Did not know

That Bertolt Brecht found time from his activism and theatre to write poetry.

Here is one called "Send Me a Leaf":

Send me a leaf, but from a little tree
That grows no nearer your house
Than half an hour away. for then
You will have to walk, you will get strong and I
Shall thank you for the pretty leaf.

From trash poem to welcome sign

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

A sign bearing these lines stand in Upper Manhattan's Fort Tyrone Park. They are beautiful, aren't they? asks a visitor as she finds the words to be poetic: they make her feel wanted.

She is then on a mission to track down the source of these lines. Upon Googling nothing shows up. The lines are then discovered to be fragments, carefully chiseled out of a longer early 20th-century poem:

Friend,
When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

This isn't a poem of sweet cajoling, but one with a scolding attitude, "grumpy lines" as the visitor calls them. The history of the poem is part of the burgeoning history of trash and trash talk in post-World War I Britain, a time when, liberated by rising economic fortunes and goaded by a desire to cultivate leisure, members of the British working and middle classes took to traveling from the cities to the countryside either in motor cars or on bicycles. The countryside, for so long a pristine habitat reserved for the ruminating walks of the upper class, was seen to be everybody's public space then.

Forced to contend with the despoiling of the countryside, the elite began to express deep chagrin about the litter that the lumpen visitors tended to leave behind.

In his book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless records the backlash against the new tourism which really was a backlash against the violation or a "flagrant breach of the national good form."

So, in short, the two lines that comfort the modern visitor to the Manhattan Park is in essence clipped from a longer trash poem that in class-conscious Britain had issued moral caveats.

And the Pulitzer goes to...

This year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry has been awarded to Vijay Sheshadri for his poetry collection, 3 Sections.

Born in Bangalore, Sheshadri had moved to the United States as a child, attended Oberlin College, got an MFA at Columbia University, and currently lives in Brooklyn while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville.

A poem, entitled "Imaginary Number" goes thus:

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

The death of a poet

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

These are the lines from "Digging" by Irish poet and 1995 Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.

He died at the age of 74.

This is what Heaney had to say about writing:

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.

No valiance in poetry

Are contemporary American poets "cowards?" 

University of Virginia English Professor Mark Edmundson seems to think so.

Edmundson has launched a 6000 word "jeremiad" against the pusillanimity of a majority of present day American poets in Harper Magazine. 

Heads that roll: Ranging from John Ashbery to Sharon Olds to even Robert Pinsky.

Poets of today are "oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning...timid, small, in retreat...ever more private, idiosyncratic and withdrawn," says Edmundson.

What are they retreating from?

From large, cataclysmic public events of today, including political and climatic one's:

Our poets today are too timid to say, “‘we,’ to go plural and try to strike a major note . . . on any fundamental truth of human experience [...] in the face of war, environmental destruction and economic collapse, they write as though the great public crises were over and the most pressing business we had were self-cultivation and the fending off of boredom. All that matters to these narcissistic singers is the creation of a “unique voice.”

Nigerian-American novelist Chimamanda Ngochi had made a similar complaint, albeit in muted tones, against modern British and American fiction writers. The prioritizing of the "unique" voice over everything else, including ideological commitment, has come under much attack lately.

I think that artists shouldn't be the only ones to be blamed for retreating into "little" things; people at large in our times could be best described as "disengaged." Ask about politics and see them grimacing in distaste, as though to cultivate political wills or perspectives or any other form of engagements (there are so many) in things political, were secondary or inferior to cultivating, as Edmundson writes, private taste.

Art carries the baggages, I feel, of the zeitgeist in which it's produced.

Having said that I wanted to try out the truth value of Edmundson's claim that while modern poets are good in their individual ways, they aren't good enough because they "don't slake a reader's thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common."

I chose a poem from the New Yorker, one that I liked for its linguistic and small-scale imagistic effects:

Xanthopsia

It wasn’t absinthe or digitalis
in the Yellow House the two of them shared
that led him to layer the chrome coronas
or yellow the sheets in the bedroom in Arles
or tinge the towel negligently hung
on the hook by the door, or yellow the window,
be it distant view or curtain, yolk-lick
the paintings on the wall by the monkish bed.

After going on, a bit abstrusely, I have to say, about what the causes of "his" xanthopsia weren't, the poem ends on a note of what I thought was an answer to the implied question: Did Van Gogh have xanthopsia, and if so what caused it? An extended question on the plethora of chrome or yellow in Van Gogh's paintings: Why so yellow?

I'd juxtapose a few lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland with the lines from the Xanthopsian poetic regime:

The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

There are abstruse little images here as well, but they get dispersed in the beautiful echoes of history, mythology, past and present. The chiaroscuro of the male figure holding on to Marie, for fear of falling is there for a reason.

It's no wonder that recently Dan Chiasson came up empty handed when he looked around for poems on the Boston bombing. 

The poems he found had oblique references to this seismic event (seismic not in the sense of numbers and scale of destruction, but in the sense of International politics, war strategies, etc: events affect policies, which in turn affect lives), and had comfortably retreated into the intricacies of the private lives and feelings. 

Chiasson then went back in literary history and dug up lines from the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman.

Transtromered

Transtromered could be an yet unverified process of falling into a trance upon reading the poetry of Nobel laureate Tomas Transtromer.

When asked if poetry was for entertainment, Transtromer said,

[Poetry] begins in delight and ends in wisdom (quoting from Robert Frost). [Poetry] reclaims an awareness of the world (quoting from Allen Ginsberg). [Poetry] strikes the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts (quoting from Keats) and when power power corrupts, poetry cleanses. 

When asked what he wants to achieve through the medium of poetry, Transtromer said, that in poetry he is seeking a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality in making something of it and not seeking empty calories of superficial entertainment.

And here is Tomas' Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Writing god

There are, as we know, many ways to express our private thoughts about the divine.

Sometimes, however, they can be too subversive for authorities to bear. Novelist and noted advocate of the freedom of artistic expression, Salman Rushdie, brought to my attention the following way in which Saudi poet and journalist Hamza Kashgari paid tribute to the Prophet Mohammed; he composed three tweets:

On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.

Kashgari was promptly jailed by the Saudi monarchy on charges of apostasy and is awaiting "trial."

The contemporary American poet Carl Phillips' way of remembering God is altogether casual and remarkably intimate.

In a prose poem, "Neon," he writes:

Comes a day when the god, what at least you've called a god, takes you not from behind, the usual, but pins you instead, his ass on your chest, his cock in your face, his mouth twisting open, saying lick my balls, and because you want to live, in spite of everything, you do what he says, heaven and earth, some rain, a few stars appearing, harder, the way he tells you to, then not so hard, a tenderness like no tenderness you've ever shown. 

A stark difference in approach to the sacred, but if Kashgari's mere humanizing (or, as they say, "historicizing") of the Prophet begets imprisonment, one shudders to think what he would have been sentenced to had he echoed Phillips'-like sentiments

I like Phillips' evocation better, as god here is an embodied individual, i.e. invested with a body and a personality. He is gay and male, of course (so is Phillips), but he is also fierce.

Kashgari's Prophet is an abstraction and he sounds somewhat deferentially-inclined toward the entity.

Lady Lazarus on camera

Sandra Lahire took 9 years to make a film on Sylvia Plath's poems, especially Lady Lazarus and the sumptuous Daddy.

Lahire describes the film as:

A visually woven response to Sylvia Plath’s own readings of her poetry… which celebrates her macabre humour and cinematic vision. A carousel of images in windows, an atmosphere of constant metamorphosis; her poetry as cinema.

I love Plath's voice; it's too rich to be true.

I also believe in how she differentiates finely between "real" and "seeming" dangers to our psychic health. Gentility, she says, poses a far greater danger to our psychic health than does overt displays of anger and violence. Gentility is order and the order is predicated on a certain squelching of subterranean chaos. Gentility can only go so far in keeping the chaos from rearing its ugly head in hidden forms.

In his master's voice

Ah! The joy of listening to T.S. Eliot recite his poem, Ash Wednesday

The novel

The Novel

After "Gatsby" and "Catcher"
and Gaddis it didn't look back.
It honed its approach for cell-phone mini-books,

then buffed up, tried on smirks,
and trampled past a bust of Jonathan Franzen.
If this was its coming-out party, it mainly peered in-

ward. It wanted to jostle a reader's heart
into snare-drumming for bit
players on side streets.

Fidgety, bored, it donned cowboy hats
till it grew antennae and crawled
upstairs into your bed.

No to nostalgia

Why should I want to return

to a time where even when I occupied that time

I wanted to go back to another time

more previous,

and so on, like my head in barbershop mirrors,

endlessly deferring to its own

earlier version. What is the use of nostalgia?

—Jeffrey Skinner, from “Darwin’s Marathon.”

Poetry

What You Do

You take a class.

You spend several afternoons trying to get a straight answer from your insurance company.

You learn how to give yourself shots.

They take your blood.

Your mother comes to visit.

You stop having sex.

You drink a lot of water.

You look at your embryos on a computer screen.

You decide to freeze some.

You’re not sure what else you would do. Not freeze them?

You talk lucidly about the surgeon’s son’s chances of getting into a top-tier college during the implantation.

You sort of think, “Why the fuck are we talking about this now?” But you keep talking about it.

You finally get to pee in a bedpan. The nurse pretends to be cool about it, but you can tell she’d rather you held it.

You hold hands.

You like it quiet.

The other couple talks a lot.

You know that this much waiting makes people crazy.

You yourself are crazy with hope.

You go home.

You have fears.

You do the shots.

You wait for the call.

You feel something.

Your mother leaves.

---Carly Moore (poet, a former colleague of mine)

John Ashbery

A John Ashbery take on sustainability; on how there is too much gabbing and no action to stop denuding the environment. The earth in this poem seems to be slipping from our grasp:

So it all comes round
to individual responsibility and awareness,
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by. 

I like the phrasing, "the circus of dusty dramas."

Sylvia Plath: and she drew too...

Having recently taught poetry by Sylvia Plath as part of a college course on poetry, I take an inordinate interest in the poetess and was delighted to discover a cache of her ink sketches here.

The cat does look curious. Maybe it's a French attribute--to be curious--that afflicts the feline population of France as well!

Wondrous excerpts

A list of excerpts from recent works of fiction and poetry:

Once upon a time there was a leper colony in Jamaica (Alice Williams, The Last Warner Woman)

The whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it (Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire)

All that I have I carry on me (Herta Muller, Hunger Angel)

I was not allowed to have a gun (Benjamin Busch, Dust to Dust)

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk (Alien Vs. Predator, a poetry collection)

The one clear thing I can say about Wednesday, the worst and most amazing day of my life: it started out beautifully (Rajesh Parameshwaran, I am an Executioner: Love Stories)

---noise background, My getting out or what?! Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity)

For besides beaver teeth, my/love had more pocks on/his face than a watermelon//has seeds (Jane Springer, Murder Ballad, a poetry collection)

It looks like Oz (Bill Clegg, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery)

Modern & Modernist

Teaching Modernist poetry, in the form of T.S. Eliot, can be a tricky task, especially if the classroom is dominated by undergraduates who take "Modernist" to mean "Modern," and then simply the meaning of "Modern" to mean anything that is connected with "moving forward" in a most jejune sense of the term--technology.

Reading a review of a collection of letters by Samuel Beckett this morning tells me that I need to get traction in my explanation of how "Modernist" poetry could be the opposite of what to be "Modern" in the early 21st century signifies to a bunch of people with thinking that is pretty straight-jacketed.

Beckett was an arch-Modernist. He wanted to shear expressions off linguistic excess. He is best known for sparseness of expression, and he felt that sparseness would enable him to hold up for the reader's viewing that which he is really trying to show.

Language can diffuse the picture of what one tries to show, or language can cloud our vision of the "nothingness" that Beckett felt ultimately lay behind language.

Here is a sample of that linguistic bareness: 

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Beckett is establishing his Modernist stance here: Trying to express/represent that we see almost everyday and hold in our memories--the scene of an oldster holding the hand of a child and moving.

The linguistic bareness upholds the motion. We see the two walk.

The Modernists like Beckett thought the middle class wanted too many words behind which they conveniently incubate in their complacency. The aim of the Modernists were to jolt, amaze and shock the middle-class out of their complacent thinking of what it means to be modern.

T.S. Eliot might have wanted to do the same: unhinge the bourgeoisie's settled ways of thinking. I'm not sure technology by itself can do that. Where communicating ideas are concerned, technology, I feel, can cast the already nonsensical verbiage that is spewed in the name of "expression" every day (especially on the Internet), in a further sheen of mental staidness. 

Modernism can help us understand where we confuse words and meanings.

The Wasteland

Tough to teach T.S. Eliot's "modernist" epic, The Wasteland, to a class of today's young men and women.

And I won't even pare the class down to its (the other) class and demographic.

Nonetheless, I have started the process.

Day 1: The title and expectations raised by the title. A dumpster, a landfill, a death, a sterility...

From the previous Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I borrow a line and would like to ask this to the learners as well: Do I dare disturb the universe?

Do I dare disturb the learner's "universe" by saying The Wasteland is indeed an anti-homage paid to post-war European culture. However, it is also produced during a time of acute personal distress for the poet.

Eliot wrote The Wasteland as a result of his terrible marriage with his terribly unsuitable wife Vivienne. It's his wasteland. He has externalized his interior garbage spewed by his nagging, bordering on the insane, Vivienne.

Nah, that would reduce the poet's gravitas and I'll be left with nothing to pad it with except biography.