Versions of Sappho

Mark, God bless him, welcomes me back to cyberspace, but mourns Anne Carson's "tin ear." Tin andra, tin earoa, tina turner, say I--but for comparison's sake, here are two other versions of the piece. The first is from Jim Powell's Sappho: a Garland:

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,

but come here, if ever at other moments
hearing these words from afar you listened
and responded: leaving your father’s house, all
golden, you came then,

hitching up your chariot: lovely sparrows
drew you quickly over the dark earth, whirling
on fine beating wings from the heights of heaven
down through the sky and

instantly arrived—and then O my blessed
goddess with a smile on your deathless face you
asked me what the matter was this time, what I
called you for this time,

what I now most wanted to happen in my
raving heart: “Whom this time should I persuade to
lead you back again to her love? Who now, oh
Sappho, who wrongs you?

If she flees you now, she will soon pursue you;
If she won’t accept what you give, she’ll give it;
If she doesn’t love you, she’ll love you soon now,
Even unwilling.”

Come to me again, and release me from this
want past bearing. All that my heart desires to
happen—make it happen. And stand beside me,
goddess, my ally.

And here's the Guy Davenport,

from Seven Greeks:

Aphrodita dressed in an embroidery of flowers,
Never to die, the daughter of God,
Untangle from longing and perplexities,
O Lady, my heart.

But come down to me, as you came before,
For if ever I cried, and you heard and came,
Come now, of all times, leaving
Your father’s golden house

In that chariot pulled by sparrows reined and bitted,
Swift in their flying, a quick blur aquiver,
Beautiful, high. They drew you across steep air
Down to the black earth;

Fast they came, and you behind them. O
Hilarious heart, your face all laughter,
Asking, What troubles you this time, why again
Do you call me down?

Asking, In your wild heart, who now
Must you have? Who is she that persuasion
Fetch her, enlist her, and put her into bounden love?
Sappho, who does you wrong?

If she balks, I promise, soon she’ll chase,
If she’s turned from gifts, now she’ll give them,
And if she does not love you, she will love,
Helpless, she will love.

Come, then, loose me from cruelties.
Give my tethered heart its full desire.
Fulfill, and come, lock your shield with mine
Throughout the siege.

Each has its felicities, I think, even the Carson--although, to be fair, hers are mostly pedagogical, rather than matters of pleasure.

More on Sappho tomorrow, mebbe. --E

You know...

...I'm not dead yet. More or less. That grading--whew! Hard to do when you're teaching a new summer class at the same time. To be honest, though, I haven't been blogging because I haven't been reading blogs myself much recently, or even thinking about poetry, poetry teaching, and the other ostensible subjects of this little enterprise. And, of course, the longer you go without blogging, the less you feel like doing it, no? First comes guilt, then resignation: by now, who's going to be reading? Yesterday, though, one of my graduate students told me she'd just discovered the blog, and she was so excited by it. A teacher, she was out looking for lesson plans, etc., and I guess this was just what she needed. So I'm back--and Maria, thanks!

***

Most of my intellectual life these days is focused on romance fiction, my new area of inquiry. I love the books, and I love the happiness with which any new scholar joining that community gets welcomed. I haven't yet found the sort of sniping one sees in poetry criticism, nor the bickering about schools, etc., that bores me to tears in so many poetry venues. Not that I plan to leave poetry criticism for good, but I must say, given the choice between reading a new book on poetry or a new romance novel, I'm going with the little heart sticker more and more. Is it just the novelty? The ease? Or is there some deeper, substantive reason? Hmmm. Something to mull over at the pool, perhaps, this afternoon.

***

Reading Eloisa James's Duchess in Love last week I hit this passage, in which our hero, Cam, a sculptor, considers his next project:

...he spent the morning starting at the marble lump in the corner of his bedroom. Should he sculpt Gina as a pink, naked Aphrodite? A pleasant thought.

Even more pleasant when the duchess herself stood before him. She would make a lovely Aphrodite. Unusual for an Aphrodite, of course. She was slimmer than the normal model, and her face was far more intelligent. The Aphrodites he could bring to mind had sensual, indolent faces, like that of Gina's statue. Whereas her face was thin with a look of curiosity. But why should Aphrodite, as the goddess of eros, of desire, be indolent? Why shouldn't she have precisely that innocent look combined with a gleam of erotic curiosity--the look in his wife's eyes?

One thinks, of course, of Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite," whose goddess is anything but indolent and sensual. And where better to find such an echo than in a popular romance novel?

Here's the Sappho, by the way, in Anne Carson's translation. I generally give my Love Poetry students this one, and Guy Davenport's version, and also Jim Powell's, and we work by triangulation. Enjoy.

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus,who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart

but come here if ever before
you caught my voice far off
and listening left your father's
golden house and came,

yoking your car. And fine birds brought you,
quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky
through midair---

they arrived. But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love? Who, O
Sappho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.

Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.

Back Again!

Hello, everyone. Sorry about the long absence again--I've been busy over at the Big Jewish Blog, as some of you have clicked over and seen, and have been putting most of my off-campus efforts into (drum-roll, please) RomanceScholar, my new listserv for academics interested in popular romance fiction. Unlike my poetry-teacher Yahoo group, which has gone quiet for a while (gee, are school-teachers busy people?), RomanceScholar seems to be a lively bunch. Swing by, if you have an interest; if you don't, and you're a graduate student or college professor, think about joining the Say Something Wonderful Yahoo group and sparking things up a little!

Especially, come to think of it, if you have ANY IDEAS AT ALL about teaching Gertrude Stein. Tried again two nights ago--the bunch of Tender Buttons and the scrap of Lifting Belly in the Rothenberg / Joris Poems for the Millennium anthology, vol. 1. We did well enough, but I'm so out of sympathy with the texts themselves that I begin to wonder whether I should just stop teaching them entirely. If you're out there, and you love to teach Stein, please weigh in and give me some suggestions.

The problems I had teaching Stein put in sharp relief the great pleasure I have had teaching an entirely new poet for me this quarter: the medieval Sufi poet Ibn 'Arabi, in the marvellous translations of Michael Sells. Stations of Desire, the book is called; between its introduction, and a couple of Sells's shorter pieces on apophatic (negative) theology in Sufi thought, I had just enough in my head to go into class and tell the kids we were going to try to figure out a few of these poems, working collectively, and see what we could learn there. My goodness it was fun! The way these poems flicker between human and sacred love--the ways they layer these, compellingly, bringing all of the emotional variety of the former to play in their version of the latter--just a joy. I'm blogging from work, and my copy is at home, but I'll post a sample soon.

As long as we're ending on a happy note, let me give a quick mention to a writers' workshop that sounds wonderful to me--the kind of thing I don't get to go to myself, but love to spread the word about to others. It's called the "Spoleto Writers' Workshop," and as the name suggests, it's in Spoleto, a hilltown in Umbria, Italy. From the people I know who have gone, it's an intimate sort of workshop: you produce new work every day, experiment with a variety of genres (though the poets work closely on poetry, mostly), and generally have a wonderful experience. It's been going on about a dozen years, so they must be doing something right! Anyway, this summer's faculty are the novelist and poet Rosellen Brown, poet Dorianne Laux (who wrote one of my favorite poems, "The Thief," and novelist and playwright James Magnuson. It runs from July 19-August 2; you can find details here.

Opportunity for Poetry Teachers!

This forwarded to me this morning:

ANNOUNCING THE FAVORITE POEM PROJECT SUMMER POETRY INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATORS

The Favorite Poem Project, in cooperation with the Boston University
School of Education, is accepting applications for the fifth annual
Poetry Institute for Educators at Boston University, July 17-21, 2006.

We invite teachers and teacher/administrator teams across grade
levels--elementary, middle and high school--to apply. The Institute
seeks a range of participants: new and experienced teachers, those who
enjoy teaching poetry and those who've shied away from it.


A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY

The Institute offers participating teachers a remarkable week-long
opportunity: to study and discuss poetry with renowned practitioners of
the art, five award-winning American poets. Past faculty has included
poets Mark Doty, David Ferry, Louise Glück, Gail Mazur, Heather McHugh
and Rosanna Warren. Each faculty member meets with teachers to look
closely at excellent poems in a seminar/discussion setting. Each day of
the Institute wraps up with a poetry reading given by faculty.

In addition, participating teachers work in groups throughout the week
with leaders from Boston University's School of Education. Based on the
Institute seminars, and incorporating their own skills and ideas, the
teacher-groups develop innovative and energizing lesson plans with the
aim of invigorating the teaching of poetry in their schools and
classrooms. The Institute encourages dialogue among teachers about past
successes, difficulties and insights they've had in bringing poetry to
students in their various communities, seeking to build on
participating teachers' experiences.

At the end of the week, teachers present lesson plans they've created,
and take part in a "Favorite Poem" reading event, sharing a favorite
poem along with a brief reflection. We encourage participating
educators to organize similar Favorite Poem reading events in their
classrooms, schools or broader communities during the academic year.


APPLICATION INFORMATION

For an application contact Professor Lee Indrisano at Boston University
School of Education, Two Sherborn Street, Boston, MA 02215 or e-mail
leeindri@bu.edu. The postmark deadline for applications is May 30, 2006.

Housing is available. For more information, click the link below.

http://www.bu.edu/education/poetryinstitute/index.html

Good luck to all who apply!

EMS

Dear Eric...

A fun bit of brainstorming this morning.

Hi Eric,

It's April and I've been teaching my students poetry since January. They're tired and I'm tired. I would like to assign them a creative project that enables them to combine their knowledge of Petrarch, Donne, Rich, Gluck and Lorca. I'd like it to have a visual and a written counterpart. Any suggestions?

Hmm...says I. What about:

• A set of love letters or other courtship materials. A lot of possible couples here, all of them nicely complicated and more or less impossible: Petrarch and Rich, Petrarch and Gluck, Donne and Rich, Donne and Gluck, Rich and Gluck, Lorca and either of the guys, Lorca and either of the women. Think of the passions and difficulties, the debates they could have!
• Or a poetry comix assignment: turn some set of poems into a "graphic novel." Or they could find an existing graphic novel or comic and do a "detournement" of it: erase the previous text and ink in lines from the poems.
• Some sort of collage assignment, along similar lines?
• What about a rewriting assignment? Donne in the style of Rich. Gluck in the style of Lorca?
• Petrarch, Donne, Rich, Gluck, and Lorca form a band. They make some albums, then break up. Make a fan website for the band that tells their story, complete with music, lyrics, gossip, pictures, solo projects, etc. Students with video capability could shoot a documentary history, in manner of This Is Spinal Tap, or shoot some videos of their poems (or "songs") in manner of the United States of Poetry series (http://www.worldofpoetry.org/usop/).
• Or how about this? Petrarch, Donne, Rich, Gluck, and Lorca are advice columnists, in manner of Dan Savage or Dear Abby. Students write letters to them and their responses. Or they write to one another for advice?

I think the band one is my favorite. They're a sort of love poetry supergroup, like Blind Faith, after all. So: who plays what? Lorca on guitar, natch. Gluck on bass, with Entwistle cool? Or maybe they're a Fleetwood Mac arrangement, with Rich as Stevie Nicks (tee-hee!).

In any case, a fun way to spend the morning--

Notes Between Grades

Grading The Stack: still another 30-something papers, etc., to read.

Nothing galls me so much as a bad student essay. It seems so ungrateful: "After all the work I did, this is what you give me?" Nothing pleases me so much as an effortless "A."

***

Donne brings out the best in my students. I hope this isn't simply becaused they've studied him elsewhere, before. The paper I'm reading now, on "The Flea," does better work with prosody than any essay I've seen all quarter, and I'm irrationally thrilled: Someone gets it! Or maybe it's more the thrill of finding someone I can talk to about such matters, maybe in a future seminar.

The women, especially, get him--they love how he responds to a silent female interlocutor, turn by turn--indeed, they've taught me to emphasize that element in his poems. I love to acknowledge such debts, and wish I heard them more often from colleagues.

***

"Great work on rhythm here!" How rare is that, even among the professoriat? Yet this same student lards the word "somewhat" into every page: "the diction and the rhythm of this section are somewhat of a synthesis of the two previous stanzas." How can a student with an ear for Donne's rhythms care so little about his own prose?

***

Procrastinated just now by surfing to some favorite blogs & following their leads. Emily Lloyd links to an interesting manifesto, of sorts, by an Asian American poet I hadn't read before: Cathy Park Hong. Mark led me somehow to Bemsha Swing--I think I just followed his link--and I spent some happy time reading posts on Kenneth Koch (an old favorite) and the goals of criticism... Then noticed that SSW isn't on his list of links. Sniff! Not that I link to many blogs here, and not that I actually want to join many blog-to-blog conversations. Too damned busy. Oh, right, with grading. Back to The Stack.

***

Hey, this one actually uses "his manhood" as a euphemism! I love it--my romance reading (circa 1972) and my poetry teaching suddenly coincide. The poem, by the way, says "his flesh" and "this sweet root," but not the M-word.

Even this paper, though, makes some fine moves with sound. And looks up a verb ("echo") to find its etymology, & weaves the myth back into the poem. Well done!

Mixed papers are hard to grade. I just want them to be revised, endlessly revised, until they are perfect, so that my job will be easier.

***

I usually let students work on only one paper over the course of a quarter in "Reading Poetry." They have to revise it multiple times, so that by the end of the quarter, they've all had the experience of writing one absolutely solid explication, and can therefore do it again. Why on earth did I not do that this time?

***
Lunch. Early. Yes.

Lessons and Boojums

Kudos to Josh, not only for "letting the snark subside," but for using the noun form of my new favorite word so effectively. (Gives a whole new meaning to "The Hunting of the Snark," doesn't it?) Some interesting thoughts from him in response to my last post about what is to be done.

If poetry were on the curriculum and if it were taught unsadistically (for how else can you describe the usual process by which poems are vivisected in search of "meaning," and by which students are made to feel that reading poetry is an unpleasant test to be circumvened whenever possible?), its audience would expand tremendously. (Though I'm still skeptical as to whether a mass audience could be so generated, at least not for the kind of social formalism I'm most engaged by.)

I agree: "social formalism" will always be a minority taste. That's alright: so are classical music, jazz, and seriously peaty Scotch. (I'm making my way through a very mellow bottle of The Dalmore Cigar Malt these days.) On the other hand, the more you build an audience for all sorts of poetry, the larger the total number of readers in that minority will be.

A follow-up question for you, though, Josh: is close reading necessarily sadistic? Or just the way it's usually done? How did you--would you--do it differently in your own classes? (A good question to have contemplated before those MLA interviews!)

The trouble with this conclusion is that its left me feeling like there's little that I can contribute toward solving the problem, since I doubt I have the temperament for teaching younger students.

Ah, but you'll be teaching their teachers as undergraduates--or you may, if the job market gives you the chance. Never discount the ripple effect of good undergraduate teaching!

Perhaps we really do need a new Brooks & Warren devoted to contemporary small press work (sometimes I think Steve Burt is embarked upon such a project, albeit in piecemeal fashion: consider his Believer essay, "Close Calls With Nonsense," which carries the subtitle "How to Read, and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry").

I'm getting mighty perky about this idea, folks. Anyone out there know Steve Burt? He and I should talk. Better yet, he and I and all the other folks who feel this need. I sense a book proposal coming on.

It's a tricky negotiation: the teacher and the poet don't necessarily share many concerns.

Agreed! In fact, we may often be antagonists. That's one of many reasons that I'm more comfortable with poems than with poets.

The teacher's investment is necessarily in his or her students—in readers—and in ushering them into a safe space for trial and error, with the ultimate goal of empowering them to fly on their own critical wings.

Well, often the teacher's investment is in preparing his or her students to succeed in other academic environments: in the confines of a standardized test, for example (AP, IB, ACT, SAT, GRE); or in the context of an upper-division course for which your "Intro to Poetry" is a prerequisite. Never underestimate these sorts of contextual forces.

As I have often said, I'd like to see the gap between poets and readers erased,

Really? Why? I mean, in practice I'd like to see the gap between musicians and listeners blurred--hence my fumblings at the oud--and I've spent much of my adult life closing the gap between diner and cook chez moi, but readers of poetry are so rare, so precious to me, that I'd hate to put another roadblock in their way by making them writers, too!

and I believe that poetry—particularly poetry that demands some degree of labor—has a vital role in fostering negative capability, which is the dialectic's next-door neighbor and as such the possible key to a mode of enlightenment that also has room for mysteries and doubts.

You just lost me, Josh. I can handle NC, Dialectic, and Enlightenment in separate sentences, and maybe handle two at a time, but all three at once? (Oops! Snark alert.) OK, let's put it this way: I think "enlightenment" is too lofty a goal, with or without the mysteries and doubts. What would be a lower-proof way of describing what you have in mind? Is there any way to reconcile it--probably not, I fear--with the curricular demands of academia, at any level, or is it by rights and by necessity an out-of-school, even anti-scholastic project? That may not be a bad thing, by the way. Lord knows it's a "hook"!

I think a teacher could contribute by helping students to read the way writers do, with an eye toward the emotional and intellectual effects of particular techniques.

Let's hear more about this, Josh! What would a lesson or exercise based on this investigation look like? How would it be different from the sadistic inquiries you mentioned earlier?

Which probably also necessarily means encouraging students to write their own poems—not that young people really need such encouragement.

OK: so an assignment with a "creative writing" component. Keep talking--I'm listening--and so are the teachers who read this--

Maybe I've got it backwards: we all start as writers, but only a few of us become readers.

Peter Kahn, a master teacher here in the Chicago area, premises his Spoken Word Poetry Club on this insight, with great success. Students start by writing, and they become readers so that they can steal moves from the best. It seems to work.

I know that reading for me was essential to imagining a community of thought and fellowship to which I might belong. Reading is a product of loneliness, but you have to feel lonely first. There are maybe too many distractions, too many alternative simulacra of fellowship, to foster that kind of passionate reading today.

Hey! Leave thoughts like this to the middle-aged, Josh. They may be true, but if you're thinking them already, what's left to look forward to in your 40s? (Heh, heh... If you only knew.) I'd rather have you, and your blog's readers, continue the practical brainstorming work of the rest of this post. Something very good may come of it.

Josh Fit de Battle of Jericho; or, What Is To Be Done?

This arrived during dinner, from Josh--again, with responses from me.

All right, since you've led the conversation back to your own backyard, I'll follow you there. What I don't understand is your contention—one you've made before—that poets are to blame if they don't have many readers, and that apparently there's a larger readership available if one is willing to write to the tastes of undergraduates and teens (that's the audience you single out).

Well, let's see. I would say that some poets don't have many readers because of the sorts of poems they write, but that the reason most poets don't have many readers is because of the ways that poetry gets taught in this country--or not taught, as the case may be--from grade school onward. If poetry were taught, for example, as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets, just as French students and Italian students learn Baudelaire or Petrarch early on, there would probably end up a wider audience for poetry. I also tend to agree with (gasp) Dana Gioia that an emphasis on performance, rather than explication, would help. I can think of many poems whose primary appeal to me does not lie in "figuring them out" but rather in "giving them voice," although in practice the latter always involves more of the former than one realizes, at least consciously.

My first response to that is, isn't 99.9 percent of our pop culture already devoted to the whims of teens and twentysomethings? But more to the point: if I wanted to reach a mass audience, I wouldn't write poems! Poetry, at least the kind I care about, demands qualities of attention that I doubt the mass of people will ever be willing to bring to reading, at least reading for entertainment's sake.

Hence my argument that, as you put it, sometimes "poets are to blame if they don't have many readers." No? If you don't write for a mass audience, you can't really complain about not having one. Fit audience though few seems to be what you're after, honestly speaking. Although I must warn you: Jacqueline Osherow, one of my favorite contemporary poets, is as sneakily "accessible" as Robert Frost was. I've taught her successfully to teens, twenty-somethings, aging Baby Boomers, and my own 97 year old grandmother. She doesn't have the readers that she deserves, but she's by no means to blame.

It makes more sense to me to do the kind of critical, editorial, and scholarly work that will direct the pool of readers already extant to the kinds of poems I care about—Johnson's poems, for instance.

Well, yes and no. I teach RJ's poems to undergraduates, graduates, and the teachers in my NEH seminars, some of whom go on to teach them to their high school students. (A 10th-grade classroom in rural Appalachia spent a few sessions on Beam 10 of ARK thanks to me--and their teacher--this fall.) When I found out about an upcoming NEH seminar on Milton, I contacted the professor leading it to find out if he knew about Radi Os. The pool of readers for every kind of poetry grows when poetry is taught well; in fact, current research by the Poetry Foundation suggests, apparently, that good K-12 teaching is the single biggest variable in adult attention to poetry. So I try to teach well, and teach others to teach well--but I find that this sort of work only rarely involves the kinds of writing or thinking that go on in scholarly journals, and I know that my teachers are desperate to know where they can find out about how to read and teach contemporary poetry.

One sort of "critical, editorial, and scholarly work" that is desperately needed, then, is work that brings a wider variety of poems and a wider variety of reading skills and strategies to those K-12 classrooms, via their teachers and via the educational establishment. This can happen by educating teachers, as I've been doing; it could also use a big push chez the AP, both in terms of the AP courses and (of course) in terms of the AP tests. If anyone knows how I can do this, or how anyone else can, please let me know!

Getting good essays published on the poets you love is also desperately important. But what essays, and where, and on whom? This I don't really know. Maybe you, as a current graduate student, have a better idea. My hunch is that the essays have to make some impact on one's own job prospects, and on those of the folks who read them, in order to have any real impact, but even then, who knows? Marjorie Perloff writes about Susan Howe for APR, and suddenly we're all talking about her, in part because the essay was a great piece of advocacy. Ditto for Perloff on Niedecker, I think in the same venue. Pieces that bring together poets across scholastic boundaries can make a difference, like Kathrine Varnes's wonderful talk on Julia Alvarez, Kathleen Fraser, and Anne Sexton at the Narrative and Formalist Poetries conference a decade ago. (That got me reading Alvarez's "33," and then teaching it, and then teaching it to teachers, none of which I would have done if it weren't for the fresh perspective KV brought, and her general fabulousness.) It would be nice to find a concerted effort underway, by all of us, to make lesson plans and other good classroom material about the poets we love available to each other, and to teachers: I know the MAPS site is a good start in this direction, and Al Filreis's English 88 materials, but more could certainly be done.

The only ready path I can see toward actually growing the readership for poetry is through my work as a teacher. And as a good teacher you've no doubt listened well to what it is your students like. But I also imagine that, as a good teacher, you've worked hard to stretch that liking, and introduce students to work outside their comfort zone, and perhaps even made a few converts to the work of Johnson and others whose complex linguistic textures could never be confused with the poetry of personal authenticity that I associate with slams.

True on all counts, Josh.

For the moment I'm mostly concerned with imagining ways in which me and my fellow poets might come together to make stuff happen, and perhaps to grow attention for the small press work that challenges and refreshes me the most. Ways we might support each other. New paths for the energy that too often expresses itself as bile, injured narcissism, and snark. Though I'll take even that kind of energy over slackness and gentility any day.

So what are some things you could do? Off the top of my head, I'd say that there is precious little material out there that teaches outsiders how to read that sort of small press work for (and with) pleasure. Most "introduction to poetry" training won't do the trick; the reading strategies I deploy on a Robert Hayden poem don't get me far with one of Arielle Greenberg's, say. We could use a LOT of articles in College English and in journals aimed at teachers about how and why to read and teach the work that you love; we need essays and textbooks and lessons that guide potential readers toward such work as steadily and brilliantly as Brooks and Warren guided theirs to Donne and Eliot, with as little specialized and theoretical terminology in them as possible. (This is a rhetorical strategy, not a moral judgment.)

What else? We need teacher training seminars like mine, but bigger and more frequent and more local; we need contact with Education departments and Teaching Literature courses they offer; as I said above, we need to infiltrate the conventions and planning discussions of the AP and SAT and other standardized-test institutions, because teachers do teach to those tests, and any reading strategies and textual suggestions that don't help students perform better will probably have a short shelf-life.

You'll note that I've wandered far from the world of small press publication, ad hoc magazines, and even scholarly journals. I don't know any of those worlds well enough to know what would make a difference for poetry in any of them: if publishing chunks of your own dissertation, for example, will help any of the poets you write about in any significant or lasting way. (Not an insult: I just don't know. Did it help RJ that I wrote about him in Contemporary Literature and Postmodern Culture and the Dictionary of Literary Biography? It probably didn't hurt, but I suspect that it did more for my career, alas, than for his.)

So: a snark-free response, Josh. What do you think?

Jousting with Josh

I posted some comments over at Josh's blog: more sympathetic than my notes over here, or so they were meant to be, anyway.

"Josh," says I,

I don't think you've entirely clarified (to yourself or to me) the range of desires you're trying to articulate.

Some are practical: health insurance, more opportunities to publish, more attention from potential readers.

Some are social: the "association to mutual creative benefit" you speak of here; the encouragement; the honest opinions, etc.

Others here I find harder to name, maybe because they're incohate or maybe just because I'm not a poet, and so don't know what you're up against or going through. This desire for "dignity" for example...or for the "capacity for giving" to be enlarged. Or for "life." What are the losses, the frustrations, the lacks that these are meant to assuage? To what extent are they shared, unnecessary, and political, and how much are they really much more local, more idiosyncratic, more about you, age X in situation Y?

Here was his reply, with comments by me inter alia:

Eric, both you in your snarky post (is "snarky" a more fun way of saying "cynical"?

Yes! Ain't it grand? I learned it from the ladies in romance--check out, for example, the snarkalicious comments on trashy cover art at the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog.

...you and Aaron Tieger in his post worry that I've forgotten about readers. But if you wanted to quote Thoreau the way Mark did, surely you don't mean to suggest that we all should start writing poems that folks wanna read? You know, poems that rhyme and stuff?

Who's snarky now? I mean, really, Josh. This reminds me of a horrible exchange I had once with a famous & tenured avant-garde poet who saw no difference between reading Yeats and watching the Late Show. Contempt for the audience much? Ah, well--a dozen years of teaching undergraduates and judging teen poetry slams will give you some idea of the poems that folks want to read, even if it doesn't give you any more respect for their taste.

I rather take that quote as meant to nudge its reader out of the selfish circle of his concerns: it's akin to what some people have said about how we should worry about health care for everyone and not just poets.

No, I think the Thoreau quote--in my hands, since I can't speak for Mark--was meant to nudge you into remembering that you're hardly the first writer to feel put upon because your efforts, your gifts, heck your life's work are not a commodity that many people want to buy, and that just because you show up with them, you can't expect them to do their part and attend.

But that attitude strikes me as quietistic. As if you'll be able to have any impact on global warming if you don't start taking better care of your own neighborhood first.

Straw man, this. I think in general the political analogies are misplaced here, Josh. What you're really after is some sort of renaissance in--or first birth of--a Civil Society of Poetry. Politics is not the cure for this literary bowling alone.

Yeah, my desires are inchoate. It's a POETS' union, damnit. Its primary function might very well be the fuller articulation of its members' desires, which is the first step toward pursuing them.

Hmmm... don't know what you want, but you know how to get it, eh?

Surely, Eric, you don't blame poets and poets alone for the dearth of readers out there? You're a Ronald Johnson fan, aren't you? You think his work is beautiful, offering many pleasures? Why then is he so obscure? Would writing diffferent kinds of poems have solved that problem? Easier poems? Do they get any easier than his concrete work?

Whew! That hits close to home. Let me put this as plainly as I can, Josh: RJ is obscure because I'm not Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler, or Harold Bloom. If I were--heck, if I hadn't taken five years off the conference and publication circuit, for the sake of my marriage and my kids, but been out there preaching the good word--RJ studies would be in a very different place right now. By all means, though--Mark, Josh, everyone--let's have this discussion. What would have made, or would now make, the difference?

What I'm saying is: if you want to address the dearth of readers, address the dearth of readers. I don't think that anything you've said so far about the Poets Union (PU--maybe not the best acronym?) does anything to address it either.

OK: off the soapbox. I have kids to feed.

Mark vs. Josh, and Some Snarky Bits from Me

Over at his Culture Industry blog, Mark takes issue with Josh Corey's musings about a poetry union and a poets' strike. Damn his eyes, he beats me to posting Thoreau's little fable about the Indian basket weaver in response. I'm surprised he's so nice about it, though. Many of the comments on Josh's site take a harder, more cynical line.

Not to be a cynic myself, but I'd actually welcome a strike by contemporary poets. Go for it, everyone! Give me a year or two, or a decade, to catch up on what's out there already. It's not as though I'm in danger of running out of poetry to read. Besides, what's to stop me from outsourcing poetic production to Ireland, India, and elsewhere? (Paging Frank O'Hara: what are the poets in Ghana up to these days?)

In a revealing textual echo, Josh writes:

I have a fantasy of the stable of "name" poets at, say, Knopf or FSG banding together and demanding a more open review and publication policy. But is that just more feudalism? Noblesse oblige?

Poets manufacture poetry. Critics, editors, and academics manufacture attention. Which is the scarcer commodity?

Attention must be paid for.

Yes, folks, Josh is feeling a bit like Linda Loman these days: Attention must be paid!

God forbid, of course, that anyone should try to get readers to pay attention to poetry--say, by promoting it, trying to spur demand, maybe through...gee, I dunno...maybe a National Poetry Month. That would be crass, commercialistic, and probably encourage the wrong sort of people to read the wrong sort of poetry anyway.

I have plenty of sympathy for anyone stuck for paid work and healthcare in this ridiculous economy, but the particular plight of poets? Not so much.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to turn my attention back to one more poet who certainly rewards it (Norman Finkelstein) and then to a couple of books from the most despised genre in America, romance fiction. A genre which, by the way, has virtually no critics or academics manufacturing attention for it. Just good marketing, responsive editors, writers who aim to please, and readers, Josh. Remember them? Lots and lots of readers.

Poetry Novels

Ever since starting my latest Parnassus piece on novels about poets--I'll always think of it as "Buffy the Poetry Slayer," even though I've had to change the title since--I've kept an eye out for such books. In addition to the ones I write about in the piece, I've come across two that look intriguing, although I haven't had the chance to read either of them yet.

The first is Passion: a Novel of the Romantic Poets, by one Jude Morgan. I picked this up a few weeks ago, started it, and had to stop when the deadline pressure got too hot. The first few chapters read very well, though, and took a promising approach to the times and the topic: namely, they start a generation back and a gender away from Byron, Keats, Shelley, et. al., with a focus on the women who will enter the poets' lives: Mary Shelley, Fanny Brawne, Lady Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, etc. I've actually spent very little time with the British Romantics over the years--maybe this novel will be a good hook to reel me in. I'll keep you posted.

The "Book of the Day" this morning, over at Nextbook, is a Canadian novel by A. M. Klein: a name I don't know, although he was apparently a significant poet up there in the Great White North. Anyone out there ever read him, or her? (Note to self: one of my heteronyms in coming years should be E. M. Selinger, maybe, to provoke similar musings in others.) Anyway, the novel in question is:

A.M. Klein
The Second Scroll
New Canadian Library, $6.95

In the year following Israel's founding, a Montreal publisher asks a young local poet to travel through the fledgling country and return with "a volume of translations of the poems and songs of Israel's latest nest of singing birds." The poet, a stand-in for Klein, has a different journey in mind: He wants to find his Uncle Melech, who survived the Holocaust and is now presumed to be in the Holy Land.

Reminiscent of Nabokov and Joyce, this lyrical novel begins with five chapters that correspond with (and are named for) the five books of the Torah. The five sections that follow, meanwhile, take the form of scholarly glosses on the first five. Through his unusual structure and the precision of his language, Klein somehow manages to chronicle history's violent episodes while continually hitting notes of hope.

Sounds interesting enough, and when I get the chance (ha-ha) I may pick it up, although it sounds perhaps more like fodder for my Big Jewish Blog than this one.

Easing Back In

Hi, everyone. I'm back, sort of. Easing back in. I've just starting trolling the blogosphere, catching up on the last two months of posts chez Mark and Josh and Emily and Robert and so on. A lot to read; a lot to think about; lots of cool pictures from conferences that I didn't go to.

What have I been up to instead? Well, let's see--other than banging out that piece on novels about poets (dichtersromane) and novels about poetry (dichtungskriticsromane), and writing my latest NEH grant proposal (keep your fingers crossed!), winning a wonderful grant to write about my favorite fiction from the RWA, and generally keeping up with my life, I've been working on...

Drumroll, please...

LESSON PLANS!

Yes, folks, lesson plans for high school teachers, bringing the good word to those who need it most. So far the kind folks at the Poetry Foundation have gone with four of them, which I'm proud to say are available to all of you here.

Maybe I should have given a paper somewhere--and Lord knows, I miss schmoozing and boozing with all of you conference buddies. But you know, in the big scheme of things, I think these suckers will do more for the world of poetry than one more talk by little old me.

Besides, I'm hitting the road myself next month. Going to the Popular Culture Association's national conference to talk about Emma Holly's Hunting Midnight, my favorite paranormal erotic romance, on the "Sex and Romance" panel of the "Eros and Pornography" division. Now that should be a conference! (And on Holy Thursday, no less.)

So--check out the lesson plans, let me know what you think, and let me know what other sorts of resources for teachers I should get busy writing. And if you're curious about the philosophical and aesthetic issues at stake in scenes of hot and heavy shapeshifting upyr-on-human sex, I know the guy to ask.

This from Emily

I'm not back enough to post much myself. Finished grinding out a draft of my piece on novels about poets, which won't be called "Buffy the Poetry Slayer" much longer, alas, although coming up with that title did the trick. Anyway, now I'm grading and grinding out more prose, in the form of an NEH seminar application. Busy, busy, busy.

I found this over at Poesy Galore, though, and thought I'd pass it along.

When people say, or shamble up to stammer, that they don't usually feel like they "get" poetry, that they never knew poetry could speak to them, that it always seemed like writers were trying to conceal the poem's "real meaning," they are not talking about their encounters with the works of Gertrude Stein or Bruce Andrews. They are talking about their high school or college encounters with Keats. No matter HOW many contemporary poets write accessible poems--let's say we ALL do--we will still need to penetrate the Poetry-B-Gon shields people put up after encountering Keats (et al) in school, likely introduced by a teacher who's squeamish around Keats, too...at least until these shields are bred out of humankind over many generations. How will this happen, if it ever happens? I think a good bit of it is up to high school English teachers. Many (most?) kids love poetry, from rhyming picture books to Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, before they hit middle or high school. Whether or not they've ever seen a boa constrictor, "I'm Being Eaten by a Boa Constrictor" feels relevant to their lives in a way that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" does not. I'm not saying the "classics" should not be taught in high school--I'm saying that the classics one chooses, especially to kick off a poetry unit, should be very carefully picked with an audience of teenagers in mind. Meaning: scrap Poe's "The Bells" and teach "Alone"; do Crane's "[In the desert]" instead of or before "War is Kind"; do "I'm Nobody" and "I Like a Look of Agony" and maybe even "Wild Nights!" before "Hope is the Thing with Feathers." Actually--never do "Hope is the Thing with Feathers." High school may be too early to introduce "The Red Wheel Barrow"--because, while accessible at the language level, it might not be accessible at any other to most in that age group. Do Blake's "The Garden of Love," Browning's "Porphyria's Lover." Suck it up and do "Richard Cory" but NOT "Mr. Flood's Party." And if you're going to do Keats, for godsakes step away from the urn...

What do you think?

Brief Hiatus

I hate to do this, after just getting back on a roll here, but I need to focus all my writing energies on a couple of essays over the next two weeks. Look for me at the end of January, folks!

Vendler on Patterns and Shapes

In Chapter 2, "The Poem as Arranged Life," Vendler's textbook gets interesting. No other introduction to poetry I know of has a chapter like this; the tools she offers have revolutionized my own students' reading of poetry, and my own.

I won't say that the chapter reads quickly, or feels revolutionary. Vendler doesn't pull out the rhetorical stops the way, say, Edward Hirsch does in How to Read a Poem...and Fall in Love with Poetry. Instead, in a series of close readings, she shows you how to pay much, much closer attention to any poem than I'd ever known how to pay, and what to do with what you find there.

The chapter begins by talking about "organizational patterns": that is, the various "patterns and shapes" that poems display which organize--and thereby act out--its emotional or ideational content. (Did I just say "ideational"? Help! NOT V's word, and it shouldn't be mind, but let it stand.)

Thus, for example, in Blake's "Infant Sorrow," she asks "what is the main verb in each of these two stanzas?" and discovers that the main verb in the first stanza is physical ("leapt") and the main verb in the second is mental ("thought"). One pattern here is therefore a "division into the physical and the mental," she says, and integrates that observation into her existing take on the poem. She looks at the nouns, and finds a "noun-shape"; looks at the adjectives, and finds an "adjective-shape," and so on. What other textbook gets students to attend to the "successively weaker participial line-beginnings" in a poem, I ask you? And yet, how precise, how "objective" (as students beg, periodically), how revealing such inquiry turns out to be!

Vendler lists a few frequently-deployed shapes for students to look for:

1. simple meaning-contrast
2. word-repetition
3. series, whether similar or broken
4. grammatical contrast

As the chapter goes on, she adds to these "division into stanzas," "spatial" and "temporal" divisions [i.e., where and when each successive part of the poem takes place, if we know], "missing elements" (another version of "broken series," I suppose), repetition and interruption, end-stopped vs. enjambed lines, alternations between abstraction and concrete description, even--shades of Louis Zukofsky!--shifts from "a" to "the" or vice versa as the poem goes on. One highlight for me, this time, was her reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 ("Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore..."). In it, she points out the three contrasting models of Time's passage that make up the three quatrains of the sonnet: "three mini-poems, three incompatible models of life" (59). This example turns out to be terribly valuable when I teach poems like Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" or Bishop's "One Art."

Sometimes Vendler will toss out a rule of thumb for students to remember, like "repetition is always the sign of the mind scrutinizing what it has just said and either confirming or changing its phrasing as it judges it" (43), and "when lines 'run over,' we are to infer an ongoing rush of thought or feeling" (56). When I read such rules, I veritably itch to find counter-examples--but that's me, the overpaid and over-read academic. To my students, they're a godsend, and I've been humbled enough over the years to remember that Vendler is several decades better read than I am!

"It is up to the reader to notice patterns," says V (31), since "a pattern shows that the poet has analyzed, and then replicated in language," however unconsciously, "some aspect of the content of the poem." And again, later, "only an examination of form...shows us how the poem enacts--represents by several formal shapes--the moment it has chosen, and makes us see the processes of that moment, how it gradually unfolds..." (37). In short, this chapter gets students thinking about "form and content"--that old couple!--in remarkably fresh and precise ways. A Very Useful chapter, indeed!

More next time on how it went in class. Until then, don't miss Josh Corey's latest post on the contrasting experiences of time that you get reading fiction and poetry, which is also remarkably fresh and precise. Nice stuff, Josh!

Vendler, cont.

The first chapter of Vendler's textbook, "The Poem as Life," offers two useful premises for students reading poetry, if not for the first time, at least as novices. First, poems mostly arise from and represent "well-known and well-worn occasions of life"; and, second, that poets "manage to avoid cliche," in a variety of ways, as their speakers respond to those occasions. The chapter then turns to look at three groups of occasions: those in the private life, those in public life (history, social concerns, and intersections of public and private realms), and the "great intertwined subjects" of nature and time.

She offers a dozen poems in the chapter itself, each with a very brief set of comments--sometimes a paragraph, sometimes simply a sentence--before she moves on. (You can find the full table of contents here.) At first I was quite unimpressed by the chapter, as a result; you have to wait until chapter two to get Vendler showing her close reading stuff. This time through, though, I find myself nodding at her strategy. It's wonderfully relaxing, somehow, to realize that the first few questions she wants you to ask of any poem are so straightforward, so simply posed and answered. As she puts it in the teacher's guide in my edition, the first goal is simply "to show that a single life event produces, in good poems, a series of complex and intelligent responses rather than a single undeviating point of view," and to instill in them the notion that they are meant to become, to take on the subject-position of, the speaker of any given poem. "Many responses are usually present in a poem," and "a poem can't be reduced...to a single 'meaning'": that's what she wants them to come away with.

She suggests, in the teacher's guide, that you start out by reading aloud and then paraphrasing the poem quickly for the students, so that you don't spend the bulk of class time on questions like "what do you think this stanza is saying?" "No time is left to notice imagination or artistic strategies," she warns. Yup. Been there, done that.

One last summary from V:

"I want students to see, above all, how the mood in question has been freshly imagined. Second, I want them to see how this fresh imagination has been enacted structurally. How does the scene open? Where does it continue? How does it end? Third, I want them to see the elements of drama--changes in sentence structure, syntax, linguistic register, imagery, focus, distance, rhythm. Fourth, I want them to see elements of pattern: repeated syntax, figures like anaphora or alliteration, repeated structures (parallelisms, catalogues, rhythms)."

Seems doable, no?

I'll let you know, tomorrow, what actually happened in class.
E

Vendler and Pedagogy

This quarter, I'm back to using Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, Poetry as my Reading Poetry text. My thought for the blog, at least this morning, is to make this the place where I do some of my class planning--notes, etc.--so that anyone out there who teaches poetry can steal from me as I steal from V.

For tomrrow's class, they'll have read her Introduction and Chapter 1 ("The Poem as Life"), this time with all the ancillary poems V suggests. That last is the new twist which I hope will keep this young blade happy as the quarter begins.

Key ideas from the Introduction:

1) "Lyric" poetry is our topic. (They need to know that there are other kinds, including epic and dramatic and various sorts of "I HATE SPEECH" experimental verse.)

2) "Lyric is the genre of private life; it is what we say to ourselves when we are alone. There may be an addressee in lyric (God, or a beloved), but the addressee is always absent. (The dramatic monologue...has a silent addressee on stage, but this is the exception to the rule of the absent addressee." (xlii)

A thought here: what about performance poetry? What about the whole "recitation" enterprise? What new spin does it put on the "absent addressee" convention--or, conversely, how can that convention best inform our performances of poetry, in class or elsewhere?

But I digress...

3. Lyric "lets us into the innermost chamber of another person's mind, and makes us privy to what he or she would say in complete secrecy and safety, with none to overhear" (xlii).

Again, I find myself wondering here... Aren't there lyric poems with a stronger or more anxious rhetorical project: poems of argument, on the one hand, and poems that stay closeted or self-censoring on the other?

4. OK: here's one that rings true for me: "a lyric is meant to be spoken by its reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words. A lyric poem is a script for performance by its reader. It is, then, the most intimate of genres...and it is the most universal of genres, because it presumes that the reader resembles the writer enough to step into the writer's shoes and speak the lines the writer has written as though they were the reader's own" (xlii/iii)

5. "We do not listen to him [the speaker]; we become him." Our job is to make the words our own. Lyric thus offers an "imaginative transformation of self." (xliii)

6. "Every word has to count. So does every gap. In fact, lyric depends on gaps, and depends even more ont he reader to fill in the gaps. It is suggestive rather than exhaustive" (xliii). Poems have gaps and hints, and we need to fill in the first and make the most of the second, "so that the course of [their] emotions can be understood in their full subtlety" (xliii).

Oops--my daughter just came in & asked me to "Read?" How can I refuse? More soon, then.

A Lovely Little Metaphor, a Tiny Detournement

Spotted and put a tiny spin
on this, from Josh's blog:

At the moment I tend to think of the value of a strong poetics/aesthetics as acting like a kind of gravity well, which may itself have all kinds of interesting characteristics (a planet with life on it), or may radiate a powerful and singular energy (a sun), or may be some kind of untranslatable personal mythos of the unconscious (a black hole), or may be something that was once alive but is now dead (a white dwarf).

Purists lob their verbal objects straight int their wells with nary a tremor in their trajectories (or at least such appears to be their goal; I don't think it's actually possible—but they try to correct the flights of their poems through a sort of body english, the profuse production of writings on poetics that can remind me of a bowler trying to turn a gutterball into a strike by twisting and gesturing). Most poets end up with orbits of one kind or another (and an orbit is nothing more than the arc assumed by a body that misses the target it's attracted to); the most interesting of them are slingshotting poems in wide parabolas as they test the limitations of their hard-won poetics. (Poets who can't or won't articulate a poetics are either being sly, which is sometimes necessary, or naive in a way that is bound to make their writing uninteresting in the long run.)

To put it in Lacanian terms, a poetics is like one's Thang, and you derive jouissance (your poem derives energy) based on the distance or orbit that your desire assumes in relation to it. For many of the writers I find most interesting, the politico-aesthetic complex called "Language poetry" is a significant component of their Thang—but none of them are pitching their desires in straight lines at it.

Sorry, Josh--but I couldn't resist. Lacanian terms must never be accepted without a fight. Besides, as Wanda Coleman says in "Beyond Baroque," "it takes a big thang to do a big thang." (And if you don't know Coleman, everyone, she's worth a gander or two.)

Pleasure and Interest, Redux

Lots of charming afterthoughts and clarifications chez Bob these days, on the who'd-have-thought-it-vexing topic of pleasure and disinterest. (Even more this morning, it seems, with still more of those nifty pictures. Hey Bob, how do you get them to stay in the middle of a post? Mine always come out at the top.) Sadly, the question of pleasure seems to be dropping out of the discussion, in favor of topics like "materialism" and "selfhood" and "the Origins of the Enlightenment," which mostly make my wee eyes glaze. Let me see if I can drag the matter of pleasure back into the spotlight.

As you may recall, Bob illustrated his apothegm "Modernity is Disinterest" with a passage from Coleridge. In it, John Milton made the case, against a fellow Puritan, that one might savor the pleasures of a Papist cathedral despite the social and theological errors it houses and embodies. I know this debate first hand, come to think of it, from my college days, when I spent a summer in France and Spain. Every cathedral I visited provoked it, right in my own split-self breast, and I felt it particularly keenly during my visit to the oddly named "Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca." (The name suggests some of the nasty history to be remembered during your visit.) Jacqueline Osherow's wonderful long poem in terza rima, "Views of La Legenda della Vera Croce," takes up just this topic as well, starting in a passage where she learns the proper Italian name for the picture called, in English, "The Torture of Judas":

I thought I heard the torture of the Jew
And was so stunned I played the thing again

(My Italian was, after all, fairly new
And the woman on the tape spoke very quickly
But she did say the torture of the Jew--

In Italian it's ebreo--quite matter-of-factly)
The torture of the Jew who wouldn't reveal
The locatin of the true cross--I got it exactly--

Put in a lot of coins to catch each syllable
(I also heard the English, which said Judas),
All the while not looking at the rope, the well;

Instead, I chose a saintly woman's dress,
And angel's finger pointing to a dream,
A single riveting, incongruous face--

What was I supposed to do? They were sublime.
The Inquisition wasn't exactly news
And, while I did keep my eyes off that one frame,

I wasn't about to give up on those frescoes.
In fact, I saw them again, a short while after
And again soon after--in those heady days,

Trains cost almost nothing and a drifter
Could easily cover quite a bit of Italy,
Though I tended to stay in Tuscany. The light was softer,

And--probably not coincidentally--
It had a higher density than any other place
Of things that could dazzle inexhaustibly.

And I was insatiable, avaricious
For what--even asleep--a person can't see
From a slim back bedroom in a semidetatched house

Like every other house in its vicinity
On a site whose inhabitants had been wiped out
To make room for spillover, like my family,

From the very continent I would have dreamed about
If I'd had even an inkling of the mastery
Of what its subtlest inhabitants had wrought

When they weren't doing away with people like me....

"Modernity is Disinterest" means, in cases like this, something slightly different from a Kantian "disinterested aesthetic response": it means a willingness to admit and indulge in sensory pleasure in the face of ideology, of history, even of compassion. To give, if not the Devil, at least the limbic system its due.

So--does the word "disinterest" now start to wobble? Sensory pleasure is hardly "disinterested"; rather, it speaks the "interests" of our bodies, whether by this I mean a hard-wired, evolutionary predisposition to like sweets and fats and symmetry and certain ratios and proportions, or merely our unconscious or preconscious responses to convention and childhood training. At this level, pleasure means unfreedom, plays me for a sucker, even as it liberates me from whatever mind-forged manacles I have decided or been told to wear.)

OK: enough for now. Time to practice my harmony line on "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," even if I refuse to admit that "we" were in fact in "Satan's power," let alone "gone astray."

Comfort & Joy, y'all--
E

Split Selves and Red Yidn

A nice comment this morning from Bob on my "split self" post:

Hey. Whoa. I didn't want to call disinterestedness or the kind of split we get from it a necessarily bad thing. I suppose I gave the big 'bad' example b/c I thought the 'good' side (setting aside prejudice, acting professionally, etc) was pretty clear. I mean, the kind of split we get from disinterest is amoral in itself. It can lead to good or bad things. And neither I nor Rosen (the anthropologist at Princeton) claim that the different subjectivity in Iraq is better than the split self (I suppose the word "whole" is loaded, but still...).

Maybe Mark and I did pile up on you, Bob, but my sense is that disinterested aesthetic pleasure, like so many other products of the Enlightenment, is in fact under attack these days, if not necessarily by you. Think of Bourdieu, whom you cited, whose work sets out to debunk the notion of disinterested pleasure. To him, such pleasures simply mask the true social pleasure at stake, which is the pleasure of reaffirming one's place in the educated bourgeoisie. Alas, such turns in intellectual history have consequences! My students, for example, have mostly been trained out of their natural-born curiosity; they profess no affection for books that aren't "relatable," which is to say, books in which they can take no interested pleasure. A true loss, and one worth mourning.

On a related matter, an interesting book review this morning in the Forward. There's a new anthology out that must be warming Cary Nelson's red, red heart: Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets, edited by Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub, and translated by Amelia Glaser.
(It's a U of Wisconsin book.) To call these poets "rebels" is lamentable at best. They weren't rebels against the US so much as they were lackeys of Moscow, woodenly hewing to the Party line when their fellow Yiddish leftists--anti-Soviet socialists, and rebels worth the name--were doing their best to draw some fresh progressive water from the rapidly freezing Marxist well. Says the reviewer, Zachary Sholem Berger:

On the occasion of the Hebron pogroms in 1929, which the American Communist paper Di Frayhayt described (following Soviet orders) as a heroic Arab uprising against capitalist Zionism, many of Di Linke did not extract themselves from the Soviet embrace. (Katz's characterization of the "anti-Soviet" response, which condemned the riots, is tortured: "[T]he need to support the Jewish cause in these circumstances was metamorphosing the whole attitude toward Zionism from positive to negative.") Again, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, some of the poets in this anthology still didn't distance themselves from Soviet diktat. Katz wonders, in a faux-naive vein, why anyone would criticize a poet for leaving Di Linke (i.e., the Communists) at a later rather than a earlier point — that is, for admitting later rather than earlier exactly what Soviet ideology entailed. But isn't this just the political decision that defined these Communist poets? And if political affiliations mean anything at all, isn't it because they are at the foundation of actions that we can discuss and (whisper it) even judge after the fact? In avoiding an explicit analysis of the politics of Di Linke, this book tries to de-emphasize what these Communist poets found important about their lives: communism.

Berger makes some nifty comments about the poems themselves, and tosses of a useful reminder or two about political poetry on both left and right: "ven those who make grave political mistakes can achieve the occasional aesthetic success."; "Yiddish poetry also has its geniuses on the right-wing end of the spectrum of political mistakes: The work of Uri Zvi Greenberg is both hateful and virtuosic."

(Is pleasure in virtuosity interested or disinterested?)

A book to know about, especially if you're interested (so to speak) in poetry of the 1930s, but I'm not sure it's high on my Channukah list. For an introduction to Yiddish American poetry, you'd be better served by Jackie Osherow's recent essay here, which I'll blog about over on my Big Jewish Blog this afternoon or tomorrow. See you there!

Split Selves and Other Pleasures

I've been catching up on some other blogs this morning, and over at Bob's Samizdat site I came across a long, very readable, eerily resonant post called "Good Taste, Disinterest, and the Divided Self, with a Peroration Concerning the Doom of Iraqi Democracy." Whatever you may think of Bob's politcs--I find his "peroration" utterly unconvincing, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, but also blessedly irrelevant--this post is worth a quarrel, and a look.

Bob starts with a lovely epigram: "modernity is disinterest," which he expands into a description of the modern ethic of "disinterest and gessellschaft — of setting aside personal interests and convictions in a society of abstract, contractual relations. It makes for a very split self (the part of me with real convictions, and the part of me that performs a social role according to ethics determined by that role alone)." As Bob notes, this is a relatively recent notion of ethics, and one that leaves many folks in this culture, and even more elsewhere, quite uncomfortable. He goes on to quote a Princeton anthropologist, for example, who believes that "in the Arab world the self is never seen as divided. Whereas in the West we imagine ourselves able to take on multiple, even contradictory roles — as when an official gives support to a law with which he personally disagrees — to Arabs this self-segmentation runs contrary to the idea of a person as a unified whole."

(Those of you who have read Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism will note that the intellectual ancestors of Bin Laden, et. al., took deadly aim at this split-self "schizophrenia" of the West, inspired in part by the fascist and other critiques that Western thinkers aimed at their own culture in the 1930s. Muriel Rukeyser hummed a few bars from that tune periodically too. Sure makes you pity all those crazy Iraqis risking their lives to vote today when we Westerners know that democracy can never work in their culture.)

But I digress. Let's get back to pleasure.

Bob traces the roots of this ethic back to "18th century theorizing about (of all things) good taste." Here's the money quote, and quote-within-a-quote, for your perusal:

The idea of the beautiful (and of taste in things beautiful) is deeply tied to the idea of disinterest in the main line of Western aesthetics from the 18th century on through the 20th century, and even in our time, for some die-hards. Here’s my favorite chunk of text for explaining the idea of a disinterested appreciation of beauty. This imaginary dialogue comes from Coleridge’s On the Principles of Genial Criticism, and serves (according to the students in my theory of lit seminar last semester) as a better example of Kant’s ideas than any examples Kant came up with:

"Let us suppose Milton in company with some stern and prejudiced Puritan, contemplating the front of York Cathedral, and at length expressing his admiration for its beauty. We will suppose it too at that time of his life, when his religious opinions most nearly coincided with those of the rigid antiprelatists. P[uritan]: Beauty, I am sure, it is not the beauty of holiness. M[ilton]: True, but yet it is beautiful. P:It delights not me. What is it good for? Is it of any use but to be stared at? M: Perhaps not! But still it is beautiful. P: But call to mind the pride and wanton vanity of those cruel shavelings, that wasted the labor and sbstance of so many thousand poor creatures in the erection of this haughty pile. M: I do. But still it is very beautiful. P: Think how many score places of worship, incomparably better suited both for prayer and preaching, and how many faithful ministers might have been maintained, to the blessing of tens of thousands, to them and their children’s children, with the treasures so lavished on this worthless mass of stone and cement. M: too true! But nevertheless it is very beautiful. P: And it is not merely useless, but it feeds the pride of the prelates, and keeps alive popish and carnal spirit among the people. M: Even so!"

[In short,] matters of taste in the beautiful, in the view of Coleridge’s Milton (who speaks, somewhat anachronistically for a whole 18th and 19th century tradition in aesthetics) are to be judged without reference to our sense of utility or morality.

Now, Bob goes on from this to argue that the self-splitting we do when we make an aesthetic judgment greases the slide toward self-splitting in matters of ethics, so that "we’re ready to treat our own actions that way, too, without reference our own ethics (“business is business,” we tautologically opine, while doing things we wouldn’t countenance if we weren’t enabled in the divorcing of individual ethics from professional ethics)."

I'm deeply, deeply skeptical of this. It seems to suggest that people who make other sorts of aesthetic judgments would act more ethically, or at least more consistently, in their other behavior. Is there any evidence to back that up? Haven't people in every time, every culture, found ways to behave truly horribly, whatever their aesthetic views, when greed or lust or love of power trump their moral codes? In which case, wouldn't the freeing-up of aesthetic judgment be one small step forward--a realization that the aesthetic and the ethical can be separated, so that we can enjoy more art, more music, more literature, without any real compromise in our behavior?

Or, to argue from another angle, isn't the "either / or" proposition here a false dichotomy? Don't we really tend to work through ratios, so that if the level of moral disgust is low enough we accede to beauty. What difference does it really make to the world anymore that Neruda was an unrepentant Stalinist, or that John Cage once hymned the morality of Mao's Cultural Revolution? But when the moral disgust flares higher, or strikes closer to home, we are less able to respond aesthetically. The case of Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" comes to mind: "Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion / And cracking they sides at the notion / ..../ Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day...." Etc.

Now, I can't enjoy any Baraka after that, and if part of me feels good about this anhedonia, another part knows that it's a loss, and neither kids itself that I'm a better man for those painless scruples. I'd be a little happier if I were able to read and enjoy Baraka perversely, precisely in the face of his politics and venom. ("Cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth"? You go, Amiri! Bring it on!) Hasn't happened yet, though.

There's an old poem from the 1980s, "The Museum Shop Catalogue," by John N. Morris, that addresses much of this. I can't find the whole thing anywhere in my files, but here are the stanzas that Helen Vendler quotes near the start of The Music of What Happens. I'll leave off with them:

The past is perfectly darling--
These pretty things that come along with us!
Mary and Siva house without oppugnancy...

Everything here has been imported
Over some frontier. At last
It is all a kind of art entirely.

And really they are just lovely,
Perfectly lovely, these things.
In vain do I deplore...

Mary and Siva
Accompany our lives.
Although a loneliness persists.
They are only beautiful now.

Which is to say, I suppose, that the split, disinterested self who finds art "merely beautiful" may be a sad and second-rate thing, but so is Western style capitalism and democracy. Both let you like things you really shouldn't, which is one of life's great pleasures. And both leave open more options for disinterested enjoyment and for more ethical, less disinterested behavior than any system or self I've heard about so far.

Two cheers for Split Selves! Hip! Hip!

This Just In...

TESTS BLAMED FOR DECLINE OF READING FOR PLEASURE
The (London, U.K.) Independent -- October 5, 2005
by Sarah Cassidy

Children are spending less time reading for pleasure because the relentless focus on tests and targets has squeezed storytelling and joy of reading out of schools, a five-year study by the education watchdog Ofsted has shown.

Many teachers no longer read poems or stories to their class because they feel guilty that they are "wasting valuable teaching time", the report, English 2000-2005, warned.

Instead teachers now regard texts as "a kind of manual" for teaching about "adjectives, metaphors and contrasting short and long sentences", it concluded.

This had already had an impact on children who now regarded reading as a skill needed to pass tests or to get a good job rather than as something they might do for pleasure. The inspectors said it was vital for children to hear stories being read out loud because this was the best way for them to "develop a vocabulary and an understanding of narrative ... which they need ... in order to read with full comprehension".

Teachers also struggled to find the time to keep up with the latest children's fiction and so schools were forced to rely on the same books year after year.

"Teachers often make use of texts without adequately considering their impact upon the pupils," the study warned. "They appear to regard texts primarily as a means of teaching writing: a poem is mined for its use of
adjectives, metaphors and contrasting short and long sentences without attempting to engage pupils' personal response to the ideas and feelings it expresses.

"The text becomes a kind of manual rather than an opportunity for personal response to experience. This can then lead teachers to choose any text, irrespective of quality, instead of choosing the most appropriate texts for different purposes."

Inspectors warned that many schools were failing to promote the importance of reading for pleasure. Individual reading had often been squeezed out of lessons in favour of the group and whole class work, which had been given greater emphasis in the Government's literacy hour.

Most schools expect pupils to keep a record or journal of their reading, but the quality of these is mostly very poor, inspectors found. Pupils did not understand why they were expected to keep a record of the books they read when most teachers did nothing with them.

Teachers themselves told inspectors that "teaching reading has lost its fun" under the government's strategies. Staff were confused about how to meet government targets and prepare children for tests while still teaching an enriching curriculum, inspectors concluded....

Poetry Out Loud

I had lunch yesterday--a lovely "Croque Fromage," with good bleu cheese, as it happens--with the Programs Director of the Poetry Foundation, and got an update on their upcoming "National Recitation Contest," called Poetry Out Loud. The basic premise is pretty simple: high school students compete for cash prizes by memorizing and performing "great poems," chosen from an on-line anthology you can find here or from the smaller, print version that they are distributing; there's also a CD available of poems being read aloud by celebrities and so forth, although I suspect that students who are schooled in slam poetry can do a fine job on their own.

We're in phase 2 of the project--the Beta test? the Theta test?--which means that schools in all 50 state capitals will be encouraged to participate. Next year it goes fully national--but if you're reading this, and not in a capital, take heart: many state Arts Councils seem to be jumping the gun and inviting schools to join in across the state.

Oh, heck: let's just cut & paste a little information, shall we?

Resources: About the Program

Recitation and performance are major new trends in poetry. There has been a recent resurgence of poetry as an oral art form, as seen in the slam poetry movement and the immense popularity of rap music among our youth. Poetry Out Loud builds on that momentum by inviting the dynamic aspects of slam poetry, spoken word, and theater into the English class. The National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation have partnered with the State Arts Agencies to support the expansion of Poetry Out Loud, which encourages the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and performance. This exciting new program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage.

PHASE TWO

In spring 2005 several thousand students participated in successful pilot programs in Washington, DC, and Chicago; this second phase of Poetry Out Loud extends the program to state capitals nationwide. Poetry Out Loud will be launched in high schools across America in the spring of 2006.

CONTEST STRUCTURE AND AWARDS

Poetry Out Loud uses a pyramid structure. Beginning at the classroom level, winners will advance to the school-wide competition, then to the state-capital competition, and ultimately to the National Finals. We expect over 200,000 students to take part in Poetry Out Loud this year.

Each winner at the state level will receive $200 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington to compete for the national championship. The state winner's school will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books. A runner-up in each state will receive $100, with $200 for his or her school library. We will award $50,000 total in scholarships and school stipends at the National Finals for the winners.

PROGRAM MATERIALS AND SCHEDULE

Poetry Out Loud curriculum materials include print and online poetry anthologies, a program guide to help instructors teach recitation and performance, an audio CD featuring distinguished actors and writers, promotional and media guides, and a comprehensive Website. All curriculum materials will also be available for download on the Poetry Out Loud Website, which can be used by schools not involved in the official 2006 contest.

Poetry Out Loud materials will be sent to high schools in December and January, and participating schools will run the program January through March. (The program requires only two or three weeks of class time.) States will hold their competitions in April. Following the state finals, the National Finals will be held in Washington, DC, in May 2006.

I must say, I'm tickled pink by all of this, and not simply because the Chicago winner last year--who one by reciting Stein's "Susie Asado," by the way!--was the student of a former "Say Something Wonderful NEH Seminar" participant. You simply can't read a poem well aloud without getting to know the poem much more intimately--as sound, as structure, as emotional drama--than most of the high school essay assignments I have encountered would require. (Yes, this includes the AP test.) This is also a virtually free program; the only major costs involved would be the cost of getting each winning student to the next round of competition. The poems, the supplementary curricular materials, etc., are all on the house.

If you're reading this, and you teach high school, I'd say this is
worth pursuing. If you know a high school teacher or principal, pass it on.

***
On a related topic, please follow the new link to your left to Andrew Motion's spanking new (I think) "Poetry Archive." It's quite the site, as you might expect from a British Poet Laureate with the full resources of the UK behind him. It aims to be "the world's premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work," and in my initial dip into the page I've heard poems read by Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Raworth, and Rudyard Kipling. (Yes, Kipling.) I'm keen on the way it's organized, with clickable resources for teachers, for students, for children's poetry, and with the ability to browse poems by theme and form, as well as by poet and by title. Evidently Motion will take you on a "guided tour," too, although I haven't accepted that particular offer as yet.

Now, something tells me that there are other audio archives I should know, or have known in the past. If you read this and think of them, send me the URLs, please. There's altogether too much peat a-growing on the links of this old blog.

Back on the Blog

If you read this, say hello.

Not that I've been in Tangiers, but I have been hither and yon these past few weeks. First I graded a stack or three of student papers and exams--gee, that was fun and a half!--the nadir of which must have been the essay which thought that Yeats' "When You Are Old and Grey and Full of Sleep" was about a prostitute. (The "fire" she's nodding by in stanza one is, my student hazarded, the fire of hell, which waits to punish her for the sexual promiscuity she displayed by letting so many men love her "moments of glad grace," nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Let's just say that when this lady would bend down "beside the glowing bars," all the drinkers at those bars got quite a show!) I've never actually wanted to advise a student to go out and get laid, then, damnit! before revising a paper, and I'm sure I never would, but this time, I came mighty close.

(By the way, Mark, if you need more evidence that an interpretation of a poem can be wrong, but wrong, I might just be able to snatch a copy of this one from the stack before my student picks it up. If she does. Which she probably, blessedly won't.)

I then hit the road to visit my brother and his family for Thanksgiving, down in Hudson, OH. While there, I worked some email mojo to get myself onto a conference panel for the first time in about five years. I left the circuit deliberately as soon as I got tenure. It was hard on my wife and kids for me to be gone, and other than the chance to hang out with friends, I saw no point to going. (Would it advance my career? Not really--I had nowhere I wanted to go! Would it introduce me to new ideas? Perhaps, but less efficiently than reading an essay or two.) Now that I have a new field to map and plough, though--Romance Fiction, hurrah!--I need to get out and hear what the discourse really sounds like, viva voce, to meet the relevant scholars (and, better, the irrelevant ones?), and generally to figure out my place in this new critical landscape. So off I go, this April, to the Popular Culture Association's national convention in Atlanta, to give a talk on Emma Holly at one of their "Eros and Pornography" panels. Yum.

Once I got home, I stuck with the Romance gig for another week or so. You see, the RWA (Romance Writers of America) sponsor a $5000 grant competition to foster the serious academic study of genre romance, and I decided months ago to apply. Keep your fingers crossed for me, everyone: I'd say that Teach Me Tonight (my proposed book on romance) sounds as fun to me to write as any of the poetry projects I've been kicking around for the past few years, and no less interesting, too.

In fact, reading romance novels "one by one," as I described it in my proposal, feels to me an awful lot like reading poems--or, at least, I find myself thinking about the two genres in more similar ways than I'd have expected before this project began. Thus, for example, as I read Eloisa James's latest, Kiss Me, Annabel, I found myself opining to the Missus that this novel's aesthetic was utterly different from that of, say, Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie. The Crusie aspires to what Helen Vendler calls "complete centripetal coherence"; every episode, every nonce touch (the nicknames, the snowglobes, the chicken marsala) has a complex but mappable connection with something else in the book, so that the whole has a kind of clarity and elegance of design that I quite enjoy. The James, by contrast, is proliferative, almost Rococco, in structure; it leaves loose threads a-dangling all over the weave, not least because it's part of an ongoing series of novels about a set of sisters, rather than a stand-alone text. If I knew more about soap operas, or at least the critical discourse around soap operas, I might be able to draw some connections; for now, I'd say that the Crusie feels like a single lyric, polished and ready for New Critical attention, whereas the James feels more like one sonnet drawn from a messy, maddening sequence, like the Rime Sparse, or maybe (l'havdil) like a single Canto?

Once I finished the RWA grant ap, I got busy with my stack of novels about poets--more on which later, I promise--and with a couple of very interesting poetry-related social engagements. More on both after some coffee and a big plate of salami & eggs, I think.