Thanks

A scatter of very sweet emails and comments have me rethinking the shut-down. If I can think of ways to make this sucker sing, I'll bring it back. Suggestions on the ways are certainly welcome, although I suspect they have more to do with everything going on in my non-virtual life (classes, commitments, etc.) than with varieties of blogging experience.

In any case, I'm touched. And grateful.

E

Shutting Down

Well, folks, it's time to make this official.

As of today, I'm shutting down this blog.

The keeping-up-with-friends that I did on this blog I do now via Facebook and Twitter. The thinking out loud that I did here? *Sigh* Well, I hope it was of use to somebody, but given my promotion debacle this year, I think we can all say that it didn't serve me very well, and it's sure not going to help me in the future.

If you think that's galling, imagine how I feel about my NEH seminar work. My college made it clear: teaching an NEH seminar for K-12 teachers is less valuable than writing a peer-reviewed journal article, even if the former changes lives and the latter usually drops without a ripple into the MLA / JSTOR / MUSE vortex.

I could cry, folks, but what's the point? The Powers That Be have spoken.

I'll still be on line; you can find me at Teach Me Tonight and Romancing the Blog and maybe my old Big Jewish Blog too. But my heart's just not in this blog anymore, and with this school year coming to a close, it just seems time to stop and take stock of what's worth going on with, at least in professional terms.

Maybe this summer will set me right. Maybe working with teachers again, or going to Brisbane, will make me want to take up blogging about poetry and teaching again. For now, though, I'm just sad, and tired, and done.

Thanks for reading!
--E

Myself and Strangers?

Gertrude Stein says somewhere that she writes "for myself and strangers."

I need something more than that, I think.

Writing simply for myself--an essay, for example, written solely to advance my career--feels a bit unsatisfying, although now that I know the promotion demands it, I'll write a few this way. They won't be entirely "for myself" now, after all, but for my family, just as the pieces I wrote before tenure were. (Each essay, each book, had a job to do, then. Once I had tenure, that motivation vanished, and I flailed about for a very long time before finding something more that I cared enough to write.)

Writing for strangers? I've never done it. In theory I find it an intriguing idea: to write about something that I think is worth knowing, without any particular audience in mind. In practice, though, I don't think I'd be motivated to get the job done.

What I like, in the end, is writing for--and editing for, and organizing for--someone or something or some group of people that I actually care about.

The love poetry book wasn't just to get me tenure: it was everything I knew about love at the time, a portrait, however distanced, of the first years of my marriage. The Jewish American poetry book grew out of a couple of friendships; so did the Ron Johnson book, although that was also for Ron himself, a sweet man and a lovely poet, and for my father, who wanted me to finish it, so I did, eventually.

The Parnassus pieces? As the years have gone by, they've often been written for Herb, the editor there, who had faith in me across years of writer's block. The one about poets in novels was written to advance the romance project, in gratitude to the RWA for their support; my latest, about Taha Muhammad Ali and Mahmoud Darwish (and Samih al-Qasim) grew out of my meeting Taha years ago in Chicago, and has turned into a chance to spread the word to colleagues (at DePaul and in the Jewish community) about some books that matter, deeply, to me.

As I look ahead, the projects that draw me most keenly are the ones that I connect to groups of friends and colleagues, and nowadays that mostly means friends and colleagues in Romancelandia, where they abound. What I need to find, alongside these, are some poetry projects that I connect with specific readers (you know who you are) or poets for whom I feel the same personal affection I did for Ron. As I type this, I realize: this is one reason I've never tried to gather my stray essays into a collection, or hammer them into a monograph. The question that pops into my mind ("Who'd read it?") isn't a rhetorical one or a critique of the academic publishing industry. It's a practical one: whom among my friends, my colleagues, my family, would that book be for?

As I say, it may be that the pressure of the promotion will change these dynamics. Maybe I'll start churning out copy like a text machine (get on up!), simply to put those notches in my CV. Knowing this about myself, though, I suspect that I'm better off using this insight to sort out priorities. The pieces that aren't "for myself and strangers" are the ones I'll be most motivated to write, to finish, to publish, and with limited time, I might as well start there.

How Can I Use This?

How can I use this failure? That's the question on my mind tonight.

I'd like to think of this as some kind of opportunity. But for what? To do what?

Let's put it this way: what have I been doing in order to get this promotion that I no longer have to do?

Or, rather, what have I been doing thinking it would help me get this, that didn't, which I can scrap?

What have I been up to for other reasons--money, for example--that I can drop, now that I have a more important overall goal? (I.e., to get the thumbs-up next time.) What have I been avoiding, out of fear or laziness, that I now have the motivation to pursue?

And, conversely, what have I not been doing that I can use this setback as the opportunity to do, turn back to, work through, begin? Anything I've wanted to do in the past, and set aside, that now looks like a good idea again?

Oops.

Well, I'm back, and with bad news, alas.

My application for promotion to Full Professor was turned down by the college committee at DePaul--and not just turned down, but soundly, firmly, grimly, unequivocally spanked. Not enough publishing in peer-reviewed venues, not enough leadership in committees and DePaul undertakings: come back, they said, when you've fixed those flaws, and you'll have a proper case.

Now, as you can imagine, I'm quite disappointed, and not a little humiliated. On the other hand, my hunch coming out of the interview was that things had gone awry, and everything the report ended up saying was something I'd feared that weekend. I had time, that is, to get used to this in advance.

The nice thing about missing out on a promotion, as opposed to tenure, is that nothing really changes. I still have my job, my benefits, my future in the profession. All my current projects will keep chugging along; if anything, they'll have a bit more steam. Had I known I was headed down the wrong path all these years, I'd have set some different priorities: less NEH work with teachers, fewer lesson plans online, more traditional publishing, more time in the trenches of some committee, etc. Clearly I'll have to set some of that aside until the promotion comes through, which is annoying, but there's plenty of time for it after.

After my son's Bar Mitzvah, two weeks ago, I had the odd feeling that something had come to a close, or maybe full circle. My father's death almost 8 years ago was keenly on my mind, and all the changes that came right after it, both personal and professional. (Four years of near total writer's block, for one thing.) This promotion was supposed to be based on the work I'd done in that time, and one message I take away from the no vote is that I took a bit of a detour back then, and it's time to get back on the main highway. I'm struck by how many new ideas for projects have popped into my head in the past 24 hours. Not new ones entirely, but spin-offs, expansions, and the like, of the sort I used to do quite routinely, just to be efficient. (In grad school, I never wrote a paper without submitting it somewhere, for example.)

If you're out there (and not many of you are), and you do work on modern / contemporary poetry, help a prof out. What recent articles or books would you recommend I look at to inspire me as I head back into the fray? (RECENT is the key word here. I'm always inspired by re-reading The Pound Era, but Hugh Kenner cuts no mustard nowadays. Need to relearn the idiom, as much as anything.

And, since one might as well have fun with such a moment, here's Chrissie Hynde with the song of the day. Wish me luck, folks, as I take what's coming to me.

City of David

This just up on Josh Corey's website: a poem by Allen Grossman, from his new book, Descartes' Loneliness:

City of David

Jerusalem is a grave of poets. Name
two who are buried there:
the poet Dennis Silk is buried there.
He lived with a dressmaker's dummy,
in a cave, on the Hill of Evil
Counsel due south of Zion Mount.
She bore him children
after her kind.—In any case, whatever
she gave birth to did not live.
Famous Amichai, also a poet,
is buried there. From his apartment on
the eastern slope you can see
a gate of the City, called David's Gate.
In '48, on a beach at Tel Aviv,
the poet Amichai held a dying soldier
in his arms. The soldier whispered—:
"Shelley." And then he died.
Poets built Jerusalem. Therefore,
poets have a duty to destroy
Jerusalem. If I forget thee,
the world will be better off.
The tree a cat can get up into,
a cat can get down from by itself.

"The Prehistory of Love"

"The Prehistory of Love." That's the title of chapter 3 in Paz's The Double Flame, assigned reading for my love poetry class this Monday.

Paz begins by reflecting on Greek poetry, which he finds as a rule "more erotic than [it is] amorous" (54). By which, he elaborates, it's a body of work in which "we see, and hear, the lovers in their different moods--desire, sensual pleasure, disillusionment, jealousy, ephemeral happiness--but never the sentiments and emotions of the Other" (55). There are no lovers' dialogues in this body of work, and love, for Paz, is essentially a dialogic, or at least relational, phenomenon.

• As I told my class last week, it may well be that the most genres for love are drama and the novel, rather than lyric poetry. Is this a problem for my own future teaching the class, I wonder? Will I tire of teaching lyric, or find it frustrating, given my steady diet now of romantic fiction?
• Or, conversely, might a lyric poetry that records, or at least registers, the Other's voice and subjectivity--through resistance, or active listening, or implied response--be enough to satisfy me, and him?
  

In any case, according to Paz the first texts that prefigure "what love was to be for us" come from Alexandria and Rome. "Love is born in metropolises." Lovely thought, for a city boy like me. (OK, I'm from the suburbs. But domesticity has a home there, surely--a split level, with shuffleboard court and wet-bar in the family room.) Why in cities? Because "in the Alexandrian period...an invisible revolution takes place: women, shut up in the gynaeceum, come out into the open air and appear on the surface of society," making names for themselves in the political realm and in the city's burgeoning world of "tradesmen, craftsmen, and small property owners" (59). "The appearance, in the new cities, of a freer woman" is what allows "the erotic object [to begin] to transform itself into a subject" (610).

• Love as such is born of women's rights and the rise of the middle class: sounds good to me, but I'm biased, I suspect.
• I'm not sure if it's really about the "middle class," though. Paz speaks about the importance in Rome, a bit later, of "patrician women" and courtesans as the crucial figures. "Both patricians and courtesans were free women in several senses of the word: by their birth, their means, and their mores. Free above all because to an unprecedented degree they had the freedom to accept or reject their lovers. They were the mistresses of their bodies and their souls. The heroines of erotic and amorous poetry come from both classes (62-3).
  

Doubling back a bit:

To Paz, the first great love poem is a piece he calls "The Sorceress," Idyll 2 by Theocritus (circa 275 BC). Is it anywhere on line? Here's a prose translation by Andrew Lang. For Paz, this is the first poem to show "rancor and love conjoined...the inextricable commingling of hate and love, spite and desire" (56). The speaker of the poem, Simaetha, "is a commoner, a young woman such as exists by the thousands in every city of the world, ever since there have been cities" (57). To make such a woman the heroine--or at least central figure--of a major literary text "was an immense literary and hsitorical innovation" (60). She's struck by desire for one "Delphis," a young athlete who obsesses her, whom she summons to her house. He woos her, plies her with promises, and they go to bed. They're lovers for a short while, after which he disappears for two weeks, and reports come to Simaetha that he's now fallen in love with another, of one or other sex.

"Simetha's love," says Paz, "is made of persistent desire, despair, anger, helplessness. [...] Between what we desire and what we value there is a gap: we love what we do not value and we desire to be forever with a person who makes us unhappy. In love, evil makes its appearance: it is a pernicious seduction that attracts us and overcomes us" (59). We are, he says, "very far from Plato" (59).

The next poet he speaks of, moving from Alexandria to Rome, is Catullus, whose work looks back to Sappho and to the Alexandrian model supplied by Callimachus.

In Catullus's poems for the woman he names "Lesbia," a patrician that scholars have identified as one "Clodia," about whom Paz says absolutely nothing. (Hmmm...) Catullus's lyrics record the stormy relationship between himself and Lesbia; again, we find this "union of opposites--desire and contempt, sensuality and hatred, paradise glimpsed and hell endured" in which "our flesh covets what our reason condemns" (62). Together, the poems comprise "a sort of novel in verse (63) in which the male speaker is in a "situation of dependency" and the love plays out as "an exercise in freedom, a transgression, a defiance of society," although he doesn't spell out exactly how this is so (63).

Three crucial elements for modern love poetry emerge in these texts, says Paz: choice (the lovers are free, at least vis a vis social norms); defiance (love as a transgression), and jealousy. Paz jumps from Catullus to talk about the "fatal pearl" of jealousy in Proust, whom I've never read, alas; from this diversion, however, he makes his way to this lovely passage:

We live with phantoms, and we ourselves are phantoms. [That is, we're always imagining what's going on in each other's minds, making up stories about each other and indeed about ourselves, some of which are quite painful and self-tormenting.] There are only two ways out of this imaginary prison. The first is the path of eroticism, and we have already seen that it ends in a blind wall. The question of the jealous lover--what are you thinking about? What are you feeling?--has no answer except sadomasochism: tormenting the Other or tormenting himself. In either case the Other is inaccessible and invulnerable. But we are not transparent, either, for others or for ourselves. [...] The other way out is that of love: surrender of self, acceptance of the freedom of the beloved. Madness, an illusion? Perhaps, but it is the only door that leads out of the prison of jealousy. Many years ago I wrote: Love is a sacrifice without virtue. Today I would say: Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other (66-67).

The next poet he discusses is Sextus Propertius, whose lyric poems of relationship with "Cynthia" are another "novelistic" account of "meetings, separations, infidelities, lies, surrenders, endless quarrels, moments of sensuality, passion, anger, morose melancholy" (68). He delights in the "modernity" of Propertius; he notes that Propertius is the first to write a love poem in which the beloved's ghost visits the speaker after her death (passed down, he writes, to "Baudelaire and his descendents" 71), and this leads him into a longish disquosition on a poem by Quevedo ("Amor constante mas alla de la muerte") and brief mentions of other poems by Baudelaire, Nerval, Novalis, and others.

A brief discussion of Greco-Roman novels of love: Daphnis and Chloe, in particular.

Some interesting thoughts about freedom in these texts. Not political freedom--that wasn't an option--but rather, in the face of monarchic rule, "political freedom was replaced by inner freedom," by which he means something like freedom in the private or domestic sphere: work, marriage, etc., as separated from the broader life of the polis. "Political duties, extolled by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, are moved to the sidelines of society by the search for personal happiness, wisdom, or serenity" (85). Private virtues predominate, and private pleasures, including those that earlier philosophy thought of as an enslavement, like the pleasures of passion. We start to see the idea that marriage should be by the consent of the parties, even if the heads of the families still make the primary arrangements. Again, Paz insists, "the emergence of love is inseparable from the emergence of women. There is no love without feminine freedom" (85).

Love ends up being a form of "civil disobedience," not in the name of principle (as for Thoreau) but in the name of "individual passion" (87). He concludes this way: "love is born of an involuntary attraction that our free will transforms into a voluntary union. Voluntary union is love's necessary condition, the act that turns bondage into freedom" (87).

Thursday's Child

No picture today. You can find those yourself, if you need them. Instead, this, by a poet I've just discovered, and like quite a bit:

Travel Tickets

On the day you kill me
You’ll find in my pocket
Travel tickets
To peace,
To the fields and the rain,
To people’s conscience.

Don’t waste the tickets.

--Samih al-Qasim, trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari

More tomorrow.

Paz On Love

Shoving politics out of my mind for a while. Back to Paz on love.

When we left off, Paz had just finished laying out the differences between sex and eroticism (see yesterday's post). In chapter 2 of The Double Flame, he moves on to another distinction: that between eroticism and love.

He begins with "one of the first appearances of love, in the strict sense of the word," in Western literature: the story of Cupid (or "Eros," as Paz calls him) and Psyche in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, from the late 2nd century AD. He's fascinated by what strikes him as "the real novelty of the story," which is that "a god, Eros, falls in love with a maiden who personifies the soul, Psyche" (29). Writes Paz:

I emphasize, first of all, that their love is mutual and returned: neither is an object of contemplation for the other; nor are they rungs on any ladder of contemplation. Eros loves Psyche and Psyche Eros, and very prosaically they end up marrying each other. There are countless stories of gods who fall in love with mortals, but in none of these loves, invariably sensual in nature, does attraction for the soul of the beloved play a role (29).

For Paz, the distinction between eroticism and love lies in this combination of mutuality and specificity. "Love is attraction toward a unique person: a body and a soul," he writes. "Love is choice; eroticism is acceptance" (32). [By "acceptance" he means, the book explains, a feeling like Molly Bloom's, in her closing monologue: "he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another." That's erotic, but it's not love, which at its most basic means "the passionate attraction we feel toward one person out of many" (34).]

Love is thus at once a subset of the erotic and a launching into realms well beyond it. "Without eroticism--without a visible form that enters by way of the sense--there is no love, but love goes beyond the desired body and seeks the soul in the body and the body in the soul. The whole person" (33).

• Question: would this mean, then, that it's impossible to love someone one doesn't know in person? What about falling in love by letter, as Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning seem to have done? "Do you think we should meet?" (That's not EBB, of course, but You've Got Mail, but the principle applies.)
  

Because love overlaps with the erotic, but cannot be reduced to it, it necessarily combines disparate, even opposing elements. "The attraction that the lovers experience must be involuntary, born of a secret and all-powerful magnetism; at the same time, it must be a choice. In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter" (33; my italics).

• I emphasize "encounter" because it hints at the essential intersubjectivity of love, the fact that it demands the encounter of two independent subjects, rather than simply my delight in or attraction to some object of my desire. As Paz puts it, in love we witness "the transformation of the erotic object into a free and unique subject" (34).
  
  
• This reminds me of the heartbreaking moment late in Lolita where Humbert Humbert suddenly glimpses the horror he's visited on the girl--now a young woman--he obsessively desired through most of the novel. For the first time, he sees her as a "subject," not an object; his remorse, however brief, is the closest he ever gets to actual love.
  
  
• Which, in turn, reminds me that the story of Cupid and Psyche also features what is, for Paz, a three-part structure that will endure in Western love stories: "transgression, punishment, and redemption" (29-3o).

Denis de Rougement (and others) have claimed that this vision of love-as-encounter is exclusively Western, and indeed, even in the West, relatively recent, invented, so it's said, in 12th century Provence. Against this, Paz insists on the human universality of love as such.

"There is no people or civilization," he writes, that does not tell stories or sing songs about "the encounter of two persons, their mutual attraction, and the labors and hardships they must overcome to be united" (33). In some civilizations, at some periods, however, this core story gets elaborated into a full-blown ideology, "a way of life, an art of living and dying, an ethic, an aesthetic, and an etiquette. A courtesy, to use the medieval term" (34).

Now things get interesting!

"Courtesy," Paz reminds us, "is not within the reach of all: it is a body of knowledge and a practice. It is the privilege of what might be called the aristocracy of the heart. Not an aristocracy founded on bloodlines and inherited privileges, but on certain qualities of the spirit. Although these qualities are innate, in order that they be manifested and made second nature, the adept must cultivate his mind and his senses, learn to feel, speak, and sometimes remaind silent. Courtesy is a school of sensibility and selflessness" (35).

From the idea of "courtesy" he moves on to "courtly love," which is for Paz "a knowledge of the senses illuminated by the light of the soul, a sensual attraction refined by courtesy" (36). Examples of such love, Paz notes, can be found in the Islamic world (Persian and Arabic), in India, and in the Far East (The Dream of the Red Chamber, from China, and from Japan The Tale of Genji). This leads him to an interesting conclusion: "Whenever a high courtly culture flourishes, a philosophy of love springs forth. Those philosophies of love have the same relationship with the general feeling of love as this one [the general feeling] has with eroticism, and both of them with sexuality" (37).

Thus: "sex is the root, eroticism the stem, and love the flower" (38).

***

Some differences between East and West follow, and a few useful apercus.

In the East (the far east, he means), love is "conceived of within a religious tradition," whether Buddhist or Taoist. In the West, ever since Plato, "the philosophy of love lay outside official religion [pagan or monotheist] and at times was in opposition to it" (39).

"Love in the West is a fate freely chosen," which means that "no matter how powerful the influence of predestination--the best-known example is the love potion that Tristan and Isolde drink--in order for their destiny to be fulfilled, the cooperation of the lovers is necessary" (40).

"The history of poetry is inseparable from that of love" (43).

Paz gives a brief summary of the Symposium, which makes this book quite useful for teaching undergrads--you can get them up to speed on some crucial bits of cultural history in a single chapter, as you see.

He discusses the story Aristophanes tells about the original androgyne, with its ringing affirmation that "we are incomplete beings, and the desire for love is a perpetual thirst for completion" (43), but he points out that this is not Plato's final speech on the subject, and turns to Socrates' lesson from Diotima: "Eros is neither god nor man; he is a daimon...the preposition between defines him" (44). The child of Poverty and Abundance (or Plenty, or Resource, Poros is the Greek), Eros is "a mixture of several elements united and animated by desire" (45).

Now, as we all know, this disquisition (by Socrates, I mean) leads him to the ringing conclusion that "love is desire for the perpetual possession of the Good," or some such phrase. Love in Plato is therefore an "ascent": "it goes from the love of one body to the love of many, then from the love of all beautiful forms to the love of virtuous deeds, then from deeds to ideas and from ideas to absolute beauty, which is the highest life that can be lived" (48).

But, Paz notes, that's not love. That's Eros, or "eroticism," and stands in contrast to the mutuality and intersubjectivity that lie, for Paz, at the heart of love. He doesn't say that ancient Greeks never felt what we call love, mind you; he just says that they didn't make a philosophy out of it. "Diotima seems to know nothing of fidelity, and it never even occurs to her to give thought to the feelings of the man or woman we love: she sees the beloved as a mere step on the ascent toward contemplation. In reality, love for Plato is not strictly speaking a relationship; it is a solitary adventure" (50).

"For Plato, erotic objects--whether they be the body or the soul of the ephebe--are never subjects: they have a body and do not feel, they have a soul and remain silent. They are really objects, and their function is that of being stages in the ascent of the philosopher toward the contemplation of essences" (51).

Paz notes, astutely, that although the Symposium is in the form of a dialogue, it is in fact "made up of seven separate discourses": in this text, as in the version of love it describes, "there can be a dialectic, that is to say, a division of discourse into parts, but there is no true dialogue or conversation" (51-2).

"In the Symposium," he concludes, "eroticism in its purest and loftiest expression, the necessary condition of love--the other man or woman who accepts or refuses, who says yes or no and whose very silence is an answer--does not appear" (52).

• A curious structure to this chapter, starting with the story that does illustrate love-as-such and ending with one that seems to...but oops, look again, it doesn't. I almost wish he'd have circled back to talk more about the Apuleius, and how the story of Cupid and Psyche illustrates love instead, just to clinch that in the minds of my students.
  
  
• On the other hand, since we're about to turn to Sappho for a while, it's probably better to leave them with a taste of Eros in their mouths. We won't really reach love-as-such for a couple of classes, and there's an awful lot to say about th'erotic on the way.
  

Tuesday's Child

7:03: "The purpose of awakening is black coffee." Alice Notley, "The Prophet"

***

Kids off. Bulgar pilaf with cranberries and almonds for breakfast; caught up on some romance reviews at Dear Author while it simmered. The new Lydia Joyce sounds promising.

Trying to imagine a site like Dear Author about poetry: not just a site with reviews, but one that gives, like, low grades to books. Is there something out there like that? If not, why not? What would the absence say about the differences between reading poetry and reading genre fiction? (Poetry, too, after all, a "genre.")

Has anyone who studies fandom ever turned his or her attention to poetry readers? I suspect there's a good deal to be said from that perspective: the passion, the depth of knowledge, the feral infighting...

***

Spent too much of my first day back at school restlessly checking news from Gaza, and it tugged at my attention today as well. The latest horror--30 or 40 civilians killed at the UN school where they were taking shelter--haunts me, and reports that Hamas gunmen were firing from the school, in which they'd barricaded themselves, booby-trapping it first, makes things worse, not better. (It's entirely believable, but sadly no more so than any other explanation.)

Those poor children--so many, and more to come.

Muriel Rukeyser's little poem from 1939 keeps running through my mind:

M-Day's child is fair of face,
Drill-day's child is full of grace,
Gun-day's child is breastless and blind,
Shell-day's child is out of its mind,
Bomb-day's child will always be dumb,
Cannon-day's child can never quite come,
But the child that's born on the Battle-day
is blithe and bonny and rotted away.

Sorry so glum, but what can you do? Brant Rosen reposts an interview with Israeli geographer Arnon Soffer, one of the idea-men behind the original Gaza pullout, back on May 21, 2004:

...when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.

In case you couldn't tell, he's not saying that as a warning (like, let's not let this happen). He's just planning ahead. "The only thing that concerns me," says he, "is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

I am sickened and ashamed.

***

Anyway, I did my best to keep my attention elsewhere a while this morning. For the love poetry class, I'm rereading Octavio Paz, The Double Flame, chapters 1 and 2, along with Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. The goal is to gather a shared vocabulary for talking about love (and desire, and related matters) as the course begins. Paz starts by setting up an analogy between poetry and eroticism:

"The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language" (2).

How so? Well, eroticism is "sexuality transfigured," in which "imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite," just as imagination, in poetry, turns "language into rhythm and metaphor" (3). Eroticism makes sexuality "say" something more than reproduction, so that pleasure (and aggression, and any other element of sexuality) becomes an end in itself. Likewise, "in the poem...language deviates from its natural end, communication" (4). The language of poetry circles around, looks back on itself, aspires to shapeliness rather than simply to clarity. Thus "Poetry puts communication in brackets in the same way that eroticism brackets reproduction" (5).

The implications of this? "St. John of the Cross did not wish to say anything that departed from the teachings of the Church; nevertheless, his poems said other things" (5). Poems always (at least potentially) say something more, something other that what is intended or what is useful, socially speaking. "There is always a schism between social and poetic expression: poetry is the other voice," says Paz (6).

Paz distinguishes love from eroticism, and both of them from sexuality.

"Sex is the primordial source. Eroticism and love are forms derived from the sexual instinct: crystalizations, sublimations, perversions, and condensations which transform sexuality, very often into something unknowable" (7). Eroticism "is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings" (8).

First Paz talks about the imagination's role. "Eroticism is invention, constant variation; sex is always the same." This multiplicity inheres in the nature of the erotic: "in every erotic encounter," says Paz--even in our most "solitary pleasures"--there is "an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire" (9).

He then discusses the social side of things. Sex as such, he says, threatens society: it's "like the god Pan," at once creative and destructive; it "ignores classes and hierarchies, arts and sciences, day and night--it sleeps and awakens, only to fornicate and go back to sleep again" (10). [Ah, those were the days!] Human cultures invent taboos, prohibitions, inducements: eroticism includes both "repression and license...sublimation and perversion"; it generates cultural production, from laws to rites to arts, around the twinborn poles of "abstinence and license" (11-12).

Writes Paz, "Every great historic religion has given rise, on its margins or at its very heart, to sects, movements, rites, and liturgies in which the flesh and sex are paths to divinity. It could not be otherwise: eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness" (15).

• This will set up one of our recurring topics: the relationship between sacred and secular love poetry, and by extension the relationship between sacred and secular love.
  

Paz then turns from religion to its inverse or mirror image, "libertinism." A longish disquisition on libertinism, which in my experience is as foreign to students as sexual rites and liturgies. In the 18th century, "the libertine was the intellectual critical of religion, laws, and customs," and "libertine philosophy turned eroticism into moral criticism" (22).

Sadly, that "moral criticism" ends up preaching its own rather nasty moral vision, at least to Paz:

"For the libertine the ideal erotic relationship means absolute power over the sexual object, and an equally absolute indifference toward its fate; while the sexual object is totally complacent toward the desires and caprices of its lord" (22). As a result, "the libertine turns everything he touches into a phantom, and he himself becomes a shade among shades" (24).

• This from Sade, of course, whom I haven't read since high school. Does it have any bearing on the actual behavior of anyone else?
  

Thank heaven, Paz has no taste for Sade. "A prolix and dull writer," he calls him, "the opposite of an artist" (24). He prefers Shakespeare, Stendahl, even Freud, "a man of science and a tragic poet" (25). He gives the last word in the chapter to D.H. Lawrence, who envisions, through eroticism, a "return to the place of origin, where death and life embrace," as in the poem that he quotes, "Bavarian Gentians."

So much for sexuality and eroticism (chapter 1), what of love? More on that anon.

Start as you mean to go on--

Pancakes, mimosas, Mistress of Mellyn, Andrew Lawrence-King on the wire-strung harp. Nathan sleeping in, but Margaret up, debating the merits of various romance heroes & heroines with my wife.

Dodging news from Gaza for a while.

***

Bought a red Moleskine notebook to keep track of my reading this year. So many "best of" lists by friends; maybe this way I'll have one to post next December. Should it only be for reading, though? Music? Whiskey? Brands of chocolate stout? (Young's for my birthday a week ago; now we're on to Brooklyn Brewry.)

***

Today's poem? In honor of the news, how about "Rita and the Rifle," by Mahmoud Darwish? Rita was a young woman--an Israeli Jew, as it happens--that he loved in his youth; the poem was turned into a wildly popular, much-loved song by the Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife. You can find the original Arabic here; after the English, below, I've pasted a performance of the song, one lick of which sounds oddly like the 50's ballad "Mona Lisa" to my ears.

Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
kneels and prays
to the divinity in those honey-colored eyes.

And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle.

Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again.

Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita.

Between Rita and my eyes--
A rifle.

Here's to a good year--and Lord knows there's plenty of room for improvement!

Welcome to the Working Week

Counting down, here, to the end of 2008. A tough year for this blog; here's to a better, more interesting one in the months to come.

It was warm enough to run today, so run we did, R & I. (She's following the blog now--hi, love!) Took a pitchfork to my in-box, which is more of an in-tower at the moment, a desktop Barad-dur. Got some very anxiety-provoking emails from editors and impending campus visitors; literally shrieked in frustration at one point, scaring my poor daughter silly. Took my son to the library in search of histories of rock and roll, and a stack of CDs. Not, shall we say, the most productive day, but for the first day back to work, not altogether a failure.

In fact, one success: a sheaf of paperwork I should have filed last June (you read that right, alas) for my How to Teach a Poem workshop series is now done, done, done. Scoring high on the guilt-o-meter, that was. Three days left to finish--well, why commit myself? This & that.

Time to sign off & clean up. More tomorrow.

Monday Morning

We open the week with a "this just in," via the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog. It seems the editors of Max Planck Institute's journal, in Germany, wanted to grace their cover with something poetic--and hey, what could be more poetic than this graceful bit of chinoiserie?

Of course, it might have helped if someone at the Institute knew WTF the characters said. Quoth the Independent:

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming "Hot Housewives in action!" on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their "enchanting and coquettish performance" was highly recommended.

The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to "the northern mainland" seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor.

The Max Planck Institute was quick to acknowledge its error explaining that it had consulted a German sinologist prior to publication of the text. "To our sincere regret ... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker," the institute said in an apology. "By publishing this text we did in no way intend to cause any offence or embarrassment to our Chinese readers. " (My emphasis.)

This seems to be a much more reputable site for Chinese poems, useful for teachers and such--it has the originals, a transliteration, a prose crib, and a sample verse translation. Ah, but what about those "deeper levels of meaning"?

Poor Guy; Product Placement;

Not me, although I felt pretty sorry for myself when She Who said it was time to get up. (It was 5:45, which an hour or more early--but she'd been up for God knows how long, and needed a quiet room to try to catch some Zs before the client meeting this morning.)

No, the poor guy is my son, who woke up sick to his stomach at 4, got up at 6, threw up, and needs to stay home from school. Not the best end to the week, or start to the weekend!

(A virus? Something he ate? We'll see how my daughter feels when she gets up. They had carry-out pizza last night, which we didn't touch.)

One of those days I'm very glad to have a big ol' bottle of Cucina hand-soap at the sink, olive oil & coriander scent. I'll be using it a lot today, and--so far, at least--it makes me happy every time.

***

Speaking of happiness, mille grazie to Laura for her reminder, yesterday, that a new instrument will probably end up making me feel as much guilty as happy. It's funny: I know a fair amount about what makes me happy in the short & longer term by now, but that conscious knowledge doesn't seem to get me out of the rut of hankering after the same things, year after year, even when others might make me happier. Two gifts in the past few weeks--a new pair of zip-up, nicely insulated boots and a new under-the-counter radio-cum-mp3 player for the kitchen--have brought me more pleasure, dollar for dollar, than my last two mandolins. Having the funds to buy my wife a pricey sweater last summer on Inis Meain was a joy, and the fact that the sweater was lost before we got home actually doesn't spoil that memory at all.

Isn't there a poem like that? Hmmm... Not exactly, but here's the one that came to mind, by Wendy Cope:

Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts -
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up instantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.

***

I moved on to a second Crusie essay yesterday, editing. Actually, I moved on to the second essay twice: first in an early version, on which I assiduously wrote comment after comment, and then in a later version, once I realized (right about lunchtime) that the author had already rewritten it. Mr. Efficiency, that's me.

Today I need to spend a few hours curled up with another project, reminding myself at regular intervals that my own flickers of nausea are psychosomatic, not to be trusted. (Black coffee + empty stomach / sick son = get back to work & stop fretting!) Actually, the first thing I'll need to do is clean house, so that my wife's client feels reasonably confident when she shows up at 10. After that, the real work begins.

***

Since I probably won't be posting more later, I'll sign off and get this up on line. Here's a morning song--at least, it starts off with something about getting up every morning, which is probably what brought it to mind. Haven't heard this one in years, and it feels quite good to to cue it up again.



Rustlings upstairs. Off to work, then. --E

Wednesday Mix

This played in my head last night, and came back just now, after shoveling and such. I rediscovered Leonard Cohen thanks to the poet Alicia Ostriker, whom I'll blog about one of these days; for now, let me just post this, with thanks, and grab a cup of chai.



(Note: there's a typo at 2:40, where the video-maker types "firm commitments" where it should be "first commitments." Other than that, it's more or less accurate.)

***

Broke ground on the Darwish / Muhammad Ali piece this morning. Slow work, as expected. Trying to do it with these new contact lenses? Not worth the extra trouble--they're out now, but have left me chemically grumpy, even so. Funny how that works; as my college roommate taught me, once the bad chemicals get into your bloodstream, it takes a while for them to work their way out, no matter what else is happening. (Maybe a run or something would speed that along? Or a rum!)

***

From the delightful Bemsha Swing, via Mark's blog, this inspiring / intimidating list of "principles":

(1) Be smart [Be brilliant]. It always helps to start out with that basic advantage of being smarter than the next person. What this really means, though, is to work smart. Be intelligent about the way in which you go about doing things. Think things out.

(2) Read more. Be the kind of person who has read more than the people in any given room. That's what the 9,000 book of poetry project is really about.

(3) Out work (everyone else).

(4) Stake out (your territory). Define a few areas in which you are a specialist. Within those areas, you want to have a fairly dense, saturated knowledge. You want to have read the Collected Poems, not the Selected Poems. If you are in Graduate school and reading only the works assigned, or only the reading list for an exam, you are probably not going to be very well read.

(5) got prose? Basically, as a critic you are a kind of writer. The writing is not a secondary activity ("writing up" the results of something else) but a primary one. Not every publishing academic writes all that well, so that is a way to set yourself off from the crowd right there. Assuming you have 1-4 covered, you've got to have prose.

What would my five be--and how embarrassing would it be, I wonder, to put them in writing?

***

For the first time in ages, today, I found myself hankering for a new instrument: a "music tool," as the off-shore posts on ebay sometimes call them. Too many options! A bevvy of beauties in the bouzouki / octave mandolin / cittern category, all of them achingly affordable. If I could get my hands on a few, to get the actual feel of them in my fingertips, the decision would be easy. Staring from afar, they all appeal.

(This new Trinity College Deluxe took me by surprise just now. Drop dead gorgeous--but not more lovely than three or four other options, alas!)

***

Laura, your comment yesterday (about reviewing) raised an interesting point. I do indeed "enjoy dissent and negotiation, at least at some level, and would feel a bit uncomfortable thinking of yourself as an authority figure whose opinions should never be challenged." Heck, I dissent from myself more often than not! (You should see me trying to decide who's in, who's out in a syllabus.) My Parnassus pieces are almost all arguments with myself about a poet or school of poetry, rather than ex cathedra pronouncements about the art. Hmmm... come to think of it, I quite like reading such pronouncements--but writing them, I'm perpetually haunted by exceptions.

***

Did someone say "Haunted"? Cue it up, Shane & Sinead:

Two for Tuesday

Woke up with this in my head (the song, not the video):



I bought Street Legal when it came out in '78--my last year in Hawai'i, was it? (Quick calculation: I graduated from high school in '82, so '78-'79 was freshman year, which was Hawai'i, not Michigan. Punahou, not Cranbrook, to be precise. I liked it, but as I recall, it got savaged by reviews, which robbed me somewhat of my pleasure in it. Our house, you have to understand, was a house of reviews, not of dings-an-sich, with the New York Times its sacred text. My father's greatest dream for me, professionally speaking, was to have me write for one of the News: The New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books. By the time I had the chops to go for them, I no longer wanted to, which caused him a certain amount of puzzlement, if not actual disappointment. But you see, I didn't read them anymore--and if I didn't care enough to listen to the conversation, why would I join it?

(These thoughts occasioned by a post from Mark, a few days back, about some piece by Adam Kirsch in Poetry--and, more generally, by a piece about Kirsch from Poetry itself back in May ["The Plight of the Poet-Critic."] On some level I suppose I'm wondering how long I want to write essay-reviews, which have been my major body of work since tenure, rather than other forms of criticism. More on this as the ideas begin to simmer.)

***

I'm on my department's MA Exam committee, and have spent the last week or two emailing colleagues about what texts we should require for the next two exams. Always a fretful negotiation: am I the only person who thinks Saul Bellow's work is dreary, misogynistic, borderline racist, and generally over-rated? Am I wrong about this? It's not as though I'll invest the time to learn otherwise at this point, at least without some very compelling reason. (Pay me and I'll read him, as I read Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser Papers last fall. What a mean and dreary book!)

But I get ahead of myself: it looks like this year's list will be Midsummer Night's Dream (huzzah!), Middlemarch (ulp!), the Four Quartets (all four? Yes, dear, all four), Henderson the Rain King (oy), and Rita Dove's Mother Love (which I pushed for, so that we'd have at least TWO women and ONE author of color--and my colleagues felt that she'd fit the bill for our students better than Harryette Mullen).

***

Sent out my comments on one Crusie essay by noon, which was a Goal For the Day. Now what? Something poetry related, I think, to keep the scales balanced. Oh, but first I have to call Sarah. And before that, have lunch. (And so, my friends, the days go by....)

***

As my son approaches 13, I've been revisiting the music I listened to at his age. Here's the second song for today: a "good bad song" from my own ill-favored youth. Almost enough to make you believe in progress, ain't it?

Mrrow!

Monday & Everything After

Monday morning: a new week, and since last week was devoted mostly to a religious holiday (my wife's birthday), a week when much more work will get done.

Work on what, you ask?

• The Jennifer Crusie book: editing essays, and wrapping up my intro and own essay for it
• The New Approaches to Popular Romance volume: ditto
• My Darwish / Muhammad Ali essay
• Conference planning (PCA, Princeton, Brisbane)
• NEH work (old and new)
• Campus visits (Ostriker and Hoffman)
• A book proposal (don't ask--more on this anon)
• My poets' biographies essay (still at the earliest stage, but on my mind)
• A book review I can't talk about publicly yet
  

That's the list that comes to mind--if you're out there, and I owe you something, let me know!

***

But wait--there's more. Jewish stuff, which I seem to store in a separate file, mentally. (And blog about elsewhere, too.) But they're intertwined, at I discover when I work on the Darwish essay. Hard to read him, or Taha, as anything but an Ashkenazi American man of a certain age. I'd read them both differently were I a few years older or younger, or living in Sderot rather than Chicago.

Who wrote that book on "contingencies of value"? Barbara Hernstein Smith. Any good, anyone? (And how, one wonders, would we judge? Contingently, I guess.)

***

So...it being the low point of the afternoon (3:40--the kids home, sun almost setting, every cell in my body crying for a nap), what got done today? Worked on the Crusie intro until I realized I really couldn't do any more until I got the essays fresh in my mind, after which I re-read and re-formatted (as a Word doc) K's piece on Crusie as a feminist author, which will help with the next chunk of the intro, certes.

(Dr. Laura, an email of response will be winging its way to you shortly.)

That's it? Well, and some phone calls, emails, etc. Not the most productive day, but not the worst, by a long shot.

***

Today's theme song (ending abruptly after a couple of minutes, but the best I could find):



***

Guilt, Grading, MacDiarmid

Why do I post so little? Guilt, I think. I stopped posting regularly as the projects began to pile up last year, and although the stack is down considerably--from a high of 27, if memory serves, to a manageable 10 or dozen or so--I still owe essays and editing work to some very patient comrades-in-arms (Laura, Sarah, Herb), and that makes it hard to steal time for blogging.

Now that I have a few weeks off from teaching, though, I'm going to throw myself hard at those projects, try to break a few logjams. And, en route, to post a few things here--the usual mix of personal update and professional musing.

***

Finished grading Tuesday, down at the office, & left the papers and grade sheets there on my desk, glad to be rid of them.

By the time I got home, this email was simmering in my inbox:

Hi Professor Selinger,

I'm just wondering if I could have a rundown of why I received a B plus in your class. I was anticipating a higher grade after re-writing my papers and attending every class, participating, and never leaving early.

If you could let me know where I went wrong, I'd appreciate it.

A few years back, this would have sent me through the roof. And I'm still a little miffed. Rewriting the papers got this particular student into sight of the B+; one of them was a C+ paper to start with, raised to a B after I changed the syllabus to allow for revision. ("No good deed," as Elphaba says.) As for attendance, the syllabus said that missing classes would lower your grade; the converse isn't necessarily true, is it?

But, as I say, this time the complaint didn't send me through the roof. I just wrote back, explained what I said here, and promised to take another look at the student's final exam on my return from winter break. *Shrug* Maybe I'm just too old to fret about such things the way I used to. (Or to care?)

Something sad about the "never leaving early" bit, on reflection. It's as though the student really wanted to cut out halfway through--as some did, it being a night class--but forced him / herself to stay in order to get that top-notch grade. This is supposed to move me?

(Anyone else out there remember the old essay about "cow" and "bull"? It seems on point, somehow.)

***

My "Modern Poetry" survey this quarter--the one that B+ email comes from--was, I fear, less successful than I'd hoped. My plan was to give the students oodles and oodles of reading, drawn each week from both volumes of the Norton Modern and Contemporary Poetry anthologies. I organized the class thematically, rather than chronologically or by author or movement: a week on war, a week on gender, etc., with some poems (like The Waste Land and Mina Loy's Songs for Joannes) showing up repeatedly, in several contexts. Why? Partly because I'm tired of telling the same old stories about Modernism, stories that I'm no longer sure that I entirely believe; partly to try and restage, on the undergraduate level, the thrills of my recent graduate courses, in which I've simply assigned whole anthologies, reading them at about 100 pages a week. (This way, my students don't simply imbibe my own interests or biases--they get to, have to discover the poets and poems and movements that interest them.)

Most of the students seemed happy enough with the results, and I got some lovely notes from a few about how much they liked the class. Me? Not so much--I would dearly love to find a good prose guide to modern poetry, something as well written as Hugh Kenner's venerable introductions but a bit more inclusive. (Suggestions, anyone?) Still, a few highs and lows are worth noting:

• Pound is getting almost impossible to teach, here at DePaul, at least without devoting several weeks exclusively to him. The student resistance and fear needs to be a subject all its own, and I'm not passionate enough about the work itself these days to carry me over those shoals. We'll see whether the grad students do better with him next quarter, taught out of Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry antho, with the companion website.
• Lorine Niedecker, on the other hand, taught extremely well, as did Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, May Swenson, and Adrienne Rich.
• Ginsberg remains extremely popular--enough so that I should probably go back and teach him at length again, since he's surrounded by a lot of very vapid cliches (about history, form, and the like) that I might enjoy dispelling. I'm not sure, though, that I want to spend 10 weeks with students who want to spend 10 weeks on Ginsberg anymore.
• Denise Levertov's "Song for Ishtar" was a big hit early in the quarter:
  

The moon is a sow

and grunts in my throat

Her great shining shines through me

so the mud of my hollow gleams

and breaks in silver bubbles

She is a sow

and I a pig and a poet

When she opens her white

lips to devour me I bite back

and laughter rocks the moon

In the black of desire

we rock and grunt, grunt and

shine

Students liked that more than Mina Loy's "hoggerel," although we did well with Loy by the end of the quarter.

The big surprise, to me? I'd never taught Hugh MacDiarmid before, but took a swipe at teaching "O Wha's the Bride" on the day I called "Against Empire as Such," which focused on modernism and insurgent regional / ethnic / post-colonial poetries. My accent needs work, but the sheer melodious strangeness of the piece carried me through. Since most of my students have never encountered ballads as such, or at least not recently, they struggled a bit, but I was quite enraptured--here's a poem, and a poet, I'll need to come back to:

O Wha's the bride that carries the bunch
O' thistles blinterin' white?
Her cuckold bridegroom little dreids
What he sall ken this nicht.

For closer than gudeman can come
And closer to'r than hersel',
Wha didna need her maidenheid
Has wrocht his purpose fell.

O wha's been here afore me, lass,
And hoo did he get in?
-A man that deed or was I born
This evil thing has din.

And left, as it were on a corpse,
Your maidenheid to me?
-Nae lass, gudeman, sin' Time began
'S hed ony mair to gi'e.

But I can gi'e ye kindness, lad,
And a pair o' willin' hands.
And you shall he'e me breists like stars,
My limbs like willow wands.

And on my lips ye'll heed nae mair,
And in my hair forget,
The seed o' a' the men that in
My virgin womb ha'e met....

Anyone out there ever teach MacDiarmid? What, how, why?

The Quarter

...is over.

Or, at least, all over but the grading. Time to throw some Ds on that card, as my son advises, or maybe something higher. Tis the season, after all.

Done with the Larry Joseph piece, & now at work (again, at last!) on Darwish & Taha Muhammad Ali.

***

Jonesing for a Gretsch, as I say on my new Facebook page. Just what I need: another electronic venue not to post to--and another instrument I can't quite play! Still, performing with the Alte Rockers, our synagogue's parody band, is a highpoint of my life these days. You can find our Obamarama sessions here; I promise, I'm practicing, & sounded better at the rabbi's 10th anniversary roast. If video surfaces, I'll send it along.

***

Last week, in Boston, I spoke on "Poetry and Prayer" at a liturgy panel for the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation. Piece by piece, I'm posting the texts I discussed (and those I simply handed out) over at my Big Jewish Blog. Amichai and Milosz, so far, and more to come.

(Too much travel, recently. R or I out of town nearly every weekend for the past month or more, and we're not much for separateness. No more, I think, 'til April. My sympathies to all of you heading to MLA this year; someday I'll ship off again, I'm sure, but not this time, not this year, as Obama used to say.)

***

Meg a decade old now. Damn. Cue the Sandy Denny--or, since I linked to her version for my last post at Romancing the Blog, let's go with Kate Rusby instead:


NEH news tomorrow. Stay tuned!

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

--Robert Hayden, "Frederick Douglass"

'Nuff Said

`In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in
political terms' - Thomas Mann

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

Grumpiness; Darwish

Glum this morning, or at least exhausted. My son up most of the night, my daughter from 1-3, my wife afflicted with kicking, twitching nightmares. I blame Hillary, although I suppose the real culprits are the start of school (for the kids) and a slough of new client work (for the missus). Either way, I'm done in, and it's scarcely 9 o'clock.

***

After 17 days of heaven in Ireland, earlier this summer, the rest of the season has been hard. Too many projects (heard that before?), too little sleep, a summer class that thrilled me while I taught it, but had me scrambling to keep up with my own syllabus, reading-wise, for the past five weeks. I have until the 10th, thank God, before my own courses begin, but so much to read, write, think about before then, it's a bit harrowing.

I've also been suffering from a serious case of the blues these past few weeks--unusual for me, and a bit disconcerting for the wife & kids, as well as for me. I blamed the work, my insomniac family, and other outside sources, but the real culprit, I've since decided, was my ill-conceived notion that to deal with all this stress I had to cut back on caffeine. En vacances I could get away with little more than mugs of Irish tea, but trying to do that here at home left me in a horrid state. Since I ramped up the dosage, I've been feeling better. Embarrassing, how easy that was--a tribute to how little the conscious, deliberative self is really in charge of one's life.

"Not I, not I, but the joe that blows through me," as D.H. Lawrence would say.

***

So, anyway, I need to go work. Here's today's poem--actually a few parts of a longer poem, but the work comes in numbered sections, and although it's best as a whole, each part works well on its own. The poem is "Ruba'iyat" ("Quatrains") by the recently deceased Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; I don't know whether the original Arabic followed the AABA quatrain form, but the translation I have in hand, done by Noel Abdulahad and collected in The Adam of Two Edens, leaves that Persian form aside and gives us free verse stanzas like these instead.

1.
I've seen all I want to see of the field:
tresses of wheat combed by the wind.
I close my eyes:
this mirage leads to the music of Nahawand--
this silence leads to a blue twilight.

5.
I've seen all I want to see of peace:
a deer, a pasture, and a stream.
I close my eyes:
the deer is asleep in my arms--
his hunter is asleep in a faraway place
near his children.

9.
I've seen all I want to see of death:
in love, my chest splits open
and the white horse of Eros bolts out of it,
gallops above infinite cloud,
races with the eternal blue.
Don't stop me from dying!
Don't return me to an earthly star.

13.
I've seen all I want to see of poetry:
we used to wear garlands of flowers
and follow the funeral processions
of our martyred poets, then come back
safe and sound to their poems.
But in this tabloid age of cinemas and loud buzzing noises
we jeer as we bury their poems in heaps of dust
then see them waiting in doorways
when we get home.

15.
I've seen all I want to see of people:
their nostalgic desire for anything and everything,
their slow pace going to work,
their fast pace coming home,
their incessant need to hear the words:
Good morning!

I love that last one, so deliciously grumpy. A good poem to get this morning out of my system, so that I can get some work done--or at least begun.

Two Short Poems

Two short poems by Samuel Menashe, both good for dictation, I think.

Dusk

night
into
earth
from
rise
Voices


Beachhead

The tide ebbs
From a helmet
Wet sand embeds

***

Hey! Who knew? He's on YouTube, too. This could be useful in class, or just for your own enjoyment.

A Little Han Shan (ish) for Your Classes

We've been watching the Olympics here pretty much non-stop since Friday. Four years ago, when my kids were younger, they were inspired to stage their own "games" in the family room, which was about as adorable as it gets. This year they slump on the couch, but who can blame them? Exhaustion aplenty, chez nous: insomnia here, a virus there, lassitude and ennui.

And that's the pre-teen set! We grown-ups have our own crosses to bear, more on which (no doubt) anon.

In honor of the Games, here's a Chinese poem--or, rather, a poem written "after" one by the great Chinese poet Han Shan. Like some of you, I read him first in Gary Snyder's translations, which you can find (with an introductory essay) here; more recently the poet Red Pine has published a set of translations (well, Copper Canyon did the publishing, but you know what I mean), and there are other respected versions in English, most of which you can find linked here. (To show your students variant translations of another poem, check out the essay on the challenges of translating Han Shan here.)

The text this poem is based on comes from Burton Watson's Cold Mountain: 100 Poems, which came out back in the 1970s. In that collection, it's number 28, a little riposte by Han Shan to a scholar who's dissed his efforts. (Specifically, it's all about an error in prosody.) In his version, which was published in the endlessly heartening "Bliss" issue of Poetry East (number 60), James P. Lenfestey turns the text into a debate over what is of value in poetry, and by extension in literature more generally:

Making Poems

I laugh when I make a poem, I go to bed
at night chuckling to myself, reading and writing.
I wake in the morning chuckling to myself, reading and writing.
Years later I wonder: Why no prizes, why no money?
Maybe it's true, only sighs and tears make critics smile.
Must I now grieve for the joy I feel every day,
the fern dripping with dew,
the basket of sunshine placed every day before me?

Lenfestey has a book of these responses: A CARTLOAD OF SCROLLS: 100 POEMS IN THE MANNER OF T'ANG DYNASTY POET HAN-SHAN. Worth a look--there's probably more to be mined for classroom use, as well as for simple enjoyment.

Another Dictatable Poem

Here's one I've liked for a while, by the Jewish American modernist Charles Reznikoff:

Scrap of paper
blown about the street,
you would like to be cherished, I suppose,
like a bank-note.

Plenty to do with this in terms of sound and diction and lineation, as with most of Reznikoff's limpid short poems. If you like it, the complete Poems came back into print a couple of years ago now, and his harrowing volume Holocaust, which condenses poems out of testimony at the Nuremburg Trials, came back into print last year.

Good stuff, worth knowing, and great in the classroom.

Dictatable Poem: Yeats

Here's an early short poem by Yeats: a lovely boast, if you want to talk about it via Kenneth Koch's ideas about the "inclinations of poetry language" (of which boasting is one). The repeated phrase ("the great and their pride") might spark an interesting discussion of how much novelty, line by line, a poem demands--or, conversely, about how much repetition it can sustain. (Easier to memorize something with repetition in it, natch. Ask Homer.)

He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved
Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children's children shall say they have lied.

Dictatable Poems

Many of the teachers I worked with last year had great success with a classroom strategy based on dictation. It comes from the invaluable book A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day, by Baron Wormser and David Cappella, which I've praised here many times. When Wormser and Cappella came out to Chicago for a two-day workshop at DePaul last August--ye gods and little fishies, that was nearly a year ago!--they started out with this approach, and it dazzled the middle and high school teachers who took part.

For a full description of the strategy, you'll want to look at the book--the first 15 pages will give you a few examples, along with some robust, reflective discussion of how and why it works. But the gist of it is this: you (the teacher) dictate a short poem to your students, who then write it down, line by line, word for word, comma for comma, etc. You make sure they know the details: "Title--each word capitalized..."; "First line, first word begins with a capital letter"; "does everyone know how to spell [this word]? No? it's [...]." In the book, they say that they tell the students to double-check any spellings they're unsure of in the dictionary before they turn in their poetry journals at the end of the week. "Sometimes they check, sometimes they don't," they write. "When their grade comes back a 'C,' they tend to start checking."

By dictating the poem, the book explains,

I can slow time down and get the words into my students' bodies. Poetry is physical and I want them to experience that physicality. By writing the words down--and I make allowances for students who are challenged in various ways, such as being hearing impaired--they have to grapple with the physical nature of each word. I told them today how "apparition" is spelled [they were doing Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"] but sometimes I let them write down a word and then we check on it as a class to determine how to spell that word. It's not that I am on a crusade about spelling; it's that I want them to have to apprehend words in various situations--some more structured that others. I want them to be alive to words, and spelling is part of that alive-ness. (7)

Notice how this approach differs from the more subject-matter-focused, linguistically insouciant poem-to-prompt approach I wrote about yesterday, or two days ago, or whenever the hell that was. (Sorry--my son has insomnia and woke me up at 1, and again at 5, this morning. Am a bit fuzzy on details.) In that prompt, there was much less "aliveness to words," or at least that aliveness was limited to attention to meaning, not to sound or graphic elements. But I digress.

Once the poem has been dictated and taken down, the discussion can begin. You can start with a general question: "I ask them what they noticed as they were writing the poem down. (Dictation is not mechanical; it's focusing.)" Or you can start by asking specific questions about the words in the poem. "Poems are not hierarchical," Wormser and Cappella write: "every word matters. This means the doors into a poem are as numerous as the words in the poem" (12). Here are ten questions they list that might be useful to spark discussion, from page 12:

Ten Questions to Ask About Words

1. What word intrigues you most?
2. Is there a word that confuses you?
3. What word surprises you?
4. What word seems most metaphorical?
5. Is there a word that seems unnecessary?
6. What word is most important?
7. What is the most physical word in the poem?
8. What is the most specific word in the poem?
9. What is the strongest sound word in the poem?
10. What is the most dynamic verb in the poem?

These questions aren't aimed at getting at "the meaning" of the poem--a clumsy, reductive question, as you know if you're reading this! Rather, they're aimed at getting the students to "think about the near-infinite particularities of this one poem" (14) so that they begin to appreciate "the poem's deep individuality" (15). Here's a passage from the book that sums this up quite nicely:

If you make students aware that literature is art they respond to it as art. They come to see that art is a process, and that once upon a time the great poet was scratching out words and putting in new ones just as they do in their own writing. If you teach literature as knowledge then they start looking for the write answers. If you teach literature as art what they come to understand is that there aren't right answers; there are thoughtful and articulate and intuitive answers, but a poem can't be solved; it isn't a problem. It's a form of being and we would no more ask a poem what it means than ask a friend what he or she means by existing. (14)

I haven't done justice to these sections of the book, and there's much more to be found there, but this will give you the gist of the approach. If you've used it yourself, please drop a comment about what you've done and how it worked! In the mean time, I'm going to start posting short poems here that are useful for the dictation exercise: poems that aren't too long, and seem to me the sort that would spark useful discussions of literature as art.

Starting tomorrow. Enough for today.

"Where I'm From" Assignment

"Make yourself useful, and try to have fun." That was my dad's idea of a family motto, or so he told me, late in his life. (I wonder how it would sound in Latin? Properly impressive?) Anyway, it's time for me to make this blog a bit more useful--at least to the teachers I work with, and who read it. Maybe in the process it will be more fun again, too.

Last winter Eileen Murphy came to visit my workshop series "How to Teach a Poem (and Learn from One, Too)." She's a Say Something Wonderful alum--the NEH seminar, not the blog--and the two or three-time coach of Illinois state champions in the Poetry Out Loud competition. A master teacher, in short, who always brings great stuff to my attention. This time, she taught me (taught us) an assignment that works well for the early days of a Language Arts or English class--or, come to think of it, for the later days, especially as a substitute for the old "personal narrative essay." It's not her assignment: I've found many versions of it on line, including here and here and (as a thoughtful article from New York City) here, and again here, a West Virginia site which pegs it to a teacher from rural North Carolina. (Go Appalachia!) Now it's here, for you.

The assignment begins with a poem by George Ella Lyons called "Where I'm From," which was featured in the United States of Poetry video series a decade or so ago; as she says in a lovely piece on her website (with audio) it's travelled a long way since then, especially as a writing prompt.

Where I'm From
by George Ella Lyon

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush,
the Dutch elm
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I'm from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I'm from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from perk up and pipe down.
I'm from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I'm from Artemus and Billie's Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments-
snapped before I budded-
leaf-fall from the family tree.

You can read different versions of the discussion that ensues at the links above--obviously it's a chance to talk about what can be inferred about the speaker from the specifics she gives, but really there are a number of ways you can go with it, which I don't have time to detail right now. (See the links above, or suggest them to each other in the comments!)

You can then turn it into a prompt like this--a sort of poetry mad-lib, if you like:

I am from __(specific ordinary item)____ from __(product name) and (?)

I am from the __(home description)___. (adjective, adjective; sensory detail.)

I am from the __(plant, flower, natural item)___, the __(plant, flower, natural item)___ (description of the natural item).

I’m from ___(family tradition)___ and ___(family trait)___, from ___(name of family member)___ and ___(another name).

I’m from the ___(description of family tendency)__ and __(another one)___,

From ___(something you were told as a child) and __(another)__.

I’m from __(representation of religion -or lack of it) (further description)

I’m from ___(place of birth and family ancestry), ___(two food items representing your family)___.

From the ____(family story about a specific person and a detail) the ___(another detail of another family member)___.

I am from (Location of family pictures, momentos, archives, and several more lines indicating their worth).

That's it, as she taught it to us, and as you'll find it on line. Google the search terms ["I am from" "(specific ordinary item)"] to find an array of instances, drawn from any number of cultures and community groups.

What's missing from this prompt, of course, is any sense of langauge as such: sound, rhythm, wordplay, the line as a unit (as a frame for language). That could be brought into a revision, or could be discussed as a lacuna: i.e., "what's in the poem that's missing from the prompt?" So adapt this, tweak it, and let me know how it goes!