Official Hiatus

You're wondering how you'll notice? Well, you'll notice when I come back. I'm off to rest, read, and re-group; when I return, I have a class on "Teaching Poetry" to prep and lead, which should prompt a variety of postings, and a new version of my usual "Reading Poetry" course as well. New books all around--it should be interesting.

On thing that my immersion in romance fiction has done, oddly enough, is give me a new appetite for poems, if not necessarily for poetry criticism. I'm packing Christian Bok's Eunoia and Lawrence Joseph's Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos along with the swoonier material. We'll see how they measure up!

--Gone fishin'

E

Powers

For the first time, yesterday, I checked out the Sitemeter statistics on this blog. I'm stunned: evidently, some of you out there are reading me in Lima, Peru, in South Africa, in Germany...all around the world. I had no idea, but now that I know, I'll try to do better, I promise.

Which means what? More about teaching and poetry, and less about ouds? Probably, but bear with me for one or two more personal posts as the summer goes by.

Tonight, for example, I'm thinking about Powers. Not powers of horror, powers of darkness, or even Norman Finkelstein's fine long poem Powers, part three of his trilogy Track, which I'll be teaching in another two weeks over at Chicago's Spertus Institute. No, I'm thinking about the Powers I learned to love in Ireland two summers ago: John Power & Son's Irish Whiskey. I bought a bottle for myself on father's day this year, and have been savoring it, and the memories it stirs up, ever since.

Some of those memories, as it happens, are entirely literary. I first heard of Powers in a poem by William Corbett, whose freshman comp class my first year at Harvard stays fresh in my mind after 24 years. (I can only hope one or two of my own classes have that staying power for students.) Bill was a wonderful, genial, enthusiastic teacher, and is a wonderful, genial, enthusiastic poet. A few years back I reviewed his memoir, Furthering My Education, and his then-most-recent collection of poems, Boston Vermont, for my favorite journal, Parnassus. Reading it, I was struck by a poem called "At Last," which I take to be about what it was like to write the memoir.

"Thirty years writing / this book / and now it comes fast!" Corbett grins.

I put down
the certainties of my youth.
Satisfying to work all day
no longer embarrassed
by who I was.
I am on the bus when
these words come to me
and having no pen, buy one
in Cambridge, an expensive Cross,
green and black Lalique
like frog skin,
treat for all that I have done.
I use it waiting for Ed
in The Cellar's dark corner
over Powers and a Newcastle Brown.

I had to look up "Powers" at the time, and I remember how much I savored Bill's off-hand, all-but-unconscious rhyme between the poet's restored "powers" and his chosen tipple. (A lesser, more self-dramatizing poet wouldn't have chased it down with the Newcastle Brown.)

A few years later, again while writing a piece for Parnassus, I stumbled over this in The Orgy, Muriel Rukeyser's autobiographical novel about a trip to Ireland:

The Irish touched my lips, cool, and then branched out in purity of fire, lips, breath, breasts, and reaching out and down, in concentration more like cognac, in the most noble white strength. The clearest fire of color I have ever seen was when a photographer set up a bank of lights to make a close-up of my left eye, and the blaze went off beside my head. There was a moment of black; and then two flames in sequence, the most intense lime-green, the most appalling lavender, that I have ever seen, burning, beyond all color. Earthly color is the shadow of what I saw.

All other whisky is the shadow of Power's.

I don't know about you, but I'd be happy to see more product endorsements in poetry. So far in my life, I have poetry to thank for one lamb dinner, saved when I remembered Elizabeth Bishop's line about a sea "green as mutton-fat jade," and for a truly fine tipple. Surely I should have learned more than that after 30 years of reading! Ah, well, perhaps another memory will murmur its way to the surface if I have just another drop before dinner. Until then,

(Image removed per request--)

My New Romance Blog!

Hey, everyone--if you want to hear more of my thoughts on romance fiction, you can follow them at the new collaborative blog Teach Me Tonight.

More soon, including an update on the long-awaited Ronald Johnson: Life and Works collection. Right now, I'm off to put the kids to bed and prep my summer class. Don't cry for me, though, Argentina: prep work consists of re-reading Hunting Midnight, an erotic paranormal romance by Emma Holly. If I finish in time, I'll take a look at the new book in the series, Courting Midnight, too. But to hear what I think of them, you'll have to go to the new blog on the block. Spread the word!

It's the hard knock life. --E

Oudism

I wanted to buy myself a new instrument of some sort on Father's Day this year, as I did last year, but the budget, alas, was too tight. Instead, I picked up some new strings for my oud, and spent the afternoon restringing it. Astonishing results, worth mentioning here!

As one or two of you may remember, I ordered my oud directly from a Turkish luthier, Haluk Eraydin. Mine is the one on the right, up above. A beautiful instrument, which arrived in perfect condition in its crate last fall, but it had never sounded quite as loud or as compelling as I had imagined. I had heard from other members of Mike's Oud Forum that I should put a new set of strings on the oud, and Aquila strings seemed to be the top recommendation. (Indeed, Haluk's best quality ouds come with these as standard equipment, but not his learner model.) But I hemmed and hawed over the decision, unsure whether I should order strings for Turkish or Arabic tuning, and the months went by.

(You see, I fell in love with the oud in Arabic music, but could afford a better-quality Turkish oud, and had read on a number of websites that learner-model Turkish ouds were generally better made than comparably priced Arabic instruments. The Turkish / Armenian tuning is a full tone higher than the Arabic, however: EABead, as a rule, rather than CGAfgc, although there are other competing tunings out there for both, and Bashir-style ouds that are tuned even higher. But I digress.)

A few months ago, the decision was made for me by a new book: an Oud Method by Armenian
oudist John Bilezikjian, which I picked up on Amazon.com. It gave me the chance to, well, learn to play the instrument, rather than simply noodle around, as I'd been doing since I bought it. And as you might expect, Bilezikjian writes it for an oud tuned to Armenian tuning.

The long and the short of it is this: I ordered some Aquila strings, put them on--a slightly more complicated process than restringing a guitar, but not much more--and have been stunned and delighted. It's like a new instrument: twice as loud, twice as resonant, and a joy to play. My son still laughs at me; he thinks all plucked string instruments are essentially the same. (What do you expect? He plays clarinet and piano.) But I pluck my little scales and exercises nightly after dinner, learning to handle my mizrap, and I'm having a blast. I figure I'll just have to buy a second oud to keep in Arabic tuning, once I've saved up.

Hmmm... Either that or a Celtic harp.

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