The dust may be a-settlin' on our "difficulty" spat, but Lo! In the distance, a mist begins to rise. Bring out the dry ice and crank up the amps to 11--and, of course, lower the eighteen-inch Stonehenge--it's time for one last dash of mystery.
Mark, that is to say, has turned up a couple of indispensible quotes from Oscar Wilde (“The Critic as Artist”) and the young Stephane Mallarme, saying things like this--“He [the critic] may seek...to deepen its [the art-work's] mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike”--and this: “Whatever is sacred, whatever is to remain sacred, must be clothed in mystery. All religions take shelter behind arcana which they unveil only to the predestined. Art has its own mysteries.”
Well, folks, it doesn't get any Higher Church than that, does it? I'm fairly woozy from incense, even as we speak. What, though, can we do with such instructions pedagogically? My students would love me to tell them to "raise a mist of wonder" around a poem they have been assigned, although I'm not sure they always know the difference between a mist of wonder and a cloud of confusion, let alone a shpritz of Calvin Klein's Eternity!
It would be awfully helpful, though, for me to show them quotes like these when we're hitting poets from the 1890s and early 1900s--maybe a little earlier and later, too, up through the present day--with an assignment that asks them to figure out just how the poet has tried to create an aura of the sacred by "clothing the poem in mystery." What are the rhetorical tricks, the gestures of language, that raise those curtains of arcana? How effective are they? Do they make us feel one of the predestined--and if so, how--or do we feel more like Dorothy, the Small and Meek? Where or when do we glimpse the man or woman behind the curtain? Such instructions would be ideal for teaching just about anything by Susan Howe, like this page from "The Nonconformist's Memorial," which muses on and recreates the noli me tangere scene from the gospels:
The motif of fear is missing
The motif of searching
Historicity of the scene
Confused narrative complex
Two women with names
followed by two without names
Distance original disobedience
Against the coldness of force
Intellectual grasp
Scene for what follows
Do not touch me
It is by chance that she weeps
Her weeping is not a lament
She has a voice to cry out
No community can accompany her
No imagination can dream
Improbable disciple passages
Exegetes explain the conflict
Some manuscripts and versions
Her sadness
Perhaps more important, though--since few teachers have the chance to teach Howe, outside of college--this could be a way to frame a discussion of Eliot. So many students think that the point of reading anything by Eliot--from "Love Song of JAP" onward--is to bang your head against it until you have "figured it out," and indeed this puzzle-pleasure, leading to a sense of mastery, may be central for some, but it's off-putting as anything to others. (And, sometimes, it leads you quite astray!) Students who know that Eliot comes out of the poetry world that Wilde and Mallarme delineate--even as he chafes within it, turns against it--will cut themselves some slack as they go. And, perhaps, may end up caught up far more in the poems than their puzzle-master classmates.
Hmmm... More on all this soon, via a couple of textbooks I need to review before my NEH seminar next week! And some suggestions, for Nan, about ways to teach the Lee from yesterday.
E
Monday, June 20, 2005
Sunday, June 19, 2005
It's Fathers' Day
It's Fathers' Day, of course--a very important holiday at my house, although not nearly as important as its, ahem, maternal counterpart.
In honor of which, these poems. I apologize in advance if they're not difficult enough to... well, 'nuff said on that front. If they're in the wrong "mode," not the next big thing or the last one, then so much the worse for literary fashion, say I. They both teach awfully well, by the way; if you'd like, I can post some thoughts on how I present them, etc. For now, though, just enjoy.
Father’s Song, by Gregory Orr
Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.
Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child’s blood’s so red
it stops a father’s heart.
My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.
Round and round; bow and kiss.
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk.
Words for Worry, by Li Young-Lee
Another word for father is worry.
Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.
Worry trimmed the child’s nails before
singing him to sleep.
Another word for son is delight,
another word, hidden.
And another is One-Who-Goes-Away.
Yet another, One-Who-Returns.
So many words for son:
He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes.
His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.
His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.
But only one word for father.
And sometimes a man is both.
Which is to say sometimes a man
manifests mysteries beyond
his own understanding.
For instance, being the one and the many,
and the loneliness of either. Or
the living light we see by, we never see. Or
the sole word weighs
heavy as a various name.
And sleepless worry folds the laundry for tomorrow.
Tired worry wakes the child for school.
Orphan worry writes the note he hides
in the child’s lunch bag.
It begins, Dear Firefly....
In honor of which, these poems. I apologize in advance if they're not difficult enough to... well, 'nuff said on that front. If they're in the wrong "mode," not the next big thing or the last one, then so much the worse for literary fashion, say I. They both teach awfully well, by the way; if you'd like, I can post some thoughts on how I present them, etc. For now, though, just enjoy.
Father’s Song, by Gregory Orr
Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.
Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child’s blood’s so red
it stops a father’s heart.
My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.
Round and round; bow and kiss.
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk.
Words for Worry, by Li Young-Lee
Another word for father is worry.
Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.
Worry trimmed the child’s nails before
singing him to sleep.
Another word for son is delight,
another word, hidden.
And another is One-Who-Goes-Away.
Yet another, One-Who-Returns.
So many words for son:
He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes.
His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.
His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.
But only one word for father.
And sometimes a man is both.
Which is to say sometimes a man
manifests mysteries beyond
his own understanding.
For instance, being the one and the many,
and the loneliness of either. Or
the living light we see by, we never see. Or
the sole word weighs
heavy as a various name.
And sleepless worry folds the laundry for tomorrow.
Tired worry wakes the child for school.
Orphan worry writes the note he hides
in the child’s lunch bag.
It begins, Dear Firefly....
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Difficult to what?
Deanna's comment a few days ago raises a useful question:
In either case, though, Deanna's underlying point is crucial for us to remember. When we say "difficult" we should always add a verb: "difficult to..." Difficult to what? "Difficult to explicate" is quite different from "difficult to appreciate." "Difficult to read for more than a few lines without losing interest" is different from "difficult to talk about animatedly in an exciting theoretical or historical context." "Difficult to understand" isn't always the same as "difficult to enjoy" or "difficult to lose yourself in" or "hard to find yourself haunted by."
(These are not quite the same, I notice, as Steiner's categories. I think they may be just as useful. Maybe more so, actually.)
One task that faces us in the classroom, then, is to multipy the verbs of engagement. We need to build in opportunities for students to read closely, with explicatory precision--I won't give up on that--but we need to offer chances for students to do other things with poems (with other kinds of poems) as well. There may be some things--perhaps something to do with beauty, as Deanna suggests--that we can do with any poem, too, but the more we keep the categories separate in our minds, the more versitile we, and our students, will be!
"Difficulty" is not an issue. We don't take students to an art gallery and ask them if they "understand" every piece. We ask them to look at its beauty. ...same thing with words. Even a simple picture of a lily-- what is more complex than that to understand? [...] I didn't REALLY appreciate poetry until I began to just look at the beauty of the words. When I gave myself permission, as a student, to take from it whatever I wanted to, then I began to really appreciate it. Now as an adult, I refuse to be intimidated. When we look at poetry without intimidation, then it's not so difficult. Difficult under whose terms then becomes the question.I'm not entirely comfortable with telling my students to "take from it whatever [they] want to," although my focus in class on describing poems, rather than interpreting them, may come to the same thing in the end. More on that in a day or two, via the Wormser / Capella book for teachers Surges of Language.
In either case, though, Deanna's underlying point is crucial for us to remember. When we say "difficult" we should always add a verb: "difficult to..." Difficult to what? "Difficult to explicate" is quite different from "difficult to appreciate." "Difficult to read for more than a few lines without losing interest" is different from "difficult to talk about animatedly in an exciting theoretical or historical context." "Difficult to understand" isn't always the same as "difficult to enjoy" or "difficult to lose yourself in" or "hard to find yourself haunted by."
(These are not quite the same, I notice, as Steiner's categories. I think they may be just as useful. Maybe more so, actually.)
One task that faces us in the classroom, then, is to multipy the verbs of engagement. We need to build in opportunities for students to read closely, with explicatory precision--I won't give up on that--but we need to offer chances for students to do other things with poems (with other kinds of poems) as well. There may be some things--perhaps something to do with beauty, as Deanna suggests--that we can do with any poem, too, but the more we keep the categories separate in our minds, the more versitile we, and our students, will be!
Friday, June 17, 2005
Of Squirrels and Spirituality
From the latest "Reflective Happiness" newsletter, this word from the psychology front:
"George Vaillant, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, leads the Medici group asking about the relation of spirituality and religion to well being. One of the first questions is to distinguish spirituality from religiousness. Vaillant believes that spirituality is limbic and primitive, while religion is cortical and highly cultural. I [Dr. Martin Seligman] would put it another way: spirituality is to humans as nuts are to squirrels. Evolution has favored spirituality, the desire to belong to and to serve something larger than the self, and it creates the positive sum games of meaning and the building of positive institutions to support meaning and purpose.
But this is more than an armchair project. Vaillant has in his databank the detailed findings of the three most complete studies of human beings across the entire lifespan: the Harvard classes of 1939-44, the Glick study of Inner City Boston, and the Terman Study of Genius. In each of these teen-age to grave studies, there are various measures of well being, of aging well, of spirituality and of religion, and this will likely give us our first close look at how spirituality and religion enhance living and at how and when they do so."
More on how all this relates to literature when I've had the chance to mull it over. For now, just remember: the next time someone starts talking about spirituality, think Mr. Peanut.
"George Vaillant, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, leads the Medici group asking about the relation of spirituality and religion to well being. One of the first questions is to distinguish spirituality from religiousness. Vaillant believes that spirituality is limbic and primitive, while religion is cortical and highly cultural. I [Dr. Martin Seligman] would put it another way: spirituality is to humans as nuts are to squirrels. Evolution has favored spirituality, the desire to belong to and to serve something larger than the self, and it creates the positive sum games of meaning and the building of positive institutions to support meaning and purpose.
But this is more than an armchair project. Vaillant has in his databank the detailed findings of the three most complete studies of human beings across the entire lifespan: the Harvard classes of 1939-44, the Glick study of Inner City Boston, and the Terman Study of Genius. In each of these teen-age to grave studies, there are various measures of well being, of aging well, of spirituality and of religion, and this will likely give us our first close look at how spirituality and religion enhance living and at how and when they do so."
More on how all this relates to literature when I've had the chance to mull it over. For now, just remember: the next time someone starts talking about spirituality, think Mr. Peanut.
Teaching Tips: Difficult Poetry
My colleague R--, who teaches poetry to the same set of students I do, writes:
In defense of difficulty, I often hear myself making versions of the following statements to students:
1) I rarely love most what I love most easily. For a poem (or a song
or a piece of music or a painting...) to have abiding interest for me, there has
to be something puzzling about it. This seems to me a useful, even
meaningful distinction between art and entertainment, and I do think of poetry
as art (though it can also be very entertaining). And, this is NOT a class
distinction of high/low art, but, rather, one of art as a meaningful
category.
1a) I want a lot out of art. I don't want it to be cute or cuddly; I want it to blow my mind. I want it to change the way I think about its own medium (whether words or sounds or paint or bronze), and, perhaps especially with poetry, I want it to therefore change the way I experience my everyday world. There are poems, songs, paintings, etc. that have changed my life. Without them, I would not be who I am today. And those that persist in my mind's eye are inevitably those that were "difficult" when first encountered.
2) As an undergraduate prof. of mine told me when I was first reading Proust, "It doesn't matter if you throw it against the wall; what matters is if you want to pick it up again."
3) "Difficulty" is really just another name for not having your expectations reinforced. "Accessible" is really just another name for habitual. For me, art is about progressivity (though, as you well know, this does not mean a kind of mindless hurtling forward, but rather a conscious and conscientious (re)working of the materials at hand.
Anyone else with talking points on difficulty? Send them along!
In defense of difficulty, I often hear myself making versions of the following statements to students:
1) I rarely love most what I love most easily. For a poem (or a song
or a piece of music or a painting...) to have abiding interest for me, there has
to be something puzzling about it. This seems to me a useful, even
meaningful distinction between art and entertainment, and I do think of poetry
as art (though it can also be very entertaining). And, this is NOT a class
distinction of high/low art, but, rather, one of art as a meaningful
category.
1a) I want a lot out of art. I don't want it to be cute or cuddly; I want it to blow my mind. I want it to change the way I think about its own medium (whether words or sounds or paint or bronze), and, perhaps especially with poetry, I want it to therefore change the way I experience my everyday world. There are poems, songs, paintings, etc. that have changed my life. Without them, I would not be who I am today. And those that persist in my mind's eye are inevitably those that were "difficult" when first encountered.
2) As an undergraduate prof. of mine told me when I was first reading Proust, "It doesn't matter if you throw it against the wall; what matters is if you want to pick it up again."
3) "Difficulty" is really just another name for not having your expectations reinforced. "Accessible" is really just another name for habitual. For me, art is about progressivity (though, as you well know, this does not mean a kind of mindless hurtling forward, but rather a conscious and conscientious (re)working of the materials at hand.
Anyone else with talking points on difficulty? Send them along!
Glum and Glummer
Who's glum? Not your humble blogger--I have a brand new Larivee Parlor Guitar just itching to be played once more! (The glorious octave mandolin I had my eye on when I headed into the shop turned out to cost, not the $425 I had remembered, but $4425, which was a bit out of my price range.) No, the glum ones are the middle school students I've been reading about on a listserv for teachers, whose exposure to literature--for a summer school class!--will take them from the romantic / sci fi / fantasy world that underwrites so much great poetry, later.
Consider this exchange. First, this request for suggestions:
"My goal is to do things the kids really like and have fun with...this shouldn't be torture and full of drills and test prep. They are at a variety of levels, but none that are very low. Some are very high and some are average. I had the kids write me a letter today where they told me what they liked and are interested in doing and what they absolutely hated and didn't want to do at all. I didn't get a ton of ideas from them, though, and the responses that they did give were pretty general, such as, "I like short stories." I responded to each of their letters asking some speciifc questions, so hopefully I will get some even better ideas, but I thought I would ask you guys for ideas as well.
There is really nothing I HAVE to do...the director of the program would like some focus on non fiction since that is a huge defecit for most of the kids. Any good ideas on ENGAGING non fiction for kids at this level? Any fun, hands-on activities that have really worked well for you? We will also have access to the computer lab, so if anyone can direct me to some good sites with activities, games, etc, I would be very grateful."
Sounds good so far, right? Now comes the first suggestion:
"Why not have them do a research project on the topic of their choice (important for buy-in) where they produce a mulit-genre project for the final project. You could do mini-lessons on different genre styles, how to research & MLA documentation, work with them on reading their non-fiction research, help them with determining what would be the best genres to use to present their findings, etc. That would certainly allow them choice in what they research, and encourage primarily (but not totally) non-fiction. They could still choose to use fiction as part of the project."
Still good, right? It's wide open, it pairs genres--could be fun! (That was, you'll recall, part of the plan.) I wonder what sorts of topics they might want to read about this summer, though? Let's see--something fun, something interesting, something with an engaging literary tie-in. Maybe something like this:
"I paired a fiction and non-fiction book on teen problems--issues that affect teens--pregnancy, drugs, gangs, cutting, cheating, steroids, etc. that was really successful at the end of the school year. Students did research on their problem and reported to class via PowerPoint presentations. I had 165 students and had each student select their own fiction book after they selected a research issue. Permission slips were required for controversial topics like abortion, pregnancy, self-mutilation, sexual assault, etc. Only 1 kid out of 165 was restricted by a parent. I worked with my librarian to pull over 300+ fiction books in our MS library dealing with about 15 teen problem / issue categories. There were few duplicates in fiction titles (ex.: only had two title about cutting, so had multiple copies of those books) so way too many titles to list."
Now, I don't mean to dismiss this project out of hand. The teacher who suggested it says it was "really successful," and I'm in no position to say it wasn't! But what a sad, sad, narrow vision of fiction these students must have. 300+ novels about teen problems? "Jesus Crisis!" as my daughter used to say.
All of which is just to say, let's not give ourselves too much grief over how difficult poetry seems to our students, whether those difficulties be (in George Steiner's list, glossed a few entries ago) tactical, contingent, ontological, modal, or anything else. The amazing thing is how well they read it at all!
P.S. A few minutes after drafting the above, I started leafing through the introduction to that fat anthology of Pablo Neruda that FSG published a while ago. In it, Ilan Stevens recalls encountering Neruda first as a boy in Mexico, as part of his 5th grade curriculum. The text? 20 Poems of Love and a Desperate Song. Damn! I want my son coming home from 5th grade reciting poems like this:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
And if that's not a poem about "issues that affect teens," then I don't know what is.
Consider this exchange. First, this request for suggestions:
"My goal is to do things the kids really like and have fun with...this shouldn't be torture and full of drills and test prep. They are at a variety of levels, but none that are very low. Some are very high and some are average. I had the kids write me a letter today where they told me what they liked and are interested in doing and what they absolutely hated and didn't want to do at all. I didn't get a ton of ideas from them, though, and the responses that they did give were pretty general, such as, "I like short stories." I responded to each of their letters asking some speciifc questions, so hopefully I will get some even better ideas, but I thought I would ask you guys for ideas as well.
There is really nothing I HAVE to do...the director of the program would like some focus on non fiction since that is a huge defecit for most of the kids. Any good ideas on ENGAGING non fiction for kids at this level? Any fun, hands-on activities that have really worked well for you? We will also have access to the computer lab, so if anyone can direct me to some good sites with activities, games, etc, I would be very grateful."
Sounds good so far, right? Now comes the first suggestion:
"Why not have them do a research project on the topic of their choice (important for buy-in) where they produce a mulit-genre project for the final project. You could do mini-lessons on different genre styles, how to research & MLA documentation, work with them on reading their non-fiction research, help them with determining what would be the best genres to use to present their findings, etc. That would certainly allow them choice in what they research, and encourage primarily (but not totally) non-fiction. They could still choose to use fiction as part of the project."
Still good, right? It's wide open, it pairs genres--could be fun! (That was, you'll recall, part of the plan.) I wonder what sorts of topics they might want to read about this summer, though? Let's see--something fun, something interesting, something with an engaging literary tie-in. Maybe something like this:
"I paired a fiction and non-fiction book on teen problems--issues that affect teens--pregnancy, drugs, gangs, cutting, cheating, steroids, etc. that was really successful at the end of the school year. Students did research on their problem and reported to class via PowerPoint presentations. I had 165 students and had each student select their own fiction book after they selected a research issue. Permission slips were required for controversial topics like abortion, pregnancy, self-mutilation, sexual assault, etc. Only 1 kid out of 165 was restricted by a parent. I worked with my librarian to pull over 300+ fiction books in our MS library dealing with about 15 teen problem / issue categories. There were few duplicates in fiction titles (ex.: only had two title about cutting, so had multiple copies of those books) so way too many titles to list."
Now, I don't mean to dismiss this project out of hand. The teacher who suggested it says it was "really successful," and I'm in no position to say it wasn't! But what a sad, sad, narrow vision of fiction these students must have. 300+ novels about teen problems? "Jesus Crisis!" as my daughter used to say.
All of which is just to say, let's not give ourselves too much grief over how difficult poetry seems to our students, whether those difficulties be (in George Steiner's list, glossed a few entries ago) tactical, contingent, ontological, modal, or anything else. The amazing thing is how well they read it at all!
P.S. A few minutes after drafting the above, I started leafing through the introduction to that fat anthology of Pablo Neruda that FSG published a while ago. In it, Ilan Stevens recalls encountering Neruda first as a boy in Mexico, as part of his 5th grade curriculum. The text? 20 Poems of Love and a Desperate Song. Damn! I want my son coming home from 5th grade reciting poems like this:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
And if that's not a poem about "issues that affect teens," then I don't know what is.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Contextual Healing
A flurry of postings from Josh and Mark and Robert (twice) debating the course and fate of "indeterminate" (or post-avant, or whatever) poetry, with an eye to What Comes Next. Robert notes that the slither of "ontologically difficult" poetry looks an awful lot like the slither of euphonious late-Victorian / watery Symbolist verse that Pound et. al. rejected: verse that traded on resonance, not on precision, and so forth. Who will rescue us now? (Cue up "I Need a Hero" here, from the Shrek 2 big finale: Uno, dos, quatro--hit it!)
All of which makes me say just this: I'm glad I'm not a poet.
You see, since I'm just a reader, and a teacher, I don't have to worry about What Comes Next. I tuned out of this debate around the time of the Barnard conference on "Where Lyric and Language Meet," and I haven't seen any need to tune in since. Debates about poetics are about as interesting to me as arguments over sausage recipes and competing meat-grinders, folks. I'm hungry, and if you won't git to the skillet and dish up some poems, there's them that will.
(I'm sorry. Was that anti-intellectual? Cue up "Oops--I did it again," preferably in Richard Thompson's medieval remix, and let's get back to business.)
Now, as a teacher, I can take a crucial lesson from one of Mark's observations: "The oppositional force of the 'original' Language writing," says he, "lay as much in its social formations, its rejection of conventional circuits of consecration and validation (the academy, trade and university presses, high-tone magazines), as in the forms and modes of the poetry itself; now that those forms and modes have begun to be common parlance and entered into the APR-AWP jobsearch marketplace, it becomes difficult to pretend they’re oppositional any longer – at least in the same way, or to the same degree. I'm frankly uncomfortable here, and need to think more about the issue, especially in regards to the creeping suspicion I have that a form or mode of poetry has no determinate ideological valence outside the social formation in which it is composed and received."
If I were to teach some of that "original" Language writing, then--as opposed to the more recent "crispy" variety?--I'd probably want to embed it in the story Mark tells. Indeed, I suspect that the more we teach poems as embedded in stories--biographical, literary-historical, whatever they might be--the wider the variety of poems our students will enjoy. Let's face it, folks: our minds crave plot, crave characters, crave coherence of all sorts. If we satisfy those cravings with a story about, say, scrappy young poets who overturn, overturn, overturn--get me the casting director here: I'm thinking Milton, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Trisan Tzara, Susan Howe--our students will gobble up ontologically difficult poems like popcorn, baby, popcorn.
Speaking of which, here's a snack I've enjoyed for the last few days. It's the opening poem of Kathrine Varnes' new collection The Paragon, a book which veers from narrative to chewy, discombobulating juxtapositions with gurlesque delight. (Can that be the Next Big Thing? Please?) Since the title drops the "Tell it" from the Neville Brother's song--that would be a moment of "contingent difficulty," I suppose--I'd teach this poem as a piece about telling and not-telling, confession and evasion or concealment (which is to say, "tactical difficulty"), and try to tease out some clues from the poem for a narrative fromwhich it might spring:
All of which makes me say just this: I'm glad I'm not a poet.
You see, since I'm just a reader, and a teacher, I don't have to worry about What Comes Next. I tuned out of this debate around the time of the Barnard conference on "Where Lyric and Language Meet," and I haven't seen any need to tune in since. Debates about poetics are about as interesting to me as arguments over sausage recipes and competing meat-grinders, folks. I'm hungry, and if you won't git to the skillet and dish up some poems, there's them that will.
(I'm sorry. Was that anti-intellectual? Cue up "Oops--I did it again," preferably in Richard Thompson's medieval remix, and let's get back to business.)
Now, as a teacher, I can take a crucial lesson from one of Mark's observations: "The oppositional force of the 'original' Language writing," says he, "lay as much in its social formations, its rejection of conventional circuits of consecration and validation (the academy, trade and university presses, high-tone magazines), as in the forms and modes of the poetry itself; now that those forms and modes have begun to be common parlance and entered into the APR-AWP jobsearch marketplace, it becomes difficult to pretend they’re oppositional any longer – at least in the same way, or to the same degree. I'm frankly uncomfortable here, and need to think more about the issue, especially in regards to the creeping suspicion I have that a form or mode of poetry has no determinate ideological valence outside the social formation in which it is composed and received."
If I were to teach some of that "original" Language writing, then--as opposed to the more recent "crispy" variety?--I'd probably want to embed it in the story Mark tells. Indeed, I suspect that the more we teach poems as embedded in stories--biographical, literary-historical, whatever they might be--the wider the variety of poems our students will enjoy. Let's face it, folks: our minds crave plot, crave characters, crave coherence of all sorts. If we satisfy those cravings with a story about, say, scrappy young poets who overturn, overturn, overturn--get me the casting director here: I'm thinking Milton, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Trisan Tzara, Susan Howe--our students will gobble up ontologically difficult poems like popcorn, baby, popcorn.
Speaking of which, here's a snack I've enjoyed for the last few days. It's the opening poem of Kathrine Varnes' new collection The Paragon, a book which veers from narrative to chewy, discombobulating juxtapositions with gurlesque delight. (Can that be the Next Big Thing? Please?) Since the title drops the "Tell it" from the Neville Brother's song--that would be a moment of "contingent difficulty," I suppose--I'd teach this poem as a piece about telling and not-telling, confession and evasion or concealment (which is to say, "tactical difficulty"), and try to tease out some clues from the poem for a narrative fromwhich it might spring:
Like It IsMore on this, on Peter's playlist, and on other things, tomorrow.
Here is a spray of heliotrope
in fuchsia bloom. Here is the fool
who said I do. Here is the grope
that started it all, a small granule
of undissolved sugar. Tarry
and it’s whisked away by the cruel
waiter who lives by an estuary.
Why do we want to redesign
hip pockets anyway? You bury
the curses next to the common thyme;
I mulch them with shame worn sleek
with worry. Whatever stars align
themselves on this — um — yawn — antique
affair, let blaze out. Elephant
on the couch: we crowd the ends, sweet geek.
Let’s name the beast, its elegant
urn-like rump. Let it elope.
Our love was ever indigent.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
At St. Peter's Gate
This came earlier today, and is to good to languish overnight. Comments to follow tomorrow.
Dear Eric,
Need I say how much I've been enjoying your bloggery? As I've mentioned to Scroggins, it's been like Gatorade for my aching electronic limbs. Ah, now that's refreshing!Though it's nearly a witty aside, your comment, "Sadly, between gradeschool fantasy fiction and collegiate modern poetry classes falls The Shadow of realism, killing such romance," set me to thinking. I think this progression - or obstruction - is inaccurate, at least from my experience. In fact, if it weren't for gradeschool fantasy fiction, I don't think I would ever have become involved with poetry. Furthermore, I think fantasy - & of course sci-fi - provide a cipher for the difficulty you, Mark, Mike, Norman & everybody has been talking about.
Whoops! That was actually the point I was trying to make--that IF the Shadow falls, poetry withers, and alas, in terms of books assigned in grade school, fall it does, more often than not. A problem to address elsewhere. Now, back to you in studio:
Let me plot it backwards, rather than forwards: nearly all the most engaged readers of fantasy & science fiction I know are invested readers in poetry - as poets, teachers, reviewers, fans. Many of us are hard-pressed to choose between a favorite fantasy trilogy or American long poem. (Not to mention that two of the most inventive [& pleasurable!] such long poems - The Changing Light at Sandover & ARK - are, in essence, science fantasy.) I don't think these are coincidental. I think reading deeply in sci-fi & fantasy prepares one for reading seriously in poetry. (You could just as easily have quoted from the Mighty T. as from Susan Cooper in your note; & Philip Pullman inaugurates [that's the right word for it] The Amber Spyglass with verses from Ashbery & Rilke, c'mon!)
For me, deep, steady, constant reading in fantasy & sci-fi connected me as a teenager to progressive rock (& Metal, natch.) Jon Anderson's lyrics in Tales from Topographic Oceans, not to mention the mystical/quizzical lyrics for "Close to the Edge," make Ashbery seem perfectly legible, not to mention the lucidity of, say, Kerouac's blues or Ginsberg's LSD poems, or you name it. I've made no secret of the fact that I started writing poetry because I wanted to write lyrics for prog. rock operas; my first favorite poets were Pete Townshend, Ian Anderson, Neil Peart, & the collective Krewes of Metallica & Iron Maiden. (I read Dune in order to understand the song on Maiden's Piece of Mind devoted to the book. Metallica got me reading Lovecraft. But Rush got me reading Shakespeare & Coleridge - but never Ayn Rand!)
Which is all to say, when as a freshman at the University of Chicago, I walked into 57th St. Books & purchased a copy of The Waste Land & Other Poems, in the rack-size HBJ paperback, with the dyspeptic portrait of TSE geening out at me, all because John Tipton, who lived in my dorm, mentioned that he had been reading it, I was already prepared for its discombobulations. I'm not saying I "got" it right away (or have yet), but I'm saying that its transparent difficulty was in no way dissuading to me toward reading it. (I had bought a copy of Finnegans Wake, and leafed dutifully through it, because it was mentioned in a Triumph album, after all.)
OK, my geek pedigree is all too clear, but I think difficulty has many shades to it - some of them pedagogical, which can appear unwantedly negative - but some of them personal & intuitive, & not altogether unpleasant, oftentimes sought after.
My intensive Science Fiction & Religion class begins on Monday - so, I might just be revving myself up here.
In any case - loving the Blog...pax,Peter
Mystery Achievement Afterthought
I finish the post, I sit down to read, and there as the epigraph to my book (Mike Heller's Uncertain Poetries) I find this answer to the "modal difficulty" question:
Call now! Operators are standing by!
(Don't help me much with Lang Po, do it, though?)
Magic, intimations, and "the great sentiments": yup, I'd buy that.
Even now poetic men...still seek the limits of knowledge, indeed preferably of skepticism, in order to brek free of the spell of logic. They want uncertainty, because then the magician, intimations, and the great sentiments become possible again."
--from On the Poet (1875), by Friedrich Nietzsche
Call now! Operators are standing by!
(Don't help me much with Lang Po, do it, though?)
Mystery Achievement, #2, Revised
As the man who first told Mark Scroggins that there were "very few things sexier than a winsome-voiced Southerner singing love songs to Jesus"--well, actually, I'm not sure I specified a Southerner, at that, but I know that he was skeptical at first--let me get a couple more licks in on the "bringing 'em to difficulty" front, with nods to M and to Robert Archambeau, too.
First, let me toss out a working hypothesis. Remember how, a few years back, scientists discovered a "daredevil gene"? Not the gene, perhaps, but an inborn temperament that disposes you to enjoy, or eschew, daredevil behavior: extreme sports, hang-gliding, hot-pepper chomping, Puritan theology, etc. (Hanging by a spider-web over the fires of hell? Dude! Bring it on!)
I suspect there is a similar inborn temperament where poetry is concerned: a predisposition to enjoy word-objects we do not understand; a higher tolerance for doubts and ambiguities; a slower and less-irritable reach for fact and reason in the face of mystery. This temperament has its costs--as my high school physics teacher used to say, "It's a good thing you weren't born instead of Sir Isaac Newton, Eric!" But like a fondness for extreme sports, it opens the door to some pleasures as well. In any given class, then, you're faced with students from across this "Q continuum" ("Q" here standing for the sort of puzzled "Que?" that Manuel used to mutter on "Fawlty Towers." Maybe I should call it the "K" continuum, just to be on the safe side.)
Why deploy this hypothesis? Well, first of all, it takes our various responses to "difficult" art--hermetic, obdurate, post-avant; I say it's broccoli, and I say..--well, anyway, it takes those various responses simply as a given, and not as a moral scorecard. It thus lets you "differentiate" within a single class, and bring each student, without judgment, to the sorts of poems he or she will prefer. There are, after all, a LOT of poems out there--good poems--in any given mode.
In fact, let me take this a step further. If you're teaching Pound and Eliot, why not give them Larkin's mordant attacks on modernism too? He's a fine poet, whatever his fondness for spanking fiction; indeed, his lines about the trees "coming into leaf / Like something almost being said" will serve as an elegant gloss on certain sorts of "almost said" poetics. Why not let recalcitrant students know that they have a poet or two on their side? Why not give them, at that, some of Auden's light verse, or a fistful of Stevie Smith, or the pleasure of reading Wendy Cope's "Waste-land limericks" once they've busted their chops on the original?
I
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.
II
She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!
III
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.
IV
A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.
V
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.
More on Mr. Eliot to come.
Now, what about the various sorts of difficulty that Robert enumerates (with some help from George Steiner)? How can we make those pedagogically useful?
You'll recall the list (I've changed the order slightly):
Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport--both dead. Who does the job now, folks? Who did it for you?
(More tomorrow on poetry and science fiction and romance, via an email from Peter O'Leary, a poet to know.)
First, let me toss out a working hypothesis. Remember how, a few years back, scientists discovered a "daredevil gene"? Not the gene, perhaps, but an inborn temperament that disposes you to enjoy, or eschew, daredevil behavior: extreme sports, hang-gliding, hot-pepper chomping, Puritan theology, etc. (Hanging by a spider-web over the fires of hell? Dude! Bring it on!)
I suspect there is a similar inborn temperament where poetry is concerned: a predisposition to enjoy word-objects we do not understand; a higher tolerance for doubts and ambiguities; a slower and less-irritable reach for fact and reason in the face of mystery. This temperament has its costs--as my high school physics teacher used to say, "It's a good thing you weren't born instead of Sir Isaac Newton, Eric!" But like a fondness for extreme sports, it opens the door to some pleasures as well. In any given class, then, you're faced with students from across this "Q continuum" ("Q" here standing for the sort of puzzled "Que?" that Manuel used to mutter on "Fawlty Towers." Maybe I should call it the "K" continuum, just to be on the safe side.)
Why deploy this hypothesis? Well, first of all, it takes our various responses to "difficult" art--hermetic, obdurate, post-avant; I say it's broccoli, and I say..--well, anyway, it takes those various responses simply as a given, and not as a moral scorecard. It thus lets you "differentiate" within a single class, and bring each student, without judgment, to the sorts of poems he or she will prefer. There are, after all, a LOT of poems out there--good poems--in any given mode.
In fact, let me take this a step further. If you're teaching Pound and Eliot, why not give them Larkin's mordant attacks on modernism too? He's a fine poet, whatever his fondness for spanking fiction; indeed, his lines about the trees "coming into leaf / Like something almost being said" will serve as an elegant gloss on certain sorts of "almost said" poetics. Why not let recalcitrant students know that they have a poet or two on their side? Why not give them, at that, some of Auden's light verse, or a fistful of Stevie Smith, or the pleasure of reading Wendy Cope's "Waste-land limericks" once they've busted their chops on the original?
I
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.
II
She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!
III
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.
IV
A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.
V
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.
More on Mr. Eliot to come.
Now, what about the various sorts of difficulty that Robert enumerates (with some help from George Steiner)? How can we make those pedagogically useful?
You'll recall the list (I've changed the order slightly):
- Tactical Difficulty: "various kinds of coding" used "to get past censors, or to put subversive messages into works that, were the meaning manifest on the surface, would get the author (and perhaps the audience) into trouble." Double-entendres fit in here, evidently, too, although my students rarely have much trouble with these
- Contingent Difficulty: "the kind of difficulty that can be resolved through the presence of a good encyclopedia or perhaps a few minutes with Google." I think of this as "range of reference" difficulty, although I think that saying this "can be resolved" through footnotes or research elides the embarassment, the shame, of realizing one's ignorance. (Hugh Kenner's remark that the things you need to know to understand poems are generally things worth knowing may be true, but it doesn't really get at this immediate emotional response.)
- Ontological Difficulty: "here, the poem is made in such a way that it resists interpretation and maintains its indeterminacy." Steiner finds this, Robert says, comparable to "the elusiveness of religious mystery"; more recently it gets defended as political, a "noncommodifiable resistance to the market," in Robert's paraphrase.
- Modal Difficulty: "the reader understands what's happened in the poem, but is out of sympathy with the project and rejects it as pointless."
There are also difficulties of syntax--trouble parsing a sentence, as when my students think that "she me kissed" is Tarzan-speak for "I kissed her," and not the other way around; and trouble with asyntactical assemblies of language--and difficulties of, well, life experience, as when my younger students don't know what the hell Auden means by "the desert yawns in the bed," not really, no matter how clearly they hear it explained. Maybe these fall into categories 1 and 4, respectively.
Most of my students have little trouble with the idea of "tactical difficulty." They know all about code-language, double-entendre, and the like, and they generally even like it, like "getting it," since it certifies their possession of a certain amount of new knowledge and new skill.
They tend to resent "contingent difficulty," since it reminds them how little they know, and they dislike having their noses rubbed in that fact--so as a teacher, I have to negotiate this more delicately, schooling them to blame their peers and parents and earlier teachers, rather than the poet. I also need to teach them not to confuse contingent difficulty with ontological difficulty--that is, not to think that certain poems (The Waste Land, say) are only difficult because they don't know enough. "It's not a poem to 'figure out' so much as a poem to feel your way through," I tell them about this last, "so that you have the experience of confusion (boredom, puzzlement) and horror (as you recognize patterns and motifs, most of which are of negative experience) and failure, even, as you attempt to make the poem cohere into a single story or speaker. To experience a Waste Land world—and this world as a Waste Land—is part of your task as the reader: to resist the temptation to master all this via learning, hold it at bay, so that you come away from the poem having felt the full force of desire for something else, something better, something that would give you wholeness and peace,even as the poem keeps telling you that the usual things you might look to for this help--romantic love, cultural captial, even religious revelation--don’t do the trick or might turn out to be merely illusory."
I'll admit, I've never been able to sell my students on the "anti-commodity" version of obdurate poetics. Like what goes in a commode, commodification happens; obdurate poems may not function in the usual marketplace--"I don't buy it," saith the reader--but like styles of fashion, musical consumption, and any number of other commodities (politics, too) they serve to identify me socially and butress my sense of myself as this or that sort of person. (The kind who reads Charles Bernstein; the kind who listens to Webern or Berg; the kind who smokes whatever one smokes these days, or smokes at all.) I've tried to make that case, say when comparing The Country Between Us with Ammiel Alcalay's from the warring factions, and I think I've done a pretty good job. But none of us is ever quite sold on the idea--er, I mean, convinced.
Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport--both dead. Who does the job now, folks? Who did it for you?
(More tomorrow on poetry and science fiction and romance, via an email from Peter O'Leary, a poet to know.)
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Mystery Achievement #1
[A revised version of the now-defunct "Memo to Mark, part 1," which I broke off to watch my son play baseball.]
OK, folks—no guitar purchased, but I do feel mighty restored after a sinful interlude with a koa Baby Taylor and a fancy bouzouki at ten times the price. The latter has me thinking of Mark, a mean hand at all such eight-course instruments, so let me mull through his last postings first, at least for as long as the kids will let me.
Mark takes issue—as did
Well, Bub, I’ve been slogging it our right there beside you, and if I’ve had some better students here and there, I’ve had my share of chowderheads as well. You know what? They keep me honest. So do my relatives, most of whom have little time for “difficult” art. (I suspect we all have some of those.) Yet both sets of patience-teachers have plenty of time for a lot of other things—baseball fandom, actual politics (not the vicarious sort you do by writing poems), working with addicted homeless folks—that I can’t seem to fit into my own busy schedule. Poetry confronts readers with their ignorance more quickly, more directly, than other genres, and let's face it--no one likes to feel ignorant. That's often what the charge "it's elitist" means.
So what do we do, as teachers? Sniff at them? Chide their laziness? Make fun of them behind their backs? All three, of course, from time to time. But surely our first task is to sort out, for them, the difference between poems that simply have more complex syntax and diction than they're used to--say, 90% of what they'll read---and poems that really ARE "elitist," in that they really WANT to address a coterie, a coven, an in-crowd, a "fit audience though few," which our students, whatever their social class, are invited, just by being there, to join.
They may not want to join. There's a cost involved--a sacrifice, a risk, not least of mockery. ("You like this stuff?") There's an element of self-transformation involved, which may involve rejecting the values they grew up with--of making sense, of communal affiliation, of moral clarity--or turning away from the values they were bequeathed by Brute Biology--of syntax, of narrative, of euphony, etc.--in pursuit of new values, or in the faith that those values can be found in some story about the work they're growing to love. (Think here of the grand, almost Promethian tale of revolution in which Jerry Rothenberg and Pierre Joris embed disjunctive, anti-narrative work in Poems for the Millennium, or of the way Susan Howe's prose supplies all the autobiographical, even confessional elements her poems exclude and defy.)
When I cite Bourdieu, the social classes and differentiations I have in mind are less external , economic ones--although those need to be factored in--than they are these sorts of group dynamics within a given class, a given grade, a given school. I still recall how Dr. Roth's English class sifted itself, in 10th grade, into those who could succeed at poetry and those who couldn't--and then, once again, had to sift itself out into those from the former group who could make sense of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which we read the day that parents came to class. Bromberg and I accepted that invitation; he went to Yale, I went to the Other Place. I don't recall if Martin Kihn was there, but if so, he knew too much and kept hismouth shut. Last I heard, he invented "Pop Up Video" for MTV, whateve that suggests.
In any case, all this is why I like, but really LIKE, Mark's simple point that “poets are a ‘word elite.’ Period.” Let’s translate that into a pedagogical point, and one which potentially lowers the anxiety level considerably. Poetryisn’t just part of the “language arts”; it is THE language art, the one where every resource of language, every damned thing that words can do, gets done, from inviting people in and shutting them out to making aura-buffing "spiritual" noises that make my heart sing and make everything...groovy (insert recorder solo at will) even when I really don't believe them.
For example, in this poem, which I find embedded in Susan Cooper's series The Dark is Rising:
On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,
Must the youngest open the oldest hills
Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.
There fire shall fly from the raven boy,
And the silver eyes that see the wind,
And the light shall have the harp of gold.
By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie,
On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call;
Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall,
Yet singing the golden harp shall guide
To break their sleep and bid them ride.
When light from the lost land shall return,
Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn,
And where the midsummer tree grows tall
By Pendragon’s sword the Dark shall fall.
Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu,
ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod.
Think of how these lines--and I've known them for nigh on 35 years now--muster all sorts of resonant gestures in the service both of a riddle (each is a clue to the plot to follow) and of a spell-casting charm that spills out past the exigencies of plot, into sheer mood-magic. A child schooled on such verses is ready for the line of verse that runs from Yeats to Duncan, and probably back to a fistful of Symbolists and forward to, I don't know, Beam 10 of Ron Johnson's ARK. (Isn't Gerard de Nerval's "El Desdichado" a poem just like this without the novel to explain it?) Sadly, between gradeschool fantasy fiction and collegiate modern poetry classes falls The Shadow of realism, killing such romance. (More on that later, via Henry James.)
The only textbook I know that speaks to such issues turns out to be Kenneth Koch’s Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, however far from the Symbolist line Koch's own poems may be. Says Koch:
Language has no truth- or reality-check. You can say anything. […] The conventional use of language does have restrictions: what we say must be clear (understandable) and true (verifiable) or, at least, familiar. A wild statement if it is sufficiently familiar will be allowed: “Life is a dream,” but not “Life is two dreams.” Poetry can say either one. Language is like a car able to go two hundred miles an hour but which is restricted by the traffic laws of prose to a reasonable speed. Poets are fond of accelerating. (25-6)Your students—and mine—have spent years in a culture and a school system that has taught them to keep the ragtop up and the volume down and obey the posted limits at all times, at least when it comes to language. Oh, and only drive when you have somewhere to go. “Difficult” poetry isn’t full of speed bumps, as they think it must be; rather, it’s the frickin’ Autobahn, and they can’t read any of the exit signs, and they’re not entirely sure when the straight and narrow path turned onto this road they’re on. That’s a better metaphor—a less stuffy, if not necessarily less pretentious one—than anything about “elites,” I suspect. Maybe your students would respond.
More soon, based on more of the responses out there. And frankly, I think it's time we started talking about T. S. Eliot, who is THE "difficult" poet that students crash on at some point in high school, no?
(Or, "and what did you do during the Waste Land wars, daddy?")
--E
Building a Mystery, 5: Updates Abroad!
Several longish new posts out there in the 'sphere, responding to the "Building a Mystery" debate. Mark weighed in a few days back, and I haven't really taken him up on his challenge to secularize the question; today, with "Smells Like Teen Spirit," he lets St. Peter O'Leary keep a backbeat on relics while he whips out some serious new psychodrama on a vintage Strat. But wait! There's more! Bob Archambeau, at Samizdat, has been following the argument; two more long posts on "difficulty" and "inderminacy" for your Humble Blogger to catch up on and think through in the next few hours.
Which I will do. But not now. Now, I have a guitar to buy.
Oh--but before I go, I promised Mike this last word, via email, responding to Mark and myself:
More soon, with examples, rebuttals, and a whole lot of love--
Which I will do. But not now. Now, I have a guitar to buy.
Oh--but before I go, I promised Mike this last word, via email, responding to Mark and myself:
Correction of inelegancies. My riposte to Mark was not meant to exclude readers (and the demystifying usage of "consumers" strikes as insufficient, even pejorative, certainly reductive to the word "reader") or to create any division of affect (spiritual, ineffable, or, per your last, which I'll get to in a moment, some coinage you'd like). Absolutely, we are subject to the poem's energies--even if different strokes for different folks applies (Mark's position, which seemed to be concerned with the efficacy--and I was merely pointing to the possibility of efficacy for whom).
Now to your comment: "I, of course, am most interested in the question of consumption, not being a poet myself. And I think that we'd be well served to come up with some other words for that "otherwise unnameable or ineffable quality," whatever it might be, since "spiritual" has so many other implications." Zukofsky--Mark will correct me or point me--says somewhere that the reader becomes a poet because he becomes subject to the forces of the poem. I might add, as did the poet.
But I'm most concerned here with your desire for "some other words," wondering if, ultimately, this isn't an impossible task, and if a codification could be produced, wouldn't it be reductive and outdated in a sec. If I may borrow from my sense of Ari Elon's book--for which a number of us already thank you for pointing us to--every poem is going to have its own midrash, its numerous midrashes, and the last thing I would want as a teacher (I've been there) would be to close down or close off interpretation. So much else is now "settled" by the cultural industrial complex, but the poem continues to break open the cocoons and envelopes of the culture (which is, sub rosa, the dynamic/thread I hope binds my essays together), and that the teacher keeps confronting students with the existence of mystery, not as a holy secret, but as a result of the unfixability of truth and value.
In an early blog post, you spoke of "faith" as indicative of belief in "goodness:" this uncertainty is the goodness that poetry brings.
More soon, with examples, rebuttals, and a whole lot of love--
Monday, June 13, 2005
Where to take this?
Just sent this, in response to an email; it seemed right to post it here as well:
Mike--More on which tomorrow. Time to pick up the kids, clean the house, and cook for company.
You're probably right that the word isn't the problem--that any substitute for "spiritual" will have its own baggage, and be subject to the same endless debates. Your last point, though, about poems keeping things a little unsettled, a little open, in the face of a culture (broad and local, pedagogical, test-driven, etc.) that wants things to be cut-and-dried, is where I'd like to head with this discussion, since it hits on the practical problem that we teachers face as we frame our discussions of the art.
How to teach the power, the wonder, the pleasure of that sort of openness without lapsing into the cliches my students spout about how "the poem means whatever anyone says it means, so my interpretation is just as valid as yours, and none of them matter very much, do they?" How to sort out mysteries in the poem from mere confusions in the reader? Those are the questions I face, and want to take up next.
Time for a Contest!
You know, this talk of spirituality has gotten so veddy, veddy serious--I think it's time for a contest!
Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby announce the first annual
Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby announce the first annual
High Theological Foxhunt Prizein "Difficult" Poetics;or,the Unreadable in Pursuit of the Ineffable.
Send me suggestions--poems, only, please!--with perhaps a note or two on their yearnings, their auras, their mysteries, and / or their mystifications. I'll cull a few of the best and worst and post them, later this month.
Meanwhile, let me see if I can downshift back to a more pedagogical discourse--especially since my NEH seminar is fast approaching!
Meanwhile, let me see if I can downshift back to a more pedagogical discourse--especially since my NEH seminar is fast approaching!
More soon,
--E
Mas from Mike H--
On the subject of "spirituality," another fine reply, to me and to Mark, from Mike Heller:
I, of course, am most interested in the question of consumption, not being a poet myself. And I think that we'd be well served to come up with some other words for that "otherwise unnamable or ineffable quality," whatever it might be, since "spiritual" has so many other implications.
How about a few of you lurkers joining the fray? Josh? Peter? Emily? (I've read that "Lamb Curry" poem--and I know you're out there!)
No need to put any poets in a "spiritual elite." But the reason the
word "spiritual" continually crops up is that it is hard to find any poetry
which isn't possessed by some sort of hunger or longing, and so the word is a
short hand for that otherwise unnameable or ineffable quality, which permeates
your Auden or your Pound, your Mallarme to the nth and Oppen &
Zukofsky, each in their way. And one might say that that quality is one of
the things reserved by poetry for its way of being and speaking.
Saying this in no way elides the issues of art and consumption or elitism,
since these issues are enwrapped in the poet's work no matter its religious or
non-religious disposition. And yes, reading poetry may be no substitute
for the communal religious experience--though such experiences are often
permeated with poetry, scripture, whatever. But that is about the
consumption of poetry, not why some people write it, what "spiritual" exercise
they may be performing for themselves by doing it.
I, of course, am most interested in the question of consumption, not being a poet myself. And I think that we'd be well served to come up with some other words for that "otherwise unnamable or ineffable quality," whatever it might be, since "spiritual" has so many other implications.
How about a few of you lurkers joining the fray? Josh? Peter? Emily? (I've read that "Lamb Curry" poem--and I know you're out there!)
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Spiritual Poetry?
And, for something not completely different--but a nice change of pace--check out the delightful "spiritual poems" by Emily Lloyd at Three Candles today. "Lamb Curry" and the Diet Coke one have me out the door and off to market, to market, to buy... Well, I'll just be enigmatic about that, perhaps. Hats off, Emily! --E
Building a Mystery 4: Return of the Norman
Norman's comment is, again, so good I have to quote it "above the fold," with my responses interwoven, as before.
We're nostalgic for the Old Speech, really, aren't we? For a world where saying makes it so. When we speak of the "spiritual," don't we really mean a set of moods (reverence, anticipation, intensity, importance, all seasoned with a dash of negative capability) that we associate with wizards and magic and fairy tales, with glamour, spell, and charm, and only secondarily (as adults) with religion--and that, generally for small reason, by the way. (Think of all those fin-de-siecle writers dreamy over a Catholicism they knew next to nothing about, except that it had "mysteries.") Panis envy, let's call it. (Thinking here of that marvelous "Penis angelicus" scene in When Henry Met Trudy.) Northrop Frye on "Riddles and Charms" is probably relevant here, but alas, I don't have it at hand, and no matter how hard I wave my wand and shout "accio Northrop!" it doesn't seem to budge...
I don't know anything about Clark Coolidge's "spirituality," but old Jack Kerouac, from whom he learned that improvisitory "bop prosody," was an ex-altar boy who knew quite well that he was dealing with matters of spiritual possession, the Spirit / Void blowing through him, and the like; matters he couldn't or wouldn't find at Church anymore, for a variety of reasons. Whatever the part of the brain that still craves oracles loves this sort of poetry, no? Except, perhaps, when we come to someone disjunctive-but-playful, like Charles Bernstein, who is anything but oracular. (Hmm... Let's get back to that.)
Eric, I knew I was on thin ice when I mentioned a spiritual elite, but I felt uncomfortable responding to the Badiou quote without having read the work it comes from—so I decided to focus on the Mallarme quote within it.You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. My tastes run more to Badu (Erika) than Badiou, and I haven't read it yet either. Guilty as charged.
Maybe you and I will have to disagree, but there was a time (pretty much the whole of the 19th century) when the tension I refer to between Romantic artist and philistine did obtain, keeping in mind that from a Marxist perspective, this dichotomy was two sides of the same dialectical coin. That means one could find “self-flattery” on both sides.Yes, I'm with you so far--and I'm sure back then I'd have been buying the Yellow Book with the best of them, if I weren't trapped in some stinking ghetto or dancing with my boychicks in Ger.
In our time, we need to be careful here about both snobbery and anti-intellectualism.Ouch! You got me! I have, let's say, a pilot light of AI alwasy simmering in me, which certain sorts of discourse (gassy, I guess) cause to flare up in a heartbeat.
Oops. Missed that. "The tension itself" is between artist and philistine?I like Mike’s point drawn from Benjamin about art that illuminates the tension itself, which, arguably, is what a great deal of art for art’s sake does.
Well, what counts to whom? I tend to think of this from my students' perspective, and am always wary of the sorts of shaming that go on in classrooms, from junior high school on, where poetry is concerned. And remember, what I object to is the obligation-to-be-seduced (there's probably a word for that in German), as opposed to the project of enigmatic seduction itself (for which I swoon with the best of them).But looking again at the Badiou quote and Joshua’s explanation, it seems to me that what counts is not the potential snobbery, which is always present in discussions of taste, but the ideas of enigma, seduction, aura etc.
Surely you don’t have a problem with the poem’s surface (whether or not it looks enigmatic or mysterious) seducing the reader! After all, much of your critical project involves poetry in relation to erotics, pleasure and seduction.That's right--I like to be seduced, and often am: by Montale, by Howe (sometimes), by Jorie Graham (in three of her books), and (among many others), by some of your own works, you rascal, you! Again, my objection is to the idea that we "ought" to be seduced by any enigmatic surface, and that if we're not, it's because we're too cheap and easy, to distracted and lazy, to fall under the poem's spell. And, of course, I'm wary of the notion that only enigmas are seductive. Graham talks about "the whole seduction," at one point, and she includes narrative, coherent speakers, and other mainstream tricks of the trade in that category (of which she's wary, natch--but she uses them).
As for mystery, enigma, aura and so on, Mike’s points about the degree of mystery in a poem, again, are well taken. Besides, what’s wrong with “gnosis for agnostics”? I love that phrase! In some respects, it sums up why I read (and write) poetry.I thought you'd like that phrase. Borrow at will. But let's not kid ourselves that what we're talking about here is really a gnosis, a saving knowledge. It's the feeling of gnosis, an everything-but-salvation that we get from poetry; it is "like what we imagine knowledge to be," as Elizabeth Bishop says ("At the Fishhouses"). Or, better, it is as much gnosis as you can have and still be agnostic--a gnosis that gells, but doesn't crystalize into a "faith"? Hmm... This I need to think about more, with the help of Mark's post on "The Pleasures of What's Difficult" tomorrow. My sense, though, is that what we both like isn't a "spilled religion" so much as it is a nostalgia for...not religion, really, but a childhood faith in language, in magic, in the magic of language, and so on. Remember that the 19th-century split where this begins derives, in part, from the astonishing success of science and technology, which is to say of empiricism and logic as the discourse of power (and of money). Think of all the technology that makes this exchange, here, now, on this blog, possible! Not one jot or tittle of it derives from the magic of language; not one byte was bitten off and chewed by the mystic mouth of "spirituality"; not one flicker of your screen derives from "aura." And, pace Spicer, if anyone ever actually makes contact with Martians, it won't be a poet.
We're nostalgic for the Old Speech, really, aren't we? For a world where saying makes it so. When we speak of the "spiritual," don't we really mean a set of moods (reverence, anticipation, intensity, importance, all seasoned with a dash of negative capability) that we associate with wizards and magic and fairy tales, with glamour, spell, and charm, and only secondarily (as adults) with religion--and that, generally for small reason, by the way. (Think of all those fin-de-siecle writers dreamy over a Catholicism they knew next to nothing about, except that it had "mysteries.") Panis envy, let's call it. (Thinking here of that marvelous "Penis angelicus" scene in When Henry Met Trudy.) Northrop Frye on "Riddles and Charms" is probably relevant here, but alas, I don't have it at hand, and no matter how hard I wave my wand and shout "accio Northrop!" it doesn't seem to budge...
I don't know anything about Clark Coolidge's "spirituality," but old Jack Kerouac, from whom he learned that improvisitory "bop prosody," was an ex-altar boy who knew quite well that he was dealing with matters of spiritual possession, the Spirit / Void blowing through him, and the like; matters he couldn't or wouldn't find at Church anymore, for a variety of reasons. Whatever the part of the brain that still craves oracles loves this sort of poetry, no? Except, perhaps, when we come to someone disjunctive-but-playful, like Charles Bernstein, who is anything but oracular. (Hmm... Let's get back to that.)
It’s a difficult distinction to make, but I would argue that we need to look at enigmatic or obscure work and try to decide if it’s mystery—or mystification. I won’t name names, but some of the “second generation” or post-language poets seem to have fallen into this trap, and the great lines from Oppen that Mike quotes about mistaking a gesture for a style definitely come into play.
Not just the "second generation," Norman. Sturgeon's Law applies: 94% of everything is bullshit. But my students hate, I think--heck, I hate--the feeling that I'm not allowed to decide which is which; that I'm obliged to pull the wool over my own eyes, for social reasons or otherwise.
Two more points, since I don’t want to appear longwinded. Like Michael P.,
I’m no fan of Forche, but it’s less a question of subtlety or mystery or the
play of the signfier than of a kind of tourism or voyeurism in some of her work.
I’m not convinced by the rhetoric or the ostensible urgency. The
self-consciousness or questioning that one finds in Celan, in Oppen, and in some
of Palmer’s own work (like Sun) strikes me as a lot smarter and more moving.
I hear this a lot, but it's often from people who haven't re-read the Forche in a while. The Country Between Us is a remarkably self-conscious, self-critical, even self-excoriating book; it includes several speakers (other than Forche) who take the reporter-poet to task in cogent, bitter, complicated ways. I don't think the final poem in the collection holds up as it might, but up through then, I think it's a better book than Palmer makes out--and to be honest, I catch a whiff of sour grapes in his remarks.
As for the other poets you mention (Kooser, Oliver et al), it’s not that I
dismiss the direct approach and opt all the time for enigma. I love Reznikoff,
Harvey Shapiro, William Bronk. It’s simply a question of how one handles the
instrument.
Isn't it always, when it comes to seduction? (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Finally, back to spiritual elites—and this leads us to your other blog. The best defense I have ever seen for this concept is that wonderful book you’ve told us about, From Jerusalem to the Edge of Heaven. Look at how Elon distinguishes
between mediating and creative elites among the rabbis. He clearly aligns the
latter with artistic production. I’m not sure the analogy could hold up
historically, but his presentation is very suggestive in regard to many of the
issues we’re confronting here.
This I'll have to take up another day--but as I leave, this parting shot: there's a world of difference between "creative elites" (what Mark, at Culture Industry, calls "word elites," or something like that) and "spiritual elites." The latter, to my mind, suggests some actual goodness in this world; the former can be as amoral as you please (and as the rabbis of Pumbadita often were, to Elon, lo?).
Hmm! All this gives a new meaning to Ogden Nash's immortal couplet: "Purity / is obscurity." On which note, I'm off--more soon, in response to St. Mark--E
Mark Leaps In
Don't miss Norman Finkelstein's long comment to my earlier post below, which I'll answer in detail as soon as my daughter stops serenading me with "BINGO" and requests for me to read King Arthur all morning.
Also, a long and very smart post by Mark Scroggins on The Pleasures of What's Difficult over at the indispensible Culture Industry, setting us all to rights. Check it out. More soon. --E
Also, a long and very smart post by Mark Scroggins on The Pleasures of What's Difficult over at the indispensible Culture Industry, setting us all to rights. Check it out. More soon. --E
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Building a Mystery 3: Mike Heller enters the Fray
A long, thoughtful email from Michael Heller, responding to my recent joust with Josh and Norman:
Norman and Eric, fascinating posts raising more issues than one can easily sort. But I'll try a short-hand take:More on this after Shabbos, gentlemen! Meanwhile, can I borrow you to make a minyan?
To rework a famous remark of Einstein's about simplicity, things should be mysterious, perhaps, but not too mysterious. The burden is always on the nature of the mysteriousness, its function.
Oppen's marvelous lines in "Five Poems About Poetry: "How does one hold something/ in the mind which he intends//to grasp and how does the salesman/Hold a bauble he intends//To sell? The question is/When will there not be a hundred//Poets who mistake that gesture//For a style." These lines have always struck me as useful critical guides, though I'll acknowledge that the act of upraising the bauble can itself be an illuminating bit of art.
Benjamin, in the Baudelaire book, critiques l'art pour l'art rather pointedly to this discussion (see my Uncertain Poetries p225): "In l'art pour l'art the poet for the first time faces language the way a buyer faces the commodity on the open market...." Such poets, he maintains, "have nothing to formulate with such urgency that it could determine the coining of their words--the choice is made only among words which have not already been coined by the object itself--that is," [and here WB is inscribing his Marxist spin] "which have not been included in the process of production."
For me, Benjamin's comment seems to strive to suspend, for the moment at least, the misunderstood elite-artist vs. philistine incomprehension struggle, or at least transpose it to another plane, where the writing that WB deems valuable is one which illuminates the struggle or tension between the two by offering glimpses into the mechanisms and catenaries of power, etc. that lie between the struggling parties or whatever.
It strikes me that something like this situation exists in the realm of (Norman, please don't blanch) "the spiritual," that a possible continuum exists (or can exist) between simpler, even naive, forms of spiritual activity and more complex forms, and that the forms ought to be considered as they function not so much to preserve "the mystery" (as though that were some sort of selling point i.e. a bauble) but as they operate to enlarge it with respect to the basic functions within a spiritual practice, to be ethical, to find God, etc.
Perhaps I'm just saying something simple--too simple--that when we look at X, Y or Z's poetry, it is not illegitimate to ask what is this poem trying to do to me and why--i.e. what, to borrow from WB, "determines the coining of its words")--that would at least open the door to its and to my (pardon again, Norman) "spirituality."
Friday, June 10, 2005
Building a Mystery, Part 2
Norman Finkelstein's comments on my "Pleasure, Difficulty, Mystery" deserve to be posted here, in full view, so that I can think them through, step by step.
"Eric," says he, "I'm somewhat troubled and definitely provoked by this post, which is, of course, a good thing. First, I think we have to put the remark by Mallarme in its historical context: it comes at a time when the tension between artist and bourgeois philistine was real, and so I'm not very troubled by the classism or moralizing. The idea of the artist or aesthete as part of a spiritual elite is not necessarily so bad a thing, as long as it's coupled with a real educational effort."
First of all, let's distinguish here between the remark by Mallarme and the USE of that remark by a contemporary critic, writing in a very different time, yet reluctant to let go of that oh, so comforting "tension between artist and bourgeois philistine." Aren't you struck--isn't everyone?--by the extraordinary self-flattery involved in this idea? Aren't you troubled by how it conflicts with the smarmy and petty and just plain awful ideas (let alone lives) of so many members of that "spritual elite" in the last 150 years? Auden had a crawful of this idea back in the 30s, and spurned it, with good reason. No, let's save that phrase for those who deserve it, and let's not kid ourselves about art, of any sort, produced or consumed, as a shortcut.
Norman continues: "Speaking of education, it seems to me that one thing we can offer our students is the idea that poetry can provide, if not a sense of spirituality (god I hate that term!) for those among us who are not satisfied with conventional religious experience, then at least a sense of inwardness, mystery, aura, etc."
THIS I like. A lot. In fact, I think it's incredibly important (cf. Stevens here, not Auden, I suppose), and we do indeed short-change our students by not offering this idea, and the texts to back it up, from the Romantics onward. (Aren't they the ones who kick it off, not least by equating God and the Imagination?) I think of this as the High Church approach to poetry, as opposed to the Low Church of, I don't know, Frank O'Hara and poetry slams. Educationally speaking, the only textbook I know that tries to convey it is Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, although it's not quite a textbook, and in my experience, it doesn't quite do the trick. (By the by, is the problem with "conventional religious experience" is that it's religious, or that it's conventional?)
On the other hand, remember that while some of the Romantics wrote "difficult" work (Blake, Hoderlin, Nerval), others wrote poems that wouldn't cut the mystery mustard, at least at the deli Corey advertised. To say that "today, that quality is often found in very enigmatic work," is true (Palmer, Howe, yourself not least) but it's also often found in NOT terribly enigmatic work, at least as far as many readers (and our students) are concerned (i.e., Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, Richard Jones, Coleman Barks's translations of Rumi, etc.). What's upsetting, to me, is the impulse that dismisses THAT poetry as too transparent, too obvious, too normative, whatever, and that tries to shame students into preferring poems of the other sort. (I'm sure you don't do that, as a teacher, but I've seen it done.)
Finally, I do suspect a class bias (cf. Bourdieu here) in the preference for poems which don't seem to do "work" in the world, including the work of pleasing us easily, but which rather wrap themselves in "aura." Quoth Le Preacher: "working class people expect every image to explicitly perform a function, if only that of a sign, and their judgments make reference, often explicitly, to the norms of morality or agreeableness. [...] The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile--in a word, natural--enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of those who can be satisfied with the subliminated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences" (Distinction, pp. 5-7). Michael Palmer's disdain for Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us, and his preference for, say, Celan or Vallejo as models of political poetry, comes to mind as an example.
Keep those cards and letters coming!
"Eric," says he, "I'm somewhat troubled and definitely provoked by this post, which is, of course, a good thing. First, I think we have to put the remark by Mallarme in its historical context: it comes at a time when the tension between artist and bourgeois philistine was real, and so I'm not very troubled by the classism or moralizing. The idea of the artist or aesthete as part of a spiritual elite is not necessarily so bad a thing, as long as it's coupled with a real educational effort."
First of all, let's distinguish here between the remark by Mallarme and the USE of that remark by a contemporary critic, writing in a very different time, yet reluctant to let go of that oh, so comforting "tension between artist and bourgeois philistine." Aren't you struck--isn't everyone?--by the extraordinary self-flattery involved in this idea? Aren't you troubled by how it conflicts with the smarmy and petty and just plain awful ideas (let alone lives) of so many members of that "spritual elite" in the last 150 years? Auden had a crawful of this idea back in the 30s, and spurned it, with good reason. No, let's save that phrase for those who deserve it, and let's not kid ourselves about art, of any sort, produced or consumed, as a shortcut.
Norman continues: "Speaking of education, it seems to me that one thing we can offer our students is the idea that poetry can provide, if not a sense of spirituality (god I hate that term!) for those among us who are not satisfied with conventional religious experience, then at least a sense of inwardness, mystery, aura, etc."
THIS I like. A lot. In fact, I think it's incredibly important (cf. Stevens here, not Auden, I suppose), and we do indeed short-change our students by not offering this idea, and the texts to back it up, from the Romantics onward. (Aren't they the ones who kick it off, not least by equating God and the Imagination?) I think of this as the High Church approach to poetry, as opposed to the Low Church of, I don't know, Frank O'Hara and poetry slams. Educationally speaking, the only textbook I know that tries to convey it is Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, although it's not quite a textbook, and in my experience, it doesn't quite do the trick. (By the by, is the problem with "conventional religious experience" is that it's religious, or that it's conventional?)
On the other hand, remember that while some of the Romantics wrote "difficult" work (Blake, Hoderlin, Nerval), others wrote poems that wouldn't cut the mystery mustard, at least at the deli Corey advertised. To say that "today, that quality is often found in very enigmatic work," is true (Palmer, Howe, yourself not least) but it's also often found in NOT terribly enigmatic work, at least as far as many readers (and our students) are concerned (i.e., Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, Richard Jones, Coleman Barks's translations of Rumi, etc.). What's upsetting, to me, is the impulse that dismisses THAT poetry as too transparent, too obvious, too normative, whatever, and that tries to shame students into preferring poems of the other sort. (I'm sure you don't do that, as a teacher, but I've seen it done.)
Finally, I do suspect a class bias (cf. Bourdieu here) in the preference for poems which don't seem to do "work" in the world, including the work of pleasing us easily, but which rather wrap themselves in "aura." Quoth Le Preacher: "working class people expect every image to explicitly perform a function, if only that of a sign, and their judgments make reference, often explicitly, to the norms of morality or agreeableness. [...] The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile--in a word, natural--enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of those who can be satisfied with the subliminated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences" (Distinction, pp. 5-7). Michael Palmer's disdain for Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us, and his preference for, say, Celan or Vallejo as models of political poetry, comes to mind as an example.
Keep those cards and letters coming!
New Link Added
I just added a link to the University of Michigan's "Archive of American Poetry," which lets you download and search books of American poetry published before 1920. If you've ever wanted to teach, say, H.D.'s Sea Garden as a complete collection, without making your students buy the New Directions Collected Poems--and I've done it, and it's a very interesting and engaging assignment!--this is your chance to get them the book for free.
A Site To Know.
A Site To Know.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Pleasure, Difficulty, Mystery
A useful set of musings this morning over at Josh Corey's blog, "Cahiers de Corey," on a topic I've wrestled for years: the pleasures of "difficult," in this case mysterious poetry.
Josh starts with a passage by one Alain Badiou, from a book I don't know called Handbook of Inaesthetics. Here's the quote: "As for the enigma of the poem's surface, it should really serve to seduce our desire to enter into the operations of the poem. If we give up on this desire, if we are repelled by the obscure scintillation of verse, it is because we have let a different and suspect wish triumph over us—the wish, as Mallarme writes, 'to flaunt things all in the foreground, imperturably, like street vendors, animated by the pressure of the instant.'" (30)
This, I don't like. It has that awful classist moralizing tone, not all through, but in a few crucial touches: for instance, why on earth is the "different" wish a "suspect" wish, and what does it really have to do with street vendors, anyway? Even the obligation imposed by the first sentence, where enigma "should really serve to seduce our desire," puts the burden of seduction in a very odd place. Imagine a person saying to you (insert bad French accent here): "Mais cherie, mon enigmatic behavior should really serve to seduce your desire, non?" Hel-LO, Alain! Wake up and smell the cafe au lait. If your enigmatic poet-friend wants to seduce me, tell him to go right ahead, but chiding me that I shouldn't let a different and suspect wish triumph over me won't get me in the back of anybody's Bookmobile.
Josh, thank goodness, does a far, far better job. "Why are some of us seduced by enigmatic surfaces while others rush to denounce them as fraud?" he asks himself. "I myself don't really "get" a lot of [Clark] Coolidge...but my first impulse is not to shout, 'The emperor has no clothes!'" Pourquois pas? He gives two reasons, both of which make wonderful sense, and both of which have important pedagogical implications.
First this: "For me, books like Coolidge's The Crystal Text or At Egypt have a kind of aura...so that the distance they establish from more transparent texts inspires a kind of wonder, and a desire not to violently pierce the mystery but to accept its invitations."
"Aura" is precisely the word, I think, especially in Walter Benjamin's sense of the term, from "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." "Aura" to Benjamin is our sense of "a distance however close [the thing] may be": an air of "unapproachability" which reminds us of the origins of art in ritual and magic. Aura recalls and reinscribes the original "cult value of the work of art," and with the rise of mass and middle-class culture in the 19th century, poets like Mallarme invented a new, mysterious, difficult poetry in order to preserve that aura, that old sanctity: to save art from the crass desires of all those awful street vendors (among others). Says Benjamin: "At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art." Hence the loosely theological language that Josh invokes: "a kind of wonder," and a desire to "accept the invitations" of this "mystery."
(NOT a "mystery" to be solved, mind you. No Lord Peter, no Sherlock Holmes, need apply! That's "mystery" in the spilled-religion, vaguely Catholic sense of a "mystery of faith," or a pagan "mystery religion": a gnosis for agnostics. Isn't it?)
Pedagogically speaking, this notion of "aura" doesn't come up in many textbooks, but it matches precisely the "high church" tone of Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which is a book to know.
Josh's second point, which is even better, turns from mysteries to practicalities. "Not the least of such poetry's demands and pleasures," he continues, "is a slowness that most of us feel we can ill afford in a time where efficiency is elevated to an ideal. Not to feel like we already understand everything is the gift of a difficult poem. Which is not to say that I don't respond more viscerally to poems whose pleasures are at least partially attuned to my own eye, ear, and education—but if that's all they cater to they will be quickly exhausted."
This is a wonderful point, I think--and one that we can all, as teachers, take to heart. If our students resist...no, when our students resist "difficult" poetry, they do so in part for the very good reason that we're asking them to read such work on the wrong schedule, and in the wrong key. To read The Crystal Text or a lyric by Montale or Stein's Lifting Belly for a class is, more often than not, to read it in a crisp, efficient context of weekly assignments or things to be mastered ("will this be on the test?"), when such poems assume, demand, or respond to (pick your verb) a utopian context: "mais cherie, we 'ave all ze time in ze world..." Back to aura here: such texts assume a time-out-of-time comparable to religious ritual, and lose their efficacy as surely as a service (mass, minyan, take your pick) spent watching the clock.
Now, I'm probably a dozen years or more older than Josh. I have a busy schedule: the wife, the kids, volunteering, the job (in descending order of importance?). I'm also steeped, up to my punim, in actual religion-religion, as I wasn't two decades ago. For all these reasons, perhaps, I have less and less patience, less and less interest, in poetry that asks these things of me--AND I'm more sympathetic to busy students who have the same response. With such busy dance cards, my students and I are all harder to seduce, less likely to accept the invitations of "mystery," than we might be. That doesn't make us suckers for "street vendors," though. We just have the shopping to do.
Josh starts with a passage by one Alain Badiou, from a book I don't know called Handbook of Inaesthetics. Here's the quote: "As for the enigma of the poem's surface, it should really serve to seduce our desire to enter into the operations of the poem. If we give up on this desire, if we are repelled by the obscure scintillation of verse, it is because we have let a different and suspect wish triumph over us—the wish, as Mallarme writes, 'to flaunt things all in the foreground, imperturably, like street vendors, animated by the pressure of the instant.'" (30)
This, I don't like. It has that awful classist moralizing tone, not all through, but in a few crucial touches: for instance, why on earth is the "different" wish a "suspect" wish, and what does it really have to do with street vendors, anyway? Even the obligation imposed by the first sentence, where enigma "should really serve to seduce our desire," puts the burden of seduction in a very odd place. Imagine a person saying to you (insert bad French accent here): "Mais cherie, mon enigmatic behavior should really serve to seduce your desire, non?" Hel-LO, Alain! Wake up and smell the cafe au lait. If your enigmatic poet-friend wants to seduce me, tell him to go right ahead, but chiding me that I shouldn't let a different and suspect wish triumph over me won't get me in the back of anybody's Bookmobile.
Josh, thank goodness, does a far, far better job. "Why are some of us seduced by enigmatic surfaces while others rush to denounce them as fraud?" he asks himself. "I myself don't really "get" a lot of [Clark] Coolidge...but my first impulse is not to shout, 'The emperor has no clothes!'" Pourquois pas? He gives two reasons, both of which make wonderful sense, and both of which have important pedagogical implications.
First this: "For me, books like Coolidge's The Crystal Text or At Egypt have a kind of aura...so that the distance they establish from more transparent texts inspires a kind of wonder, and a desire not to violently pierce the mystery but to accept its invitations."
"Aura" is precisely the word, I think, especially in Walter Benjamin's sense of the term, from "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." "Aura" to Benjamin is our sense of "a distance however close [the thing] may be": an air of "unapproachability" which reminds us of the origins of art in ritual and magic. Aura recalls and reinscribes the original "cult value of the work of art," and with the rise of mass and middle-class culture in the 19th century, poets like Mallarme invented a new, mysterious, difficult poetry in order to preserve that aura, that old sanctity: to save art from the crass desires of all those awful street vendors (among others). Says Benjamin: "At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art." Hence the loosely theological language that Josh invokes: "a kind of wonder," and a desire to "accept the invitations" of this "mystery."
(NOT a "mystery" to be solved, mind you. No Lord Peter, no Sherlock Holmes, need apply! That's "mystery" in the spilled-religion, vaguely Catholic sense of a "mystery of faith," or a pagan "mystery religion": a gnosis for agnostics. Isn't it?)
Pedagogically speaking, this notion of "aura" doesn't come up in many textbooks, but it matches precisely the "high church" tone of Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which is a book to know.
Josh's second point, which is even better, turns from mysteries to practicalities. "Not the least of such poetry's demands and pleasures," he continues, "is a slowness that most of us feel we can ill afford in a time where efficiency is elevated to an ideal. Not to feel like we already understand everything is the gift of a difficult poem. Which is not to say that I don't respond more viscerally to poems whose pleasures are at least partially attuned to my own eye, ear, and education—but if that's all they cater to they will be quickly exhausted."
This is a wonderful point, I think--and one that we can all, as teachers, take to heart. If our students resist...no, when our students resist "difficult" poetry, they do so in part for the very good reason that we're asking them to read such work on the wrong schedule, and in the wrong key. To read The Crystal Text or a lyric by Montale or Stein's Lifting Belly for a class is, more often than not, to read it in a crisp, efficient context of weekly assignments or things to be mastered ("will this be on the test?"), when such poems assume, demand, or respond to (pick your verb) a utopian context: "mais cherie, we 'ave all ze time in ze world..." Back to aura here: such texts assume a time-out-of-time comparable to religious ritual, and lose their efficacy as surely as a service (mass, minyan, take your pick) spent watching the clock.
Now, I'm probably a dozen years or more older than Josh. I have a busy schedule: the wife, the kids, volunteering, the job (in descending order of importance?). I'm also steeped, up to my punim, in actual religion-religion, as I wasn't two decades ago. For all these reasons, perhaps, I have less and less patience, less and less interest, in poetry that asks these things of me--AND I'm more sympathetic to busy students who have the same response. With such busy dance cards, my students and I are all harder to seduce, less likely to accept the invitations of "mystery," than we might be. That doesn't make us suckers for "street vendors," though. We just have the shopping to do.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Spot the Adonic (etc.)!
A few days ago I posted my list of the Four Noble Goals of metrical attention: Hearing what they Hear; spotting Local Expressive Effects; thinking about Thematic Relevance; and noting Historical Associations. Of these, the last is always my favorite, simply because it always gives me the strongest sense of discovery--and, I suppose, the greatest thrill of making a connection between, not just two poems, but two bodies of knowledge in my own head.
I like to play the Historical Association game with parts of poems even more than with whole texts; that is, I love it when a poem shifts gears briefly into some recognizable pattern, so that my ear catches the unspoken allusion. Consider what happens during Sharon Olds' "Language of the Brag":
The Language of the Brag
I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of the circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
Among the various allusions here (to Whitman and Ginsberg most obviously, and not just at the end), I hear one that really tickles me. It comes in the fourth stanza, when the rhythm shifts just enough for you to hear a strong-stress tetrameter line emerge, complete (in some lines) with alliteration and assonance to mark the stresses. It's a wee taste of the old Beowolf line, a beat sampled from the soundtrack to Old English tolchocking, which Olds uses to toast the heroism of pregnancy. More--just as that primitive, original 4-beat strong stress line tends to take over whatever text it touches, warping it to sing-song, so here it suits the primitive take-over of the speaker's body by biological forces over which she has no control, which don't feel hers, the way that her strength and poise felt hers at the start of the poem. (That would be Thematic Relevance interwoven with the Historical Association.)
Two other poems that use rhythmic allusion to wonderful effect draw on another metrical pattern, the Adonic. This is the five syllable pattern--in English, "TUM-ti-ti-TUM-ti"--made famous as the short tag line at the end of a Sapphic stanza, as here in stanza 1 of Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite," translated by Jim Powell:
Artfully adorned Aphrodite, deathless
child of Zeus and weaver of wiles I beg you
please don’t hurt me, don’t overcome my spirit,
goddess, with longing...
"GOD-dess, with LONG-ing": got it?
That little riff has two strong associations: one with Sappho, hence with love poetry, and the pangs of Eros more generally; the other, via its name (Adonic) with the famous elegy for Adonis whose tag line, "O ton Adonin," shows the pattern at its purest.
Listen how Michael Heller ends his splendid love poem "She" with an Adonic, invoking the first Historical Association with both passion and wit:
She
is looking up, and then she is not looking up.
With a lovely uncontrollable quiver, she's become herself.
I can see she is no longer the breasts which offer up
their enticements, nor the dark mysteries of the pubis.
She is not even her laugh. She is she, without residuals.
'Bye, my love, I think. And, possibly, by my love? And I
am happy, happier even then when her mouth is on me and I
gasp at the ceiling.
Damn--I love that. Those adonics get me every time. "She" comes near the end of Heller's New and Selected Poems, called Exigent Futures, which I'm now reading; it has some marvellous, haunting ekphrastic poems, too, based on photographs, in a sequence called "Bialystok Stanzas."
Here's a second example, where the Adonic isn't used to recall Sappho and eros, but rather Adonis and the untimely death of beautiful youth in general. It's by Charles Reznikoff, from his book Rhythms, 1918, and was originally an elegy for the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka, killed in WW 1:
How shall we mourn you who are killed and wasted,
sure that you would not die with your work unended,
as if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?
The poem keeps edging towards the Adonic all through: lots of "TUM-ti-ti-TUM" patterns surfacing, from the first line to the last. Only in the final syllables, though, does that rhythmic outcry ("O ton Adonin!" "Oh, for Adonis") finally emerge: "STOPS for a FLOWer." In effect, the Adonic IS the "flower" that the scythe does stop for, even if it won't stop, as it never does, for the beautiful young man.
Yes sir, I sure do
LOVE that aDONic!
I like to play the Historical Association game with parts of poems even more than with whole texts; that is, I love it when a poem shifts gears briefly into some recognizable pattern, so that my ear catches the unspoken allusion. Consider what happens during Sharon Olds' "Language of the Brag":
The Language of the Brag
I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of the circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
Among the various allusions here (to Whitman and Ginsberg most obviously, and not just at the end), I hear one that really tickles me. It comes in the fourth stanza, when the rhythm shifts just enough for you to hear a strong-stress tetrameter line emerge, complete (in some lines) with alliteration and assonance to mark the stresses. It's a wee taste of the old Beowolf line, a beat sampled from the soundtrack to Old English tolchocking, which Olds uses to toast the heroism of pregnancy. More--just as that primitive, original 4-beat strong stress line tends to take over whatever text it touches, warping it to sing-song, so here it suits the primitive take-over of the speaker's body by biological forces over which she has no control, which don't feel hers, the way that her strength and poise felt hers at the start of the poem. (That would be Thematic Relevance interwoven with the Historical Association.)
Two other poems that use rhythmic allusion to wonderful effect draw on another metrical pattern, the Adonic. This is the five syllable pattern--in English, "TUM-ti-ti-TUM-ti"--made famous as the short tag line at the end of a Sapphic stanza, as here in stanza 1 of Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite," translated by Jim Powell:
Artfully adorned Aphrodite, deathless
child of Zeus and weaver of wiles I beg you
please don’t hurt me, don’t overcome my spirit,
goddess, with longing...
"GOD-dess, with LONG-ing": got it?
That little riff has two strong associations: one with Sappho, hence with love poetry, and the pangs of Eros more generally; the other, via its name (Adonic) with the famous elegy for Adonis whose tag line, "O ton Adonin," shows the pattern at its purest.
Listen how Michael Heller ends his splendid love poem "She" with an Adonic, invoking the first Historical Association with both passion and wit:
She
is looking up, and then she is not looking up.
With a lovely uncontrollable quiver, she's become herself.
I can see she is no longer the breasts which offer up
their enticements, nor the dark mysteries of the pubis.
She is not even her laugh. She is she, without residuals.
'Bye, my love, I think. And, possibly, by my love? And I
am happy, happier even then when her mouth is on me and I
gasp at the ceiling.
Damn--I love that. Those adonics get me every time. "She" comes near the end of Heller's New and Selected Poems, called Exigent Futures, which I'm now reading; it has some marvellous, haunting ekphrastic poems, too, based on photographs, in a sequence called "Bialystok Stanzas."
Here's a second example, where the Adonic isn't used to recall Sappho and eros, but rather Adonis and the untimely death of beautiful youth in general. It's by Charles Reznikoff, from his book Rhythms, 1918, and was originally an elegy for the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka, killed in WW 1:
How shall we mourn you who are killed and wasted,
sure that you would not die with your work unended,
as if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?
The poem keeps edging towards the Adonic all through: lots of "TUM-ti-ti-TUM" patterns surfacing, from the first line to the last. Only in the final syllables, though, does that rhythmic outcry ("O ton Adonin!" "Oh, for Adonis") finally emerge: "STOPS for a FLOWer." In effect, the Adonic IS the "flower" that the scythe does stop for, even if it won't stop, as it never does, for the beautiful young man.
Yes sir, I sure do
LOVE that aDONic!
Monday, June 06, 2005
Books to Know: 19 Varieties of Gazelle
My friend Marv Hoffman, a master teacher, writes in a recent book review:
I taught 19 Varieties of Gazelle about a year ago, to a rag-tag bunch of non-majors from across my college--commerce kids, computer science kids, kids from the liberal arts--and had a curiously mixed response to the book. On the one hand, it reminded me of so many works of African American poetry from, say, Dunbar to Hughes, in its effort to give (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s phrase) "a new face to the race." Nye wants to intervene in what Hoffman calls the "demonizing" of Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, and she puts that "elegance of language and metaphor" in service of this politics of sentiment--which may mean, on occasion, of a pretty sentimental politics. Is this a bad thing?
Nye wants to hook a new set of associations to the ethnic terms in her readers' minds, so that when someone says "Arab" or "Palestinian," we think of the hospitality of her relatives, the sweet indulgence of her father (a man "tender as butter," in Alicia Ostriker's memorable phrase), the suffering of her friends, relatives, and comrades-in-humanity in Palestine and elsewhere. That's a worthy and familiar project, and a necessary one, especially in some circles I know of, but I can't help but wonder whether some of our students--and not just those with family serving in Iraq or those who lost relatives in 9/11--won't feel somewhat manipulated by the book as a whole. My own students eagerly associated themselves with Nye at first, but by the end of the quarter, many began to wonder whether she wasn't playing to their unreflective sense that some set of ethnic Others are always more hospitable, more authentic, more in touch with the earth, than they are. Would younger students, or a class full of students of color, feel this way? I'm not really sure, and would love to know. Any thoughts from any of you?
There's no shortage of web-based materials to help you teach Nye, including poems and lesson plans, notably here. To close, why not a poem to send you off in search of them? This one was a favorite of my scattering of Muslim students, only one of whom was Arab American:
Different Ways to Pray
There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.
While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into
children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.
If you turn to the news section of this paper on any given day, you’re likely to find a disproportionate number of column inches devoted to stories about the Middle East and reports about immigration – legal and illegal – from many parts of the world. Neither occupies a large place in the curriculum of most schools, so it is important to see how publishers of books for young readers are addressing these issues and compensating for their low visibility in our textbooks and syllabi.
Naomi Shihab Nye, one of our most prolific and engaged writers and gatherers of poetry and prose for readers of all ages, is a Palestinian-American. Out of that heritage she has been able to bring us a perspective on the Arab world that is both anguished and artful. In 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins, $6.99, 160pp.), she has gathered new and previously published poems which evoke both the sensual and familial joy and sadness which coexist in one of the world’s most troubled regions.
The book opens with a poem which is an account of a bus trip through Oklahoma on that fateful September 11th. She is seated beside a man released from prison that day who may be the only person in the country unaware of the tragedy which will sear that date in all our minds forever. It is a fitting beginning for the book because 9/11 provided most Americans with an excuse to demonize a culture about which they already harbored deep misunderstandings. It establishes the author’s
mission which she imagines her long dead 106 year old grandmother to be
channeling to her:”Say this is not who we are.”
Although war and loss always lurk in the background, downstage Ms. Nye’s world is a cornucopia of figs, almonds, olives, lentils, eggplants. It is inhabited by loving, large
families which include Uncle Mohammed, who has chosen the life of a hermit,
perhaps to flee the relentless and seemingly intractable horrors of every day Palestinian life. “Laughter lived here/jingling its pocket of thin coins/and now it is hiding.” There is anger and deep sadness in these poems, but it never turns to the kind of bitterness that would diminish the author’s own humanity. Her message is delivered in the voice of a poet, not a propagandist, with an elegance of language and metaphor that is aesthetically uncompromising.
In her final take on the contested landscape of her ancestors, she asks the ultimate question: “Are people the only holy land?”
I taught 19 Varieties of Gazelle about a year ago, to a rag-tag bunch of non-majors from across my college--commerce kids, computer science kids, kids from the liberal arts--and had a curiously mixed response to the book. On the one hand, it reminded me of so many works of African American poetry from, say, Dunbar to Hughes, in its effort to give (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s phrase) "a new face to the race." Nye wants to intervene in what Hoffman calls the "demonizing" of Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, and she puts that "elegance of language and metaphor" in service of this politics of sentiment--which may mean, on occasion, of a pretty sentimental politics. Is this a bad thing?
Nye wants to hook a new set of associations to the ethnic terms in her readers' minds, so that when someone says "Arab" or "Palestinian," we think of the hospitality of her relatives, the sweet indulgence of her father (a man "tender as butter," in Alicia Ostriker's memorable phrase), the suffering of her friends, relatives, and comrades-in-humanity in Palestine and elsewhere. That's a worthy and familiar project, and a necessary one, especially in some circles I know of, but I can't help but wonder whether some of our students--and not just those with family serving in Iraq or those who lost relatives in 9/11--won't feel somewhat manipulated by the book as a whole. My own students eagerly associated themselves with Nye at first, but by the end of the quarter, many began to wonder whether she wasn't playing to their unreflective sense that some set of ethnic Others are always more hospitable, more authentic, more in touch with the earth, than they are. Would younger students, or a class full of students of color, feel this way? I'm not really sure, and would love to know. Any thoughts from any of you?
There's no shortage of web-based materials to help you teach Nye, including poems and lesson plans, notably here. To close, why not a poem to send you off in search of them? This one was a favorite of my scattering of Muslim students, only one of whom was Arab American:
Different Ways to Pray
There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.
While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into
children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Teaching Tips: Rhythm and Scansion
Oh, I have been dilatory and dumb, as Whitman says! It's been ages since I posted anything substantial here, either about teaching poetry or about anything else. Time to get back on track, with some thoughts about rhythm.
It seems to me that there are really only four things we want our students to do when it comes to rhythm and meter, and it helps to recognize how different these four things are.
We want them to:
1. Recognize the whether any meter is there—or, to put it in a fancier way, to recognize where the poem falls on the “metrical continuum” between hyper-regular verse and utterly free verse. Recognizing a meter might entail noticing duple and triple patterns (ti-tum vs. ti-ti-tum and ti-tum-ti, say); how many stresses there are per line (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), and so on.
2. Notice Local Expressive Effects: that is, how particular variations in the poem's rhythm (stresses packed together or lots of speedy unstressed syllables) can plausibly be said to "act out" whatever movement or description the words in question mean--or, perhaps, how they comment on it in some other less obvious way. "The sound must seem the echo of the sense," as Pope rather too-famously says.
* A succession of stressed syllables can reinforce local meanings and effects of
weight, difficulty, inertia, or slowness, the stretching out of time.
* A succession of unstressed syllables can reinforce local meanings and effects of
rapidity, lightness, ease.
* An unanticipated reversal in the rhythm--i.e., a trochee where you’d expect an iamb--can reinforce a sudden movement, literal or of thought: a discovery or illumination, a new direction of thought, a new tone of voice, a change or intensification of address. This needn’t happen only in a metrical context, by the way: any change from expected patterns or sounds is noteworthy.
3. We want them to think about Thematic Relevance. How, they should ask, is this use of a particular meter--or with modern poems, writing in meter at all--plausibly connectable to the theme or mood of the poem at hand? Two examples will illustrate what I mean. You can connect the mix of duple and triple, rising and falling meters in Hopkins's "Pied Beauty" to the poem's thematic material (the beauty of everything mixed-up, shifting, couple-colored, etc., as it shows the glory of God). Or you can connect the little dip into iambic pentameter at the end of "Those Winter Sundays" to the poem's closing effort to bestow dignity and honor on the father's sacrifices. These are all ways to connect the emotional drama of the poem to the particular element of linguistic drama found in meter and rhythm.
4. And, finally, we want them to think about Historical Associations. Most meters (and many stanzas) have picked up an assortment of historical associations through the centuries. Poems in ballad meter or hymn meter may want to raise balladic or hymnal expectations in your mind, either to match them or to play with them. Poems in strong-stress 4-beat lines may want to remind you of how archaic, even primitive, the 4-beat line can sound (with its memories of Beowulf, say, or with the way it sounds like a hypnotic chant). Pentameter poems may want you to think of such famous predecessors as Shakespeare or Milton, Pope or Wordsworth or Keats, in order to carve out some place for themselves in relation to the noble dead. Naturally there are more associations with any given meter than will fit any individual new poem, but the more poetry you read the more you should become able to sift out which associations shed new light on the poem at hand, and why.
In my next post I'll show how some of this can be particularly engaging, at least for students who aren't completely flummoxed by the challenge. What do you think, though? Any thoughts about meter and rhythm from your end?
It seems to me that there are really only four things we want our students to do when it comes to rhythm and meter, and it helps to recognize how different these four things are.
We want them to:
1. Recognize the whether any meter is there—or, to put it in a fancier way, to recognize where the poem falls on the “metrical continuum” between hyper-regular verse and utterly free verse. Recognizing a meter might entail noticing duple and triple patterns (ti-tum vs. ti-ti-tum and ti-tum-ti, say); how many stresses there are per line (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), and so on.
2. Notice Local Expressive Effects: that is, how particular variations in the poem's rhythm (stresses packed together or lots of speedy unstressed syllables) can plausibly be said to "act out" whatever movement or description the words in question mean--or, perhaps, how they comment on it in some other less obvious way. "The sound must seem the echo of the sense," as Pope rather too-famously says.
* A succession of stressed syllables can reinforce local meanings and effects of
weight, difficulty, inertia, or slowness, the stretching out of time.
* A succession of unstressed syllables can reinforce local meanings and effects of
rapidity, lightness, ease.
* An unanticipated reversal in the rhythm--i.e., a trochee where you’d expect an iamb--can reinforce a sudden movement, literal or of thought: a discovery or illumination, a new direction of thought, a new tone of voice, a change or intensification of address. This needn’t happen only in a metrical context, by the way: any change from expected patterns or sounds is noteworthy.
3. We want them to think about Thematic Relevance. How, they should ask, is this use of a particular meter--or with modern poems, writing in meter at all--plausibly connectable to the theme or mood of the poem at hand? Two examples will illustrate what I mean. You can connect the mix of duple and triple, rising and falling meters in Hopkins's "Pied Beauty" to the poem's thematic material (the beauty of everything mixed-up, shifting, couple-colored, etc., as it shows the glory of God). Or you can connect the little dip into iambic pentameter at the end of "Those Winter Sundays" to the poem's closing effort to bestow dignity and honor on the father's sacrifices. These are all ways to connect the emotional drama of the poem to the particular element of linguistic drama found in meter and rhythm.
4. And, finally, we want them to think about Historical Associations. Most meters (and many stanzas) have picked up an assortment of historical associations through the centuries. Poems in ballad meter or hymn meter may want to raise balladic or hymnal expectations in your mind, either to match them or to play with them. Poems in strong-stress 4-beat lines may want to remind you of how archaic, even primitive, the 4-beat line can sound (with its memories of Beowulf, say, or with the way it sounds like a hypnotic chant). Pentameter poems may want you to think of such famous predecessors as Shakespeare or Milton, Pope or Wordsworth or Keats, in order to carve out some place for themselves in relation to the noble dead. Naturally there are more associations with any given meter than will fit any individual new poem, but the more poetry you read the more you should become able to sift out which associations shed new light on the poem at hand, and why.
In my next post I'll show how some of this can be particularly engaging, at least for students who aren't completely flummoxed by the challenge. What do you think, though? Any thoughts about meter and rhythm from your end?
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems
Well, Memorial Day has come and gone--I was feeling incredibly rested and ready to work for about 12 hours, until another cold kicked in; now I'm groggy, medicated, and ready for a nap. Before I sleep, though, I want to curl up with a new book by the fine Chicago poet Quraysh Ali Lansana, called They Shall Run, a collection of what Lansana calls "Harriet Tubman poems." If you teach anything connected to Tubman, or to slavery and abolition, or to the dramatic monologue or poem-about-history, this is a book to know.
More on it later this afternoon, I hope!
More on it later this afternoon, I hope!
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