems to do at least some of their furnishing – the younger folks, almost all – from Ikea. It appeals to my Samuel Beckett side, I must admit, but gets a bit oppressive after a while. So much white, so many clean lines. I found myself longing for a bit of colorful, texturally various just plain clutter. (No lack of that back home, I assure you...)

Most shocking of all, however, was the general sense of personal style. I had the mistaken impression – derived mostly from a regular diet of Hannah Anderson catalogues – that the Swedes were a nation who dressed with a wonderful, colorful flair: lots of pastels, stripes & patterns, etc. I even bought a couple of pairs of eye-poppingly colorful striped socks to wear with my red Diesel trainers, just to fit in with this fashionable race. Instead, I found a bunch of folks whose passion for earth tones, clunky shoes, and muted sweaters would make them fit right in in, say, Portland, Maine, or Waukegan. Occasionally you'd see something cool – a sixtyish man with spiky grey hair in a magenta sweater, or a pair of running shoes in colors that don't occur in nature – and the children, to be sure, are miniature palettes of bright color; but for the most part the Swedes I saw seem to melt right into the countryside.

Worst of all, I must confess, was the youth style. Aside from a half-dozen weird approximations of American hip hop wear, the default mode for the Swede of 15 – 21 seems to be, of all things, "New Wave" styles, MTV circa 1983. Much black, usually accessorized with chains & studs; fishnet hose; stovepipe trousers, inevitably worn with Chuck Taylor sneakers; lots of dyed hair; many Robert Smith asparagus hairdos (the Cure must still be really big in Sweden, judging by the number of t-shirts on people who weren't born the first time they played Stockholm). I felt like I was in a time warp back to the "new wave nights" at the local Marriott, Blacksburg Virginia, during my undergraduate days.

***

Alas, with a 4- and 6-year old in tow, there was little time for sampling Stockholm's cultural pleasures (tho I do have a good working knowledge of the city's playgrounds now, & have been to Junibacken – read "Pippi Longstocking Land" – twice). But I'm happy to report that the architecture is magnificent, the public transit system is extraordinary, the people are uniformly friendly and welcoming even to an American ugly as I, and the Modern Museum ("Moderna Museet") is absolutely first-rate. The weather – at least for our two weeks – could use some work.

product placement

Try as I might, I can't entirely seem to move myself into the digital age – even, for that matter, into the keyboard age. Now and again, when taking up a new writing project, I resolve that this one will be strictly word-processed – no pens, paper, ugly scribbles, & so forth. All clean & on the keyboard & screen. But I can't really do it, ultimately, even though I know it would save me tons of time & help avoid the writer's cramp that seizes my right hand just a little bit earlier every time I sit down to write. 

I've had some luck writing reviews and brief prose pieces on the keyboard, but I simply can't make it work when I'm trying to write poems. It's pen & paper or nothing. (Note: think about what writing technology means to literary texts – Pound was Mr. Typewriter, but he still drafted his poems by hand; the late Henry James, however, & Adorno for that matter, tended actually to dictate their work.)

Anyway, a big part of my equipment for life has always been notebooks. Yes, I fetishize notebooks, & I'm not the only one. A post a couple years back on Ron Silliman's blog alerted me to his love for the clunky orange Rhodia notebooks (see left), which are pretty cool but not quite to my taste. For the past seven years or so I've been pretty much in love – like everybody else, it seems – with the wee compact Moleskines, with their elastic closure, the pages that end flush with the binding, & their deliciously portable size. I think I've filled maybe 17 or 18 of them; they're the sort of books that make you want to write.

Problems with Moleskines, however: (1) Their very size, which is great for jotting travel notes or scribbling blog entries or taking notes at a lecture, can be constraining when drafting poems. It's true that I tend towards a short-lined poetics anyway, but there are times when I dream of a Whitmanian / Kochean expansiveness, & it just doesn't work when I'm scribbling in a Moleskine. (2) I also happen to fetishize pens, fountain pens in particular; this doesn't mean that spend money on cigar-sized pretentious Mont Blancs or other corporate office doodads, but I have a pretty large collection of brightly colored inexpensive, mostly beautifully designed European student-quality fountain pens (and yes, a couple of nice Pelikans as well). The paper in Moleskines simply doesn't take fountain pen ink very well – it bleeds thru, or spreads out. I've spent ages trying various inks to find which work with the notebook best (for the record, Waterman ink wins out, which is bad luck for the pens that don't take Waterman cartridges or can use bottled ink). (3) The darned things are expensive; when Moleskines first got reintroduced in the US, they retailed for $12 apiece; now they're down around $10 at most outlets, but that's still a pretty steep price for a hunk of paper.

I came upon solution of sorts to my notebook dilemma at the MoMA design store over the summer. One word: Muji. Muji is short for "Mujirushi Ryōhin," which means "No Brand Quality Goods." It's the Japanese Ikea, a company that makes well-designed products that range from paper goods & office supplies to clothing, furniture, & packaged foods. I picked up a couple of their notebooks (see right) at MoMA because I was entranced by their size & clean lines: approximately 8" x 5", a single fifteen-leaf sewn signature (for 60 pages total) with a band of heavy tape covering the spine, the pages narrow-ruled with very light grey lines. And mind-bendingly cheap: $1.00 apiece, in fact. 

When I got them back to the apartment, I found that this might well be my new workhorse notebook: the color of the paper is pleasantly neutral, the notebook opens satisfyingly flat, the cover is stiff enough to promise some durability, while still being able to be written on. And delightfully, the paper proves absolutely perfect for fountain pen use. Even the broadest, wettest nib leaves a perfect line that doesn't spread out or bleed thru to the opposite side of the page. I was delighted: the next time J. left me at the apartment to catch something on Broadway, I sent her to the new Muji flagship store in the New York Times building to pick me up a serious stack of the things – 10, to be exact. (There, it turned out, the notebooks were going for all of 99¢ apiece.) I'm looking forward to filling them up.

Enough anality for now. Is it clear I'm avoiding preparing syllabi?

***

But speaking of slim & cheap volumes, I have a largish stack of copies of Anarchy on hand at the moment, probably enough to send one out to anybody who cares to backchannel me a request.

Moody's Pound

So we're about 65% unpacked; I'm still waiting for a couple of cartons of books to arrive from New York – acquisitions from The Strand & Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), but there's plenty to keep me busy right now, including a copy of A. David Moody's new Pound biography. The thing's got one of those titles that makes you unclear as to where to colonize & where to hyphenate: near as I can tell, the full moniker is Ezra Pound: Poet – A Portrait of the Man and His Work – Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 (pause for breath).

Back in November, I responded rather snarkily to Andrew Motion's Guardian review of the book – mostly to Motion's inane review, mind you, not to Moody's book, which I hadn't seen at the time. I do regret, however, a sidenote in which I doubted – based on Moody's Eliot scholarship, which was all I'd read of his work – how good a Pound biographer he'd prove. Boy, how wrong could I be!

Anyway, back then I'd noted that Pound had already received more than a little biographical treatment:

There's no shortage of Pound biographies out there: full-length treatments include Charles Norman's (1960), Noel Stock's (1970), Humphrey Carpenter's (1988) and JJ Wilhelm's (in three volumes, 1985, 1990, 1994); shorter & more specialized books include Ackroyd's illustrated Ezra Pound and His World (1980), Jacob Korg's book on EP & HD (2003), C David Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile (1976), Anne Conover's book on EP & Olga Rudge (2001), John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987), Ira Nadel's recent volume for Palgrave's Literary Lives series, & probably a few others shelved in my office at work right now, where I can't lay hands on them.

All of these books have shortcomings, some of them more dire than others. Norman's book is a breezy celebrity bio, notable mostly (to me at least) for his use of Zukofsky as a resource. Stock's is the life as told by a somewhat repentant former disciple. Wilhelm simply can't write, & has no sense of discrimination among his materials.

Humphrey Carpenter's big (1000+ pp.) work, then, is probably the biography of record, unfortunately: while he conveys an admirable density of facts & dates, his work is hampered by the fact that he's utterly unsympathetic to, & mostly uncomprehending of, Pound's mature poetic project. (What possessed the author of lives of Auden & JRR Tolkien to devote this much energy to Pound of all people? Aesthetically, it's rather like me polishing off the LZ biography & setting out to write the life of Billy Collins.) I'll consult Carpenter for a date; but for a sense of Pound's poetry or for a clear idea of what his political or economic thought at any particular stage, I look elsewhere.

And now I know where that elsewhere is: Moody's first volume (out of a projected two, which even if vol. 2 is the same length as this hefty volume 1, will still be a bit shorter than Carpenter) is absolutely luminous. I'm tempted to say that this, folks, is biography as it ought to be written – if you've gotta read one biography of a major modernist (who isn't Joyce or Zukofsky, of course), then Moody's Pound is the ticket.

I'm particularly impressed, beyond Moody's limpid and sometimes elegant (but never show-offy, like Carpenter's) prose, with how the biographer keeps Pound's poetic project in his sights, and shows convincingly that even the "stale cream-puffs" of A Lume Spento are logical steps in the development of a quintessentially modernist poetics. He's very good on the poetry; he's even better on Pound's cultural thought, how even in his earliest stages he was seeing poetry as inextricable from the larger life of the polis (in volume 2, we'll see how this leads him down the path to Italian fascism). And he's very good indeed at depicted Pound in the context of the London literary scene of the 'teens – just how much of an outlander, a kangaroo Pound was even to those who sensed his formidable drive and intelligence.

The only fault I would find with Moody is his discounting of WC Williams's testimony about Pound's early years. (By the way, on the evidentiary issues that I find so fascinating in biography, Moody is about as scrupulous as they come; his notes at the end of the book make fascinating reading when he tangles with earlier biographers & editors.) All of WCW's testimony about the pomposity & basic silliness of the young Pound, it seems, is vitiated by the distance from which Wms was writing, & by his tangled relationship with EP in the intervening years. The biographer in me approves of Moody's handling here; I think he's well justified. The biography-reader, on the other hand – the one who's cherished those snapshots of a silly young Ez – is disappointed with a rather puerile disappointment.

Go read this one; you won't regret it.

Back!

So we're back in Boca, & have just ridden out messy Tropical Storm Fay (a fine welcome home, I should say). Weary from too long away, perhaps too much travel. Much to write about – Swedish style, Moody's Pound, Proust, and many new entries for the "100 poem-books." But for now will leave my few remaining readers with a snap of winsome Daphne (aet. 4) in attendance at the fabulous if rainy Stockholm Europride parade. ("Is this the Swedish flag, Daddy?")