Alfred Corn's weblog

Changing Coordinates

2010-01-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

This will be simply an announcement. I am changing the location and name of my blog. The new name is "Topics and Events," and it can be found at http://topicsevent.blogspot.com.

See you there.

Alfred Corn

Metaphor, Masks, Coding

2009-12-22T12:32:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows Yeats’s preference for “the quarrel with ourselves” as a source of poetry superior to the rhetoric made from “the quarrel with others.” I’ve said several times in print that I prefer poems that are straightforward to poems that wear a “mask.” So it occurs to me to quarrel with myself on this theme, to perform what Chairman Mao called “autocritique.” I doubt the result will be poetry, but it may bring some clarity to a subject poorly demarcated and seldom well thought out.

I’ve noticed that people are more likely to cooperate with a directive placed indirectly than directly. A direct recommendation or command is likely to be resisted. But if the suggestion is indirect, is coded, there’s a greater chance of a positive response. Hence the advertising industry’s “hidden persuaders.” Keats’s rejection of poems that “have designs on us” doesn’t reference specific titles, but we can all think of examples of texts that seem coercive, seductive, or designed to foster complicity. In truth, almost every poem has this aspect, but the degree varies. Rarely does the poet “spit in the eye” of readers and attempt to alienate them. And even this can sometimes be analyzed as an elaborate, reverse-psychology method of commanding assent. And make no mistake: reading isn’t a purely pacific process but instead a species of sparring or outflanking, an effort to neutralize the resistance that we all bring to any phenomenon, actual or broadcast or written, that we encounter. In view of all this, indirect suggestion is probably a cleverer way of securing reader endorsement than straightforwardness.

Any art, and certainly poetry, will include a ludic or game-playing dimension. Decipherment is fun and challenging in the same way that the Times crossword puzzle is. The poem that just lays all the cards on the table doesn’t offer us the Scrabble-Chess-Go component of a conscious art and won’t stimulate as much adrenaline as those games do.

Constructing “masks” and devising metaphors able to suggest a subtext requires ingenuity; and ingenuity deserves praise, even if it isn’t quite in the same league as magnanimity.

The reality is that many writers have things they urgently wish to convey and yet dare not out of fear that their concerns will be ridiculed or condemned. Indirection allows them to communicate their sense of a topic while providing an escape clause. If ridicule or condemnation is aimed at the subtext of a coded work, authors can always evade and say, “That’s not what I meant. You’re reading things into it.” Of course the disguise is less courageous than going for broke, but it isn’t realistic to rely on courage in human affairs, given that it is the least widespread of all admirable qualities.

In countries where censorship is the rule and imprisonment a possible consequence of publishing texts critical of the regime, masked or metaphoric treatments of political topics is the only safe way to take them up. Meanwhile, there are laws against libel everywhere, and coded communication allows for the expression of libelous sentiments, yet without the risk of prosecution.

Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth.” Why “least himself when he talks in his own person”? I suppose what Wilde means is that the public persona is tidied up for public consumption. If you meet strangers on the street, chances are they will behave in a friendly fashion. But if they get behind the wheel of a car, the relative anonymity thereby provided frees them to behave as aggressively and rudely as they like; and if they like being aggressive and rude so much, that must be who they really are. The true person hidden away is like the picture of Dorian Gray, not nearly so presentable as the man who shows up for tea in his morning coat. Using masks allows us to present ourselves as we actually are; it gives an unidealized portrait of our actual natures, something we generally have difficulty discovering, either to ourselves or to others. And if one value of art is to awaken us to truth, then masks are a convenient avenue to the truth about self. Considering this dark side, we could adapt Eliot’s comment and say, “After such self-knowledge, what forgiveness?” But without self-knowledge, we don’t know what needs forgiving. Better first search out the truth, and then see about the forgiveness problem afterwards.

Finally, for all that metaphoric texts point us toward a partly concealed meaning, they can never do so with 100% accuracy. There will always be room for interpretation and doubt. Readings of a truth told “slant” will vary from reader to reader. Hence the text takes on the aspect of an oracle, vague, suggestive, not fully circumscribed by semantic boundaries. The poem becomes a Rorschach test, its weird, tortoise-shell symmetries productive of multiple responses, according to each observer. Engaging in this process we become like those who, as described by Horatio, listened to and tried to interpret Ophelia’s disjunctive glossolalia (Hamlet, IV, 5): “They aim at it,/And botch the words up fit to their own thought.” And this vague, cloudlike, metamorphic kind of textual encounter is for many readers the esthetic experience, one that outweighs all others, even the apprehension of memorable lines like, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The Solstice and Holly

2009-12-20T13:09:00.000-08:00

We got about two feet of what St. Francis called “Brother Snow” last night, just in time to welcome the year's shortest day. When the world turns white everyone is reassured by any color remaining, which must explain why evergreens figure so prominently in homes and churches this time of year. My particular favorite is holly, partly because of the unusual form of the glossy leaves and partly because of the extra of its red berries. The plant was sacred to the Druids and associated with ceremonies for the winter solstice. The property of holly leaves to resist dying in cold weather puts it with other evergreens like ivy and the conifers that offer steadying remembrances in what French poets referred to as “la morte saison.”

Among Henry VIII’s poems is one about holly, focusing once again on its enduring green as a way to suggest the permanence of love in adversity.

Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy
Though winter blasts blow never so high,
Green groweth the holly.

Clearly the pre-eminent color of the Renaissance in England was green, and we can think of other examples besides the lovely song “My Lady Greensleeves” where it appears. That tune was adapted for a well-known carol, almost as familiar as “The Holly and the Ivy,” a text that sounds as though it could have been written by Henry as well, considering its references to the running deer and the crown. But the origins of this carol are uncertain. In any case, here is a good rendition of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7eHtDtZ7hs

At some point after I met Holly Stevens (in New Haven, around 1977, I believe), it occurred to me to wonder why her poet father had given her that name. Its similarity to “holy” is obviously one answer, but I also remember seeing the holly tree planted (shortly after Holly's birth) outside the house on Asylum Avenue in Hartford, where the Stevens family had lived. So the tree itself mattered to the poet, at least enough to give his daughter this name. One of his best-known poems is “The Snow Man,” an austere meditation giving us the concept of the “mind of winter,” the only sort of consciousness equipped with enough fortitude to contemplate the nothingness of bare, unrelieved reality and not be crushed by it. Other operations of consciousness (and other poems) could bring into the wintry mind the green of the imagination (in Stevens, imagination is most often associated with that color) and if green, why not an evergreen? So there is a figurative aspect to the name he gave to his only child, a name epitomizing his own hopes as a human being and as a poet.

As for Holly herself, she was a forthright, likable person, reserved but steady, and a respected member of the literary community in New Haven during the years when I lived there. I recall going out to her house in Guilford, not far from Long Island Sound. On the walls of her sitting room hung several of the 20th-century French paintings her father had collected (bought sight unseen, by transatlantic order placed with an agent), including the still life he took as the point of departure for his poem “Angels Surrounded by Paysans.” The painters were not famous names; the only one I recognized (and only just) was the Breton (later, Paris-based) artist Pierre Tal-Coat. Nevertheless, to see images that had fired Stevens’s desire to write was impressive and even moving.

Holly had had a period of rebellion from her parents, marrying a man they didn’t like and meanwhile working in a wartime factory—her reasons quite defensible, I’d say. But after Stevens’s death, she became the curator of his literary legacy, editing posthumous collections of his works and sorting out his archive, which she placed with the Huntington-Hartford Museum in San Marino, California. The Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale might have seemed a more fitting repository to most observers, but Stevens was a Harvard man, and in those years the Beinecke couldn’t compete with other institutions interested in acquiring poets’ papers. Years ago I gave a reading at the Huntington Museum and had the chance to see a few of the Stevens holdings. It’s easy to laugh at bardolatry, whether the bard in question is Shakespeare or other poets of unusual stature. Still, there’s no getting around the strange sensation stirred by seeing a holograph copy of a poem or letter written by a poet you revere. I felt as much when I saw one of Keats’s letters at the Beinecke. “This living hand…” as he says in a memorable poem.

If readers can absorb a huge shift of literary scale then I will mention the fact that about two decades ago I deposited my own archive at the Beinecke, the transfer negotiated by Patricia Willis, who may be known to you as the Marianne Moore scholar and editor of Moore's works. I no longer had room to store the two dozen boxes accumulated and began to be afraid that things might be lost in the frequent moves that characterized my life, then and continue to do so. The papers will be safer there than any place I can think of. A safe haven in New Haven’s ivied university. That’s my view of a library: as a protective greenhouse where the leaves and folios don’t wither, even if they’re not holly or ivy or spruce or pine. An alternative to the Snow Man's "nothing that is.”

A Letter from Sam Hamill

2009-12-17T16:37:00.000-08:00

In response to the appeal described in the previous blog entry, Sam Hamill has sent the following letter:

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Compañeros:

Gray and I have been very deeply moved by your generosity and expressions of solidarity.

It is welcome news that Gray has been pronounced cancer-free and that I am in good enough shape to postpone any further angioplasty or stent implants for at least a few months. In the spring, we will put our house on the market and hope that it sells and that we can find a smaller home in Anacortes, close by doctors, hospitals, and without the burden of a mortgage.

I am still altogether capable of giving readings and lectures, but my steadily declining hearing makes it all but impossible to teach conventional writing workshops. For public conversations I often need a “hearing-ear person.” I am presently planning a weekend in Chicago in April, and will return to Vietnam (with Joiner Center colleagues) in May, and to the Joiner Center (at UMass, Boston) in June. These odd gigs and paychecks are all we have to counter exploding medical and prescription expenses. We thought we could get by on our modest pension from Copper Canyon Press and Social Security, but ever-increasing medical costs combined with skyrocketing property taxes have been devastating.

Now that we have crossed this particularly rugged mountain, I hope to resuscitate a writing (and possibly translating and editing) life. I have all of you to thank for this possibility—otherwise, Gray and I would both be wrestling with checkbooks and credit plans and the saddles they place on our wilder (healthier) imaginations.

To realize that we have such friends in the world is at once humbling and exhilarating. Our gratitude is eternal.

Namaste,

Sam

Thanks to All Contributors

2009-12-10T20:53:00.000-08:00

I didn't post anything here about the appeal Marilyn Hacker and I worked on to raise some funds for Sam Hamill and Gray Foster after both had faced serious medical problems and expenses, but I'll mention it now. The onset of Sam's illness came a few months before he was eligible for Medicare, and Gray is still not eligible. Sam, who with Tree Swenson many years ago founded Copper Canyon Press, was publisher there until a few years ago. In addition to producing widely respected volumes of poetry, and translations from Chinese and Japanese, he has taught writing workshops intermittently, and we recall as well that he inaugurated the Poets Against the War initiative beginning in 2002, its website still up and running. Nowadays hearing impairment prevents him from continuing to teach, and clearly what he should be doing is his own work, health permitting.

Anyway, in mid-November Marilyn and I launched an appeal, and there has been a wonderful show of support for Sam and Gray. Two institutions came forward, there was a benefit reading in Cambridge, and 102 individual donors sent checks. Marilyn and I are grateful to them and can report that the result has made things much less precarious for Sam and Gray. Here is the list of donors.

The Poetry Foundation
The Fund for Poetry
Benefit reading organized by Dan Wuenschel in Cambridge, MA

Individual contributors

W. Yake and J. Barreca
Dan Wuenschel
Franz Wright
C.D. Wright
Eleanor Wilner
Doretta Wildes
Afaa Michael Weaver
Anna Warrock
Laurie Wagner-Buyer
Sophia Wadsworth
Tino Villanueva
Michelle Valladares
Valerie Trueblood
Ellen Tabios
Yerra Sugarman
Michael Spence
Larry Smith
Jordan Smith
Brenda Skinner
Grace Schulman
Willa Schneberg
Walter Schiff
Mark Schafer
Bruno Ruhland
Stanley Rubin
David Romtveldt
Bertha Rogers
Hilda Raz
Donna Pridmore
Robert Pinsky
Britt Peter
Lee A. Perron
Eunice and Vincent Panetta
Thomas O’Leary
Naomi Shihab Nye
Sheila Nickerson
Emily Tan Lin Neville and Bert Stern
Marilyn Nelson
James Moore
Ifeanyi Menkiti
Askold Melnyczuk
D.H. Melhem
Heather McHugh
Kathryn Maris
Stefi and Fred Marchant
Douglas Manson
Richard and Angela Mankiewicz
Elizabeth Macklin
Liza Lowitz
Adrian Louis
Jeanne Lohman
Frances Lindsay
Rachelle K. Lerner
David and Jan Lee
Dorianne Laux
Yehia Lababidi
Caroline Knox
Bill Knott
Kenneth Knabb
Judith Kitchen
Stephen Kessler
Nancy Kassell
Fady Joudah
Bonnie Jones
Donna Hollenberg
Bob Holman
Michael Hogan
Jane Hirschfield
James Henle
Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman
Joy Harjo
Ian Haight
Marilyn Hacker
Donald Gutierrez
David Groff
Samuel Green
Carol Gordon
Daniela Gioseffi
Celia Gilbert
Daniel Gerber
Harris Gardner
Geoffrey Gardner
Kim Garcia
John Adele Foley
John Fitzpatrick
Ruth Fainlight
Kevin Cutrer
Jerry Costanzo
Alfred Corn
Martha Collins
Yvette Christianse
Elizabeth Carter
Mary Frances Carney
Deborah Buchanan
Sarah Browning
Henry and Joan Braun
Linda Bierds
James Bertolino
Gerald and Denise Bergman
Margo Berdeshevsky
Judith Bebelaar
Jennifer Barber
David Barnhill
Bob Baldock

Because my administrative and typing skills aren't the best, there may be mistakes, and I would appreciate it if any were pointed out. In any case, it has been a lift in spirits to do this, and Marilyn and I thank you all.

Poetry, Aesthetic and Moral

2009-12-04T12:39:00.000-08:00

Though I went again to New York this month and again engaged in pursuits that might be interesting to report here, to vary the texture of the blog I think I will focus instead on an article by D.H Tracy in the current (December 2009) Poetry. In his essay, titled "The Moral and Aesthetic, Recently," Tracy is taking up the issue of aesthetics and ethical content in poetry, his point of departure, poems by Frederick Seidel and Robert Hass, but also citing poems by Adam Kirsch, Anne Winters, and one of mine titled "Coventry."

The ethical aspect of poetry, its role in shaping character, was considered a given in the classical period, but Tracy believes it didn't resurface in the Western tradition until Shaftesbury. I think it comes earlier, explicitly in Jonson, who spoke of "the impossibility of a man's being a good poet without having first been a good man." Nor can the ethical aims of 17th century religious poets like Donne, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Herbert be overlooked. But perhaps Tracy is referring to critics, not poets, when he makes this observation. (Incidentally, I've read articles by Tracy for several years now and find him one of the best of the younger critics, well read in the tradition, judicious, and in command of an elegant and elevated prose style.)

So then does poetry have an ethical dimension that is at one with its aesthetic nature? I see no reason why it can't. Begin by observing that "aesthetic" derives from Latin and Greek aisthesis, which simply means "sensation." An anesthetic is a chemical that deprives you of all sensation, especially pain. Yet an art that consists solely of pleasurable sensation is experienced as somehow lacking, at least, by most readers. "Oh, for a life of sensation rather than thoughts," Keats exclaimed in one of his letters. But he never attained to that, and we're glad he didn't. What he did attain was a poetry filled with sensations, but, in addition, thoughts a-plenty, so that he is immeasurably more than the figure Yeats imagined as a young man with his nose pressed against a sweetshop window.

By the late 19th century the battle lines were drawn on this question, with Arnold on one side claiming an ethical role for poetry, which he called "a criticism of life," and on the other, the Esthetic School, notably Pater, Wilde, and George Moore, who argued that art had no obligations to fulfill, no social function to perform, except to embody to perfection the canons of art itself. This view has been epitomized as "Ars gratia artis," a post-classical Latin tag coopted with enormous economic irony by MGM Pictures. Closely examined, though, the phrase "art for art's sake" has almost no meaning. It is quickly deconstructed, beginning with the notion that art is a conscious entity, separate from human subjects, a Platonic Idea that expects things to be done for its sake. Art is made for people, not for Art, whoever he might be; and people have many needs and expectations, including the desire that the import of experience be clarified so that human beings are given the insights and means to choose more vitally and effectively.

But a poetry that consists of a series of commandments hasn't generally won an audience of adherents. It is almost true that, given modern habits of self-assertion and antinomianism, bald injunctions demanding good behavior are likely to be met with anger and negative obedience. Hence the recommendation that we avoid "didactic" poetry, often phrased in reviews as a sneer at "preaching." We might also recall that a culture's sense of "good behavior" changes over time and that much of what might be praised as good behavior in 1859 would now be ridiculed or despised. I sense that even Marianne Moore doubted she'd got away with the line, "So he who strongly feels, behaves."

On the other hand, we believe Flannery O'Connor means it when she says that for her art is best when "the author's moral sense coincides with his aesthetic sense." What she doesn't tell us is how to manage this, I mean, apart from the implicit lesson of her fiction itself. One clue might be Willliams's "No ideas but in things," which can be revised for our context here as, "No moral insights detached from observation and sensation." Ethical inferences must be arrived at after considerable observation, the resulting emotions, and then reflection on them; if presented to us pre-cooked, we are likely not to accept ethical directives. All the more, considering that these are most likely going to cost us something, maybe our very lives. (Or the ethics we arrive at may, on the contrary, help us realize we've been wasting our lives in a pointless, destructive conformity to moral norms we don't actually believe in.) Anyway, we like to feel that the author didn't begin with a priori moralities, but arrived at them after undergoing a series of direct, concrete experiences, their significance, and significance for decision, emerging only gradually. "In dreams begin responsibilities," according to Rilke. If the poem is insufficiently perceived and dreamt, it might not lead us toward any sense of responsibility--indeed, may (if only temporarily) turn us against any sense of obligation at all.

As for the poem "Coventry," I'm not certain that it has any persuasive ethical power; I don't know how I would go about determining whether it did. But since Tracy's article appeared, I've had queries about it, especially among my Facebook friends, who are intrigued by the excerpt and interested to see the whole poem. Which, meanwhile, is found in a book (titled Autobiographies)now out of print. Given that I control the rights to it, I've decided to make the poem available--along with the (ethical) request that no one circulate it without asking permission. There is one more reason: the excerpt quoted by Tracy in has a couple of errors. These are minor, but of course for poets, "God is in the details," and we always insist that the text be printed as we wrote it. See below.

COVENTRY

Even if not sent there, some would go
just to visit a byword for banishment, or
nod and smile at Tudor cottages
verifying their age among highways
athrottle with the local Jaguar—
nine centuries ago the route of (do
they know for certain?) Godiva’s midday ride
through narrow, cobbled streets. Still there, and nude,
a statue on a civic pedestal,
she serves as patron for the recent mall.

St. Michael’s ruin has no plans to recover
from the blitzkrieg fires of 1940,
visibly content with its roof of sky,
a brownstone sheepfold with fence of ogives,
tracery drained of blood-red or river-
blue glass. A few steps north, in autumn sun,
the adjunct modernist cathedral proves
by inscription that Britten’s sharp baton
rode lightly above the War Requiem
as, borrowing the tenor of Peter Pears,

Wilfred Owen back from the fields of France
grafted his words onto the older hymn
under the eyes of a merciful giant.
The clash of arms turned music of the spheres
to counteract a deadly expedient
how many thousands now cannot denounce.
Black swallows rise and circle as bells chime
the congregants inside at Evensong,
as if war’d been a roughhewn cornerstone
in the edifice of Common Market peace.

Et lux perpetua luceat eis:
Owen, Britten, Pears, all three moved out
of earshot to that other Coventry,
attendants of the blessed lady, prompted
perhaps by music’s blinding insights. Is it
because an icon forfeits all privacy
that every bystander at last is tempted,
eye at keyhole or shutter?—this means you,
Peeping Tom, and I, and you, oh,
on fire to see the last thing we will ever see.

(1991)

New York Friends and Thom Gunn

2009-11-08T20:42:00.000-08:00

It’s the familiar paradox: when your days actually do bear retelling, i.e., when you’re out there doing things and seeing people, you don’t have time to write about them. I haven’t added to these pages because my two weeks in New York (plus a weekend in East Hampton) didn’t leave me a free hour. I got into town on October 15th, staying on the Upper West Side with Karen Clark and Jonathan Bernstein, who invited friends James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar to dinner that first night. James is spending 2009-2010 in New York, enrolled in the MFA program at NYU and Sandeep is doing post-doctoral research on the British modernist poet Hope Mirlees. After so many encounters in London, meeting them in New York added a new thread to the text of our friendship.

Next day Karen and I went to see the Blake exhibition at the Morgan Library, which might sound like an exercise in déja vu, after the Tate Britain. The difference is that the Tate’s prints are on permanent display and therefore have to be kept behind thick plate glass in semi-darkness. At the Morgan the prints were well lit and right there on the wall, allowing for up-close inspection. Given that many of the works are small, the pleasure of focusing on detail was magnificent. Also, quite a few items included were drawings, watercolors, or holograph mss. from the museum’s holdings, including the Job watercolors, which are among Blake’s most successful. There were a few works as well by Blake’s contemporaries or followers, the group that called themselves “the Ancients.” For example, Fuseli and Samuel Palmer. To be immersed for an hour in early English Romanticism is an experience not easily described or matched.

It was only a short walk from there to the CUNY Graduate Center, the plan being to attend a reading from Michael Montlack’s My Diva anthology, which includes an essay I wrote about Billie Holiday. Michael hadn’t known I was going to be in New York and already had a full slate of participants (Mark Doty, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Murray, Jason Schneiderman, and Richard Tayson); but, when I said I would attend, he asked me to read at least a short poem. The choice seemed obvious: “Billie’s Blues,” which includes some comments about my “diva,” arguably the greatest jazz singer of the 20th century. I’d never actually met Michael face to face, and the event also was an occasion to renew friendship with Wayne Koestenbaum, whom I hadn’t seen for nearly two years. I made appointments to meet both Michael and Wayne for the following week.

From there I took a cab to the New School to join Marilyn Hacker for the annual awards ceremony and dinner of the Academy of American Poets. Marilyn had flown in from Paris just to attend, as Chancellors of the Academy are generally expected to do. We had a few minutes to catch up before proceedings got underway. She’d received her first copy of her new book, titled The Names, most of whose poems I’ve read with enormous admiration as they were written and published. We found a seat down front in Tischman Auditorium, and, while people were milling around, I had a chance to speak to Jean Valentine (this year awarded the Wallace Stevens Prize), Frank Bidart, and Kay Ryan, whom I’d seen only once before, several years ago, when we were both participants in the West Chester writing conference. The ceremony went like clockwork, each award accounted for in an introduction, then followed by readings from the recipients. Afterward, drinks and snacks were served in the hall outside, and I spoke to several poet friends I hadn’t seen for a while, Marie Ponsot, Carl Phillips, Rita Dove, and David Baker, for example. It was a chance to exchange news—to me one of the main reasons for attending events like this. The reception was followed by dinner at the Café Loup, and Marilyn and I, by the luck of the draw, were seated at the same table as Tree Swenson, Director for the Academy and an extraordinarily intelligent and friendly person, whose work for the Academy deserves special commendation. After our dinner Marilyn, Marie and I took a cab uptown together and summed up what we’d seen and heard during the evening.

After my weekend in East Hampton with Walter Brown, one of my oldest and closest friends, I came back to New York and stayed in his loft in SoHo (described in blog entries for March 2008). The following week I devoted to revisiting favorite places around the city, seeing friends (Jaime Manrique, Michael Feingold, Elizabeth Macklin, Michael Montlack, James Byrne, Ben Downing, David Shapiro, Wayne Koestenbaum), and having a look at three special exhibitions at the Met Museum: Robert Frank’s photographs for The Americans, a ravishing assembly of Watteau paintings having to do with music and theatre, and a blockbuster show of American paintings billed as American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915. Many familiar pictures in the latter show, including Eakins’s homoerotic picture The Swimming Hole, which I first saw many years ago at the Amon Carter Museum in Texas. One Winslow Homer painting in the show I’ve often admired for its handling of color and chiaroscuro depicts African-Americans celebrating carnival; Homer is one of the few 19th century artists to depict African-Americans in non-stereotypical ways. And our greatest water-colorist.

I saw one more Met exhibition, in the company of David Shapiro and his wife Lindsay. In the Asian wing, it gathered works by the 18th c. Chinese painter Luo Ping, juxtaposing to them works by his mentor Jin Nong and others by his family members. Luo Ping belonged to the group known as the "Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou," and his images justify the designation. David knows a whale of a lot about classical Chinese art and gave me a running commentary about it as we strolled among the vitrines. He has a particular liking for the “scholar’s rocks,” bizarrely shaped but natural mineral formations used as objects for reflection in Chinese culture. But David’s conversational style is digressive, so he also spoke of music (he plays violin expertly) and friends like John Ashbery, Meyer Schapiro, Jasper Johns, and Kenneth Koch, for all of whom he provides a special perspective. When you have as much learning as David, it’s only natural that the abundance will spill over in conversation. We went for coffee afterward, whereupon David presented me with several of his lovely and, I guess, “eccentric” collages. Not sure what I’d done to deserve them, I was nevertheless touched, and pause here to look them over again.

I had been invited by a poet named Alex Dimitrov to attend a meeting of a group of young gay poets he formed and named "the Wilde Boys." It was held at the apartment of Tom Healy, whom I remembered from his days in the MFA program at Columbia. I was glad to see Tom and again and to hear that he had just published his first collection, titled What the Right Hand Knows. (Tom gave me a copy and now that I've read it I can recommend it as one of the most startling and original first books I've seen in a long time.) Among the guests were pals David Groff and Mark Bibbins, not seen for a couple of years and both prospering. It was also interesting to meet John Stahle, editor of the magazine Ganymede and a poet himself. The younger poets I didn't know but found them all bright and sophisticated, a whole new crop of talent that clearly will soon be publishing their first books. It made me wish there had been an equivalent group when I started out, but gay poetry in those years (excepting Duncan,Ginsberg, and Gunn) was mostly marginalized and unmistakably a career disadvantage. I'm glad the current generation doesn't have to confront the poorly concealed hostility we had to put up with back in the day.

On October 28th, I participated in an event celebrating the poetry of Thom Gunn, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. The coordinator of the event, Joshua Weiner, is the editor of a recently published collection of critical articles about Gunn, titled At the Barriers, where an essay of mine about Gunn and existentialism appears. All the program participants had in fact contributed to the book—Joshua Weiner, Wendy Lesser, Robert Pinsky, Tom Sleigh—with the exceptions of Elaine Equi and Robert Polito. I enjoyed talking with everyone before and after the program, when we all went to dinner (again, at the Café Loup, which seems to be the preferred venue this year). I had a long conversation with Alice Quinn, now the Director of the P.S.A., whom I first met when she was an editor at Knopf, an early architect of their celebrated poetry series. During the years when she was poetry editor for The New Yorker, she was also my colleague in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia. One achievement of hers from that time was to plan a program of poets from England, Ireland and Scotland, in collaboration with the magazine and the Writing Division. It brought poets over that I hadn’t known about beforehand, and I count the event as one of the factors that led to the decision to go and live in Lonfon. One of the poets invited was Thom Gunn. In fact, it was the last time I saw Thom. To conclude this blog, I will append the comments I made for the PSA program. The poems of Thom’s I read after presenting the comments below were “The Hug,” “The Vigil of Corpus Christi,” and “The Girls in the Next Room.”

*

Remembering Thom

The example of Pound, Eliot, Auden, Hughes, Plath, and Thom Gunn suggests that results are likely to be good when American poets go to live in Britain or British poets come to live in the United States. Thom Gunn has meant many things to me, and his expatriate courage is one of the reasons that during the last decade I’ve lived in London as much as I have. I say “courage” because of course home may decide to take offence when you go away, and you sometimes find that away’s welcome is mixed. It’s not a choice for the faint-hearted, and Thom was certainly not that.

I first met Thom in October or possibly November of 1982. At that time I was living, with J.D. McClatchy, at James Merrill’s apartment on East 72nd Street in New York. Thom and I had begun a little correspondence—letters on my side, postcards on his. Possibly you remember his poem “Interruption,” in which he says, “I manage my mere voice on postcards best.” When he wrote that he was planning to be in New York, I asked him to drop by for a drink. I knew what he looked like from book-jacket photographs, plus one drawing that depicted him in a tank top, a clothing choice that would be startling even now, twenty-seven years later. He struck me as handsome in a craggy, unadorned mode; he wore jeans, a leather jacket, and of course no tie.

I wouldn’t say he was so very warm during that first meeting, though certainly keen-witted. It might have had something to do with the fact that we were in Merrill’s apartment; they weren’t friends, though I think he had a qualified admiration for Merrill. It was a reserve that could plausibly be extended to anyone he perceived as being a follower of his very famous American contemporary. We exchanged comments about not much in particular that I can recall. He asked at one point where the toilet was, and I gestured toward a door off the next room. Although he closed the door, while he was there I could hear him whistle a little melody, not one I recognized, but spirited and quite in tune. And then he left.

Exchange of letters (on my side) and postcards (on his) continued. And then in Oct. of ’84, I had a reading date at Berkeley so I proposed meeting in San Francisco the day before. The suggestion was accepted. I’d always been a fan of San Francisco, ever since my first visit in the summer of ’69, in the aftermath of its years as epicenter of the “Counter-culture.” I took a bus from the place I was staying in the mission District, went along Haight Street past Ashbury and Fillmore, all the Victorian gingerbread painted in Flower-Power colors, liquidambar trees trimmed perfectly spherical along the sidewalks. And the signature fog hanging in the air. A turn up Cole Street, past Parnassus, Waller, and Alma to number 1216, where I rang the bell. Steps bounded down the stairs and Tom threw open the door. He was suntanned and offered a closed-mouth smile, with creases at the cheek, his black hair salted with white. His voice had an original timbre, breathier and higher in pitch than you might expect, and American-tinted British in accent.

He said we should hurry out to a restaurant directly before it closed. We took a five-minute walk to an unpretentious café with ferns levitating at the window, sat down, placed our orders, and gazed at each other. I noticed he wore a delicate gold earring and looked a little heavier than he’d been two years earlier; but I on the other hand had been working out regularly and was quite fit, as didn’t escape his sharply observant dark eye. Truth to tell, Thom and I were never altogether easy with each other, both of us a little intimidated, I think, though the reason for that is hard to state. Imagine a couple of tom cats circling each other, intrigued but wary.

After lunch we walked back to his place, entered, walked up a flight of stairs. A series of rooms opening on something like a central atrium. His partner Mike Kitay had assembled a collection of commercial graphics, metal signs and posters advertising soft drinks and whatnot. These were displayed along the walls instead of the usual cutting-edge paintings expected in poets’ digs. In the bedroom was a glass case filled with pop figurines—comic-strip characters and American folk heroes like, say, Paul Bunyan or Billy the Kid. We sat and talked for a while, but the previously mentioned wariness prevented conversation from getting confessional, though it was cordial enough. Thom said he’d be in New York the following month and we promised to meet.

But in fact we didn’t. I don’t recall any further meetings except for a public encounter when Thom came to participate in a celebration of British, Irish, and Scottish poetry that The New Yorker co-sponsored in the late 1990s with the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, where I was teaching.

If I’d lived in San Francisco, I think we’d have been close. But I didn’t and that was that. I reviewed one of Thom’s books in the years following and suspect he didn't much like it, never mind that the comments were favorable. I can imagine him feeling I was too young and unseasoned, that I hadn’t yet earned the right to praise him; which was plausible enough. Meanwhile, the year he won the Brandeis Poetry Prize, he was unable to attend the ceremony in Boston, and I was asked to accept the award for him. I recall sending him a letter about the event, concluding with a tercet in iambic dimeter that went this way: “Isn’t it fun,/Being a pun/For Thompson Gunn?”

I had a few more postcards from him and faithfully read whatever he published, even the blurbs he gave younger poets, some of which provoked a puzzled “What?” from me. I speculate that Thom was a soft touch where his friends or even acquaintances were concerned. He also gave me a comment for my book Autobiographies, one sure to have been equally puzzling to my fellow blurbees. Thom had unpredictable taste, one that could make room for Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Mina Loy, and Robert Duncan. I like it that he was unpredictable, hard to pin down. He had the courage of his convictions and his convictions could change. I wish, how I wish, he were here now.

A Backward Glance to Summer

2009-09-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

During the latter part of my stay in Newcastle, things began to pick up speed. I took a trip down to London to see Mimi Khalvati, with whom I had lunch near her place in Stoke Newington. That same week, I spent some time with James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar, too, in fact, they put together a sort of joint birthday dinner for us, with guests Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon, plus Nina Zivancevic over from Paris with her son Vladimir. It was something of a going-away party since James and Sandeep’s plans were to New York in early September to live for a couple of years, Sandeep pursuing her postgraduate research and James enrolling in NYU’s MFA program.

Back in Newcastle I began to get to know poets living there or nearby. Sean O’Brien (one of the most praised poets now publishing in the U.K.) and his partner the literary agent Gerry Wardle were especially kind to me. Sean has won all the major British poetry prizes, but surprised everyone this year by bringing out his first novel, titled The Afterlife, which I saw favorably reviewed in several papers. It’s a dark fable (also, bitingly funny), the story of several aspiring Cambridge poets in the 1970s, whose lives epitomize the confusion and anomie of that decade. I asked Sean if he planned to write a second novel, and he assures me that he does. So much for the notion that poets can’t write fiction--Hardy, Lawrence, Blaise Cendrars, James Dickey, and Margaret Atwood all cases in point, and I might as well let Alfred Corn be the caboose for this distinbguished train.

Sean and Gerry took me on an excursion to the Northumbrian coast one bright early-August morning, an unforgettable day that managed to crowd in many sights, including a visit to Ashington’s coal-mining museum, where, among other things, I was shown paintings of the “Ashington School.” They were a group of coal miners (or “pit men”) who in the 1930s had been given art instruction by a progressive painter named Lyon, who came up from London to the industrial sector of Northumbria. His pupils mounted an exhibition to some acclaim and began to be collected, not really incredible if you recall the progressive politics that characterized British cultural life in the Thirties. Besides, the paintings have a lot of originality and appeal. More about the painters follows farther on.

From Ashington we drove to the coast, stopping in the pretty town of Alnmouth for lunch. On the sand beach there you see Farne Island with its lighthouse and a beautiful expanse of light blue sea. When we continued on the road we saw Alnwick Castle (used for the Harry Potter films), Bamburgh Castle, ancient seat of the Percys (vide Hotspur in Henry IV), and finally the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, the cradle of Celtic Christianity in Northern England. I’m not going to attempt in a blog to register the full impact that seeing these things made.

We turned inland and drove through the moors north of Newcastle to get me back to my place, where we toasted our day with a drink from my balcony thirteen floors above the Tyne. I saw Sean and Gerry once more for lunch before leaving Newcastle, and we plan to meet again when I return.

Through an email introduction made by Anne-Marie Fyfe, I also met the poet Colette Bryce, whose refreshing recent book Self-Portrait in the Dark I’d been reading. Colette came over for a drink, bringing with her the poet Paul Batchelor, who besides publishing well-received volumes of poems wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the Northumberland poet Barry McSweeney. I’d actually met Paul four years earlier, when he came to a reading I gave for the Proudwords Festival in Newcastle. But it was a pleasure to see him again, now fully fledged as a poet.

I made a daytrip to Whitby, which I’d never visited, to see Kennedy Fraser, an old New York friend (English by birth) who divides her time between New York and this small seacoast town that has a special history. Begin with the fact that the earliest surviving poem in Anglo-Saxon was written there by the shepherd Caedmon and that St. Hilda, the abbess of Whitby, flourished during the same period. We had good weather and made a tour of some of the sites, including the ruined abbey, the old church, and the graveyard made famous by the opening chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But the awful traffic and swarms of tourists firmed up a recent resolve never to visit such places except in the off season.

Through James Byrne, I was put in touch with Toby Martinez de las Rivas, a young poet who lives in Gateshead with his Italian wife and child. Toby’s grandfather, a Basque from Bilbao, came to England during the Spanish Civil War and married and Englishwoman. Though he grew up in southern England, Toby is now a proud Northerner, which leads me to the reflection that nearly everyone who lives in the North of England is or becomes a staunch partisan of the region. Apart from its gorgeous landscapes and architecture, a long rich history that includes Roman garrisons and Hadrian’s Wall, constant invasions from Northmen and Scots, Celtic monks and saints (e.g. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede), the interest of shipbuilding and coal-mining industries, and many resident poets, how can local pride be explained? But no further explanation than those facts is really needed. While there, I felt the strong magnetism of Northumbria and certainly plan to stay there again. Anyway, Toby has yet to publish a book, but he was chosen to number among the new poets whose chapbooks have ben published by Faber, and he has already won prizes.

In mid-August I met kind and charming Valerie Laws, poet and playwright also concerned with the matter of the North. We made a day trip out to Hadrian’s Wall and to the excavated Roman settlement Vindolanda, which Hadrian is believed to have visited shortly before the wall project was begun. Reconstructed Roman dwellings have been added to the site, including a little temple dedicated to the nymphs of the water source that ran through Vindolanda. Even without the archeological attractions, the site would have visitors, beautiful as it is. Its rolling fields offer vistas of nearby mountains, the slopes on the day we visited pale purple with heather.

I had an arrivederci final dinner with Paul Attinello (musicologist and writer who teaches at the U. of Newcastle) and then went down to London the first week in September, where I stayed in East Dulwich with my friend Paddy Navin, the actress. Paddy called up other actor friends and we had a reading of the play about Robert Lowell (in 1949) that I drafted during the summer. A revealing experience to hear your text performed by other voices. I hope to set up another such reading when I go to New York in October. Paddy and I saw the NT production of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, a play based on the story of the Ashington coal miners described above. Some topnotch performances, especially from Christopher Connel, who played the miner/painter Kilbourn. I also saw the NT’s Mother Courage in a new translation by Tony Kushner. Fiona Shaw gave a star turn in the title role, a heroic two-and-a-half-hour embodiment of Brecht’s excruciating narrative, under Deborah Warner’s direction. It will sound as though I’m a theatre addict (in fact, I may be), but I also saw the ENO production of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre in a startling realization by the Barcelona troupe La Fura dels Baus, one feature of which was an enormous effigy of a crouching woman out of whose body characters emerged at different points during the narrative. Also attending were Adam Mars-Jones and Keith King, the three of us joining up to discuss what we’d seen after and to catch up on our respective past months.

Other events: I atended the launch of James Byrne's and Clare Pollard's new Bloodaxe anthology, Voice Recognition, a gatheirng of poets who haven't yet published a book. It was held at King's Place and featured twelve of the anthologized poets, including Toby Martinez de las Rivas, who apart from reading beautifully made the startling decision to dedicate one of his poems to me. The book has all the earmarks of success and performs its prospecting and introductory function very well.

I'd been invited by Katy Evans-Bush to participate in her reading series, held at a cafe in Stoke Newington. Three other American-born poets read, including Joseph Harrison, in London on a Guggenheim. We had never met before nor did I know about Waywiser Press, for which he is the American editor. But now I do.

Mimi Khalvati attended the reading, and a few days later she and I had a laughter-filled evening over dinner at a little Turkish restaurant in Spitalfields, preceded by a stroll around that out-of-the-way old neighborhood. I first got to know the neighborhood more than twenty years ago when an American friend, a longtime resident in London named Dennis Seaver, introduced me to it. (Dennis has since died, I’m very sorry to say.) He owned a house on Folgate Street, an old dwelling that he had turned into “living theatre,” a sort of architectural narrative involving the fortunes of an old Huguenot family, specialists in silk weaving, that had come to London shortly after the Edict of Nantes (which exiled Protestants from France). Each floor of his house dealt with a different generation of the family he had invented. Not absolutely accurate from the standpoint of history, it was even so an enthralling experience, casting a spell not easily forgotten, as you see. Mimi and I also walked up to Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, which figures in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, a strange historical fantasy I read back in the 80s, when Spitalfields had just begun to attract artist gentrifiers. The old Market is now lined with boutiques, Christ Church restored and cleaned, and the whole ambiance is more upscale than it was twenty years ago.

On my last day in London I was to meet George Szirtes for a drink but for some reason my phone failed to deliver the confirming message (a chronic problem all during the last few days of my stay), so we didn’t manage our rendezvous after all; it will have to be postponed till next spring. But Paddy and I went out for a sumptuous Indian dinner at a place nearby, and the London stay came to an end.

I’m in Rhode Island for a few weeks and, in fact, a few days after arrival gave a reading on the 24th at the University of Rhode Island, where my friend the poet Peter Covino teaches. In the audience were Sandeep Parmar and James Byrne, up from New York, where, as mentioned above, they will be living this year. Also, Jason Roush (see the blog for April 12) came down from Boston, a convenient occasion for a reunion after my four months away. The reading done and books signed, we all went out to dinner, joined by Peter’s partner Tim, Mary Cappello and her partner Jan Walton (both on the faculty at URI). A certain flush of excitement stirred up during the reading carried over into our dinner, which takes its special place among memories of other high-spirited gatherings organized around the bardic vocation, an unquenchable Olympian flame to which poetry’s adepts bring so much enthusiasm and dedication.

Teaching Writing

2009-07-11T04:52:00.000-07:00

My summer is going well. I’ve had two visitors. First, James Byrne came up for a couple of days and then a week later, Mimi Khalvati. Because neither had ever been to Newcastle, I played one of my favorite roles, as tour guide. Things seen and done included a look at the temporary exhibition at the Baltic Museum for Contemporary Art showing works by artists who could be construed as having been influenced by Darwin—a timely topic. Also, a visit to the permanent collection of the Laing Art Gallery in the city center, which includes canvases by Gauguin and John Martin, the Blakean painter of sublime subjects that might be said to involve Wordsworth’s “beauty and terror.” We also ferreted out medieval remnants of the old city, for example, the Castle Keep, with its four crenellated towers and the Black Gate, which sounds suitably Gothic, though the name probably comes from a Mr. Black who once lived there. James Byrne particularly wanted to see the Morden Tower (built into the city wall in the western part of town) because of its association with contemporary poetry. Bunting first read Briggflatts there and later readers included Creeley and Ginsberg. Newcastle’s Chinatown is close by, perhaps because the 13th-century ramparts reminded Chinese immigrants of their own Great Wall. Another echo of that would also be Hadrian’s Wall, which begins not far west of Newcastle, a remnant from the Roman occupation of Britain that embodies some of the mystique of ancient parapets. During my first visit to Newcastle in 2005, I went out to Hadrian’s Wall and began shortly after working on a poem titled “Hadrian,” which appeared here in PN Review and can be found in their online archive, if you’re a subscriber. It’s an impressive structure along some stretches and goes west all the way to Carlisle.

New subject: Because of a recently published and widely reviewed book by Mark McGurl titled The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of the Creative Writing School, the topic of creative writing schools is being discussed again, though I’m not sure the attack and defense positions have made any points not familiar to us already. McGurl restricts his discussion to fiction, leaving aside poetry and non-fiction; and he comes down in favor of the phenomenon by citing a number of successful graduates of MFA programs, including Flannery O’Connor. I think we can safely say that O’Connor is a permanent figure in American literature, but it’s too soon to guarantee that some of the more recent successes McGurl mentions prove his point. They may or may not have lasting value. Nor do we have any testimony from these successes (to my knowledge), confirming that they regarded their courses as a help.

I only took one creative writing course, and that was in short story when I was an undergraduate at Emory. The teacher was H.E. Francis, who published several collections of stories and edited a little magazine called Poem, which I believe is still going, though I haven’t checked. I never had a poetry-writing class, and I’m not sure that I had even heard of the Iowa School back in the 1960s, or, a bit later, the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, founded by Stanley Kunitz. And since I hadn’t heard of them, it never occurred to me to apply to them. So I will never know if such a program would have helped me or not. My substitute was the freely offered comment that friends made, beginning with Edmund White, whom I met in 1966 before he had published fiction. And then Richard Howard and David Kalstone. And then James Merrill and John Hollander. I don’t think I properly appreciated at the time what an enormous service was being done, given that no payment was involved. But now I do. I’ve taught poetry writing classes off and on since 1977 (but only one fiction-writing class). This was only occasionally full-time employment, I was never tenured faculty; which may explain why I didn’t suffer from burnout.

Flannery O’Connor, when asked whether she thought creative writing courses discouraged young writers answered, “Not enough of them!” So one argument against such programs is that they annually unleash hundreds of merely competent writers onto the marketplace, flooding it, and making the task of sorting out the topnotch from the middling much harder. It also gives magazine editors a lot more work, since all these new writers constantly submit (and submit the same work to multiple publications simultaneously). I really don’t think it is humanly possible for editors to read huge stacks of unsolicited mss. with anything like close attention. That is a problem. I would estimate that the beginning writer who has no literary contacts and hopes to be discovered by sending in unsolicited work to a magazine has practically zero chance of success. So, apart from the course content, one value writing programs can have is to serve as a first screening: the instructors who find good students can then recommend them to editors or other professional associates. Of course job descriptions don’t list this task as a professional duty, yet I think most teachers undertake it voluntarily.

But what about the actual course instruction? Is it really helpful? Harmful? There’s no way to avoid the banal answer: some students are helped and others are harmed, depending on individual temperament of the student and the quality of the teaching. (I’ve already written here a little about teaching creative writing and the students I’ve had. See the blog for February 23, 2008.) Certainly there are harmful teaching styles, for example, the teacher who wipes the floor with student work, the critical assessment amounting to nothing more than a sneering dismissal. Nearly as bad is the teacher who smilingly accepts all entries with “That’s just wonderful, keep writing.” It wins popularity for the teacher, but is valueless as instruction.

In my opinion the teacher who tries to coerce students into writing exactly the way she or he does is harmful, particularly if she or he plays favorites, rewarding the close imitators with lots of praise, high marks, and out-of-class social interaction from which the non-imitator is excluded. (And of course if social interaction turns into a sexual relationship or even the offer of one, that is harmful, indeed, unethical.) I’m aware that it isn’t possible for a writer actively engaged in developing an oeuvre and winning an audience for it to regard all approaches to literary composition with equal favor. But the teacher should not insist on overriding an approach that she or he regards as substandard, beyond pointing out its disadvantages and acquainting the student with alternatives. Once that has been done, to demand conformity with the teacher’s personal style is coercion, not fine arts instruction. The arts are not like math and science; no proofs are available. We have a few guidelines, but the rest is an interpretation of experience, it is taste and educated guesswork. On the other hand, students ought to familiarize themselves with the teacher’s writing before enrolling. If it is clear there are no shared aesthetic perspectives at all, then working together will not be easy and possibly not very helpful.

I question the value of writing programs that consist entirely of workshops. Some of the courses should involve reading from contemporary poetry, in more than one language tradition, and of course poetry from earlier periods. At Columbia, I taught many literature courses, the MFA equivalent of “Physics for Poets.” That is, students were not required to write MLA-style essays, but instead to see what plunder they could make off with when reading the assigned texts. Usually no more than one or two informal papers were required per term, just as a way to see what class members were getting from their reading, and what sort of critical skills they were developing. Needless to say the professor in question also learned a lot in the process. I won’t say workshops never taught me anything, they did; but certainly I learned more from the literature courses I taught. Continuing my own education wasn't of course the basis for my salary, only a fringe benefit. Primarily, these courses were the means of bringing to students’ attention artistic resources and authors they were unaware of.

In the workshop format, the teacher can convey to students what sort of audience expectations greet new work published in our era, and, clearly, these expectations differ from what they were a century ago or even fifty years ago. This might sound too obvious to mention; but, occasionally, I got students who hadn’t read anything written after, say, 1925, and wrote accordingly. The sense of audience expectations is conveyed by the instructor, but also by fellow students when the workshop format is used. And there are normally some differences in the instructor’s sense of what is valuable and the other class members’. Fairly often a student will rise up in indignation and say, “I don’t care what audience expectations are, I already know how I want to write!” Which is fine but leaves unanswered the question of why a genius would ever enroll in a course of instruction to begin with. Though not in every case, usually the instructor’s preferences are more conservative than the students’. He or she has probably read quite a lot more than the class members, and long ago worked through the excesses associated with juvenilia. Just as there are some students who haven’t read anything published after 1925, there are others who have read nothing (slight exaggeration) published earlier than two years ago, a disadvantage that cries out to be repaired.

Given that universities have for a long time now offered courses in visual art and in music composition, without anyone’s objecting, it’s hard to understand why some writers and critics anathematize writing courses. Is there really any intrinsic difference in the nature of the creative process in art, music, and literature? Obviously, you can’t teach—what to call it?—inspiration, but you can equip aspiring writers with basic compositional skills (including prosody), expand or refine their sense of what a subject is, and perhaps develop critical faculties, so that students can rush to the circular file when necessary.

Of course employing notable writers as teachers is a left-handed way for universities to serve as patrons for contemporary literature. Yet I doubt that motive is foremost in the decision to set up writing programs, which, to university administrators, are generally regarded as nothing more (or less) than cash cows. The idea that poets might gain a living by teaching poetry was first proposed, I believe, by Leopardi, in his Zibaldone (or notebook). He imagined an Academy where aspiring poets came to consult acknowledged masters concerning their mss. and paid for the opinions offered. But the project wasn’t realized till more than a century later. Well, then, does teaching help the writer-teachers? It helps them not to starve, which, given the current national indisposition to support literary artists with a regular stipend (as is done, for example, in the Netherlands), is a real value. But teaching, especially full-time teaching, may harm writers, gobbling up their time. Still worse, it may actually overwhelm them with boredom and disgust for the whole process of literary composition, whose results can come to seem like an industrial product, not the pure elixir drawn from the fountain of life that first drew them to writing.

As said before, I only rarely taught full-time and didn’t suffer burnout. My sense is that teaching, apart from paying the rent, improved me as a writer. I learned from the literature courses I taught, but also from my students as well, who sometimes opened new avenues for me I might not otherwise have bothered to explore. On the other hand, as tuition costs began to skyrocket, I began to worry that it was a serious imposition on students to crush them under the heavy debt of student loans incurred for the MFA degree, which is null as a credit toward employment unless also accompanied by solid publications. Obviously, only a few of the students were going to become full-fledged writers, with a long list of publications and steady income. I did notice that some got places in arts administration or arts funding, or found posts as editors of magazines. (Among former students who are now editors, I can name Ben Downing, Gabriel Fried, Timothy Donnelly, Susan Schultz, Ravi Shankar, and David Yezzi.) On the most general level, I don’t question that writing courses help class members be better readers, and I wish that more people realized the value thereof. Being the chief isn't the only worthwhile goal in life: being a member of the tribe is a noble and honorable estate. It also seems likely that most MFA candidates will acquire the habit of reading new works of imaginative literature as these appear, a solid cultural value. (It would be interesting to know what percentage of the readership for contemporary literature is made up of former writing students.) But the tuition costs and resulting debts began to climb to terrifying levels, at least in some universities. So conscience was eased when I gave up regular teaching. I do occasional workshops, where the tuition isn’t stratospherically high, and that satisfies my wish to work at the classroom context. Sometimes people seem shocked when I say that all I do is write. But writing is (and in truth, always was) a full-time occupation.

London to Newcastle

2009-06-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

Before leaving London the first week in June, I crowded in lots of events—dinner at Adam Mars-Jones’ in Herne Hill with his partner Keith King; attending the launch of Cahal Dallatt’s excellent new book The Year of Not Dancing at the Troubadour Café, a program where other poets, including the gifted newcomer Maura Dooley, read; coffee with Sandeep Parmar, while James Byrne was in Belgrade receiving a poetry prize; spending an afternoon strolling around Hampstead with Mimi Khalvati; and having coffee with Anne-Marie Fyfe in the Embankment Gardens.

Also, I paid my invariable visit to the Tate Modern, lingering in the “Poetry and Surrealism” galleries; saw one art exhibition, the Kuniyoshi prints being shown at the Royal Academy, and two plays at the National Theatre. The first was Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, at the Olivier, with Nonso Anozie as Elesin, the “horseman of the king,” and Claire Benedict as Iyaloja, the “mother of the market,” and Giles Terera as the Praise Singer. The director Rufus Norris had the inspiration to cast all the roles, even the British colonials, with black actors, the latter roles played in “whiteface.” Which could suggest that underneath the externals, we are all Africans, an idea well supported if you consider the origin of the species Homo sapiens is African. Anyway, it was a vigorous evening, with ample, Brechtian crowd scenes in the market, singing, drumming, dancing, and satiric upbraiding of fools. To say it was an indictment of colonialism is correct but doesn’t sum up the various psychological forces involved. It is a mysterious work and I’d like to see it again.

The second play was Ted Hughes’s version of Racine's Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren, with Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus and Margaret Tyzack as Oenone. The translation seemed good, the only problem being that I have quite a few of the French lines in my head, and could hear them when Hughes’s English equivalents were spoken, which became the source of a dissonance probably not too many in the audience had to deal with. I’d say most of the performances were good (and this was the first preview), though tending to go over the top. Mirren may have been away from the stage too long to feel altogether comfortable there, especially in something so grand as Phèdre. I liked Dominic Cooper, partly because some of his working class flavor infiltrated the performance, and partly because he has an angry intensity that he is able to draw on when apt for the lines. Of course the audience laughed at several points, which is inevitable for classical tragedy in our ironic era. But Nicholas Hytner probably shouldn’t have had Hippolytus vomit into a fountain basin on the stage-left wall after hearing Phèdre’s avowal of love. This provoked the loudest laughter of the evening. On the other hand, when she is giving us a portrait of her despair, Mirren smiles a lot, which is quite effective, marking out as it does that strange no-man’s-land between tragedy and comedy that we all know only too well. The production is also sited in an in-between time-space continuum, not archaic Greek nor yet modern but a mixture of the two. The same for the characters’ names, some of which keep their French form, others adopting the familiar anglicizations of classical names.

Departure: I came to Newcastle (strictly speaking, one should add the suffix “upon Tyne” to the name) on the fifth of this month settling in a short-term rental I found only at the last minute. I’m on the 13th floor of a high-rise building, next to the river and directly across from the Baltic Museum of Contemporary Art on the south bank of the Tyne, in the borough of Gateshead. The Museum is the result of a makeover of a flour mill built there in the 1950s and can be compared to the Tate Modern, though it only hosts temporary exhibitions. The current one has to do with the influence of Darwin on contemporary art, which is timely, given his bicentenary. Another spectacular feature of this part of town is the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, designed by Christopher Wilkinson and influenced by Calatrava’s harp-like creations. A huge parabolic arc connected to a pedestrian walkway by eighteen cables, it has an unusual feature: it can be tilted back so the walkway is lifted while tall ships pass under. The hoist occurs every day at noon, and sometimes twice. I watched it on Sunday and found the spectacle impressive. Across the river are other postmodern buildings, and, all in all, the quays of the city make a handsome, welcoming public space. Also on the Gateshead side is the ultramodern Sage Gateshead concert hall, designed by Norman Foster, a long, rounded, flowing structure in reflective glass, containing three separate performance halls. This week the Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Thomas Zehetmair, has been giving a series of four performances of 20th-century music. I’ve attended two extraordinary programs so far, the first featuring Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, and the second, Stravinsky, Messiaen, John Cage, and Stockhausen. The Cage work was his notorious 4’33, which asks the performer to sit at a piano without playing anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I’d never heard (seen) it done, so I have no way of commenting on the relative excellence or inferiority of this rendition. Certainly it’s not true to say the point of the work is silence because after about ten seconds the spectators begin making various noises. This time there were coughs, nose-blowings, barely suppressed giggles, and whatnot. You might think the audience would have responded to programmed silence with “the sound of one hand clapping,” but, no, there was a real explosion of applause, as though to compensate for the unbearable absence of audio that preceded it. In the modern era, only Quakers and Buddhists welcome silence. For nearly all others, it is experienced as a deathlike void and must be filled. So I must be Quaker or Buddhist.

The city center, sometimes called Grainger Town, features the gorgeous Grey Street, lined with wonderfully varied neoclassical buildings as it mounts and curves up to Eldon Square, where a monument to Charles, Earl Grey, dominates. Yes, this is the Prime Minister for whom the popular bergamot-flavored tea was named. His statue stands atop a very tall fluted classical column, rather like Nelson's in Trafalgar Square. For reasons unknown to me, Newcastle didn’t much follow the vogue for Neo-Gothic architecture in the Victorian period. Instead, you get 19th-century neoclassical style, which is rather rare until the fin de siècle when many Beaux Arts masterpieces were constructed in Paris and New York.

But there are many medieval architectural survivals in Newcastle, including remains of the old city wall and the eponymous castle, first built in wood by William the Conqueror’s son and then later rebuilt in stone. In the Morden Tower part of this structure, Basil Bunting, a proud native Northumbrian, first read to the small public gathered there in 1965 his long poem Briggflatts. I was first introduced to Bunting’s poem by Jonathan Williams, who appears in this blog for March 2008, when I spoke of him on the occasion of his death. Jonathan was Bunting’s publisher in America. When I came to visit Jonathan at his summer home in the dales of Cumbria thirty years ago, he drove us up to see the Quaker meeting house at Brigflatts (that is the correct spelling, though not Bunting's). We didn’t push on to Newcastle, and I didn’t then know Briggflatts had debuted there. In 1966 it appeared in Poetry (Chicago) and launched Bunting’s reputation as a modern master.

Partly because the poem mentions the semi-legendary warrior king Eric Bloodaxe, one of the U.K.’s most important poetry publishers, located in Newcastle, took his epithet for their name. (Non-U.K. readers may or may not be familiar with Bloodaxe Press, which has a large and important number of poets in its catalogue.) Newcastle University, too, has in recent years marked out a place for itself on the poetry map by inviting leading poets like Sean O’Brien and W.N. Herbert to join their faculty. So no one should fear I will be a fish out of water up here, far from London and its cultural abundance. The truth is, I wanted to get to know the North a little better, and the process is well underway.

I have one friend in Newcastle, Paul Attinello, an American who teaches in the Musicology department at the U. of N. I mentioned staying with him here back in December, which is when I conceived the plan of coming to Northumbria for the summer. We’ve had a pleasant reunion, attending the concerts together, and I expect to see him many times during my stay, which is now begun and will continue until early September. And several London friends have promised to come up for a visit as well. Maenwhile, I've begun drafting some new work.

Reviews and Objectivity

2009-05-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

The book review seems to be the topic of the moment, maybe because online discussion of new books has partly supplanted reviewing in the print media. Tonight in New York the National Book Critics Circle has planned a roundtable discussion of the topic. A young poet named Jason Guriel prefaced a recent review (in Poetry) of three books with a justification of writing negative reviews and received a long letter in response to it further examining the question of negative reviews. This became the subject of a long exchange of comments on Poetry’s “Harriet” blog. The debate was then picked up by an online magazine called Mayday, which invited guest comment on the topic; their online forum was in turn linked by the blog of Magma magazine here in the U.K. So clearly it’s a subject that excites enormous interest, no doubt because book reviews can affect the careers of both reviewer and reviewee; and we live in an era where career is everything. We might wish that the practice of the art of poetry itself was the main attraction for anyone drawn to it, but, considering the public rewards of being a successful poet nowadays (high-paying teaching posts, prizes in excess of $100-thousand, lucrative reading fees) that wish is clearly quixotic. The following comments are informal, composed at random, and necessarily incomplete.

The conventional wisdom about reviews in the fine arts is that the worst review is no review. To gauge the value of a review, get out the tape measure and see how many inches of column it occupies. It doesn’t matter what is said. A pan can interest readers just as much as a puff. The author’s name recognition increases, and that is all that matters in terms of material success.

But surely the conventional wisdom is too simple. A rave review in The Sunday Times Book Review or Poetry can lead to copycat raves elsewhere and then to the awarding of a prize. There is a high correspondence between prize-winning and favorable reviews in the Times and the New York Review of Books. If the reviewer is a person with great prestige, like Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom, a review can form the basis for lifelong career prominence.

Fairness and objectivity are the stated goals of review editors, leading to questions like “Do you know the author?” (always asked at the Times) and “Has the author ever reviewed a book of yours?” This is admirable but doomed. Almost everyone in the poetry world knows, with varying degrees of closeness, everyone else. The insistence on impartiality also ignores literary history, which gives us Coleridge’s ecstatic reviews of Wordsworth as well as his qualified praise of the same; or Jarrell’s rave about his best friend Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle or Bishop’s (also a close friend) North & South; and the list goes on (add your favorite examples). One of mine: When Chester Kallman’s first collection of poems appeared, W.H. Auden, his partner of thirty years prefaced a highly favorable review with these words (which I'm robably not remembering exactly): “The fact that I have been in a close association with this author for three decades shouldn’t prevent me from doing a little log-rolling.” Honest? Yes. Objective? No.

Putting aside the question of possible damage done to the career of someone attacked in a review, Auden said we shouldn’t write negative reviews because it was bad for one’s character. I can see what he means. Because it is so easy to find fault, we can lull ourselves into feelings of superiority over not only the poor scribbler we’re mopping the floor with but also humanity at large. We can become absurdly vain about our ability to find funny one-liners that skewer a poem or its author. In fact, we can become so entertaining (almost everyone loves satire) that we get more and more assignments in ever more prominent forums, writing reviews that are much sought out for their satiric readability, not for their ability to clarify aesthetic goals of the authors in question. We can build a whole career on cleverly phrased pans, but if we are poet-critics our poetry books probably won’t meet with the same success. Other reviewers will avoid writing about them for fear of reprisal. Since prize committees are composed of poets and quite possibly poets whose work the savage reviewer has trounced, the latter won’t win prizes. So it’s easy to imagine the case of a young poet who started out with the high ideal of doing something comparable to Keats or Geoffrey Hill and then, after a decade of reviewing dabbled in only as a sideline, ending up as a celebrated reviewer-satirist; but meanwhile never discussed as a poet and largely unread as one. So perhaps it’s a paradoxical kind of success.

To return to objectivity, it can only exist in relative terms in the field of the arts. To appreciate any work of art, you must greet it with a kind of welcome, with sympathy and a disposition to appreciate. This can arise from many sources, especially friendship with the artist. It can also come from a reputation of greatness that precedes the first encounter with a given work. It can also be created in the mind of a reviewer who knows the author is in a position to give him or her a leg up in the world. By the same token, the readiness to dislike can precede a first reading of the work, either because of personal antipathy to the author or to the artistic circle or social or ethnic category to which she or he belongs; or because the author has often been negatively reviewed before. Also, it’s possible to give a bad review because you are aware the disparagement will please someone with power and patronage to dispense: they may decide to dispense some of it to you.

Those reviewers who want to approximate objectivity must do two things: they have to quote generously from the text being reviewed and they have to construct arguments that are plausible, based on common sense and fresh insights into the nature of verbal communication. It’s good to adduce opinions about the art of poetry (or about experience) stated by generally admired poets and critics in support of a point of view. What's thoroughly lame is a bald, “I love this” or “I hate this.” Opinion divorced from demonstration is nearly useless, even when stated with vehemence. That is why short reviews are nothing more than notices of publication. They shouldn’t be taken seriously as reliable appraisal because they can neither quote at length nor argue in detail. Wait, there’s a third thing that helps us trust a review: the reviewer must write well. A sloppily written review implicitly calls into question the validity of the reviewer’s judgments about others’ writing. I won't go so far as to say no one should review who hasn't published a book, and yet a published book is a credential more than usually valuable because we can read it and form an independent opinion of the capacities and biases of the author.

We always focus on the problem of objectivity of reviewers, but the discussion should move back one domino in the whole process and mention the decisive role of the book review editor. It’s so obvious, no one states it: assigning or not assigning a book is a kind of review. Because, remember, the worst review of all is the one never written or published. I doubt that the decision on which books to review can be any more objective than the eventual review itself. It is based on considerations similar to those involved when the review actually comes to be written, and we should recall that more than half of book review editors are writers, too, and themselves interested in publishing, being reviewed, and rewarded.

A dismissive review can throw formidable obstacles in the path to acceptance and admiration. But the same is true of a failure to assign books by a given author. Indeed, as a means to hinder, it is probably more effective. A negative review at least makes known the book’s existence. Readers may be prompted to read a book despite sharp critiques. But if they don’t know it exists, they won't look for it, won't read it, and can't arrive at any opinion about it, positive or negative. Book review editors have more influence on the fate of books than any single reviewer. Letters to the editor expressing dissatisfaction about negative assessments of books are very common. I don’t ever recall seeing a letter to an editor criticizing him or her for failing to assign a book. But the principle of accountability, in a society attempting to align itself with justice and fair dealing, applies to everyone.

Glancing back over the above paragraphs, I see that much of it touches on what could be described as venal behavior. Unfortunately, the history of literature shows that such behavior is common. And the answer to the natural question, "How do people who behave that way live with themselves?" clearly has to be, "Oh, very easily." Perhaps once in a while a spark of self-knowledge is struck by something seen or read, but the task of extinguishing it is pretty quickly handled, by alibis and ad hominems of one sort or another.

I think we'd also have to say that book reviewing is, in the universal sum of things, not so important after all. Very few book reviews are reread, and they do not in the long run determine the continued admiration or disapproval of authors, e.g. Melville (panned) and James Gould Cozzens (puffed). They are ephemeral. Still, here, as well as in contexts immensely more crucial, I like to call to mind what the great Jewish sage Hillel wrote: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?"

Postscript

2009-05-27T03:21:00.000-07:00

Since yetserday's post, Ruth Padel has given up her appointment to the Oxford Chair of Poetry. In view of the critiques that have been made, and the loss of the prize, I feel the debt should be put paid, and she shouldn't continue to be hounded. Besides, it's good to remember Shakespeare's "Unless this general evil they maintain:/All men are bad, and in their badness reign."

London and Controversy

2009-05-26T03:54:00.000-07:00

This blog having just been named as one of the top 100 poetry blogs by Online University Reviews, I feel I ought to post something today. It was good to see other blogs I read mentioned as well—Ed Byrne’s, Mark Doty’s, Paul Lisicky’s, Sandra Beasley’s, for example, and I’ve begun to explore others on the list that I didn’t know about. Also, I don’t see why they omitted Joan Houlihan’s or Terry Hummer’s, and even Reginald Shepherd’s, despite the fact that Reginald died in September. It has been carried forward some time after his death by his partner and, anyway, what he wrote there before his death is worth rereading.

I arrived in London last Wednesday and first off saw James Byrne in his new Hampstead digs, and then a few days later again at a dinner party he gave with Sandeep Parmar. Somehow unpacking and jet lag haven’t prevented me from seeing people and attending events. Mimi Khalvati and I attended the celebration of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai at the National Portrait Gallery, the participants including Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Padel, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Sillitoe, Danny Abse, Yvonne Green (the organizer), and Hannah Amichai, widow of the late poet. She was impressive and attractive—warm, level, direct. This emerged during questions after the readings. One that interested me was the relationship between Mahmoud Darwish and Amichai. Darwish admired Amichai’s poetry and said so. They were associates for a while until Amichai interpreted one of Darwsh’s poems as being against the State of Israel. After which, Amichai said he couldn’t appear on the same platform. This puzzled me because Darwish never denied the legitimacy of Israel’s statehood. Just because you are for the Palestinian people doesn't mean you can't be for the continuance of Israel. What Darwish opposed was the refusal of right of return to those who had to to leave their homeland during the disruptions of the transition, and the reduction of large numbers of Palestinians to second-class status in the new state. Not to mention the harassment of checkpoints and the bulldozing of houses and the imprisonment of anyone even suspected of dissidence. As for the ensuing war, the most general kind of humanitarian guidelines as established by international law, irrespective of where war occurs, couldn’t possibly condone what happened. Heads of state and military officers make decisions that ultimately the civilian has to pay for. At this point it’s futile and destructive to try to say who is right and who is wrong. Blockading an entire region is wrong and from time to time depriving it of water, electricity, and food is wrong; firing rockets on civilian targets is wrong, the same as saying you intend to destroy a sovereign state; making settlements on land not recognized by the U.N. as belonging to you is wrong; suicide bombings are wrong; using phosphorus weapons is wrong; preventing the wounded or ill from getting to a hospital is wrong; shutting down peaceful gatherings is wrong; and refusing to negotiate is wrong. The only important issue now is how to bring the violence to an end and to establish viable, peaceful government. That issue should override any prideful clinging to punctilio and protocol. Clearly the people at large want the strife to end. If no move is being made to end it, then it’s the leaders who have to accept the blame. Because the peace and safety not only of the Middle East but the entire world depends on speedy resolution of the conflict, then the world at large should exert pressure on the leadership to put a stop to rhetoric and get down to negotiating.

I seemed to have arrived in the U.K. during scandal season. The misdeeds of MPs who misappropriated public money for private purposes has been so much discussed that there’s nothing to add here. On the other hand, the scandal surrounding the Oxford Poetry Chair is still recent enough to bear examination. I was angry when I heard that Derek Walcott had withdrawn his candidacy for the position because of a history of suits involving sexual harassment in years past had been cited as a reason not to appoint him. I don’t like the following analogy, but it is all I can think of to point up the issues. Compare Walcott to the convicted offender who serves his time and is released. Once he has “paid his debt to society,” this person should be allowed to make a new life for himself. If he isn’t allowed to, he will either harm himself or others. If we don’t believe in rehabilitation, then we have to hand out life sentences only. The smear campaign against Walcott was like convicting someone in advance of a crime not yet committed. Note, too, that the Chair of Poetry doesn’t involve courses and evaluation of students but only public lectures. It’s fair to say that Walcott in one of the three most important living English-language poets. Add to that the non-negligible fact that he has African ancestors—non-negligible in an era when Britain is trying to make up for the injustices of the colonial period. He would have been a brilliant choice. (I can’t help wondering, incidentally, if African ancestry didn’t turn against Walcott here. Overt or subtle, sexual predation of students among white professors is as common as student cheating on exams. But a black professor who attempts this is going to be called to account much more quickly and severely.)

Certainly Ruth Padel is one of the leading poets in the U.K. There were many good reasons for appointing her Oxford Professor of Poetry quite apart from the fact that she was a candidate who hadn't been involved in sexual harassment suits. It’s not a minor consideration that she would have been the first woman to hold the post. Her recent book about the life of her ancestor Charles Darwin would have made the appointment timely not only because of purely calendrical facts but also because we live in an era when fundamentalists are challenging Darwinian theory. Any reminder, any prestige conferrable, any fact that can weaken the fundamentalist case, wherever we find it, is welcome.

But her candidacy has come a-cropper because she at first denied she had anything to do with the smear campaign. Two emails to newspapers now show that she did. To overly aggressive lobbying tactics we have to add a public lie. I think this is intensely sad. First, because it attests to a lack of confidence that personal merit alone was sufficient reason for being appointed. (And in a tradition where women have been discouraged from believing in themselves, we can understand how this might be.) And, second, because it has been the source of pain and perhaps career damage for two poets.

And what happens now? Will the Chair be offered now to Walcott? If offered, will he accept? Will it go to another poet, and if so which poet? Should be interesting to see.

Leaving Ledig House

2009-05-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

A little backtracking. As described in the previous blog, the procedure at Ledig House is for residents’ arrival and departure to be staggered. So Amy Waldman and David Machado left, and after that, Christian Haller, and Dy Plambeck. But then new people came: Rob Schouten, a poet and critic from the Netherlands; Kaspar Schnetzler, a novelist from Switzerland; Alex Halberstadt, a writer of non-fiction who was a class member in a poetry course I taught in the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia, I think about ten years ago. And just a few days after, Chloe Aridjis left, and Joanne Wang arrived. Joanne, originally from Beijing, is now living in New York and working as a translator. Xu Xiaobing, the Chinese novelist whom Joanne recently translated, was scheduled to arrive at the same time but, finally, was denied permission to travel, which is too bad.

The international character of Ledig House sharpens your perspective on what it means to be a writer outside the U.S.A. in the 21st century. Among the short-term visitors to L. House was Taslima Nasrin, who had to leave Bangladesh fifteen years ago because of her controversial publications about the difficulties women have to face in Bangladesh. Since then Taslima has lived the life of an exile in Sweden, Germany, France, India, and now New York, where she has a fellowship from N.Y. U. to do her work. But she would like to return to Bangladesh, her home, and the place where she feels there is a lot of work to do. That same weekend we had the fiction writer Ma Thida, on a fellowship at Brown this year, but expecting to return to Myanmar at the completion of her stay. She was imprisoned there for six years on the sole basis of her publications. I found both women (who have medical degrees, incidentally) formidable in their courage and commitment to basic freedoms that Americans take for granted. I mentioned Abiye Teklemariam in the earlier blog. He received the news that several people he knew in Addis Ababa have been arrested, and that the outlook isn’t good—which raises questions about his own return to his homeland. All of this can make being a writer working in modern Western-style democracies seem very easy indeed, with our freedom to say anything we like (and be unread or ignored), our comfy teaching posts, our well-paid reading tours, and (blush) our subsidized stays in artists’ colonies. But of course we know that there are things we can do to help others in countries where circumstances are riskier.

Other weekend visitors have included Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan, who now directs Bard’s Chinua Achebe Center for African Culture. Before doing that he founded a literary magazine in Kenya called Kwani?, which was innovative in several ways. For example, it published what is probably the first short story by a Kenyan dealing with gay themes. Also up from Bard that same evening was Gabi Ngcobo, South African, who is doing a graduate degree there in curatorial studies. We had a lively conversation about contemporary South Africa (whose post-apartheid constitution guarantees gay civil rights, by the way), and the recent inauguration of Jacob Zuma, about whose government-in-formation there is a lot of discussion.

We also had visitors from the publishing world: Jill Schoolman, who is the publisher of Archipelago Books. Almost everything Archipelago brings out is translated from other language traditions, which of course sets them apart from the bulk of contemporary American publishing. Jill is extraordinarily nice, and it’s instantly clear how dedicated she is to getting important foreign-language works to an American readership, which tends to fall behind in this area. We had one literary agent, Jen Auh, who works at the Andrew Wylie agency and happens to represent Alex Halberstadt. Finally, a night's visit from Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich, who run the Ugly Duckling Presse [sic] in Brooklyn, also mainly concerned with translated work, poetry in particular.

As for the writing, my main reason for being here, it went sailing along, with only a few days when the anchor dragged. I’ve written several new poems, done some translation, and gone through the ms. of a new collection of poems and unmistakably improved it, adding, dropping, rearranging. And, finally, I have a draft of my two-act play about Robert Lowell.

Weather was unusually changeable. Though we had sun most days during the latter part of April, days were on the chilly side. And then mid-month the temperature suddenly jumped to the high eighties, a heat not recorded locally for April since the 1920s. It rushed up the flowering of the apple trees and the lilacs, but also their leafing, so the blossoms were quickly crowded out by foliage. Then things got cooler, and back we went to the expected cloudy, damp springs of the Hudson Valley.

I gave a reading in Hudson at Carrie Haddad Gallery, an event that was arranged by Bill Sullivan. My co-reader was Star Black, who came up from New York just for the day. We were both still upset at the news that our friend Darragh Park, whom I hadn’t been in contact with for a long time, had died by his own hand a few days earlier. Darragh was a painter, whom I met more than thirty years ago through John Ashbery. I used a painting of his for the cover of my second book, a New York cityscape, and among the best of those he did in that decade. Apparently he’d lost his eyesight and had become dependent on others. His death is understandable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t regrettable. Star dedicated her reading to him, which seemed right. Other friends in the audience were the poet/art-critic Carter Ratcliff and his wife Phyllis, Karen Clark and Jonathan Bernstein, who drove up from New York, and Brooks Peters, who now lives across the river in Athens and whom I first met when he was a Yale undergrad back in the 70s.

It’s been a spring with a lot of sad news, beginning with deaths from the H1N1 flu, both here and abroad. And then, the poet Deborah Digges. Though I wouldn’t claim a friendship, I did meet her once, just after her first book came out, and liked her. Opinions differ on whether her death was a suicide, but in either case, a terrible thing. Equally hard to come to terms with was the death of Craig Arnold, whom I didn’t know but whose poems I’ve read. Exploring a volcanic island off the coast of mainland Japan, he fell into a deep ravine, a shock his family and friends haven’t yet recovered from.

Finally, I had an email post from Langdon Hammer the first week of the month saying that my friend Eleanor Perényi had died, at the age of 91. (In the blog describing my visit to Budapest last June, I speak of our friendship.) The immediate cause was a brain hemorrhage, and at least things went very quickly. A sad event that had an effect on my last week at L. House. We won’t see Eleanor’s like again.

I’m beginning to feel that television has been following the same track as this blog. Last June, when I was in Warsaw, I wrote here about the heroic figure Irena Sendler, a nurse who rescued 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. One evening during my residency, I turned on the TV and there was her story on something called “The Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Well done, gripping, and at moments hard to watch. And then, this past February when I was in New York, I wrote about seeing Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, a story based on the Soviet slaughter of more than two thousand Polish officers shortly after Soviet troops occupied Poland. Another night I randomly went through several channels and happened on a documentary about the period following the Nazi-Soviet pact, which once again told this terrifying story.

I realize the above paragraphs are shadowed with sadness, but I don’t want that to alter the fact that I had a stimulating and productive month at Ledig House, with the non-negligible bonus of making several new friends. Let me close with a brief mention of a dinner the painter Stephanie Rose gave in Hudson during my last week. Guests were the novelist and poet Jaime Manrique, Bill Sullivan, Carter and Phyllis Ratcliff, and Al Roberts, who collects paintings and curates shows for the Albany Institute of History and Art. I spoke of a commission from the Gulbenkian Foundation to translate fado (Portuguese popular song), something that my friend Mimi Khalvati arranged. So Stephanie played a disc of Amalia Rodrigues, the classic performer of fado, while we had our meal. Raised glasses, jokes, eye catching an eye, laughter, quiet moments of reflection, warm goodbyes.

Tomorrow I fly to London.

Ledig House and its Residents

2009-04-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

April 23: One of the calendar’s red-letter days, at least for those who like sonnets and plays written in blank verse. Also, mythic saints who were dragon-slayers.

It’s taken me some time to post here again, partly because from day one of my residency at Ledig House I began writing and have hardly stopped since. Hitting a lull, I’ll pause long enough to say at least a few things about being here. The colony is situated on perhaps 300 acres of rolling land, with meadows, woods, and magnificent vistas toward the Catskills. We’re about twenty-five minutes from Hudson, New York, where I lived for two years, so I’m familiar with the environs. Besides Hudson, there are the nearby towns of Kinderhook and Chatham, charming upstate villages colonized by New Yorkers who like the country.

Ledig House consists of a handsome Italianate Victorian house, where meals and social life take place, and two outbuildings where residents have their rooms. There are about seven or eight residents at a time (plus the Ledig House Director, D.W. Gibson, on weekends). Shortly after I arrived Amy Waldman (American journalist and fiction writer) and David Machado (Portuguese fiction writer) completed their residency and left. The group is now comprised of Chloe Aridjis (Mexican fiction writer who writes in English), Christian Haller (German-language Swiss novelist), Abiye Teklemariam (Ethiopian journalist and essayist), Dy Plambeck (Danish fiction writer), Lee Tulloch (Australian fiction writer), and Lara Vapnyar (Russian-American fiction-writer who writes in English). Oh, and your blogger. In a few days we expect to be joined by new residents, and the process continues over the next weeks, with some leaving as others arrive. I didn’t in advance know any of the current guest writers, though I had met Chloe’s father about ten years ago, when he attended a reading I gave at the Casa Lam in Mexico City. Homero Aridjis is a distinguished poet and prose writer who now lives in Paris, serving as Mexico's delegate to UNESCO. He was for many years the head of International PEN and also the ambassador to the Netherlands. Chloe’s first novel is set in Berlin where she lived for a time. One reason she writes in English is that her mother Betty Aridjis (whom I also nce met in New York) is American; and so Chloe spoke English from childhood up, along with Spanish. Then, too, English is nowadays the global lingua franca, providing access to a huge readership if you can use it.

Lee Tulloch lived in New York City for many years, so we belong to the automatic freemasonry of former Gothamites, with shared points of reference such as the East Village (where some of her fiction is set) and SoHo. She’s now working on a novel set in the Hollywood of the 20s and 30s. Because I’m curious about Australia and would like to visit there (invitations welcome) she gives me insights into its geography, politics, and culture. Thank you, Lee! Then, as a result of his seriousness and knowledge of literature in several languages, Christian Haller creates around him an aura of respect; and I hope his novels will soon be translated into English. Dy Plambeck began as a poet but she now writes novels, including one set, surprisingly enough, in Texas. But then some of Apollinaire’s poems take place in the Lone Star State, so why not? Dy’s boyfriend Meds had dinner with us two nights ago and after dinner accompanied himself on guitar while singing Neil Young songs; this, with a perfect reproduction of Young’s accent, but, more to the point, an agile, tuneful voice. Because I have been close to other Russians who became American citizens, I feel a familiar affinity with Lara Vapnyar (who has the same accent as other expatriate Russians I know). She is reticent and prefers working quietly in her room to colony social life, but even so makes a distinct impression. We all feel quite spoiled, I think, when we compare our lives to Abiye Megenta’s. Abiye has been jailed several times in Ethiopia on account of articles he has published about the present government. He says convictions led to only short-term sentences and plays down the inconvenience of it all, but still. When Ledig House residents gave a reading in Hudson, two weeks ago, he presented an article composed in excellent English—again, a useful lingua franca for those whose language is Amharic. (If you google Ledig House, you'll find more complete information about the colony and its current residents.)

Later in the season, writers will be succeeded by visual artists, and one appealing aspect of Ledig House/Art Omi (the colony’s complete name) is that the grounds are dotted with dozens of art works, most of them on a monumental scale. During my hikes, I think I’ve now seen all of them. They range from satiric pieces like Steven Rolf Kroeger’s Toaster, an Oldenburgian VW bus whose roof has been been opened to admit a giant slice of bread, to works of Platonic austerity like Beverly Pepper’s minimalist Corten steel tetrahedron (four-sided pyramid) with a tetrahedronal space cut inside it. (Ms. Pepper has a famous daughter, the poet Jorie Graham, who publishes under her married name.) Also, I like the three monumental female heads in matte white plexiglass that rise from a meadow near the Visitor’s Center, like those huge statues on Easter Island. But these are works by Philip Grausman, whom I once met in the late seventies at his studio in Connecticut. His wife is the choreographer Martha Clark, and some of the faces of the sculptures resemble her. I like as well works by Willard Boepple and Tarik Currhimboy, but probably my favorite single sculpture here is one titled Valledor, by Forrest Myers, which consists of two intersecting cubes outlined in aluminum and balanced on their angles. Viewed from different sides and at varying distances, the work presents an array of complex silhouettes. The interplay of negative and implied positive space provides a sort of jungle-gym for the spatial imagination; and perhaps we could as well lend a human sense to the purely abstract intersection of two cubic forms. I don’t know the meaning of the title, though it sounds like a Spanish place-name.

Walking is my favorite exercise, so I’ve ranged far afield from the main house so as to enjoy the woods, ponds, and streams on or near the estate. Early spring is the ideal time to be here. Close to the house there are daffodils, squilla, and narcissus, and farther on the familiar cadmium yellow of forsythia. In swampy areas of the woods, skunk cabbages are now unfurling, and I’ve seen shadblow, marsh marigolds, trillium, clumps of wild chives, and the small white flowers of bloodroot. The ferment of early spring is in the air, and, though we’ve had sunny days, it has remained generally chilly, so the flowering trees are still holding off.

Working in an artist colony has a monastic aspect, for sure. But I’ve stayed in many over the past two decades (the Djerassi Foundation, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts) and have a theory about colonies and the artistic process. The first thing they do is plunge you back into childhood, a time when food and shelter are taken care of by someone else. Needless to say, that situation stimulates creativity, the carefree, inventive sense of play that children all have. What’s more, you get to meet other resident “children,” companions in the playful exploration involved in making art. But then, as weeks pass, residents “mature.” They see their colleagues begin to leave, a process that has the poignant tinge of mortality. As the date of your own departure comes closer, something autumnal enters the mind, even if your stay is booked for one of the spring months. The prospect of the coming expulsion from Eden is its own kind of stimulus. I guess my point is that an artist’s residency can be experienced as the microcosm of an entire life. Ars longa, vita brevis, according to the old Latin tag. I'm at the midpoint of my stay. Time to get back to work.

Boston and Hudson

2009-04-12T20:42:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written here this past month, and instead used Facebook to keep friends posted. But there’s more going on these days, so here we are, back on Blogspot.

This past Wednesday I took Amtrak to Boston’s South Station where Robert Pinsky met me in his black BMW to drive us to lunch. I hadn’t seen Robert for a couple of years, depending instead on email to keep in touch; but we always instantly pick up the thread where we left off. It’s a friendship that began in 1976, when we were both tapped for the “Introduction” program New York's 92nd Street YMHA used to host. The idea was that four first-book poets were chosen each year to read in a program at Kaufman Hall. (The other two that year were Tess Gallagher and Maura Stanton.) Robert is among the contemporaries I most admire, a poet of wide sympathies and solid poetic achievement, which has won him an ardent following. His most recent book Gulf Music is world-class poetry, which leaves me wondering why it didn’t win all the major prizes when it came out. But then prizes are anybody’s guess, aren’t they?

We drove to a restaurant near Boston U., where Robert teaches, and had a light lunch, exchanging news, opinions about recent books, and thoughts about mutual friends. Seeing Robert is always an upbeat occasion, because he is a mensh; we agree on nearly everything. Old friends are best, to wax proverbial. After lunch, Robert let me off at the Gardner Museum, with no sense that we’d exhausted topics of mutual interest. I’m determined not to let a long interval pass before our next meeting.

My afternoon plan was to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the legacy of a 19th century heiress who exemplified many of the ideals of America's Brown Decades. That period’s widespread preoccupation with European art was expanded in her case by an enthusiasm for Asia and Asian art. I’ve visited the collection several times during the past three decades, but only under rushed conditions. This time, several free hours were available. I strolled and lingered and, sure enough, focused on things that had escaped notice before. People who haven’t visited may even so know about the notorious theft of several art works (including a Vermeer) from the Gardner several decades ago. The crime was never solved and the works haven’t been returned. As it happens, I mention this incident in a long poem from ten years ago titled “Seeing All the Vermeers” (found in Contradictions). Curators at the Gardner have left the empty frames on the walls where the paintings used to be, a sharp reminder of the loss.

Mrs. Gardner commissioned this building on Boston’s Fenway in order to house an art collection too large for normal domestic spaces. Rooms are arranged around a central courtyard incorporating architectural elements brought from Venice, notably, four corner balconies down from which stream lianas maybe twenty feet long, a cascade of orange nasturtiums that were a special favorite of the patroness. It’s an effect that requires careful training of the annual plants by staff gardeners. The courtyard garden these days is very done up, exhibiting pots of orchids and a quartet of tree ferns and large palms in the corners. Plus other tropical plantings among the statuary. Colonettes integrated into the brick arcade at ground level are medieval, but, really, everywhere you look bits of European stone carving drawn from many different periods are incorporated into walls and corners, so that the whole becomes a sort of historical anthology of architectural ornament.

Though Gardner collected some statuary from classical antiquity, she seems to have had an aversion to the neoclassical 18th century; possibly she felt Boston proper already provided enough from that period. Instead, the emphasis is on Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th century, and Asian art. One corner is dedicated to the memory of Okakura Kakuso, Japanese author of The Book of Tea. He came to Boston shortly after 1900 and became a friend and advisor of I.S.B.'s, part of whose fortune was based on the China trade. He became her primary channel for insight into Buddhism and Japanese culture—ink painting, ceramics, ikebana, and the tea ceremony. Considering it all, you begin to understand the cultural matrix that produced Amy Lowell’s Orientalism and the related esthetic of Imagism she espoused once Pound had announced the movement. Several local fortunes were built on the China trade, and of course the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has one of the greatest collections of Asian art outside of Asia. Gardner had a descendant of the same name (known to her friends as “Belle”) who wrote poetry (not at all in the Orientalist or Imagist vein); she was Allen Tate’s last wife. It has occurred to me her work is due for a revival, so maybe we’ll see that in the coming years.

As for paintings, I had forgotten that the Piero della Francesca Hercules is there, though its provenance I don’t know. It’s an eroticized treatment of the mythological hero and certainly not a typical subject for quattrocento art; so it would be interesting to read an art-historical account of it if readers can direct me to one. The Gardner’s Botticelli Madonna (the first major artwork that I.S.B. bought) is a fine example, not as saccharine as other works of his. And there is the famous El Jaleo of Sargent, a chiaroscuro rendering of flamenco musicians and their silk-skirted dancer. Also, a youthful Rembrandt self-portrait that I’d say doesn’t figure as a great example of his self-portrait series. And the Titian Rape of Europa, which, though dynamic, has a certain gracelessness atypical for this painter. Meanwhile, the subject provides a neat analogy for American rubber barons’ raids on the art treasures of an impoverished Europe during the late 19th century. Many of the works are secondary, if not merely copies of notable paintings, and quite a few could use some cleaning. Paintings are hung among pieces of furniture, tapestries, and decorative pieces of varying quality. The jumble aspect, which has to be maintained in accordance with Gardner’s will, is disconcerting. But certainly the whole provides access to the ambiance of the Jamesian era in American cultural history.

After leaving the Gardner Museum, I took a T train to the Boylston stop and walked on Boston Common for a while, trying to speculate where exactly Emerson might have had his “transparent eyeball” vision, the one recounted in his magisterial “Nature” essay. Possibly near the band shell at the center, a gray stone structure with a small dome. It wasn’t built when he wrote that essay; but if the band shell's stone hemisphere wasn’t the source of the eyeball image, there was still the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House directly in view. I recall that on quite a different occasion Emerson took a stroll across the Common with Whitman and sagely warned his younger disciple against writing poems with explicit sexual content—advice just as sagely ignored.

I walked up toward the State House and, once I got to Beacon Street, paused to look at the Colonel Shaw memorial, a bronze relief sculpture commemorating the slaughter of Colonel Shaw’s 54th Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863. The 54th was the first African-American regiment in our history. The story is, by the way, told in a stirring film that came out more than a decade ago (Glory, with Matthew Broderick providing an appealing Col. Shaw). Is it an accident that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued the same year when the Fort Wagner massacre occurred? The sculpture is, unmistakably, St. Gaudens’s masterpiece; and it served as the point of departure for Robert Lowell’s powerful poem “For the Union Dead,” an excellent example of the public poem bearing political content. Beneath the bronze relief you see verses by an unidentified author inscribed on the granite base:

Right in the van on the red rampart’s slippery swell
With heart that beat a charge he fell
Forward as fits a man
But the high soul burns on to light men’s feet
Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet.

The Shaw monument is directly across from the State House, a handsome structure in Georgian-style brick with white trim. It is the design of Charles Bulfinch, built in the 1790s on ground that used to be John Hancock’s cow pasture. Since it was directly in front of me, I decided to have a look inside. Easy enough, though you have to pass through security check. On the second level I found the Flag Room, ornamented with the flags of historical importance, under a dome of many-colored glass. This addition to Bulfinch’s original design dates from around 1900. Up another level, you can find Massachusetts’s lower and upper legislative chambers, connected by a hall where portraits of former governors hang, including a 17th c. Governor Bradstreet, who must have been related to Anne B., this continent’s first English-language poet. The Senators convene in a blue and white neoclassical hall designed by Bulfinch, its dome directly underneath the exterior gold counterpart.

That seen, it was time to leave and recross the Common. After some browsing in the venerable Commonwealth Bookstore, I went into one of the buildings that house Emerson College, directly overlooking the Common, to find the office of my friend Jason Roush, who teaches there. Jason has just published his third book of poems, titled Crosstown. I met him six years ago in Provincetown, when we were both participants in a gay literature conference. We became friends, and I’ve followed his work since then with a lot of enthusiasm. He had invited me to attend a reading scheduled for that evening at Emerson, and, after catching up a little, we walked to the building next door to find the hall where he would perform. Excellent poems, presented with heartfelt skill, warmth, and good humor. The new book has several poems about London, which he visits every year. It’s one of our affinities, but not the only one. Many of the poems involve rock music, which he knows a lot about; in fact, he’s become my main source of knowledge about the music scene. As happened earlier with prose fiction, film, and jazz, we are seeing rock escape designation as mere popular entertainment and enter the realm of the fine arts, with sophisticated critical discussion and college courses devoted to the subject. So it’s inevitable that contemporary poetry has begun to deal with the music that has the largest share of the global audience.

It was one of the topics we touched on next day during a drive from Boston to Hudson, NY. Jason had volunteered to drive me there since there’s no direct public transportation to take. The trip lasts something over two hours, and we had good weather. Once in Hudson, Jason left me off at Bill Sullivan’s house on Prospect Street, where we were invited in cordially. But Jason had to get back to Boston, so we made our goodbyes fairly soon. I’ve known Bill for a couple of decades, meeting him through Jaime Manrique, another close friend who lived with Bill in New York City for many years. Bill is a painter who has been showing since the 1960s, one of the few contemporary artists who have been able to make use of 19th century American painting, in particular, the Hudson River School. Where better for him to live than Hudson, across the river from Thomas Cole’s house in Catskill, and in the same town where Sanford Gifford once lived? Actually, Bill is working on a new show that will open in Hudson this May at the Carrie Haddad Gallery. The theme this time is portraits of young men who have tattoos. He's finishing up the works in the show now, but with luck he'll find (before the show is complete) someone who has a tattoo of the Hudson River; painting that, he could unite the two themes.

It was a stay of only one night, a stopover on my way to Ledig House in Ghent, NY. Ledig House is a working residence for writers from many countries. I am there now, but will postpone for a while giving an account of it. At some point during the coming week, I imagine.

In New York City

2009-02-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

Just back from a few days in New York, glad for the chance to get there so soon after returning to the U.S.A. Marilyn Hacker had asked me to teach a couple of her classes at C.C.N.Y. while she was away, something I’ve done before and enjoy.

It was also a chance to see friends and catch up on a city that, like Heraclitus’s river, you can’t ever step into twice, constantly changing as it is. And yet there is a permanent aspect to New York, one that I recall from my earliest years there in the 1960s. Its vertical aspect, its vast underclass, the contrast between riches and poverty, its African-American, Jewish, Latino and generally international flavor. I had good weather, and riding slowly through the streets in a bus I caught again the, I guess, “visionary” aspect of New York in winter, something in the way the light strikes high-rise buildings along the avenues over bare trees; something that seems to incorporate the long history of aspiration motivating so many immigrants to come here, either from other parts of America or from Europe. Not that aspiration was always rewarded. In the city’s story there are so many more broken hearts than lights on Broadway. Nevertheless, if we focus on artistic achievement, New York since the days of Whitman has a wildly impressive record. To have lived long periods in New York, Paris, and London has been my lucky fate. All three did a lot to make me who I am, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, etc.

Going through Harlem I see that it is now integrated and very upbeat in feeling, not at all the Harlem I first saw back in the day (1965). I may be imagining it, but I sense a new cheerfulness and confidence in the Black population of New York. The results of Obama’s presidency are already evident in the faces of his most ardent supporters. And to think he once spent a year or so in one of Harlem’s old-style tenements, without the least idea that he would one day be President. I wonder if a plaque has yet been placed on it. Of course Bill Clinton’s national headquarters located to Harlem several years ago, and after that it was open season for the gentrifiers. Once again the city blocks between 110th and 135th are a new focus of interest and enterprise.

By coincidence the undergraduate course I was subbing for had ot do with the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and 30s. It’s an under-researched area of American literary history, particularly where the women poets (Anne Spencer, Mae Cowdery, and Helene Douglas) are concerned, though I’m sure that will change. Former students Karen Clarke and Elise Buchman had asked to sit in on this class and also the graduate seminar in prosody, and that was a plus I hadn’t counted on.

It would be silly to come to New York and not try to see things you can’t get elsewhere, so I made an altogether predictable beeline to the show of late Bonnard paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, about eighty works done after he and his wife Marthe bought a house in the South of France in the mid-1920s. “The Late Interiors” was the show’s designation for these works, all of them indoors, though often looking out onto the garden and the Riviera town of Le Cannet. Of course other artists and writers were working in that general environ at the time, not only Matisse, Picasso, and Colette, but also Americans like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gerald Murphy. If only it were possible to make month-long visits to earlier periods. I’d be off the Twenties in a flash. Bonnard’s unfussed presentation of daily French domesticity—simple interiors casually assembled but with bright bowls of fruit and flowers, coffee carafes, patterned wallpaper, printed or embroidered textiles—is just as persuasive as Matisse’s equivalent. The cultic French doctrine of pleasure, often dismissed in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic cultures as mere inconsequential prettiness and therefore not really serious, needs revising.

Nevertheless, I also had a chance to see a work produced under the sign of high seriousness and--there's no other word--tragedy. It’s the recent film Katýn by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whose reputation was established half a century ago by films including Ashes and Diamonds and Kanal. I saw it at the Film Forum in downtown Manhattan; there's little chance it will get a national release. A fiction film, it is even so based on historical fact—the mass murder, in 1940, by the Soviet military of a group of Polish officers. During the Communist Era, Poland’s Soviet government tried to cover up the event, shifting the blame by adding it to the catalogue of atrocities that the Nazis had actually committed. It’s an unwieldy narrative, touching on several lives only tangentially connected. But the performances are profound and attest to a kind of depth in human experience and response to experience that has more or less been frittered away in the modern West during the last few decades, when the populace at large seems to want live their lives as a sitcom or else a video game.

Another aspect of the film likely to cause embarrassment in an American audience is its unashamed incorporation of Christianity. But you can’t get to first base in grasping the nature of Polish culture unless you understand how important their commitment to religion is. I broached the topic in these e-pages during my visit to Krakow and Warsaw last June. Catholicism is part of the beleaguered Polish national identity, and in recent decades it has been associated, because of John-Paul II, with freedom movements. And there's no inevitable association between Polish Catholicism and Holocaust-denying, which some Poles have attracted fire for engaging in these past twenty years. Also, it needs to be acknowledged that many Christian Poles were also sent to the camps (the background subject for William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice). And I don’t see why it is wrong to commemorate the gentile Poles who died in Auschwitz, all the more considering they were fighting against German occupation. Likewise for the Roma population and gay men. The Nazis were quite lavish as to who qualified for obliteration.

Back to the film. Parts of it are horrifying (we are shown the assembly-line deathblows, each accomplished by a shot in the back of the head at close range). You feel blood-spattered by the time the film ends. The performances are first-rate, and there are arresting visuals throughout. Plus, instead of rock songs, an orchestral score by Penderecki. All told, a shattering experience.

I wandered around in Greenwich Village before seeing the film, passing by a few of the literary sites—the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas committed suicide by alcohol; King Street, where Elizabeth Bishop lived; St. Lukes Place, where Marianne Moore worked as a librarian; Cornelia Street, Auden's first aparmtent when he moved to New York, West 13th, where Edmund White lived in the 1960s, and West 16th, where Hart Crane lived in the 20s. All very familiar from my three decades' residence in New York.

Speaking of Hart Crane, I stopped in New Haven on my return trip to see Langdon Hammer, who was in a class I taught at Yale more than thirty years ago. In addition to teaching in the English Department there, he has edited the Crane letters and has published many critical essays about contemporary poetry. His current project os writing a biography of James Merrill, a complicated undertaking, to say the least. Anyway, we had the chance to catch up a bit during lunch, and I always find him upbeat and stimulating when we touch on topics around the all-encompassing subject of poetry.

Back in the U.S.A.

2009-02-12T17:18:00.000-08:00

If only for myself, I wanted to mark this transition. My stay in London (with trips to Morocco and Paris) is now at an end, and I won’t be back for several months It’s been a sparkling and useful visit (leaving aside the six weeks I lost recuperating from the broken foot). Old friends seen again, new acquaintances made, and a reckonable amount of work done. The past two weeks have been conducted under the sign of departure, with goodbyes said to friends like Kathryn Maris, Fiona Sampson, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Mimi Khalvati, Martha Kapos, Ruth Fainlight, James Byrne, Jean McRae, John McCullough, and Anna Robinson. Oh, and Kathryn introduced me to the American poet Linda Gregerson, who is here on her sabbatical, working on Renaissance theater. Special events these past weeks have included seeing the terrific film Milk with my friend Miguel Mansur, a trip to Hastings with Mimi Khalvati, and a talk given by Charles Simic for the Poetry Society. I hadn’t seen Simic for decades, but, even with the inclement weather London has been having, a nearly full house welcomed him at the Bishopsgate Institute hall. I recall that many years ago (in 1970, I think) Richard Howard told me he’d been made the head of a new poetry series at George Braziller (the publishing house). And his first choice for the series was Charles Simic, a name I didn’t know at the time. But Richard gave me a copy of the book, and I saw that something original and distinctive was being done in it. That didn’t mean I predicted that Simic would one day be Poet Laureate of the United States, but that is how things worked out. Actually, he spoke about his two years holding that post, and confirmed what I’ve said here: there is an enormous amount of interest in poetry, witness all the thousands of requests, queries, demands, invitations, debates, and whatnot that came to his door. But I’m aware that these facts will not prevent people from reverting to the old, false refrain: “Nobody’s interested in poetry.”

This doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with writing, but give me a minute. Newscasters have been obsessed this past week with the question of Bonuses for Bankers. Heads of failing banks have been interviewed by British Parliament, and some of them are about to roll. Apparently the same is happening in the U.S.A. For many years, without having a forum for it, I’ve been saying privately that the absurd salaries for CEOs was an abuse, one that, first, unconscionably widened the gap between rich and not rich. Second, that it cut deep into corporate profit; and third, that it was a fraud. Why a fraud? Well, the reason always given for these megasalaries was that a failure to do so would mean the CEO in question would go to another competing corporation and sell his talents to them. But wait a minute. If we concede there is a going rate, a stratospheric average, just who established it? Corporate boards of directors, that's who. If corporations had agreed to put a cap on salaries, there would be no greener pasture to run to. But they've made a tacit agreement not to do this. In this one way, CEOs from competing companies are loyal to each other, I mean, to their category. The salaries are huge because boards of directors vote them huge. That’s in their interest, sure, but not in the interest of the corporation and its profits. It is a scam. Bonuses are only one facet of this larger problem of disproportionate pay. Let’s focus on bonuses, though. Their justification is (in theory) that they stimulate hard work and creativity, leading to greater profit. We’ve just seen that they do no such thing. Several of these chiefs have admitted they have no particular banking expertise. No seasoned and knowledgeable pilot has been at the helm. Hence the financial meltdown from disastrous policies adopted and pursued.

In any case, why should one’s willingness to work hard and think creatively depend on bonuses? Millions of people work hard and think creatively and yet their compensation remains the same. So, why do certain “professions” expect bonuses? Because they can get them, obviously. Putting aside my writing and the payment I received for it, and focusing solely on my teaching (which I did for more than twenty years), I can say I always gave it my best, with no expectation of a “tip” for doing so. The implication of the bonus system is, “If you don’t promise me extra boodle, I’m not going to do good work for you.” I think that is shameful. Nobody ever gave Abraham Lincoln a bonus, or Florence Nightingale, or Marie Curie, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, or Kyle Smith who lays down asphalt on the highway or Mary Brown who works at the daycare center or Private Gillis who got his foot shot off in Iraq. Why are corporate types not willing to work hard (and responsibly) for what is already a vast salary by most measurements, unless it is topped off by still more loot? Sheer greed, cutting into corporate profit and, these days, awarded at the taxpayer’s expense. The only difference between these lazy fat cats and the waiter at the local pizza house who sweats for a tip, is that the sums involved are staggeringly disparate. No, there is another difference: the waiter has no advance assurance that there will be an extra. The CEO does know. The waiter works like a navvy to get that tip. The CEO doesn’t have to, it’s part of his contract. And let's don't even get into the fabled "exit package." O'Neal at Merrill Lynch got one valued at about $140 million in 2007. And others I could name got staggering amounts as well.

Right, but what has all this to do with writing? OK, the sound-bite you hear absolutely everywhere these days—at publishing houses, at arts funding organizations, at magazines, from organizers of reading series—well, all administrative desks involved with writing and publishing is that, because of the “credit crunch,” there is no money to do what the organization under discussion used to do. Funds have been cut and, besides, people can’t afford to buy books or tickets to readings, etc. That is infuriating. It’s not enough that these corporate frauds have wrecked the solvency of our citizens and our government, they are also hindering the production and publication of new literary works (and artworks in other genres). For this they should receive a bonus from the taxpayer? Has the world gone insane? (Answer: Yes.) But can we get sane again and stop paying CEOs these gargantuan salaries? And certainly—certainly!—not pay bonuses to them on top of that.

Run Extended

2009-01-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

Many of you wrote to me privately, expressing regret that this blog gave a goodbye wave on New Year’s Day. Others spoke to me directly, for example, the lunch guests this past Sunday at Anne-Marie Fyfe’s and Cahal Dallat’s attractive house near Turnham Green. (They were the poets Jo Shapcot, Sandeep Parmar, and James Byrne; and the new director of the Poetry Society, the bright and funny Judith Palmer.) A character failing of mine is that I don’t like to disappoint people, even when an expectation interferes with my idea of what I should be doing. So here’s a compromise: the blog goes on, OK, OK, but with much less frequency.

Like how many millions of people I was transfixed by the American Presidential Inauguration today. I’m afraid I unsuccessfully fought off the feeling of hope. None of the facts at hand quite crushed those irised wings. Dare to suppose that it is, as James Brown once sang, “a brand new day.” Or as Aretha Franklin used to sing in her cover of the Beatles’s song, “Let it be!”, and of course it won’t be unless all concerned citizens pull their oar to get the boat moving in a positive direction. That will include dealing with an injustice even older than racism—the subjugation of women in cultures all over the globe in every period of history. None of us is truly free until all are free. May Hilary Clinton realize she doesn’t have to be hawkish in order to prove she is just as strong as a man. Let her prefer diplomatic means for resolving international problems, to prove that she is as strong as a woman. Michelle Obama will set the example. Black American women have been resolving conflicts non-violently for centuries. They have the know-how. And while America is instituting all this change, why shouldn’t it give full civil rights to lesbian and gay citizens. Let it be!

Other matters: The Current (literary movement) announced in the previous blog seems to be gaining momentum. The lunch guests mentioned above were encouraging and interested. I’ll mention it again at the launch of a new magazine called The Long Poem in which I’m reading (on 28 January, 19:00, Barbican Library) and also at an evening of poetic manifestoes planned at the Tate Modern in the coming weeks. At lunch today with Fiona Sampson, who gives the movement her blessing, I said that it was partly the recently published Autumn issue of The Poetry Review that gave me the impetus to announce what I see as the most alive direction in English-language poetry today (in the U.K., in Ireland, in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and India.) It seems that Fiona and I like the same kind of excellence in poetry. And her work exemplifies those qualities as well.

Signoff--and a New Literary Movement

2009-01-01T08:22:00.000-08:00

So much of life is arbitrary, there can’t be any harm in taking a cue from the calendar and using this day to announce the conclusion of this blog. It sounds exaggerated, but writing it does take a lot of time. I’ve done so off and on for nearly a year now, have discharged my publicity duties to the University of Michigan Press, and have sent something like a letter to the world as a kind of self-introduction. Although it’s clear that the blog has had thousands of browsers, only a fraction of those reading it have left comments. Of course I’m aware that not every reader likes the electronic glare of public exposure. Still, blogs thrive on comment and debate; without it, some of the energy needed for writing one wanes. Meanwhile, if you want to get in touch with me directly, here’s the address: alfredcorn1@gmail.com. Just remember I get a lot of email and may not answer immediately.

Who knows, I may take up the blogger’s pen again some day, but I think I should spend these last six weeks in London getting some real work done, and I hope this doesn’t seem abrupt.

Next: I’ll also use this occasion to announce a *n*e*w* *m*o*v*e*m*e*n*t* in poetry. And high time we had one. Postmodernism has held the stage for more than thirty years, which is an almost unheard-of longevity in the history of artistic trends. Meanwhile, the various “-isms” we’ve seen over the past century have begun to seem a little tired and contrived, so the new movement is simply called “The Current.” (Compare with “The Movement” of the 1950s.)

And what exactly is The Current? First, it’s not so exact as all that. It recognizes that earlier movements were an umbrella sheltering many different kinds of talents. For example, Surrealism included writers as varied as the founder Breton, Desnos, Eluard, and several English followers like David Gascoyne and George Barker. The Current is a loose-fitting garment. It isn’t doctrinaire and welcomes individual difference as well as concurrence in style and approach.

In general, The Current favors speech-based style in writing, the tradition that includes Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Gunn, Plath, and Larkin. The names of living practitioners of this style will immediately spring to mind but The Current doesn’t enroll members without their consent. (Journalists named Thom Gunn as a member of The Movement in the 1950s before he knew of its existence.)

The Current likes poems using meter or rhyme or verseform but also likes unmetered and unrhymed poems. Chances are, though, that it isn’t possible to write good unmetered poems until the older practice has been learned thoroughly.

The Current accepts that difficulty is inevitable in poetry, but only welcomes difficulty when it is sincere, that is, not concocted just for the sake of difficulty or as a stratagem for being taken seriously. Acknowledging that paraphrases of poems are always inferior (as texts pleasurable to read) to good poems, nevertheless, the Current likes poems that allow for such paraphrases, regarding them as a step toward full engagement with a poem. A poem should not only “be”; it should also “mean.” On the other hand, the Current loses interest in poets who jot down a few lines that yield up their entire content in a single reading.

The Current wants to be a voice in the discourse of our time and welcomes poems that offer fresh insight into contemporary society, domestic and international; also, for a threatened global environment. Just as much it welcomes poems that are purely personal, recalling that “the personal is political.” The Current is non-sectarian yet is more than willing to espouse poems with religious content, no matter the religion, just as it is interested in poems written from an atheist perspective. In neither case, though, should the poem in question be overbearing. Overall, poems must not only deal with valid and credible subjects but also at the same time embody the quality of art.

The Current has at heart the value of freedom, and it is interested in the responsibilities that adhere to freedom.

The Current likes poems containing sensory detail—light, color, sound, touch, scent, taste—both for the indirect pleasure these offer and for the implied connection between the individual mind and the surrounding context.

The Current likes the tradition as much as the individual talent. It knows that originality is only one virtue among other possible virtues in the making of art. Also, that the avant-garde tradition begins as early as 1870 and perhaps even as early as Pindar. For that we reason, we should deny that the avant garde’s main recommendation to us is its newness. No one doubts that the population of poets in future eras will comprise some using the avant-garde tradition, but there will also be just as many using more immediate and natural approaches to communication. Worries, though, about what poetry is going to be in the future should not be a central preoccupation for contemporary poets. Instead, the Current devotes its energy to the poetry being written in the present.

The Current encourages rich, carefully considered language in poetic composition, but finds over-elaboration, cleverness carried to enormous lengths, clutter, and paraphernalia tedious or ridiculous. Humor is welcome, along with irony so long as these don’t make experience seem shallow or empty. The Current dislikes sentimentality just as it dislikes cold-fish poetry and sneering. It likes the “touch of nature that makes the whole world kin,” and it likes the sense of an art pursued and developed under the sign of experience and skill, the product of conscious as well as unconscious directives.

The Current's aim is not to become formulaic. It wants to participate in the flux of life and change. It expects to develop and alter through time under the shaping influence of its members. It has no Pope. It is a democratic movement, a free association of equals who respect each other and each other’s differences. Racism, machismo, class prejudice, religious prejudice, or homophobia have no place in it. Its stance is open, positive, welcoming, tolerant. It wants to avoid the boredom of highbrow official culture and the mindlessness of pop clichés. It believes that the free exercise of intelligence and feeling in art is among the most intense and most pleasurable pursuits we can experience.

The Current also knows when to shut up and hand the microphone to others.

In London for New Year's Eve

2008-12-31T08:20:00.000-08:00

Back from my travels to a city that feels more and more like home.

It’s normal on this date for people to slip on the backward-facing mask of Janus and try to sum up the year. Certainly there was no shortage of remarkable events in this one, many of them recorded and sent out on these electronic pages. Not the private side of things, which involves other people and therefore isn’t legitimately available for public posting. But I see a steady moving away from disappointment to something more reassuring. And enough travel for several years all rolled into one.

As so often happens, I failed to mention what was probably the most sublime moment for me in all of 2008. It came during the flight this past October from Casablanca to Madrid, just after the conclusion of the Darwish celebration. In bright morning sun our jet made its way north toward Spain some distance west of the African coastline. Eventually the coast began to curve away from the jet a little, and at that point appeared several mountains, which could only be the beginning of the Atlas range. We drove farther north, and suddenly there it was, a passage of shimmering, bluegreen water between Ceuta and the Spanish mainland, the Straits of Gibraltar—for the classical world, the gateway to the unknown. The Pillars of Hercules, where Atlas found a foothold atop a mountain on either continent, assuming a stance strong enough to hold aloft the entire weight of the sky. And of course the Strait was also the legendary path to Atlantis, as well as the channel (in the fiction) through which Dante’s Ulysses sailed westward toward the sunset of his life. All of this seen from a mile up in the sky.

About a decade ago I visited Gibraltar and climbed its famous peak, though I didn’t find Atlas’s footprint. From there I had my first glimpse of Africa, whose earth and air and inhabitants I’ve now in fact encountered. If 2008 had so many exhilarating moments in it, what will 2009 bring? For one thing a new President of the United States, who will be in office when I return.

When the bells ring out the Old and ring in the New Year, don't, Powers That Be, let the sound be hollow. Let's have a good year for a change, give peace a chance in 2009.

From France to England

2008-12-24T04:48:00.000-08:00

Before I left Paris, I had dinner with a former student, Tim Bradford, and his wife Tamara and their two boys Tristan and Dmitri, up near Place Pigalle, where I hadn’t been in many years. The neighborhood keeps the feeling of Paris of former days, before it became so sleek and designerish. Walking to Tim’s place I passed a revue theater called “Madame Arthur,” where drag performances are held, the theater taking its name from an old song the famous belle époque singer Yvette Guibert used to sing. (You may remember posters of her produced by Toulouse-Lautrec.) A lively evening with the Bradfords, catching up on our respective projects. Tim’s at work on a postmodern novel involving deportation of the Jews from the Vélodrome d’Hiver during the Nazi occupation, for which he received a grant two years ago. They’ll stay on until the summer before returning to the States.

I left Paris on the 20th and took the Eurostar to London, spending a night there at James Byrne’s in West Hampstead. He, his partner Sandeep Parmar, and I went out for an Indian meal, as a kind of sendoff for Sandeep who was flying early next morning to see her parents in Boston. News of the blizzard there made us all wonder, though, and I haven't heard how the flight went.

Next morning I caught a train to Newcastle to spend a couple of days there with my friend Paul Attinello, who teaches in the music department at the University of Newcastle. We met many years ago in Los Angeles, when I was visiting at U.C.L.A. American, but cosmopolitan, Paul has taught in Australia and Hong Kong and now for several years in Newcastle. It’s a town I like, based on an earlier visit three years ago when I participated in the Newcastle Festival of Gay and Lesbian Literature. It was during that stay that I went to see Hadrian’s Wall, one of the things that led to the writing of the poem about Hadrian mentioned earlier in this blog.

I enjoyed this second visit, which gave me a chance to hear what Paul is doing. He’s a specialist on the Darmstadt School of music, has written about Mauricio Kagel, and now is working on a book about music and the AIDS epidemic, which promises to be fascinating.

From Newcastle I took the train again to Chesterfield where my friend Vilna Kembery picked me up and drove me to Edensor, the little village attached to Chatsworth. Built in the 19th century according to designs of Joseph Paxton (of Crystal Palace fame), Edensor is a picture-perfect gathering of stone cottages, each different and all appealing. I met Vilna six years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was visiting and I was teaching; we’ve been in touch ever since, and no one could be a more cheerful and thoughtful host. This is my third stay in Edensor, and each visit we go over to see the house and its park, incontestably one of England's best. The weather today is bright and unseasonably warm and we had an invigorating walk in the park, kindly invited by Vilna’s great friend Elizabeth Cavendish, whom I met on an earlier visit. Each time we see each other, we speak about John Betjeman, who was her devoted admirer for several decades and wrote poems such as “The Cockney Amorist” with her in mind. I mentioned having seen a photograph of them both in a recent collection of letters written to each other by the Mitford sisters (one of these is her sister-in-law, Deborah, who spearheaded so many changes at Chatsworth and made it fiscally viable). She had heard about the book but hadn’t seen it and said she would look for it. We also spoke about politics, which interests her keenly, and we concurred that the American Presidential election had come as an enormous relief for all of us. I also agree with her that the war in Afghanistan is doomed, and that despite the tragic consequences of abandoning it, we absolutely have to. No foreign power has ever been able to win against the Afghanis in their own rugged terrain. One of the factors that ended the Soviet regime was their own costly and failed effort to conquer Afghanistan. But will the President-elect change his mind on that topic?

Vilna and I are spending quiet days here in Edensor through Christmas, after which I’ll return to London.

Franco-American

2008-12-19T06:43:00.000-08:00

I’m winding up my séjour in Paris returning on the 20th to England. The last few days have been filled with memorable events—the Emil Nolde show at the Grand Palais, for example. Nolde wasn’t a painter I knew well, partly because so few of his works are found in the big collections. Most in the show were from the Nolde Stiftung in the small German town of Seebülle. He belongs to the ferment of that period one hundred years ago when German and Scandinavian artists were working to produce works with a Northern European sensibility, which can be eerie and dark. Think of Munch, of the Vienna and Berlin Secessions, and the Dresden group known as Die Brücke (The Bridge). Nolde was shaped by all three, a reciprocal impact, one assumes.

Speaking of bridges, I made a little detour to the Mirabeau Bridge, thinking it might add something to my sense of the meaning of Apollinaire’s poem. I’ve often wondered why he chose it as the site of his lyric, rather than one of the more central and better known bridges like the Pont Neuf. It is far from the center of things, to the southwest of the Paris known to visitors. You can say that the name itself is part of the charm, since the etymology suggests something like “looking at the beautiful.” But I think there’s more. Once you’re on the bridge, you’ll naturally move to its north side and gaze up toward the Eiffel Tower and a the center city. When you do, you’ll notice the Pont de Grenelle, about a quarter-mile to the north. Not a celebrated bridge, it has even so an interesting feature: just south of it on a little island is a smaller reproduction of the Statue of Liberty, which of course France donated to the United States in the 1880s. More than any other French poet of the 20th century, Apollinaire was influenced by American culture, the poetry of Whitman in particular. American inventions had been startling the French since the beginning of the latter part of the 20th century—electric light, the telephone, gramophone, automobile, cinema. American culture ca. 1900 was the culture of the new. And Apollinaire’s great poem “La Chanson du Mal Aimé” begins with the observation that the poet has grown tired of the Old World, except for that part of its culture enshrined in Catholicism, which the poet finds evergreen. You might say that religion is what is most Polish about Apollinaire, the only part of his maternal heritage that he made use of. As “La Chanson du Mal Aimé” is a lament based on his unrequited love for Annie Playden, “Le Pont Mirabeau” is an elegy for his love affair with Marie Laurencin. Transience is figured in the flow of the Seine and in the passage of hours, days, months and years. Apollinaire posits some sort of permanence, despite change, in the refrain’s repeated phrase, “je demeure.” Time passes, water flows, but the bridge and the poet remain.

It is a modern bridge of cast-iron construction and it includes on both sides two groups of heroic statuary made of iron. The presence of these figures, which look out over the water, would perhaps explain the lines “Tandis que sous/Le pont de nos bras passe/Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse.” The poet imagines that the water has grown weary of the eternal gaze of the statues, a trope symbolizing the inevitable antagonism between transience and immutability. Finally, the poem is a consideration of—a negotiation between—the claims of permanence and change. Each stanza of the poem is different, and yet the refrain concluding each is the same, repeating its observation that time passes and yet the speaker remains. And surely this view of things reflects the attitude of the city of Paris as well, always eager for new fashions, new architecture and design, new technologies, and aesthetic perspectives; yet still fiercely protecting its historical, artistic, and architectural legacy. Paris changes, as Baudelaire remarked in “Le Cygne,” even if his heart hasn’t changed. And yet a certain aspect of Paris remains the same, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever spent time here. A commitment to the classics, to a language that is correct (though enlivened by new idioms), to pleasure, and to reasoned reflection. Robert Lowell in “Beyond the Alps,” referred to Paris as “our black classic,” which is partly accurate. Yet, since his poem was written, all the old Gothic and neoclassical buildings (beginning with Notre Dame) have been steam-cleaned and made to look new again, including, now, the Pont Neuf (the New Bridge), which is the city’s oldest.

I had a chance to review this old-new Paris during a two-mile stroll two days ago, starting from Pont Alexandre III along the quais all the way to the Île de la Cité, then the Île St. Louis, and finally the Marais. The ultimate goal was Margo’s apartment, where I had tea with her, the American poet Ellen Hinsey, and her husband Mark Carlson. The latter have lived and worked in Paris for two decades. The venerable tradition of American artists living in Paris (Henry James, Edith Wharton, Julien Green, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Janet Flanner, James Jones, Edmund White, Diane Johnson—well, I could go on) is alive and well.

Marilyn Hacker also embodies this old Franco-American artistic alliance, having written many vivid poems with Parisian or French provincial settings. When I saw Marilyn again, she was in the company of Claire Malroux. Both poets have translated each other, as well as other poets in their reciprocal traditions. As such they constitute a fitting example of the cultural symbiosis I’ve spoken of. Not for nothing does Miss Liberty look down from the Pont de Grenelle toward the Mirabeau Bridge.

Paris and Bayeux in the Big Season

2008-12-16T08:45:00.000-08:00

Quick summary of events. I attended a private reading arranged by Marilyn Hacker’s friend Marie Étienne for the poet and novelist Hédi Kaddour, who presented his new novel to a small group of writers assembled at Marie Etienne’s apartment on the rue de Turenne. Among these were some I knew—Margo Berdeshevsky, Claire Malroux, and of course Marilyn. New to me were Hédi Kaddour, born in Tunisia, immigrant at an early age to France, and now thoroughly Parisian, with an attractive voice and an elegant personal bearing. I knew about but had never met Marilyn’s friend Linda Gardner, who several years ago retired from editorship of The Women’s Review of Books and settled in her favorite city. There was also Gabrielle Althen, whom I hadn’t met though I had read her complex and refined poems; and Paul Rossi, a critic and the partner of Marie Étienne, whom I instantly liked. Kaddour read for about ninety minutes to a polite and attentive audience, many of whom had incisive critiques to offer afterward. The novel is a braiding of three separate strands: a minimal fictional narrative, a personal journal, and a series of critical reflections on authors and filmmakers. Which I guess means it should be classed as a “metafiction.” I was struck by the fact that the authors he commented on I happened to like myself—Flaubert, Colette, and Racine (in particular his Bérénice, usually overlooked but very beautiful). It’s hard to imagine a similar evening taking place successfully anywhere but in Paris.

This past weekend I spent in Normandy, in the little town of Bayeux. Of course the famous tapestry is there. (Actually, it’s not a true tapestry but instead a band of embroidered linen, 70 meters long, 1000-year-old ancestor of the comic strip.) I’d always wanted to see it and this was my chance. We’re often disappointed when we see something after years of anticipation. But not this time. It’s a magnificent work, and all done with needle and thread.

It was good to have a break from the frenetic Parisian run-up to Christmas, which is now as jarring and abrasive as in any other capital city. You could say that indulgence in Christmas rituals has increased in inverse proportion to actual Christian belief and practice. Which goes some way toward explaining why Jewish and Muslim families also celebrate it nowadays. Santa is folklore, not religion, and he has the special advantage of fitting in perfectly with a consumerist approach to things. Also, the enshrining of childhood as the quintessential, most adored phase of a modern life. After age twelve, it’s all downhill. Ask our angry and disaffected teenagers, who almost overnight have to learn how to live without the feeling that they are the center of the universe. Christmas gives everyone the opportunity of regressing to the golden age. A grateful economy does everything it can to inspire that regression. Before 1950, the French never made much of Christmas. There was the Saint Sylvestre feast on December 24, which involved midnight mass and le réveillon, but gift-giving was put off till New Year’s, where a typical étrenne (holiday present) was a cone of marrons glacés (glazed chestnuts). There’s a wonderful essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss (who recently celebrated his 100th birthday), in which he analyses the Santa Claus figure from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology. The essay begins with an anecdote about the church fathers of a large provincial city some time in the early Fifties deciding to burn an effigy of Le Père Noël on the square in front of the cathedral. That would never happen now. Christmas is part of the carnival spirit that has swept the globe, inflating not only Mardi Gras but also Halloween (which in the past two decades has become a big deal in Europe, too), New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter. All of these are good for sales, obviously, but no one has yet explained why advanced Western societies are so addicted to carnival. My guess: It’s an escape from depression, which is also epidemic in our culture. But then, why is everyone so depressed? Boring, yet stressful jobs; failed marriages; envy of those with more money and possessions; aging in a culture that only cares about youth. Finally, it’s just not as much fun to be an adult as a child. Toys “R” Us, and it’s painful to have to stop being one. But you can inhabit the toy universe again next week, if you do the legwork, like the one hundred thousand people I see every night raiding the shops on the Champs Élysées.

That was a long digression. All I was going to say was that the French provinces offer a welcome alternative to the near-hysteria of the capital this time of year. I went to see the Bayeux tapestry but found the cathedral and the timber-frame houses of the town an almost equal attraction. I’d thought there would be a chance to go the Normandy coast about ten miles away, which was the site of the D-Day invasion, but we had rain so I just stayed in town. It’s just as well, I had some restorative downtime. Now I’m in Paris again, and have four more days before returning to England.

Sights

2008-12-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

When traveling, you don’t have time to record (or not in detail) all you are doing. Quick summary: Marilyn Hacker arrived this past weekend and immediately invited Margo and myself to dinner, which gave us a chance to exchange news and think of projects. Monday Marilyn and I attended an interview-reading given by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. It was a pleasure to renew acquaintance with her. A Lebanese poet and autofiction writer, she has just published a new collection titled Les Obscurcis.

I saw an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume devoted to the life and work of the American photographer Lee Miller, who was a few years ago the subject of a revelatory biography by Carolyn Burke. In addition to Miller’s startling pictures were portraits of her made by other photographers, including Man Ray and Steichen, and a film about her life. All of this is an avenue to the artistic ferment of Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, a period of inexhaustible fascination. I didn’t know, for example,that she played the Muse figure in Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète. Another aspect of her life was the war photography she did in London during the blitz and on the front once the Allies invaded Europe. She was with the troops that liberated Dachau, and the photographs she took at that moment are the most horrifying she ever made. It’s good that interest in this less well known figure is being revived.

The Musée Maillol, in addition to its permanent collection is currently showing works by a primitive painter named Séraphine Louis (known to art historians as Séraphine de Senlis), who lived and worked a century ago in that cathedral town in the provinces. A new film by Martin Provost (titled simply Séraphine and starring the Belgian actress Yolande Moreau)) tells her story, how she worked as a housecleaner and painted in her free time, her paintings eventually discovered by a visiting German art critic named Uhde. But it’s not a triumphalist narrative, instead it involves mental illness and confinement in a hospital at a period when treatment of the insane was cruel and ineffective. I saw the film first on my own, and then Margo and I saw the show.

Apart from these activities, I fill my day with long strolls through the streets of Paris, absorbing sights familiar and new. One such stroll took me to the Île St. Louis and past a little hotel on rue St. Louis where Ann Jones and I stayed forty-one years ago while we were looking for an apartment to live in during my Fulbright year. (Why did we choose a hotel on the Île St. Louis? Well, it’s quieter than other parts of town, centrally located, and, according to Proust’s novel, it’s where the character Swann lived, which gives it a certain literary aura.) Edmund White and I stayed in the same hotel three years later after a drive we took together from Rome to Paris. In the Eighties, he took an apartment on the island, I believe on rue Poulletier, and when I came to Paris during the decade he lived here, I again stayed in the little hotel, though by then it had been renovated and looked much smarter than it did in the Sixties. As I’ve suggested before, a visit to Paris is layered experience for me, memory on top of memory, and I hope it doesn’t too much resemble archeology when I write about it here.

Paris and Memory

2008-12-04T13:31:00.000-08:00

This is being written in Paris in the apartment belonging to Marilyn Hacker in the Marais neighborhood. I’ll be staying here until she arrives from New York this weekend. It’s a pleasant and comfy place, and of course I’ve been reading some of the books lining the walls, especially volumes of new French poetry and fiction. Marilyn knows a number of contemporary French poets, in fact, has translated several—most recently Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, which won the Robert Fagles translation prize a year ago. Other French poets she has translated include Venus Khoury-Ghata, Claire Malroux, Guy Goffette, Emanuel Moses, and Hédi Kaddour. It can't be long before she will be commended by the Légion d’Honneur?

I was let into the apartment by my friend Margo Berdeshevsky, whose first book But a Passage in the Wilderness appeared with Sheep Meadow last year. Margo has had several distinct but interrelated lives: As a little girl she first came to live in Paris for long stretches while her father worked here. As an adult she enjoyed a successful career on the stage in New York but eventually put acting aside. For many years she lived in Hawaii--and that is where we first met, back in the 1990s, when I gave a reading and workshop at a cultural center on Maui. In addition to writing, she makes beautiful double-exposure b&w photographs, related to her poems in their aesthetic of ambiguity and multiple sourcings.

We had dinner that first evening at an unfussy, old-Paris restaurant on the quai des Célestins, and I was reminded that Paris has resisted (not always successfully) the rush to sweep out the old and ring in the new. Parisians do not insist that every establishment they frequent look as though it were designed tomorrow. Not every surface needs to be scrubbed and polished to a high gloss; materials can be of an older vintage than plate glass and concrete; gilt and red velvet plush are permitted. As for dwellings here, a few go back to the fourteenth century and are still being lived in. Each succeeding century has an increasing number of architectural representatives, at least until you get to the twentieth, when conservationists began to halt the tearing down of old structures for replacement by the new. No doubt the last major overhaul Paris allowed--under duress--was the one Malraux undertook in the late 1960s. In fact, it occurred here in the Marais. I was living in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship that year, and I recall the shock Parisians felt as the work began.

Memories of a city that I have known intimately, and revisited more than a dozen times since my first residence here four decades ago, have naturally come flooding in since I arrived. (See this blog for the month of May, which recalls the insurgency of that era.) An idea that I’ve been turning over in my mind is this: Paris as the Capital of Memory. The theme was important to Baudelaire in poems like “Moesta et Errabunda,” “Le Cygne,” and “Recueillement.” Proust constructed an entire novelistic epic on the phenomenon of involuntary memory. And Apollinaire’s beautiful “La Chanson du Mal-Aimé” includes this ravishing stanza:

Mon beau navire ô ma mémoire
Avons-nous assez navigué
Dans une onde mauvaise à boire
Avons-nous assez divagué
De la belle aube au triste soir

Recollection is also the basis of his “Le Pont Mirabeau,” a lyric at once searing, musical, and nostalgic, where what is summoned up from the Seine under the Mirabeau Bridge is the conclusion of a love-affair with Marie Laurencin. We tend to think of French literature (and Paris) as overwhelmingly concerned with eros and love, an estimate that's accurate provided one understands that the French have a melancholy view concerning love’s chances in a fallen world. It is almost always blocked by social convention, destroyed by circumstance, or worn away by time. And what better setting for this theme than the grey city of Paris, whose classical and Beaux-Arts architecture shows so well in the pearl-grey light of its winter months? In the French tradition, consolation for love's disappointments is found in religion or in art; or in memory, as it is enshrined in art. Or not at all.

This afternoon, as soon as the rain stopped, I took the métro up to the Butte Montmartre and wandered about for while, though the irregular cobbles of that up-and-downhill quarter were contraindicated for a foot not quite yet healed. I found some of the haunts of the artistic avant-garde of a century ago—Le Lapin agile, Le Consulat, Le Billard de bois (used by Van Gogh as the subject of his picture La Guinguette)—and the site of the “Bateau Lavoir,” where Picasso lived for nearly a decade in a state of near-starvation. Which didn’t prevent him from painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon before moving on to the colossal fame that awaited him. What else? Well, the little vineyard of Montmartre is still in operation, producing, I imagine, no more than fifteen cases of wine annually. And the Place du Tertre is there, spoiled by tourism, as you might expect. It was there that Louis Renault drove his first automobile 110 years ago, on December 24, launching one form of modernity and more problems than he could ever have dreamed of. All of France and the rest of the globe is now in thrall to oil, so that the descendants of Renault's machine and its foreign conterparts can function. And, oh, is the globe heating up!

I walked to the Sacre Coeur (church of the Sacred Heart), from whose steps you get the most impressive view of Paris’s spires, domes, and high-rises (with the possible exception of the Tour Eiffel, but that involves long waits, a steep admission fee, and the risk of acrophobic seizures). I had planned to recite Baudelaire’s “Recueillement” to myself, thinking its brilliant verbality and profound evocation of memory might take my mind off an aching foot. But who could possibly concentrate? There was too much noise, teenagers yelling about nothing in particular, buskers hawking their second-hand covers of pop songs, tourists barking instructions to family members they were downloading into their digital cameras. I’ve noticed this phenomenon at other sites that might qualify as sublime. People just don’t know how to handle the awe they’re in danger of feeling, and so they try to dispel it with trivial pursuits and deflationary comments. Too bad. But I caught sight of a couple of others like myself, silent, gazing, sifting through memories that the cityscape and late light stirred in them. My unknown companions, bound together by the unstated freemasonry espoused by those who can accord to an elevated moment its proper weight; who don’t need to experience their lives as a sit-com and aren't afraid of strong feelings.

London Today

2008-12-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

I’ll be away from London for several weeks, and maybe that’s why it seems a good moment to say something about a vast city that almost successfully escapes description. A friend in the States recently wished me a good time in “merrie olde England,” which was kind but jolted me into an awareness that not so many Americans realize that London differs from Dickens’s depiction of the city (stylized to the point of inaccuracy even for the time when the novella first appeared) in A Christmas Carol. Several things to consider: London is a world metropolis whose only peers are New York, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Tokyo. As for the composition of its population, it is the world’s most diverse. Apart from the descendants of the earliest inhabitants (we can expand the definition by saying that includes the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish) it has attracted new citizens from the former Empire or current Commonwealth—from Canada, from the West Indies, from Australia, New Zealand, India, the Middle East, from Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria, well, the list goes on. Besides that, laws governing the European Community allow citizens from all E.C. nations to live and work in Britain. Therefore all European languages are commonly spoken on the street in London. Every world cuisine is represented in its restaurants, and shops of every ethnicity can be found somewhere in the city.

Culturally, Britain has as much as anyone could desire: in contemporary visual art, several world-class artists are producing major innovative work, for example, Lucien Freud, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Anthony Gormley, Sam Taylor-Wood, Paula Rego. And the stage: Partly because it is state subsidized and partly because of a tradition that extends back to the Renaissance and Western culture’s greatest dramatist, theatre in London is stronger than in any other city, both in the standard repertory and in works by new playwrights. The Nobel isn’t often conferred for achievement in drama, but Harold Pinter has received it. London has two opera houses, with the most celebrated performers appearing at Covent Garden, and a more unusual repertory (including newly commissioned works) at the English National Opera. Music performances take place every night at a wide variety of venues such as Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican, Wigmore Hall, and the new venue King’s Place discussed here a month ago. Dance is strong both at the Royal Ballet and then Sadler’s Wells for more contemporary work, plus fringe events elsewhere. And if we turn to pop music, it’s clear that the U.S.’s only real rival in that area is Britain. In fact, there are some of us that tend to prefer British rock to American, exception made, still, for African-American artists.

British literary culture is a national preoccupation, one sign of which is the huge readership for London’s several daily papers, to which Manchester’s Guardian must be added because it is read in every city in the U.K. Magazines, literary quarterlies, and little magazines are found in numbers that would seem hefty even for a country with a much larger population than Britain’s. When a new novel appears, within a couple of weeks of publication it gets reviews in at least half a dozen publications, followed not long after by consideration in publications appearing at wider intervals. The British Arts Council funds magazines, literary festivals, workshops, and individual artists, not only in London but throughout the U.K. Given the intensity of the interest in literature, it’s no wonder that this relatively small country has produced many of the world’s most widely read contemporary authors. There’s no need to round up the usual suspects, we all know who they are.

But there is one topic related to poetry I want to pause over. There used to be an idea that British poets and American poets were twain, that neither could understand the other. The stereotypical American poet wrote shapeless personal narratives in leaden language about terrible things undergone, like child abuse, marital violence, drugs, alcohol, madness, and suicide. The stereotypical British poet wrote nicely composed poems using meter, rhyme and verseform about topics such as nature, pleasant domestic recollections, and exalted moments drawn from cultural history. British and American poets might both adore Latin American poetry, but they couldn’t understand each other. Nonsense. There are temporary barriers to perfect comprehension—differing vocabulary and references to day-to-day phenomena that don’t have counterparts in the other culture, but these are soon mastered. Many American poets (like Marilyn Hacker or Annie Finch) use traditional prosody, and, meanwhile, only a minority in the U.K. do. There are many experimental British poets, especially the group associated with Cambridge U., and British publication now reflects the ethnic diversity of its population. Younger British poets are irreverent, slangy, often working-class in tone and subject matter, uninterested in using polite means of expression. I’m not sure where nowadays you would find merrie olde England, but certainly not in London and not in British poetry.

Gay Poetry in Britain

2008-11-25T04:01:00.000-08:00

Moving to matters literary, I want to reflect a bit on the scarcity of poetry involving gay male experience here in the U.K. There are several prominent lesbian poets, forthright about their lives to varying degrees. I’m going to hold off giving their names, just in case they’d prefer not to be part of this discussion. The situation with gay male poetry, though, is very different. Two decades ago Jeremy Reed wrote poems with gay subject matter, but no longer seems to, or else doesn’t publish them. Since Reed, I know of only one book-publishing poet (Gregory Woods) who uses that subject matter in his work; but he is not famous. It might be helpful to hear him give an account of his experience. A few years ago Magma magazine (to its credit) assembled an issue on the theme of gay poetry, and Woods was queried about his publishing history. Here’s the link:

www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=16088

His account of what happened isn’t at all encouraging, but it sounds plausible, based on my experience. I’ve noticed that, when books by gay males are reviewed by straight males, the latter do everything in their power to make sure the reader understands that the reviewer isn’t gay. The easiest way to do this is to deplore the subject matter. Not much better is, “Although I’m not myself gay, I can understand…etc.” I’ve even seen, “When I showed this poem to my wife, she said… etc.” Whatever else these dodges mean, they suggest that the stigma of being gay, even in countries where homosexuality has been decriminalized, is enormous. On the other hand, I know straight men who are sometimes mistaken for being gay and who find it amusing or flattering, in any case, no big deal. But that’s not the situation with most, and you have to wonder what secret fears and insecurities make some individuals so touchy about the topic. Oh, and the other fact to take note of is that straight women reviewers are almost always less damning when they review gay male poets.

The issue also comes up outside the realm of reviewing; it affects publishers’ acceptance of the work. My friend Mimi Khalvati told me the story of a gay poet (whose name I will leave out, since I don’t know if he’d like being mentioned). He was associated with an important poetry magazine, published gay poems and poems on other topics in many other magazines, won prizes, gave readings, etc. He tried for ten years to get a book published, to no avail. Eventually, he gave up trying. That is too bad.

At the Chroma magazine party mentioned a couple of blogs back, I met a young poet who received one of the annual prizes given by the magazine. His name is John Mccullough. He has published two pamphlets, won prizes, and has appeared in many magazines, as well as The Guardian. Some of his poems involve gay subject matter, but not all. He has decided, though, not to censor himself nor to worry about public acceptance, which strikes me as courageous and admirable. In an e-mail exchange, he said:

“I hope that the British poetry world is ready for a first collection with lots of poems featuring gay speakers - most successful poets have written them after already having proved their poetic worth with other successful collections rather than trying to prove it with poems which investigate gay history and such. Sometimes I don't know if maybe I should be moving away from it and trying to be relevant in other ways. I hope that love is something which transcends gender and that my love poems are sufficiently universal. I know that gay poems comprise less than half of what I write but I don't want to be tidied away into the drawer labelled 'gay poetry - for gay people' - it's even tinier than the one labelled 'poetry'.”

John’s comment about the “universal” appeal of poetry reminds me of something I read in an essay by a very prominent British gay male poet in whose work you can’t find any evidence of the nature of his sexuality. (And he is not a political conservative, in fact, is sited on the far left of the political spectrum.) He was discussing love poems written in the second person rather than the third, and noted that this allowed the reader of whatever gender to identify with the poem’s speaker—as presumably some of them couldn’t do if the pronouns were gendered. In fact, this poet uses the approach himself; all his love poems are written to “you,” never about “him.” And yet I don’t find the argument convincing. “Upon Julia’s Clothes” is written in the third person, and I’m able to identify with the speaker instantly; it’s quite a sexy poem. Just as easily I can identify with Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt” or his “They flee from me who sometime did me seek.” And I'm aware that straight women readers also respond to these poems. Further, I know some straight men who read Cavafy’s poems about men and find them fully engaging. But, obviously, not all do.

When you consider that British (and Irish) fiction includes gay male authors who are celebrated (Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Toibin, Adam Mars-Jones, Jamie McNeill), you have to wonder what forces here operate against gay male poetry. I should point out, too, that the American poet Mark Doty has a considerable following in the U.K., and that Thom Gunn, during his lifetime, was almost universally admired here. So there’s no automatic and incontrovertible rule saying gay themes cannot interest the British readership. (That's assuming of course that the work has literary merit apart from its non-routine subject matter.) My guess is that if more poetry book editors were women, we’d see more books by gay male poets. That isn’t the situation right now, but perhaps it will change. For John Mccullough’s sake, I hope it will, and for others’.

Forward

2008-11-24T03:33:00.000-08:00

The pages here dealing with the recent election reported European euphoria about our new President. Americans living abroad also experienced this, but in a different key, some part of which had to do with being freed from the burden of embarrassment (or shame) concerning government in the home country. We could feel we were a progressive nationality again, no longer despised by most of the world.

Now that the shouting has died down, it’s time to look at a negative political theme that surfaced on the fourth of November. California voters passed (though not be a huge margin) Proposition 8, a measure overturning a court decree earlier in the year that had legalized marriage between people of the same sex. Two other states (Arizona and Florida) passed bans against gay marriage and one other a ban against adoption by gay parents. There are, obviously, no Federal guarantees or protections for gay marriage or gay civil rights in general. From the standpoint of marriage (or civil unions), this puts the U.S. in the rear guard of progressive legislation, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Gay civil rights are of course guaranteed throughout the E.U., just as they are in the government constituted in South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela.

The reason commonly given for the U.S. failure to remain at the forefront of progressive legislation in this area is the power of fundamentalist Protestant sects and the Roman Catholic church in our country. To which we should now add the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), who spent huge sums of money on TV ads during the months before Election Day to persuade Californians to pass Proposition 8. This was done in contravention to Federal law, which prohibits churches or any tax-exempt institution from engaging in political activism. And I gather that legal briefs are being prepared to challenge the Mormons’ right to tax exemption on the basis of their direct intervention over the past months.

But does Christian religion really account for disapproval of gay people and opposition to their civil rights? In Roman Catholic doctrine, abortion is a more serious sin than homosexuality, but no state nor the Federal government outlaws it. Biblical prohibitions against same-sex relations are mostly limited to Levitican law (which Christians are not required to follow) and one or two ambiguous statements made in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Jesus never mentions homosexuality or abortion. On the other hand, in more than one instance, he castigates divorce, and the Roman church has fallen into line with this prohibition—though of course annulment can provide a loophole for practicing Catholics who want to get out of a destructive marriage. But certainly neither state legislatures nor Federal law would ever institute a ban on divorce. And among the fifty-plus percent of couples who have divorced in America, millions must be Catholic or fundamentalist.

So I don’t think the widespread prejudice against gay people is really based on religion. Religion is used merely as a justificatory screen for personal uncertainties and fears. We should also note that many atheists are thoroughly homophobic and opposed to gay rights. The explanation has to lie in human psychology and the near-universal template of the nuclear family: Dad, Mom, and a couple of siblings. Anything that disturbs that template introduces insecurity and stirs up emotions of fear and fear disguised as anger. The populist objection to same-sex couples is expressed as, “It was Adam and Eve--right?--not Adam and Bruce.” That’s about as far as the reasoning goes; in other words, reason isn’t in the picture at all.

The term “marriage” did not always have a religious meaning. Atheists have freely married in civil ceremonies for a very long time. To go back in history, we discover that marriage was primarily a legal entity, set up to regulate exchange of property and guarantee lineage. In the Roman church, marriage was not a sacrament until the 13th century. Before then, it was rather looked down on. Except for the high nobility, marriages were not permitted inside church sanctuaries. In his Epistles, Paul devalued marriage in favor of celibacy but conceded, “It is better to marry than to burn.” If the religious right of the past few decades has decided to regard marriage as primarily a religious rite and to reinforce its religious status through law, then the federal and state government should have nothing to do with it, in keeping with the Constitutional principle of separation between church and state. If marriage belongs only to religion, then, as far as government is concerned, all unions between people of whatever gender should be regarded simply as civil unions. “Marriage” would become the property of our various sects, which could then decide who is qualified for it according to their own canon. Such is now the case in France, where men and women sometimes enter into civil unions without proceeding to religious marriage. So long as the legal rights adhering to civil unions between people of the same sex are indistinguishable from those attached to religious marriage, then I see no objection to civil unions for gay people. Government should also recognize that for state purposes, marriages between men and women are civil unions and nothing more, and legally demote marriage’s definition to a purely religious meaning as is the case with “baptism,” which has no legal status or force. But if government continues to apply the term “marriage” to unions between men and women, it should also be applied to couples of the same sex. The argument that marriage deserves special regard because it is designed to assure proper rearing of children instantly falls apart when we note that millions of married couples have no children, either by choice or for biological reasons. I don’t think that even fundamentalist extremists would deny that those couples are married. There is also the fact that many gay couples have adopted children or are bringing up children of one of the spouses in a process of joint parenthood.

The reasoning above will not convince those who don’t reason, I know. I don’t expect gay civil rights to be instituted overnight. Education is needed, and the schools have to do their part in this and not be swayed by fundamentalist objections. But at the private level gay people will also have to take action, first, by being forthright about their identities and speaking to those who don’t understand sexual difference and therefore fear it. Some of the most rapid changes of heart occur when homophobes discover that a family member belongs to the minority they have been vilifying.

Nearly forty years ago, I interviewed the celebrated British philosopher A.J. Ayer. Among the things I asked him about was his view on contemporary philosophy’s engagement in political issues. He said that it could play a part and cited his own activism with respect to the legality of sex between people of the same gender. He was heterosexual and the change wouldn't especially benefit him. But he had unusual powers of mind and therefore could see past the unreasonable objections to sexual variance. I’m not sure how many people besides gay historians will recall that the U.K. passed the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexuality between consenting adults, as late as 1967. Ayer’s activism deserves part of the credit. He worked for its passage not because it would improve his own condition but because justice and reason required it. It must be that the same spirit of reason and fair play has led the U.K. to make gay civil unions legal in its domain. And this brings me to a question already raised in earlier entries of this blog: Given that no legal disabilities attach to homosexuality in Britain, and that its society is largely secular, why is there so little public expression of gay experience here, and specifically in poetry? But this blog is already too long, so I will postpone that question for a day or two and wait to see whether readers want the question explored before writing further.

(On a personal note: I no longer have to use crutches, my foot is nearly well.)

Travels with Charley

2008-11-11T05:22:00.000-08:00

“Charley” is the name I’ve given to the stick (crutch) I never go anywhere without these days. Yes, it seems I've reached the third part of the Riddle of the Sphinx, and become a creature who goes on three legs. Someone asked me why I hadn’t mentioned the foot injury in this blog. Actually, I did mention it a while back but didn’t make much of the topic because the barebone truth is people don’t like hearing about ailments. Anyway, said foot is on the mend, and, in my usual way of trying to turn drawbacks into advantages, I’ve been making mental notes (possibly useful later on in some piece of writing) about public response to disability, even if what I’m dealing with right now doesn’t really qualify as that. As you're hobbling along, some people race in front of you with perfect aplomb and may even jostle you, though just possibly they don’t see the crutch. As for public transport, I notice that young women usually stand and offer you a seat. Almost no men do, proving once again that women are nicer than men. Some people are kind, some people look fearful, and some angry. Larkin’s “The Old Fools” is worth rereading in this context.

The above suggests that I haven’t kept to my rooms. Right. I have to go out, limping or not, otherwise the walls start closing in on me. I even taught a class for Kathryn Maris, who is in the Creative Writing department of Morley College in South London. And I attended a party for Chroma magazine (edited by a man named Shaun Levin), which publishes lesbian and gay prose and poetry. The magazine’s annual prizes were given out by the guest of honor, Sarah Waters, an author I very much admire, particularly her London-during-the-blitz novel Night Watch. Its lesbian characters are fully realized, and one of them is an ambulance driver, which is a reminder that women have risked and continue to risk their lives in wars that male leaders initiate. I spoke briefly with Sarah Waters and was impressed by her serenity, naturalness, and warmth. Appropriately, today is Remembrance or Armistice Day, and I was startled to see on BBC this morning that Britain numbers three survivors from the First World War, men well over a hundred years old. Although, if you survived the trenches, what can't you survive?

Last night I went to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End to hear Mark Lawson interview Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll (whom I used to correspond with back in the late 80s, before he had become known), on the occasion of the publication of a book of interviews O’Driscoll conducted with the great laureate from the North of Ireland. It was a house packed all the way up to the rafters, further evidence that no one cares about poetry. All ages, sorts, and conditions attended and applauded wildly at the conclusion. I wonder what it’s like to be the object of so much adoration; probably intimidating, but not altogether disagreeable. Heaney led things off with some prose poems, then Lawson put a series of questions to both participants; and finally Heaney read a few poems, including an impressive recent one based on the gospel account of the paralysed man who was lowered by his friends on a pallet through the ceiling of a room where Jesus was speaking, a room too crowded for them to enter any other way.

I knew that Heaney had recovered from a minor stroke a couple of years ago, and indeed he looked thinner and rather more fragile than the young man I first met back in, I think, the spring of 1978. The occasion was a reading he gave at Yale. He wasn’t well known in the States then. Perhaps only forty people made up the audience. At that time I was living with J.D. McClatchy at Silliman College, in one of the suites of rooms allotted to faculty who were willing to serve as Resident Fellows for the Yale’s colleges, a responsibility McClatchy had briskly signed on for. I believe Heaney read several of the “Glanmore” sonnets, one of his loveliest sequences. Anyway, considering no one had arranged a reception, it seemed natural to invite him and some of the audience to have a drink at Silliman after the reading. When he came in, I recall shaking the hand of a vigorous, hesitant man with prematurely gray hair nearly down to his shoulders, wearing bluejeans and a cotton shirt. I don’t think he was fully comfortable in those surroundings, and who could blame him? Harold Bloom, who sometimes attended Yale poetry readings, didn’t attend that one; it was only later that he got to know and admire Heaney’s poetry.

The next meeting came perhaps five or six years later, when we were living in New York. Seamus (the first name seems to suit this least arrogant of poets) had given a reading at the 92nd Street YMHA, at the invitation of Grace Schulman, who was the director of the Poetry Center. Grace had people to her place down in Greenwich Village after the event. By then Seamus was a famous poet, confident, relaxed, and surrounded by admirers. With him was his wife Mary, who I think was glad to have someone to talk to while fans swarmed around her husband. (That was often my role in those years, speaking to the wives of the artists, a practice it seems that Alice Toklas automatically fell into when famous visitors came to call on Gertrude Stein.) I found Mary unaffectedly down to earth, patriotic about her origins in the North of Ireland, with a sharp eye and wit, not to mention being very beautiful. Theirs would seem to be that very rare thing in the lives of poets, a thoroughly happy marriage. (Richard and Charlee Wilbur, and Robert and Ellen Pinsky are other examples that come to mind, along with Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat here in London.) I forget the stimulus for it, but at some point Seamus was moved to recite one of Wyatt’s best known poems, “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.” It was roughly at that moment that the current revival of interest in Wyatt began—and may that revival endure. I knew by then that Seamus would one day be tapped for the Nobel, there was no mistaking the ability. And perhaps it was just such a certainty that added to my reluctance to attempt to stay in touch in the years after—not that sincere admiration always suffices as a base for a long-lasting association. If I’d had enough brass to pursue the connection, there would probably have been some kind of response. I see many writers acting out their notion that being sharp and condescending is a sure sign of greatness, but Seamus’s example is enough to give the lie to that notion.

Anyway, I could meet him on the page, and that was the main thing. He's one of the few contemporary poets I've read in entirety. It's a piece of luck that we have that work in a time that isn't especially favorable to poets and poetry.

It suddenly strikes me that I haven’t mentioned the availability, beginning ten days ago, of the new collection of critical essays (see the column to the right). What jogged my memory is that one of the essays deals with Heaney’s poetry. Besides Heaney, there are essays on Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Auden, Bishop, Derek Walcott, Thom Gunn, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, Larkin, Marilyn Hacker, Derek Mahon, and one on poems involving travel. Worth the detour, I think.

Turning Point

2008-11-05T02:28:00.000-08:00

When people preface a statement with the phrase “Words can’t express…” you know you’re going to hear quite a few words, and this won’t be an exception. I snapped awake at four A.M. London time last night to see where the election stood and got the news that Obama had just gone past the 270 electoral votes needed to win. A huge weight slid off mental shoulders, a weight built up over the eight groaningly awful years when the U.S.A. had been pushed into a terrifying decline by leadership incompetent and unethical to a point words can’t express. These were years when I got out of the country whenever I possibly could, ashamed of what my nationality had come to stand for in the global picture. Two stolen elections, an intransigent monopartisan Prez, WMD’s, the fictional “yellow cake,” the preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation against the will of the U.N., Abu Ghraib, the endless occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and thousands of Americans killed or maimed for life, the Patriot Act I and II, phone-tapping, people detained at Guantanamo without habeas corpus or access to counsel, the refusal to sign Kyoto Accords and simultaneous undermining of environmental regulations at home, the Enron implosion, the Administration’s “outing” and dismissal of Valerie Plame, the politically motivated dismissal of legal personnel by the Attorney General, scandals revealed and then buried by the press, the abandonment of the poor of New Orleans devastated by hurricane and flood, the gutting of social programs, the showering of tax breaks on billionaires, financial deregulation and the unleashing of greed and resulting credit collapse in the financial sector… words cannot express. And it's drawing to a close, hallelujah!

BBC coverage gave me a picture of the wild mood of relief and celebration in America. Yet what comes as a delightful surprise is the exhilaration I’ve seen over here. The U.K. and all of Europe are jumping up and down and cheering. It’s as though Obama had been elected President of the World. Which, in an odd way, he has been. I find this humbling. The truth is, much of the globe deeply admires and enjoys the good things that U.S.A. has brought to the global table. It’s quite clear that people everywhere hope the President-elect can restore to full operation the America that they like and have emulated throughout the 20th century. It’s not just Americans who wanted America back. BBC channels were interviewing all sorts of people here for their reactions, and one incident reported was that a black child walking down Oxford Street, when he heard the news, said, “I’m going to be the first black Prime Minister!” Which means that Obama’s example has become a focus of aspiration not only for Americans but for people of color all over the world. Fixing historical pivots or turning points of any kind are always a bit arbitrary, but maybe we can say that today marks the end of the long, inhumane colonial imposture, based on the concept of a superior white overlord and an inferior dark underling.

When the January inauguration takes place, it will be almost exactly 400 years since the first Africans were brought as captives to North America. The story of their slow, agonized liberation is one of the great epics of modern history, to be placed beside other struggles of a like character, such as the emancipation of the Jews of Europe, the varied peoples of India, of Southern and Northern Ireland, and former colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. An epic deserves a resounding conclusion, and that conclusion comes with the new Administration. Although. We should know in advance that there will be some disappointments, Obama will not manage to do everything we might want him to do. He is a human being, not Superman, and from the Bush Administration he inherits the biggest governmental and economic disaster since the Hoover years. I intuit that he is more Centrist than Left. He has Congress to deal with, fifty fractious states, and a judicial branch mostly put in place by the previous Republican Administration—facts that for good or ill limit his influence. But his value as a symbol is unquestionable. The change he will bring will come partly by the decisions he makes, but also simply by his historical identity. Being a redemptive symbol is no small thing. If an African-American can be President, why not a woman, why not a Jew, why not a Native American, a Latino, an Asian, and why not a gay person?

If we turn to the arts, this may be the best moment to advance a theory that has been on the back burner of my mind for several years now. When the government of a nation is as terrible as ours has been for eight years, the arts necessarily suffer. During the Bush years American artists lost their confidence. The fiction that America and its cultural productions stood for freedom and justice was exposed as a fraud. Most artists thrust their heads safely in the sand and produced art that made no reference at all to what has been going on, winning for themselves some sort of sponsorship from the right wing, and at the same time a pitiable irrelevance. Others—the minority—responsibly tackled the problem of making art and witness, imagination and criticism, somehow coincide. We have a few glowing examples of an engaged art made in the past eight years. But here’s the painful paradox: for whatever reasons based in human psychology, art whose prime motive force is didactic doesn’t inspire complete and unqualified assent. Art is most itself when it praises and when it consoles. How, during the last eight years, could American artists find much to praise in America and to console us for what it had become? Perhaps, perhaps, a new era is being ushered in, when it will be possible not to feel shame and anguish about our nationality, or at least not so much as to prevent us from working well and rediscovering the confidence that made American cultural productions as bold, original, strongly constructed, and liberating as they have been for nearly two centuries. I heartily hope it will be so. Words cannot express how much I hope it will be so.

Evaluating the Poets

2008-11-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I mentioned James Fenton, whose value as a poet is well known; but possibly some readers may not be aware that he is a learned and brilliant writer about visual art (mainly in a series of essays for The New York Review of Books); and among the English-language poet-critics writing about poetry, I’m inclined to think he is the best. Confirmation can be found in a collection of essays published several years ago in a book titled The Strength of Poetry, which includes studies of Wilfred Owen, Larkin, Marianne Moore, Bishop, Plath, Lawrence, and several having to do with Auden, who is no doubt the figure that most influenced Fenton himself. Reading these essays, it dawns on you again that being a poet and writing poetry are impossible assignments—I mean, that poets are faced with problems that can’t be neatly and sensibly and permanently solved. Fenton touches on the issues that made poetry difficult for the figures discussed, issues connected to nationality and/or politics, gender, sexual orientation, poetic style, and mental or physical health. It seems that sooner or later a poet will do, say, or write something judged truly terrible, and punishment won’t be long in coming. The public imposes a very high moral, political, and aesthetic standard on poets, demands that no suburban life could ever fulfill, certainly. And it does seem that poets don’t for the most part make balanced choices. If not dogged by mental illness, most suffer from at least mild neurosis (even the strict rectitude of Moore has its disturbing side, when you reflect that she always lived with her mother, until the latter’s death, and never formed a love-relationship with anyone else). More commonly, twentieth century poets suffer from alcoholism, which sometimes leads to suicide, as with Berryman, or relatively early death, as with Thomas, Auden, Lowell, and Bishop. I haven’t taken a close census, but it seems clear that the majority of poets’ marriages or long-term relationships are broken off after a few years and affairs seem to be quite common even during the course of lasting marriages.

Personal problems and writing would be difficult enough in themselves, but once an author has actually produced good work in manuscript, there arrives the excruciating problem of how to bring it to a public. Here beginneth the long and grueling struggle with magazine and then book editors, the years of incomprehension and rejection, at least for work that departs from standard expectations. I’m not sure that even the sterling virtues of Moore helped her avoid disdain for contemporaries that were successful because unoriginal or only original. Then, when publication does materialize, it lanches another nightmare, the slow and often ill-considered response of reviewers and critics, who can stop a career in its tracks, and not always for the purest of reasons. Magazine critics are underpaid and sometimes an underlying resentment at the unfair working conditions of the critical profession is taken out on the book assigned. And there are many obstacles to fair and objective assessment. Men critics may have it in for women or women for men or straight for gay or vice versa. Critics who are friends of a writer belonging to one faction may blast a writer belonging to another—if in fact those critics aren’t themselves poets with factional loyalties. A critic who has ever slammed a writer isn’t likely to change his mind later on; doing so amounts to an admission of fallibility, and that is a no-no in professional circles. Actually, vendettas can go on for decades.

As for favorable responses, the specter of horse-trading or one-hand-washing-another is so endemic to the literary world that it is completely taken for granted, and I don’t see how such practices could ever be reformed, given that the numbers of people involved are rather small, and that for good or ill almost everyone knows everyone else. And how does one solve this dilemma: I am to award a prize to a book this year, and, meanwhile, one of the candidates is a friend of mine, whose book I believe to be the best by far among the contenders. I am in no doubt at all about this. So do I disqualify that book merely because the author is my friend? The choice is between "conflict of interest" and perjury. If we must perjure and this choice is going to be the universal rule, I think we can expect that writers will soon avoid establishing friendships with other authors. Out with Coleridge and Wordsworth, with Forster and Woolf, with Moore and Bishop, with Bishop and Lowell—all of whom advanced each other’s case in public. Still, it would be refreshing if now and then a writer praised a known enemy in print, or a prize controlled by one faction were awarded to an author belonging to another. I search my memory and don’t find more than a couple of instances of such a thing in the past thirty-five years, a dismal statistic. In French literature of the early 20th century, a much discussed concept was l'acte gratuit, the "free act," one not controlled and determined by mere reason or self-interest. Several French writers, notably Gide, tried to achieve such "free acts." But when it comes to contemporaray literature, what we see is the most robotic exercise of self-interested choice. Participants are career-machines and, with electronic predictability, react in ways designed to maximize personal advancement. After all, it's the capitalist way.

So there it is, the inconvenient life of the poet. My advice to those starting out? If you can possibly choose another pursuit or profession, do so immediately! There are Sunday painters, so why not Sunday poets? It’s not worth ruining your life trying to be the next laureate. Enjoy writing for itself. Unless of course you just can’t help it and, no matter what, have to suit up and get out there on the path to public acclaim.

Excursions, Renewals

2008-10-28T04:56:00.000-07:00

To pick up the thread again, the reading described in the last entry proceeded according to plan, the only subtraction being that Penelope Shuttle couldn’t come after all. But the rest of us did our bit and the audience did theirs.

We’ve had mostly sunny weather in London, on the cool side, but then autumn is my favorite of the Vivaldi four. Golden plane-tree leaves spinning through air and ornamenting the pavement like Asian lacquer work. I would have been able to enjoy it more if I hadn’t tripped on an irregular stretch of that pavement, taken a tumble, and cracked a metatarsal in my foot. Which has meant that the unstoppable flâneur has had to call a halt and put at least one of his feet up.

But I do make an occasional excursion. Seeing that the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum was about to close I hobbled down there this Sunday and went though it at my new pace (snail’s). I admired a portrait bust of the young man from Hispania who would be emperor, seductive with curly sideburns and features reminiscent of Goya portraits. Also striking was a nude statue of him as Mars, once he’d assumed his title. He was the first emperor to have a nude representation of himself as one of deities of the Roman pantheon. As for the building of that name, his renovation thereof was one of the subjects dealt with, and the thesis that the Pantheon dome influenced later buildings like Haghia Sofia and Florence’s Duomo was given an extra boost by referencing the dome of the Round Reading Room of the British Museum itself, under which the exhibition was assembled. Also, it was refreshing that the organizers didn’t flinch about the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous but reported it for what it was. They even included the B.M.’s Warren Cup, a silver wine goblet with representations of male-on-male clinches to substantiate how accepted a part of Roman life homosexuality was. Not that the Romans had a word for it. They didn’t classify themselves according to sexual labels. Desire sometimes brought them to someone of the opposite sex and sometimes to their own, as is the case with all higher mammals, especially the primates. The fuss about this natural phenomenon begins with the advent of Christianity, and not even immediately then. By now the situation has no become almost hysterical, where it seems some men would rather be convicted of murder than become known as having felt desire for another man.

There were portrait busts of Hadrian’s wife Sabina and useful information about her, but she still remains an unfocused figure in my mind. I hadn’t been aware that she was with Hadrian during the journey to Egypt during which Antinous drowned. One of the stunning items in the show is a statue of the mourned youth as Osiris, since his drowning coincided with Egypt’s annual rituals around the death-by-water of Osiris. Eliot specialists: Has anything been made of this in critical analyses of The Waste Land?

A new display at the B.M. was a series of five sculptures under the overall title “Statuephilia,” though the significance eludes me. Perhaps the stateliest was Anthony Gormley’s metal man with an airplane-sized wingspan. And no doubt the most pop was Marc Quinn's solid gold statue of Kate Moss in a pretzel-like yogic posture. If the work turned out not to be important and resaleable, at least you could always melt it down for the gold, which would have appreciated during the interim. I wonder if Quinn took his cue from the Damien Hirst diamond-studded skull exhibited two years ago; the price tag wasn’t so much greater than the value of the component diamonds. Buying it, you'd be hedging your bets; and it was bought. Hirst was also one of the “Statuephilia” sculptors, still hung up on skulls, to judge by his entry, a thoroughly mindless work titled “Cornucopia.” It put numbers and numbers of repro skulls splashed with multicolored acrylic on the shelves of the ground-floor library of the B.M. Clever: but is it really? No, it’s even emptier than his nasty embalmed animal slices of a decade ago. We’ve just seen the banking and mortgage bubbles burst, and perhaps we’re on the eve of something similar with Hirst, a silly artist if there ever was. (Add Tracey Emin to the list, too. Among the YBA’s only Rachel Whiteread really has much to say.) Since the 1990s, contemporary visual art has become besotted with irony, taking it to lengths so enormous they can only be described as sentimental. Jeff Koons has a lot to answer for.

Another excursion your temporarily disabled blogger made was to attend the launch of a new anthology of poems about astronomy and the heavens, edited by Maurice Riordan and the astronomist Jocelyn Bell Burnell). It's called Dark Matter, which is odd, considering that what we most perceive about the night sky is light. But the poetry audience being what it is, a broodingly portentous title would obviously be more of a draw than something to do with radiance and starlit awe. The event was held in the Astronomy Library of Burlington House (home as well to the Royal Academy of Art), a handsome, book-lined room with a spiral staircase up to shelves on the higher level.

The readers for the evening included two astronomists and the poets Kathryn Maris (whom I wrote about here in September) and Jamie McKendrick, an excellent poet who lives in Oxford. The anthology includes poets and old and new and I think can be ordered online. A fringe benefit of attending the event was seeing Maurice Riordan again, whom I first met here in London three years ago. Mimi Khalvati was there, shocked to see me leaning on a crutch, and also Anne-Marie Fyfe, who already knew about it from the Wolf reading on the 20th. A nice surprise, too, was seeing James Fenton, whom I caught sight of across the room in conversation with the poet Nick Laird (included in the anthology with a poem about the concept of the black hole). I went up and, aware this was an unanticipated context, spoke what was probably startling hello, followed by my name. I got to know James several years ago when I spent a month at Wroxton College near Banbury, with almost daily commuting from there to Oxford for library research or raids on Blackstone’s. But I hadn’t seen him for a while, and it was interesting to exchange capsule updates about that interim. He lives on an attractive farm outside Oxford, with one of the most ravishing gardens you’ll ever find anywhere; and travels a good bit to literature festivals worldwide or to New York, where he has a place of his own.

So that brings us up to date.

Poetry Event

2008-10-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

I’m participating in a poetry event this coming week and wanted to post the details:

LONDON - Monday, October, 20th, 8pm, The Troubadour, 263-7 Old Brompton Road. Coffee House Poetry hosts The Wolf Showcase. 8 poets, featuring…Penelope Shuttle, Alfred Corn, Nina Zivancevic, Niall McDevitt, Fiona Curran, Sandeep Parmar, Siddhartha Bose and Ahren Warner. Hosted by James Byrne & Anne-Marie Fyfe.

Tickets £6 concessions £5. For information, advance booking, season ticket & mailing list enquiries contact Ann-Marie Fyfe on 020-8354 0660 or e-mail: CoffPoetry@aol.com

*

This is the same venue where I read for the evening of American poetry hosted by series director Anne-Marie Fyfe back in June. But the occasion is different. I’ve mentioned James Byrne (editor of The Wolf) here before, and as I write this the circumstances of our first meeting float to the surface of memory. It was a poetry reading, just about three years ago. Not him coming to hear me, the other way round. My friend Yvonne Green asked me to go with her and to hear and meet an interesting new poet. And that was James. Since then we’ve been steadily in touch, and I’ve published a couple of things in his magazine. So if you’re in striking distance, come to the event on Monday and learn about some of the people published in The Wolf. More information about James Byrne and the magazine can be found at the website: www.thewolfmagazine.co.uk.

Essay on Thom Gunn

2008-10-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

For fans of Thom Gunn's poetry, there's an essay of mine about the influence of Existentialist philosophy on his early poetry, available at the Kenyon Review online. It was commissioned for a new collection of critical writings about Gunn edited by Joshua Weiner and is due out early in 2009. Here's the link:

www.kenyonreview.org/kro/corn.php.

To Morocco and Back

2008-10-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

The celebration of the life and work of Mahmud Darwich was a splendid success. Because we are both in London, Amjad Nasser and I traveled together, picking up a connecting flight in Barcelona to Casablanca. There we were met by the charming Mohammed Benniss, a poet who teaches at the University Mohammed V in Rabat; he had engaged a driver for the hour-plus trip to our hotel in that city. Tourists going to Morocco often skip Rabat, which is odd considering how interesting a city it is—the capital, situated on the Atlantic, the center of government, and the residence of the Moroccan king Mohammed VI.

I saw nothing of his palace except its enclosing wall, but I did take a long walk to see other sights on my first morning; for example, the Tower of Hassan, which looks like Seville’s Torre Giralda, the reason being that they were both built in the same era under the same empire. Impressive, too, is the Casbah of the Uddayas, a former fortress that now encloses a garden, with a terrace tea house looking out over the Bouregreg River toward the ocean. I felt that the inevitable wall between tourist and resident was breached a little when I explored the labyrinthine alleys of the Medina, the market sector of town. Not in the crafts part of it, which is there mainly for tourists, but the open food markets, where Rabat’s non-rich people shop. Great heaps of produce everywhere, fruit, vegetables, chickpeas—also, stacks of mint and coriander, used in so many North African dishes. Lots of homeless cats wandering about, surviving I don’t know how, just as they do in Rome.

The Darwich event was held in a Moorish-style hall in the Faculty of Literature at the University. A crowd gathered in the courtyard outside and then filled up the house. The university president, Dr. Boutaleb Joutei was there and the Minister of Culture, whose name I didn’t get. That was a problem when I was introduced to other participants—I mean, I couldn’t always decipher their names, and I take it for granted they weren’t certain about mine, either. Of those reading in Arabic, of course there was Amjad Nasser and Mohammed Benniss, but as for the others, I only got the name of one. Why? Because when I spoke to him afterward I asked him to write it down. That was Jalal El Hakmaoui, who explained (we spoke in French) that his generation of poets had abandoned the grand rhetorical style and subjects of an earlier generation in favor of something more down to earth and daily, and this partly under the influence of American poetry.

The international aspect of the event was filled out by a reading in Spanish by Federico Arbos Ayuso, of the Instituto Cervantes in Rabat; in French by the Parisian poet Lionel Rey; in German by Klaus Reichert of the Deutsche Akademie in Frankfurt; and in English by the unaffiliated but sincere Alfred Corn. I read three poems from Fady Joudah's translation The Butterfly's Burden. Author introductions were made by an attractive young woman poet named Ouidad Benmoussa. I have to say that during the nearly two-hour-long program, the audience seemed rapt. And speaking to people afterward in the courtyard, I heard nothing but praise and enthusiasm. Once again, that inexplicable fact: People outside of North America and Europe are passionately interested in poetry, whereas in our countries it’s fashionable to be a little condescending to that particular form of loomcraft. After all, there’s no money in it. Definitions of civilization vary.

I found the old-style Franco-Arab manners very appealing. Nothing was ever rushed, people showed regard for each other; courtesy and measured deference were the rule. That might not be true in Casablanca or Tanger, but it was true in Rabat. We were driven to a restaurant in an old quarter of town, the name of which I’m not sure of. It was a high-ceilinged Moorish room with an elaborate domed ceiling supported by slender stone columns. Our waiters were striking in appearance, not only because of the varied genetic origins they attested to, but also because they wore pre-modern clothes. I hope it doesn’t sound like “Orientalism” to wish there might be some way to save the traditional dress of Morocco for most people, letting others who have to engage in business and administration adopt our plain, colorless, dull Western outfits. (Actually, in the Medina I saw quite a few men wearing djellabas and many women in headscarves and ankle-length dresses.) One of the things I liked about the late 1960s is that people, even males, could wear bright colors, embroidery, ornamental accessories, etc. Now we’ve all gone back to the gray suits, blue blazers, and striped ties of commercial correctness. Only Catholic or Anglican churchmen can wear magenta robes. Well, and Indian women here in London often wear saris, whose color provides relief from the overwhelming, gray, black, white, tan, navy blue, and dull green everyone else has been taught to favor.

I was seated next to Klaus Reichert, a soft-spoken cultivated man who took a degree in English-language literature and who has a special liking for Emily Dickinson and Robert Creeley. It also turned out that he knew (and published) Paul Celan, which gave me a chance to ask questions about a poet I love and have translated. Also at table were Dr. Boutaleb Joutei, an intelligent, good-humored man with nothing of the dull functionary about him. Others at our table were Federico Arbos, Ouidad Benmoussa, and of course Mohammed Benniss. We had a delicious Moroccan dinner, completed by fruit and sweet pastries.

At the hotel again there were warm goodbyes, and then the lightning-quick visit was mostly over. Amjad and I were driven back to Casablanca airport next morning for our Iberia flight. So I really saw nothing of Casablanca, but I'm told it is just a huge modern city with little of the traditional Moroccan charm. (Which brought to mind the moment in the film Casablanca, when the character Rick is asked why he came to the city in the first place. "I came for the waters." "But, monsieur, there are no waters in Casablanca." "I was misinformed.")

Check-in went smoothly, but unfortunately we had to pick up a connection at Barajas airport outside Madrid. No one told us there was a two-hour difference in the time zones. I thought there was just one, with the result that we dawdled a little and missed the connection. Another three-hour wait in the dead zone of a modern transportation hub. I hadn’t been through Barajas since it was remodeled. It is this huge megaport that requires miles of walking between terminals, and its moving conveyor belts and airport train really seem like an imposition rather than assist. It's also, like all new airports, a vast shopping mall, which no doubt adds to the distance pedestrians have to cover. Let’s face it: air travel has become an excruciating nightmare, what with passing security and immigration every time you make a connection, crowded flights with cramped seating, and no extras of any kind. Iberia doesn’t so much give you a glass of soda for free. When oil prices peaked last summer the airlines screamed, raised ticket prices, and dropped all the amenities. Now that the barrel price of oil is below $100 again, do we see any relief for the passenger? No. Business is business; squeeze the client for every penny you can get.

Just how deeply our civilization is in the grip of business and those who conduct it became luridly apparent during the last two weeks of banking news and tobogganing stock market prices. How did it happen? Well, think about it: a worker in finance, if he wants to keep his job, needs to show financial growth for his “product.” And if he doesn’t really have it, he has to fake it in his bookkeeping techniques. How does he get away with it? Because the Republicans deregulated financial practice. With the results that we’ve just seen. Do you suppose people are now ready to stop worshiping the Great God Business and turn their attention to experience that is really valuable? And by the way, all those billions of dollars wiped out on the world stock markets had to go somewhere, it wasn’t just hot air. Where, exactly, did those billions go? Who got away with the money?

Moving

2008-10-02T13:13:00.001-07:00

In haste: I'm nearly packed. It's my last night in Kennington-Walworth, cradle of Charlie Chaplin and so many others.

No sooner do I unpack in my own flat in Belsize Park, then I must repack and leave on Monday for a journey to Rabat, Morocco. I've been invited by the university there to participate in an international celebration of Darwish. This sounds exciting, to understate.

Apparently, an official at the Nobel Foundation said today that no American writer was good enough to be awarded the prize. We were too parochial, out of touch with the world at large. It's interesting to glance back at the previous American winners: Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, I.B. Singer, Bellow, Toni Morison. First observation to make is: no poets. No Frost, Wallace Stevens, no Marianne Moore, no W.H. Auden, no Robert Penn Warren, no Robert Lowell, no Elizabeth Bishop, no John Ashbery, no Adrienne Rich. (Granted Eliot was born in the U.S.A., but he became a British citizen and more an English than an American poet. Granted, Milosz and Brodsky held American citizenship, but their poems were written in Polish and Russian, not American English.) Clearly any one of the American poets just named could hold her/his own with the likes of, say, Jaroslav Seifert or Rabindranath Tagore. All our Nobels are novelists, and with the exception of Faulkner or Morison, a bit on the popular side. But then Europe has only ever been interested in our semi-primitives; they feel that Europe does the complex, refined thing better than we do. A typically literate Frenchman will have read Erskine Caldwell and Allen Ginsberg, but not Henry James or Wallace Stevens. But as is so often true, the Salon des Refuse's often looks better than les Accepte's. Non-Nobellians include the names above, Rilke, Colette, Stein, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Borges, Pavese, Julien Gracq, Moravia, Georg Trakl, Tennessee Williams, Nabokov, Zbigniew Herbert, Larkin, Michel Tournier, Tomas Trastromer, Yehuda Amichai, and Mohammed Darwish, whom I will be celebrating next week.

Adam and Keith invited me on Wednesday to come with them to the opening day of Kings Place, the first new music venue to be built in London since the Barbican twenty-five years ago. It's a handsome modernist building on York Way--I suppose part of the general renovation of King's Cross, which used to be so dreary but now has the new St. Pancras and the new terminal for the Eurostar trains. The halls for music are on the lower level and the main level has cafe's and a restaurant, all very posh. In a month or so both The Guardian and The Observer will move into offices on the upper floors. We heard a chamber music concert given by a group called Endymion, works by York Bowen and Schoenberg-Webern. Very good music, excellent performance, and perfect acoustics. A month-long festival is underway and I will no doubt attend other performances when I return from Morocco.

After the concert, I went with Keith King to his own King's Place, a studio down in Camberwell, where he makes his ceramic sculptures in clay and then fires them. Human figures, less than life-size, more males than females, usually nude or with little clothing. After firing he paints them, just as classical Greek sculptors used to transform their Platonically white marble into polychrome. But Keith's figures are often swimmers with their swim togs on, which brings it all up to date. Anyway, they are executed with an eye to the small significant detail that arrests the eye. He also does bas relief casting, a complicated process that I'm particularly intrigued by. I think an earlier blog mentioned an article I published a year ago in the Hudson Review about the bronze Ghiberti doors for the Florence Baptistry. It's reassuring that the tradition is still going on.

Translation Prize Ceremony

2008-09-30T06:34:00.000-07:00

The first month of my stay here has rushed by with a speed that would, if I’d let it, push me toward clichés about time’s winged chariot and comparable proverbs. On Friday I move to my new place in Belsize Park. I’ve had Mimi Khalvati to dinner here, then Adam Mars-Jones and Keith King. Mimi was recently awarded an Arts Council grant, which will give her a sabbatical from teaching and allow her to complete a new book of poems. Adam says the next installment of the mega-novel whose first part Pilcrow appeared last spring will be coming out in September 2009. Keith is producing his art works in ceramic. An amateur London historian he tells me that the area I'm now staying in was once London's primary quarter for the stabling of horses, including Iliffe Yard, which these windows overlook. There are now no more horses, but I feel surrounded by energy and originality.

The translation prizes for 2008 were awarded last night at Queen Elizabeth Hall, with winners in Arabic, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, presented the prizes, but his participation also included some good-humored dispelling of what Eliot once called "the depressing highbrow effect." He'd also arranged to distribute copies of the current issue to the audience, its pages as usual containing articles you want to read as son as you see the subjects.

I’d been invited to attend the evening by Samuel Shimon and Margaret Obank under the auspices of Banipal magazine, which administers the Arabic translation prize. I looked forward to seeing Fady Joudah, whose translation of three Darwish books under the title The Butterfly’s Burden was this year’s winner. It was published by Copper Canyon Press in the U.S.A. and Bloodaxe Books here. Actually, there was a less formal prize celebration this past Saturday at a pub in Holborn, where Margaret, Simon, and Fady greeted me warmly and also welcomed James Byrne, who came with me. The whole evening had a spirited, Middle Eastern family feeling, and, in fact, I was introduced to Fady’s mother and father, who had flown over from Tennessee in order to attend. I met several Arab authors, including Amjad Nasser and Aamer Hussein, and I was glad to see Mimi (who knows Farsee but not Arabic) at the party, and the American poet Margo Berdeshevsky, who came over from Paris just for this event. Margo and I first met about fifteen years ago when she signed up for a poetry workshop I gave at a cultural center in Maui, and we’ve seen each other in New York a couple of times since then. Her first book But a Passage in the Wilderness was out last year with Sheep Meadow.

Fady read very movingly from Darwish in both Arabic and in his translation. Also, with eloquence and reined-in passion, Amjad Nasser recited from memory a Darwish poem. Hearing the sounds of that language, I reflected on what could be called its “epic” history, given that Arabic has traveled to so many parts of the world and formed the basis of so many high points in civilization. (My own special favorite moment is the golden age of El Andalus, where Christian, Jewish, and Arab cultures coexisted peacefully and were able to influence each other in surprisingly productive ways.) Samuel recounted how he began learning Arabic at an early age (his first language was Assyrian or Aramaic) but didn’t make much progress until he began reading Darwish, whose poems more or less guided him toward a deeper understanding of the language.

I mentioned that Copper Canyon has published The Butterfly’s Burden in America, and I’m proud to say they have also just brought out the new edition of The Poem’s Heartbeat, as well as the paperback edition of Contradictions, both findable on Amazon and B&N.

For Jewish friends, Lshanah tovah, happy 5769!

One-Sided Representation

2008-09-25T14:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have been a slacker about writing for this site. Events have been crowding in, and things will get even more complicated (though I hope fun), so I better prove I’m still here while I can.

Among the many cultural events offered this month in London, two have evoked a lot of commentary. Matthew Bourne, choreographer of the transvestite Swan Lake and a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, was back at Sadlers Wells a couple of weeks ago with an updated ballet on Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, where little blond Dorian is a metallic hustler on the make. The other event is Tate Britain’s massive Francis Bacon retrospective. Works by gay artists in the limelight, hmm, so far so good. But maybe this is a convenient moment to raise a question that has always puzzled me: Why do the most celebrated works about gay experience invariably show bizarrerie, edge, nastiness, violence, and doom? (I’m going to put aside the issue of art depicting lesbians because I’m not fully qualified to comment.) The range of contemporary gay experience is very wide, from yeoman farmers to suburban MDs to high-ranking commanding officers. But over and over, the wild-side or downright repulsive aspect of gay experience is used as subject matter: psychopathic killers (How many works has Jeffrey Dahmer inspired? I’ve lost count, but they include, get this, lyrics for a musical written by Thom Gunn); mortal illness and suicide; sex addicts, S&M devotees, and betrayers (Even Tony Kushner's excellent Angels in America includes a scene where a man leaves his dying partner’s hospital bed and goes out to the park for an anonymous quickie with a leather clone; prison rape and sexual slavery in the slammer; transvestites (by far the most popular with straight audiences because cross-dressers are always represented as being harmlessly funny, in fact, endowed with hearts of gold, which is by no means the case in general; molesters of the underage, especially priests (meanwhile, the majority of such cases are between so-called adult men and little girls); wife betrayers, woman haters, and even gynocides (cf. Hitchcock’s Psycho); barflies, steam-bath wraiths, “cottagers,” or disco bunnies; or just lonely, pitiful miserabilists, unable to be straightforward about their sexuality. The message is clear: If you want to be successful using gay subject matter, paint a nasty picture, and you’ll be exalted as prophetic—also, as the height of fashion. (And, covertly, as a valuable discourager for a “lifestyle” the majority barely tolerates and whose disappearance they would applaud.)

Am I exaggerating? Add to the works mentioned above these savoury masterpieces of the cinema and television screen: Rope, The Boys in the Band, Visconti’s The Damned, I, Claudius, Naked Lunch, Oz, Queer as Folk, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Paris Is Burning, Will and Grace, any number of episodes of Law and Order, Brokeback Mountain, Amores Perros. The typical gay work of fiction ends in a murder and/or a suicide, sometimes hopeless alcoholism or addiction. In the Eighties, a variant was death by AIDS-related causes. Cut from the sheet-draped remains, and down comes THE END with a triumphalist thump. Of course I’m not saying that these subjects should never be dealt with. I’m asking why only the extreme and negative can become the subject of a work about gay experience. “Oh, well, you can’t make works of art about happiness.” No? There are in fact many such, about happy loves between men and women, family life, the achievement of various kinds of liberation (especially the subjects drawn from African American experience). Where is the gay Much Ado about Nothing, Pygmalion, The Thin Man? The gay North by Northwest? Where is the gay Bill Cosby Show? The gay One Hundred Years of Solitude? As for somber or tragic narratives, there could be stories involving gay people where the central crisis had nothing to do with sexuality, but some purely external problem, like war, poverty, a natural disaster, or the death of a beloved (non-gay) relative. I would love to see a film about gay experience in contemporary Africa or Brazil or Lebanon, involving people at the bottom of the economic ladder. I would love to see a TV special on gay health workers (nurses, MDs, psychotherapists, heads of clinics in developing countries). As for the predator padres, they’ve had plenty of coverage. What about the gay priests who never harmed any child, who were self-sacrificial and beloved of their congregations? For example, the gay priest who was killed while administering to the injured during the bombing of the World Trade Towers. If we turn to history, we’ve had a lot about Wilde. Why not something now about Edward Carpenter or Magnus Hirschberg? The British Museum currently has a show about the Emperor Hadrian, so why not a film based on the Yourcenar novel? Why not a film about Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson? Give the murderers a rest for a while!

To return to the intro to these pages: I think Francis Bacon is overrated. Begin with his subjects. Who isn’t tired of sex being represented as though it mostly resembled a thick rasher of porcine muscle and fat writhing in the saucepan over what must be hellish heat. Or if not that, decomposing cuts of mutton. It must all have seemed a lip-smacking bit of sensationalism in the late Fifties and early Sixties when Bacon made his first splash--an emetic sneak-peek into the arcane world of johns and rent boys. By now all the chic shock has worn off and we’re left with pictures whose color is haute boutique or smart spa, whose use of picture space is banal (including the silly line-drawing cubic schemas that pretend to be an important compositional feature but never prove they are); and design organization that makes nothing active of blank swathes of solid paint. Can’t we just say it? Bacon was a gay man in a time when even consenting adults could be imprisoned for their private lives; he was an addicted alcoholic and had other psychological problems; his partner committed suicide. That is all sad and regrettable and mostly not his fault. No doubt he regarded his work as a way to exorcise personal demons. But that is not necessarily a value for us. This is not major work. Opinion stated. Thanks for your attention.

Pigeonholes

2008-09-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s novel The Information, where the narrator, a hitherto unsuccessful novelist named Richard Tull, has a meeting with a high-powered literary agent who’s considering adding him to her client list. She says:

“‘Now. Writers need definition. The public can only keep in mind one thing per writer. Like a signature. Drunk, young, mad, fat, sick: you know. It’s better if you pick it rather than letting them pick it. Ever thought about the young-fogey thing? The young fart. You wear a bowtie and a waistcoat. Do you smoke a pipe?’”

When I first read this, I groaned at the pitiless accuracy. In an era when no one has time to make judicious assessments, the thumbnail literary sketch rules. “Oh, yeah, W., he’s the fat queen bee pornographer, isn’t he?” “Oh, right, X, he’s the retro-traditional guy, I’ve heard of him.” “Oh, sure, Y, he’s the radical politico, yeah.” “Ah yes, Z, she’s the Frenchified poet, isn’t she?” “Oh, A., he’s the adultery guy, right?” “Oh, B., absolutely, she’s the doyenne of the ghost and vampire cult.” “Oh, C., sure, he’s the infectious illness bard.”

Is it just me, or do other people see this sort of typecasting as ludicrous? William Shakespeare: “Oh, you know, the toadying monarchist.” “No, the revolutionary.” “No, the sly agnostic.” “No, the crypto-Catholic.” “No, the misogynist.” “No, the feminist.” “No, the ‘Life is a dream-play’ guy.” “No, the first realist playwright.” “No, the comedic-romance wizard.” And so on.

Why does the public need to pigeonhole? Because it’s a way to avoid having to make a close and accurate assessment of a body of work. It’s a way of not coming to terms with internal variety and even contradiction. It’s a way to hold off any strong impression works or art in their entirety might make, in effect, to disempower them. While we're on pigeonholes, let's turn to its counterpart, the columbarium (from Latin columba, "dove"). Ashes of deceased relatives or friends are often placed in a columbarium, metaphorically, a dovecote. And pigeons have their counterpart to these man-made communal nests. In the realm of metaphor, pigeonholing is an act of murder, the imposition of a narrow, even stereotypical identity on something much more fluid and diverse.

Nor is this merely a literary phenomenon. I didn’t see Madonna’s recent Wembley show, but apparently one number in it stages four or five of her earlier incarnations (schematically represented), to which she sings a wail of dismay, protesting “That’s not me now!” In other words, she realizes she’s been thumbnailed, trapped in an iconic image her fans formed a long time ago. Not even one of the most famous performers on the planet has the power to crack the shorthand version of herself that’s current. But then, could believers in the Greek or Roman pantheon ever have allowed Venus to become Minerva, or Vulcan to become Apollo? The popular mind needs fixed, stable icons.

Of course there are those that can’t wait to get pigeonholed. Why? Because it’s good market strategy, as the passage from Amis suggests. Product recognition is very, very important for sales. Once I’ve got my little formula down, I can do it to death, and people will always know anything I put out there is a work by Moi. Market, market, everything is the market. Sincerity is such a mistake.

So how do we fit that strategy in with this week’s stock market meltdown? Maybe the market approach to existence is ultimately doomed to failure, what if? The strangest fact of all is that our current right-wing Republican government has gone into the business of nationalizing financial institutions: Bear Stearns, Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, and now AIG. We were wrong, then, to thumbnail the Republicans as rabid, free-market tigers. They are benevolent Socialists—at least where the finance industry is concerned.

Accents

2008-09-12T03:21:00.000-07:00

Living in London, you become aware of a wide variety of accents. There's no such thing as a "British accent," the thing is plural, beginning with working class or Cockney, going on to Midlands, Scots, Irish, Australian, New Zealander, West Indian, Nigerian, Indian, and more recently East European.

In the old days, there was something called the "BBC accent," used in all public broadcasts, or the "University accent," based on public schools (in the U.S.A., read "private") topped off by speech patterns prevalent at Oxford or Cambridge. And there were also "county" accents, characteristic of the old landed gentry mainly situated outside London. All of these were related, they constituted the speech that was regarded as belonging as a birthright to the ruling classes--and therefore desirable.

But now the BBC announcers use a variety of accents, including one that developed in the 1980s and usually referred to as "estuary." The latter is Essex-flavored and was adopted by younger upper class speakers as a way of not sounding too posh or upper class. It was felt to be more egalitarian.

My advanced degree is in French, and in the course of getting it I learned not only French but also German, Italian, and Spanish. Because I have "a good ear" I can sound quite close to what native speakers in all these languages speak. And I think people in at least France are glad I don't sound like Jean Seberg in Breathless when I speak French.

A long time ago I set myself to learning English as a foreign language, and now know the differences in vocabulary, spelling, idiom, and pronunciation. (A few examples: a cellphone is a "mobile." The trunk of a car is "the boot." The statement, "It has nothing to do with you," becomes "It's nothing to do with you." American verbs in "-ize" like "realize" become "-ise," "realise." Yet again there are class differences in vocabulary, so that, for example, upper-class "napkin" becomes "serviette" in working-class English; and there are several other words that vary according to social status.) When I began examining accents, I discovered, as I said, that there are several. The BBC was the easiest. Hardest to learn is working class or Cockney, which has an amazing range of vocal effects, fun to reproduce to the extent I can. I haven't spent enough time with county people to manage their accent (again, there are differences according to region), though of course it isn't terribly different from the University accent. I'm getting pretty good at Irish, but Scots I haven't made a lot of progress in, no doubt because I don't yet have any Scots friends.

Linguists regard all languages and all accents as "value-neutral," meaning none is viewed as intrinsically better than others. (As speech, I mean. Literary value can be improved by a decision to expand vocabulary, establish distinctions, and move usage and idioms closer to what's logical and clear.) The "value-neutral" idea makes sense to me, but I realize/realise that it's not the common view. Most people of the upper class regard the working-class accent as unfortunate or cacophonous, and most working-class people regard the upper class accent as pretentious or snobby (which, as noted above, resulted a couple of decades ago in younger upper class members' adoption of the esturary accent, to avoid being despised by the majority.)

Meanwhile, as any British person who has lived in America will tell you, the British accent wins a visitor instant regard over there and often enough, lucrative employment--even when the particular accent in question might be considered in the U.K. as a marker of low economic status. Few Americans can distinguish the differences among British accents. So, how should we interpret the American fascination with the British voice? It must point to a lingering sense of cultural inferiority in the U.S.A., part of the same instinct that led people in 1920s Hollywood to build timber-frame Tudor houses in a landscape and climate entirely different from the one that first produced that building style. And allowed the transplanted Englishwoman Elinor Glyn to become the arbiter of what was done and not done socially in the California film capital.

After the social, technical, and artistic achievements of the 20th century, I see no reason for Americans to feel automatically inferior to Europeans, whatever the situation may have been in earlier centuries. By the same token, there's no reason to regard the British University accent as superior as such. I think it sounds good, but so does working-class speech, just as French or Italian or German sounds good--wonderful sonic creations invented by people who weren't especially trying to invent anything. But here's an interesting fact: When I'm in some shop in Kensington, I notice I get better treatment if I use the University accent. By the same token, if I go the the East Street outdoor market here in Kennington and buy a turnip, I'm well treated if I call the seller "mite" ("mate") and use the working-class voice. Prejudices aren't going away just because they are based on unexamined assumptions. At intellectual gatherings, American voice is best, I think, to avoid the supposition that I'm "putting on airs" if I speak British English. (Which, by the way, points to a conviction, consciously or unconsciously held, that the British accent is superior to the American, a superiority I could be seen as aspiring to, but without the "right" to it. Meanwhile, no French person would feel there was anything out of place if I managed "l'accent de Paris" with close accuracy.) Anyway, once it's established you're not an ignoramus or fundamentalist or Bush-supporter, British writers and thinkers are quite welcoming to Americans, so why not provide the vocal marker for your nationality? Finally, during the forty-odd years I've been coming to London, British speech has moved a lot closer to American than it used to be, probably because of the influence of American film, television, and pop music.

I think too much is made of accents, they're seen (or heard) as much more important than they really are. Here, let me back up a bit. I grew up in the State of Georgia and heard two forms of Southern American English throughout my childhood: the English spoken by whites and that spoken by African Americans. I could still manage either today with perfect ease, though I would certainly avoid speaking Black English for fear that people would assume I was making fun. (Too bad, because Black English has many interesting tonal resources and is fascinating to hear, once you get past the idea that it is substandard.) But around age six or seven, my father, thinking maybe I might one day get a degree in law, engaged a speech tutor for me, a woman from Ohio, I think it was. So she instilled in me something like a Midwestern American accent, and it may well be that the process of acquiring it was the beginning of the development of a special talent at hearing and producing different vocal sounds.

Those lessons came in handy when at the age of twenty-two I came to live in New York and enrolled at Columbia. There were one or two other Southerners in the program, and I noticed they were quickly cut short when they spoke in class--not because what they were saying was stupid, but because their voices gave the impression they were stupid. Now that we've had several Presidents with Southern accents there's less stigma than formerly about the Southern voice, in fact, it seems to be something of a plus. Although: wasn't it in Alabama, during the primaries, that Hilary Clinton spoke with a Southern accent and came in for criticism? Ah, but she wasn't Southern by birth and was therefore dissed as being inauthentic, no matter if living all those years in Arkansas must have made Southern speech patterns perfectly accessible to her. Still, how is varying your speech different from doffing your suit jacket and walking among steel workers with a blue-collar shirt on your back? People like to see themselves reflected in those they meet, to hear from others what they themselves speak. Whose fault is that? If you're running for office, a gift for different accents might be useful.

I still think too much emphasis and concern attach to accents, but no doubt that's like saying people worry too much about clothes. Self-presentation to outsiders is one of the most powerful motivators in experience, and that's not going to change just because a little reflection shows that there's no rational basis for fears that we're unworthy if wearing the "wrong" kind of outfit and speaking in a way different from those around us.

Transatlantic

2008-09-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

I’m in London and jet-lag is nearly dispelled. James Byrne (see blog for June 1 of this year) met me at Heathrow, which was an enormous favor done to the bedraggled traveler weighed down with enough luggage to last him for the next six months. James presented me with a copy of the latest number of The Wolf, the magazine he edits. I’ve had a chance to read it since, and it probably is the best so far. James looks alert, fit and happy, off in a few days to Belgrade on a poetry mission. I look forward to seeing him again with his partner Sandeep Parmar who just received her degree and is a Mina Loy scholar, as well as a poet in her own right.

My host for the first night was the American poet Kathryn Maris (author of The Book of Jobs) at her attractive house on Warwick Avenue. Her two adorable children Mathias and Cosima kept us company while we exchanged news about friends in common, books, trips, plans. Poets in general are rather plain where looks are concerned, Kathryn being a great exception, with classical Mediterranean features of the sort that we imagine would have led Sappho to compose breathtaking verbal equivalents.

I have a temporary sublet down in Kennington, a flat belonging to friends of James’s. They are Anna Smaill a poet and poetry scholar from New Zealand and the novelist Carl Shuker. They’ll be in Japan for a month, which ought to give me the leisure to find something longer-term for my stay here. This is the first time I’ve lived in South London, but I always find working-class neighborhoods bracing. Nearby Walworth Road reminds me of Canal Street in Manhattan, lined with shops of every description, the clientele equally diverse—Asian, West Indian, Eastern European, and just plain old British. Anyway, it all feels like a homecoming, given that I’ve had more than a dozen stays in London since 1967. It isn’t always easy to explain a love for London to everyone: the standard plain brown brick, pierced by windows with white painted frames, the chimney pots, the prevalence of bizarre Victorian architecture, the turbulent gunmetal skies, the damp. But then my maternal Lahey grandfather was born in Liverpool, and on the paternal side there’s a Scottish great-grandfather, not to mention the first English Corns who came to Virginia in the 17th century. So perhaps it’s genetic, but in any case something there is in the gray, brown, and green of these isles that speaks to me.

Turning to the arts, you really feel that people read here. You can pick up a copy of the TLS or London Review of Books plus half a dozen literate newspapers (The Guardian a special favorite) at almost any newsstand; and bookshops are everywhere. The current TLS has several absorbing essays, beginning with a review of two new books about Mme. de Staël and Benjamin Constant. (These may have scooped a forthcoming biography of Mme. de Staël written by my friend Francine Duplessix Gray and soon to be published by Penguin.) Odd that there’s suddenly so much interest in this not terribly well-known figure. The review has it wrong, from a French standpoint: for the French Constant is the more important author; his brilliant récit Adolphe is still on the reading lists, whereas Mme. De Staël’s novel Corinne and De L’Allemagne are reserved for literary specialists. Granted, the book on Germany launched the vogue for Northern European Romanticism in France (I'm sure that's the explanation for Pierre Bayle's adoption of the pseudonym Stendhal), and there’s no question that she was important politically and as a literary-political salonniere. The review didn’t make the point that Constant (whose name seems ironic, given the facts) had already wooed and won a literary lioness before meeting Mme. De Staël. This was Mme. de Charrière a Low Countries noblewoman who married into the minor Swiss aristocracy and became an important figure in the later French Enlightenment. She published under the pseudonym of Zélide and is the subject of a lucidly written biography, The Porrtait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. (The book was recenty reissued with an introduction by Shirely Hazzard.) Scott, briefly Berenson’s secretary, was a figure on the London literary scene in the teens and 1920s; his first book, titled The Architecture of Humanism, discussed variants of neo-classical style in post-Renaissance Europe. Scott and the Berenson circle are the subject of an interesting biography by an acquaintance of mine, Richard Dunn; but not many people seem to have read it.

New subject: yesterday I had lunch with Samuel Shimon, author and editor of a magazine titled Banipal, which publishes Arab writers from the world over, some of them translated from Arabic, some from other languages. Samuel is riding the crest of the success of his autobiographical novel, published earlier this year and enjoying special success in France. Certainly his experience is unusual: born in Iraq to Christian parents, he became an expatriate at an early age and was, like Orwell, down and out in Paris, his ultimate ambition to get to the U.S.A. We sometimes forget the religious diversity of the Middle East. Not only are there Christians in Iraq there are (or used to be) Jews, Zoroastrians, and a strange sect known as Yazidis, whose hybrid doctrines draw from several sources. The Christian-Muslim divide in Lebanon is better known, but people don’t seem to realize that about 35% of Palestinians are Christians.

Anyway, Samuel was brimming over with enthusiasm and plans. Later this month there will be a tribute here in London to the Palestinian poet Darwish, with Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet who lives in Houston, Texas, and translates Darwish, as a special guest. I mentioned Fady’s Yale Younger Poets book The Earth in the Attic in an earlier blog, and it will be a pleasure to see him again. Samuel is also planning an evening of Arab poetry in New York City, at the Pomegranate Gallery in SoHo, for this coming October. He gave me the latest issue of Banipal, filled with good work, including an excerpt from the fiction of Lebanese author May Menassa—as it happens, the sister of the distinguished poet and novelist Vénus Khoury-Gata, who lives in Paris and publishes in French. The author photograph confirms the cliché that Lebanese women are particularly beautiful, Ms. Menassa in a mode different from her sister. I first met Vénus a decade ago at a French-language conference in Montréal, and then again in Paris three years back, when Marilyn Hacker brought me to have lunch at Vénus’s elegant flat in the 16e arrondissement.

I’m breaking the rule that blogs should be short, my only excuse the uprush of elation about being back in the swim here in London.

Terms

2008-08-31T16:42:00.000-07:00

I just received early copies of the paperback edition of my most recent book of poems (titled Contradictions and published by Copper Canyon Press). The hardcover came out in 2002, and I sympathize with those who in times of economic uncertainty couldn't spring for it. It will be nice to see the new edition on the shelves of Barnes & Noble and Borders again.

On another topic: I've been reviewing the American presidency in terms of the length of terms. We think of the minimum as being four years, but history gives us examples of much shorter Presidencies. William Henry Harrison held office only in the months of March and April in 1841. James Garfield served from the month of March through July in 1881, no more. Warren G. Harding had about two years before dying of mysterious causes. Millard Fillmore had about three years, the same as John F. Kennedy, as many of us remember. Gerald Ford completed just the shank end of Nixon's second term, after the Watergate scandal and Tricky Dick's resignation. Actually, several presidents didn't complete their second term, and F.D.R. died during his third. It would be interesting to hear testimony about the damage to health that the stresses of holding this strenuous office bring on.

May John McCain, the oldest first-term presidential candidate in history, and one whose health was no doubt compromised by his awful years in a prison camp, have a long and vigorous life, whether or not elected President. Meanwhile, here are two intriguing ifs: if he happens to be elected, and if he doesn't complete his first term, we will apparently have Governor Palin as President. Which means the White House will also be occupied by--what term do we apply to him, the First Man? When does the public get a chance to meet this man and take his measure?

McCain supporters have made the curious assertion that Governor Palin is actually more experienced than Senator Obama, at least, insofar as executive experience is concerned. But the duly chosen Democratic candidate's experience has in large part developed in the national capital, not in Alaska (population, about 680,000). Among the tasks facing a first-term President coming from outside the District is to get to know all the players, elected and otherwise. Senator Obama has had time to do this. Governor Palin obviously could not. He has also participated in the legislative process, and a President who doesn't understand the ins and outs of Congress more than superficially is in big trouble. Critics of the Senator say that he has insufficient knowledge of foreign policy. If he does, what about the Governor's experience in that area?

I may as well say it: even the very remote prospect of having a gun-loving individual of either gender as the American President doesn't appeal to me at all, no more than one who prefers drilling the United States, inland or offshore, instead of developing clean alternative energy sources. Governor Palin has made jokes about us non-carnivores, keen hunter that she is. With the result that now, whenever I see her picture, I don't think of the former beauty contestant; instead, an image of her smiling over the carcass of a deer she has shot (perhaps a doe with a near-term fawn in its belly), blood streaming from its side. Governor Palin must realize that a deer of course wants to bring its offspring to term. It does not want that fawn aborted by someone else's decision. Why would she ever feel entitled to kill a conscious being that, according to her faith, is a divine creation? The same question for John McCain who likes to hunt, too. And he has even had first-hand experience of the pain a bullet causes and other things it does when it rips into flesh.

U.S.A.

2008-08-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

We’ve just had a rousing Democratic Convention, with speeches exalting our citizens and the “American Dream” from extraordinary individuals Michelle Obama, Hilary and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and of course Barack Obama, all of them bringing Convention crowds to a fever pitch of enthusiasm. This election was already a landmark, given that the Democratic candidate is the first to have African ancestry (at least, the first acknowledged as that, but who really knows?). And now Senator McCain has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, the first time a Republican candidate has chosen a woman—though of course Geraldine Ferraro was the first Democratic Veep candidate nearly three decades ago.

As I prepare to go to live in London, I’ve decided to do some America boosting myself, listing a few places on the American scene that have made a deep impression on me during the last few decades—places of special beauty or historical importance or cultural resonance. I’ve visited all 50 states and almost all large or notable cities in the U.S.A. Some of this is touched on in a long poem titled “1992,” which appeared in the book Autobiographies. That’s out of print but still available at online booksellers. Here goes:

The Taos Pueblo, in New Mexico, nearly a thousand years old, a Cubist urban wonder of the New World. Also, the Mesa Verde settlement, tucked into a cliff wall, at an early point in history and later abandoned.

The Walt Whitman House Museum in Camden, NJ.

The view from Coit Tower, Telegraph Hill in San Francisco; Golden Gate Park in the same city; and Chinatown.

The Potomac River, VA.

New York City from Fort Tryon Park all the way down to Battery Park, and the view from the Staten Island Ferry. Also, Brooklyn Heights.

The modernist architecture of Chicago and the view of Lake Michigan along Lakeshore Drive.

The Barrier Islands of Georgia, St. Simons, Jekyll, and Sea Island.

The Grand Canyon, a jaw-dropping fusion of geology and awe.

The Poe tomb in Baltimore, MD.

Views along the stretch of I-91 above Putney, Vermont all the way to St. Johnsbury, the Green Mountains and the Connecticut River.

Route 100 from L.A. to San Francisco. Carmel and Monterrey, CA.

Basin Street in Memphis.

Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, where the Civil War ended.

Old houses and liveoak trees near the Battery, and Catfish Row, in Charleston, SC..

Skyline Drive and Monticello in Virginia.

Louis Kahn’s Kimball Museum in Fort Worth, TX.

The vast, flat, treeless plains of North Dakota.

Glacier, Yellowstone, Zion, and Yosemite National Parks.

The Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, MA.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania.

Fort Ticonderoga, NY.

The Frost House, near Breadloaf, VT

The conjunction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers at Hermann, just north of St. Louis, MO.

Skagway, Glacier Bay, and Sitka, AK

Harper’s Ferry, WV.

Lake Tahoe and Carson City, NV

The Ryman Theater in Nashville, TN, cradle of the country music empire.

Langston Hughes’s birthplace in Joplin, MO.

Santa Monica, Silver Lake, and the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles.

Independence Hall and surrounding historic buildings in Philadelphia.

Mt. Rainier, WA

Seneca Falls, NY, birthplace of the Women's Suffrage movement.

St. Augustine, FL.

Vineyard country along the New York State shore of Lake Erie.

Provincetown, MA

The Black Hills of South Dakota

Talequah, OK, capital of the Cherokee Nation.

The Rockies from Montana down to Colorado.

Wilmington, DE

The Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati, OH.

The Florida Everglades.

Wichita, KS.

Lake Bemidji, MN.

Eureka in the Arkansas Ozarks.

The Columbia Gorge, OR

Vicksburg, MS.

Omaha, NB

The Lincoln Memorial, Smithsonian, and Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Branford College, the British Art Center, the Beinecke Library, and the Elizabethan Club, Yale, New Haven.

Tulsa, OK.

The Hudson Valley north from Poughkeepsie to Albany, NY. The view from Frederick E. Church’s Olanna in Hudson.

The causeway running from Miami down to Key West, FL.

The Great Salt Lake, UT.

Cannon Beach and Manzanita, OR

The East End of Long Island (Whitman's "Paumanok"), NY

The Penobscot Bay area, Castine, and Mt. Desert National Park, ME.

The Snake River in Idaho.

Niagara Falls, NY.

Black Mountain and the Nantahala Range, NC.

Haleakala Crater and Ohe’o Park on Maui, HI

The Cliff Walk, Newport, RI.

The Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, NM.

Cranbrook School, Detroit, MI.

The Shaker village at Pleasant Hill, KY.

Boston’s Old North Church and State House; the St. Gaudens monument to Colonel Shaw, Boston Common; 91 Revere St., birthplace of Robert Lowell; and Richardson’s Sever Hall, Harvard, Cambridge.

Iowa City, IA

New Harmony, IN.

Louis Kahn’s Salk Pavilion in La Jolla, CA.

Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, MA

Boulder, CO.

Monument Valley, AZ and UT.

Nantucket, MA.

The Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle to Biloxi, MS.

Benefit Street, Providence, RI

Savannah, GA

Tucson, AZ

The Abbey of Gethsemani, KY

Estes Park, CO

Mount Vernon, VA.

The Paterson Falls and the Palisades, NJ.

The French Quarter and the Garden District in New Orleans.

Ephraim on the upper peninsula of Wisconsin.

Brasstown Bald in the North Georgia Appalachians.

Wallace Stevens’s house in Hartford, CT.

The White Mountains, NH.

Emerson once remarked that the magisterial landscape of New Hampshire was mocked by the pettiness of the people inhabiting it. But I’m going to put aside negative feelings about our saber-rattlers, philistines, dolts, and fundamentalists and recall instead my friends here and those like them, people abundant in warmth, intelligence, fair-mindedness, artistry, and generosity. Auden once said, “Americans are like omelets. There’s no such thing as a pretty good one.”

Pindaric and Olympic

2008-08-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

Strophe 1

Water is the finest of all, while gold, like a lambent fire,
Shines through the night in pre-eminence of superb wealth.
And if, my heart, you wish to tell
Of prizes won in trials of strength,
Seek no radiant star whose beams
Have keener power to warm, in all the wastes of upper air, than the sun’s
beams,
Nor let us sing a place of games to surpass the Olympian.
It is from there that the song of praise, plaited of many voices,
Is woven into a crown by the subtle thoughts of poets,
So that they chant the praises of Kronos’ son
As they make their way to Hieron’s rich hearth,

Michael Phelps having swept the board this past week and become the all-time swimming champ, I thought it might be stimulating to go to Pindaros (Pindar), the great 5th century B.C.E. Greek celebrant of Olympic athletes. The above is the first strophe from his Olympian Ode I.

Here is my effort to transliterate the sounds of the first two lines. I’m aware this isn’t the standard notation used by linguists, but it may give some idea of the sound, based on typical English spelling.

Ahriston men hiudor, ho de chriusos aithomenon piur
Ahtay diaprepei niukti meganoros eksokha plutu

The text in Greek and in William Mullen’s translation can be found at:

www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu/PindarOlympia.htm

In Pindaros and in other Greek poets you find a frank acknowledgment of the love and admiration men have for other beautiful, physically agile men. And we see echoes of that in Whitman’s celebration of the young swimmers in “Song of Myself” and in A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.”

At some point last week it occurred to me that TV coverage giving details about the lives of American contenders mostly left out information about their spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends. Why? I’m willing to bet that some of the women are lesbian and some of the men are gay. Just maybe there were a few hints about that here and there. However, though same-sex orientation isn’t illegal, apparently it still can’t be broadcast in Olympic coverage. Which means that TV has determined or arbitrarily decided that the broad public wouldn’t like it mentioned. That makes me angry. If the Olympians who happen to be gay really want to make a lasting contribution to life on the planet, they might consider speaking openly and honestly about who they are and thereby help remove the stigma projected by part of the public on the orientation that is theirs.

Back in the early seventies I used to have a magazine picture of Mark Spitz on my bulletin board. It was interesting to hear him interviewed about his own Olympic success and Michael Phelps’s. He had nothing but uncompetitive praise for the young man who has surpassed his record. Nor did he make any mention of the fact that the new swimming caps and engineered suits developed since his day help contenders trim seconds from their events. In 1972 Spitz had the typical longish hair of male fashion in the early 70s, which must have slowed him a bit. I also recall getting interested (in ’88, I guess it was) in Rowdy Gaines, a compact and appealing youngster, partly because Andy Warhol decided that year to take photographs of some of the competers and publish them in Interview. Interviewed back then, Gaines mentioned he had shaved his whole body so as to create less drag against the water. Well, Gaines was one of the newscasters for these games, and he appeared a couple of times, still fit, but clearly older and with a receding hairline. Spitz, also fit, now has white hair, and I believe his work for many years was to own a car dealership, though I gather he has become something like a corporate consultant now. Which leads me to this question: When the high point of your life comes around age twenty-one, how can the remaining fifty or sixty years not seem like a letdown? There was an article in this month’s Smithsonian magazine about Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two African American runners who in the 1968 Olympics made the Black Power gesture just after receiving their medals. Their lives since then have been anything but a picnic, partly because of the controversy. I doubt any Olympic gold medal winner has read Frosts’s “Provide, Provide.”

It’s anybody’s guess what Phelps’s future life will be. I suppose he will earn millions by doing product endorsements. But there is something hard-edged and brooding in his nature, not entirely concealed in his interviews; and I wonder if he will remain in the public eye long enough for us to understand what the source of that is.

Meanwhile, anyone tempted to get Pindaric and base a poem on him? It would also be great to read a lesbian poem about some of the women Olympians. Come on, people, you can do it! There’s more than one kind of gold.

August 14

2008-08-13T21:27:00.000-07:00

The strange resonance of dates again. My birthday coincides with V-J Day—the day not the year. I was two when Japan surrendered and the Second World War ended. The general celebration unfortunately overlapped with an irreparable personal loss. My mother, in her mid-thirties in 1945, and living in a small town in South Georgia, developed appendicitis in August of that year and didn’t get treatment in time to prevent the appendix from rupturing. She could still have been saved if the little hospital had had any penicillin,but the limited supplies available in those years were all sent to the various war zones, and so she died of infection on the very day when the fighting ended. The upshot is, I’m never able to celebrate this day without an underlying sense of loss. For the reasons stated, I count her as one of the war casualties, “collateral damage” as the current euphemism has it. If there had been no war, she would not have died, and my life would have been very different. So there’s no surprise if I oppose war now and always.

Meanwhile, here we go again. I heard Mr. Bush’s speech about the crisis in Georgia. We are sending humanitarian aid to the invaded nation, which is good; but, unfortunately, this aid is being accompanied by military escort. Yes, we should stand by Georgia and condemn the Russian invasion. But we should not use military intervention. How long is it going to take before we step down from our role as global policeman? This is a matter in which Europe and the United Nations must act. We can make statements, send envoys to Moscow and Tbilisi, and cooperate with other countries to implement sanctions against Russia; that is all. Or, if the U.N. calls on its members to provide peace-keeping personnel, then we should send them, along with every other country’s. We should not act on our own initiative. Remember that the First World War was launched by a single bullet. Much more than that has already happened in Georgia. Who’s to say that we are not on the brink of the third such conflict, with the difference that weaponry is vastly more sophisticated and destructive than it was one hundred years ago.

Since I’m plumping for the U.N., will someone explain to me why no one has proposed the possibility of having U.N. forces come in while we’re making U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. If it’s true that Iraq isn’t yet stable enough to be left on its own, surely the Iraqi people will be more tolerant of the presence of U.N. peace-keeping troops than ours. After all, we dropped bombs on their country with no prior provocation. And our occupying forces have killed and brutalized (everyone remembers Abu Ghraib, right?) their people. The very sight of a U.S. soldier and the American flag must make many Iraqis sick. It’s time for us to get out (safely), and as we get out, let the U.N. help Iraq achieve stability and full autonomy.

One world and one at peace. So far, a dream, but one that will come true if the desire and dedication can be found to bring it to birth. W.H. Auden: “We must love one another or die.” (“September 1, 1939.”)

Competition

2008-08-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

This post comes out of the exchange of comments on the previous post. It didn't seem adequate to look at the question in the space of a note. What the letters dealt with was my own dissatisfaction with the competitive aspect of the contemporary scene. How valuable a characteristic is the competitive spirit, for an individual and society? A fish in the sea doesn't know how salty the water is. Americans apparently aren't aware just how competitive things have become here, the tendency is too universal for us to perceive clearly--unless we back off a bit and try for objectivity.

We're taught that competition helps us excel, in athletics, scholastics, and art; that competition between businesses offering commercial goods and services produces better goods and services; and that we need to compete on the world stage in order to insure the security and well-being of our country. These assumptions are so much taken for granted that we don't even bother to look at the other side of the question. What is the cost of competition, for the self and for the world? First, a sort of garrison mentality, in which the goal of beating the rival never gives us a moment of relaxation or untroubled rest. W.E.B. Dubois, after his first visit to Liberia, noted a certain laisser-aller in that country; it wasn't a model of efficiency or tidiness. What he did see was ordinary human contentment and added that he had noticed a correlation between unhappiness and the demands of efficient modernity in advanced Western nations. Obviously something is going wrong in our own particular society, if you consider how many Americans take antidepressants, the shockingly high percentage of people in prison, high divorce and suicide rates, drug addiction, alcoholism, and troubling level of unemployment. Businesses, in order to be competititve, must downsize, reduce the payroll and schedule of benefits. No one's job is safe in the current competitive ambiance. Computers now answer telephones, absorbing many of public's productive hours during the week while we thread our way through the beeps and then are kept on hold until one of the company's two telephone answerers gets to us. And why? So that businesses can downsize and remain competitive.

And when we go to the supermarket, yes, we're confronted with forty varieties of laundry detergent, but do we really think that any one of them is significantly better than any other? The main way that the companies compete is through eye-catching ads on TV, which cost the companies a fortune, at least until advertising expenses are passed on to the consumer. A recent credit card ad proclaimed, "We are a nation of consumers, and there's nothing wrong with that." Oh? The main spur for consumption seems to be the old keeping up with the Jones syndrome. A high school senior dare not appear in the classroom without the sneaker of the month. His parents dare not drive a car that fails to make his neighbors choke on envy. "He who dies with the most toys wins." Designer clothes, designer furniture, designer lives, designer drugs, Subzero fridges--all to show that you have successfully competed. Unfortunately, in the race to keep up we've moved to the edge of bankruptcy and become a debtor nation. If our competitive spirit produces better products, why does no one but an American want to buy an American car or home appliance? Because those products are inferior. In fact, affluent Americans all want foreign cars and products because these expensive items prove that you have successfully competed. And if you're still not happy, you can go on Lexapro. Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" has become all pursuit and no happiness.

As for international competition, it has meant the build-up, at staggering cost, of a massive military machine, absorbing tax dollars that could have gone to socially constructive programs like national health and repair of the infrastructure (see the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge). This huge military potential lulls us into a false sense of security, and encourages in us a readiness to use military rather than diplomatic means to solve international problems. There's an important article by Tony Judt in the May 1 New York Review of Books, where he accounts for American blitheness about war by the fact that we did not experience on home ground the terrible devastation of the two World Wars. We lack first-hand knowledge of what it's like to have your own city or town bombed, to see dismembered bodies of people we love, to lose all that we have. War for us is just another video game. But not for those who are sent to Afghanistan or Iraq, who return to tell us or don't return. And certainly not for the civilian populations whose lives we have pulverized.

In today's New York Times journalist John Tierney suggests that we just drop the restricitons on athletes doping, since drug tests are unreliable and anyway athletes should be free to use any method whatsoever in order to compete successfully. Apparently there's even a way to alter your DNA by injecting genes with the help of a virus so that stronger muscles can be built, more records be broken, and more gold won by the country with the easiest access to the latest biotechnology. Is this grotesque or what?

What produces happiness? Moments of solitude and communion with what is divine, moments when no rivals are around to stir up anxieties. And then moments of shared happiness with those I love, moments of community spirit with people I like and don't regard as enemies. In Chaos theory, it's said that every time a butterfly unfolds its wings in China, weather patterns in the Western Hemisphere are slightly altered. Along the same lines, there's a popular ballad titled "Let There Be Peace on Earth (And Let It Begin With Me)," which, sentimental as it is, even so contains a grain of truth. Every time I choose competition over cooperation, every time I try to cut someone off on the freeway, every time I am violent in deed or word, I increase the world sum of aggression and the probability of armed conflict. It's only a question of scale between, on one hand, the high-school and college shotgun massacres we've come to expect now, and, on the other, bombing countries we decide are dangerous to us. Maybe the best expression of this concept is Marianne Moore's poem, "In Distrust of Merits," where she speaks of the war-producing disease of "myself."

Turning to the arts in general and poetry in particular, I have to say I find the spectacle of competition on the contemporary poetry scene thoroughly repellent. There used to be a website called Foetry that detailed some of the underhanded tactics of some poets to get ahead of their rivals or to promote the particular aesthetic faction to which they belong. Perhaps the website was sometimes in error and maybe they overplayed their hand. But no one with an inside view can fail to see that competitive infighting is a destructive, not a creative force. Yeats's phrase about the "worst" being filled with a "passionate intensity" applies well here. So far from being in favor of freedom of expression, today's aesthetic factions are dead set on crushing any and all rivals. Whereas, to prove that they are more than simple machines designed to advance the case of Number One, I believe that poets or poetic parties ought to sometimes publish or allow into their forums representatives of alternative views. In Marxist theory, progress in thought or in social organization works through dialectic. How little we see of that in the current scene. No, it's all about Moi, and everybody else can go to hell.

I would like to see great works of art produced in my time. If they are produced by this hand, fine. If they are produced by someone else, equally fine. I feel lucky to be the colleague of many wonderful poets now writing. I'm glad when someone else scores a triumph, it's one more artwork in the world that I can enjoy. The artist I'd like to outdistance is the artist I was before now. Lao-Tse: "The wise man does not compete. Thus no one can compete with him."

Olympians & Co.

2008-08-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Olympics! The eighth day of the eighth month of 2008, at eight minutes after eight o’clock (for the Chinese, the number eight represents prosperity). Like four billion other inhabitants of the planet, I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics last night and found it staggering. It must surely be the largest and costliest single spectacle in human history, even discounting the expense of building the “bird’s nest” stadium. The crack precision of the thousands of performers executing carefully calibrated maneuvers was impressive and not a little daunting. It far surpassed the German equivalent as recorded in Leni Riefenstahl’s classic film about the 1936 Olympics, The Triumph of the Will. Unfortunately, the planner failed to omit thirty seconds of Chinese soldiers marching goose-step fashion, which rather undermined the peaceful ethos of the Olympic games.

On the other hand the spectacle included a summary of Chinese cultural history, beginning with Chinese calligraphic painting, the presentation imaginatively conflating dance with the movements of the inkbrush. And then on to the Chinese invention of printing with moveable type and so on up to digital contemporaneity, with glancing references along the way to other inventions like silk, fireworks (based on the Chinese discovery of gunpowder, about which I can’t avoid feeling ambivalent), and martial arts (suggested by the choreographed movements of 2008 practitioners of tai chi). Two omissions that puzzled me were Chinese poetry, one of the world’s greatest traditions, influential on twentieth century English-language poetry through the publicizing efforts of Ezra Pound; and Chinese porcelain, which numbers among the perfected achievements in visual art at any period, not to mention its utility in realms as disparate as dining, tiles, electrical equipment, and heat shields for spacecraft. Since we're on this topic, it's interesting to see poetry and porcelain meeting in some English-language textual instances, for example Gray’s poem about his cat drowning in a porcelain “tub” of goldfishes, Marianne Moore’s “Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain,” or Eliot’s “The stillness, as a Chinese jar still/Moves perpetually in its stillness” (Burnt Norton). You may think of other examples and alert me to them.

If we're meant to regard the Olympics as a world celebration of what the human body can do, there’s no need to wonder why its intellectual/ethical counterpart, the annual Nobel ceremony, isn’t televised. Even if it were, nothing like four billion viewers would tune in. For most people, the body is more absorbing, more compelling, than the mind. No artist can pull down the enormous salaries of famous athletes, with the occasional exception of film or rock stars (whose success is often more the result of physicality than artistic skill), and no artist has an audience as large as the sports audience. Does that mean sports are more important than art? I don’t think so, and if people were reasonable (which they aren’t), they’d agree. A sports event results in no lasting object, no pleasure that can be re-experienced, no advance in learning or technology, and no improvement in the social fabric. Once over, it’s done, though of course some few people may want to review the video record of a particular game from time to time. Most, however, will prefer to see newer events and pay huge admissions prices to do so. Fundamentally, it’s an ephemeral, one-off show of fleeting importance.

You can say that sports events encourage people to practice a sport and become fit, which is sometimes true. And yet America, the most sports-minded of all countries, has a devastatingly high percentage of people suffering from obesity. Please explain the disconnect. Also, we shouldn't overlook the high incidence of sports-related injuries, which leave some athletes permanently disabled or killed. Perhaps Muhammed Ali might be the symbol of this danger. Finally, sports events often result in spectaor violence, when winners and losers start insulting each other and then start getting physical, assisted by beer bottles and whatever blunt instruments are handy. I know that by raising these problems I will earn the hatred of all sports enthusiasts, and actually the totalitarianism is part of what bothers me. It's OK not to be interested in, say, handicrafts or gardening; but when you say you're not interested in sports, you're instantly branded as a freak or an unpatriotic s.o.b. I mean, it's just a game. Why do I have to care so intensely about who gets a pigskin over a certain boundary marked on a grassy field?

The Olympics have a putative value as an affirmation of peace and global cooperation; and, though it was a lift to see the wonderful variety of faces, ethnicities, and national costumes when each delegation paraded before the camera, how to overlook nationalistic conflicts going on between or within the countries represented? Georgia was being overrun by tanks at the very moment the Georgian and Russian teams were smiling at the world. When the Sudanese paraded their participants, how was it possible not to think of Darfur? When the five Palestinian participants walked slowly along, who could forget what is going on in their homeland? And so on with Iraq, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the United States. World peace? Cruel irony.

Significant Dates

2008-08-06T08:43:00.001-07:00

Every year, when the calendar reaches the date August 6, I find myself unable to forget that it's the anniversary (the sixty-third in 2008) of the first military use of atomic energy. The date has an extra edge this year because of current international anxiety about the possibility that Iran has developed or is developing nuclear armaments. Not that I have any say in the question, but I wish Iran wouldn’t develop them, just as I wish all the nuclear-weaponed nations would dismantle what they already have. I also wish the world would review what happened at Chernobyl and be less blithe about nuclear power plants. Even if we have no more meltdowns, the problem of disposal of radioactive waste remains, and I don’t believe that burying them deep in the earth is really a solution. Solar energy is the only safe future, along with the goal of engineering some microbe able to convert cellulose into a combustible substance. Every nation with the power to finance research should pursue, cooperatively, the goal of clean energy.

These notes begin with a date and I’d like to go on from there by pointing out some strange calendric coincidences in the war between the United States and Japan, 1941-1945. That began on December 7, when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Meanwhile, in the Catholic religious calendar, it's the day before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Most Christians wrongly assume that the Immaculate Conception is the same thing as the birth of Jesus from a virgin mother. The doctrine actually says that Mary was “conceived without sin” from her mother Anna. It was developed in Roman Catholicism as a way to get around the difficulty of giving Jesus a physical inheritance tainted by Original Sin. (The Eastern Orthodox church never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin, by the way, and by the same token don’t have a Feast of the Immaculate Conception.) But to the extent that Japanese authorities understood Christianity (which Jesuit missionaries had begun to spread in Japan as early as the 17th century, despite repression sponsored by Japanese imperial authority), would they have made a distinction that few Western Christians are even aware of? If they assumed December 8 celebrated the birth of Jesus from a virgin mother, perhaps they thought it made sense to bomb Pearl Harbor the day before the feast—symbolically, a rape.

Meanwhile, among possible dates for its nuclear reprisal, the United States also chose one that figures in the Catholic calendar. August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which celebrates that moment in the gospel narratives where Jesus went up on a mountaintop with his closest disciples and suddenly became “transfigured,” glowing with an unearthly white light attesting to his divinity. If atomic fission amounts to a “transfiguration” of matter into energy, the date has a symbolic resonance. What can only regrettable to Christians is the association of Jesus’ divinity with a weapon of mass destruction that incinerated a city and most of its inhabitants.

Finally, the war ended with the Japanese surrender on V-J Day, August 14, which is not a church holiday, but precedes the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin by one day. The doctrine maintains that the Virgin did not actually die, but instead was taken up physically into Heaven while still alive. This non-biblical supposition was optional for Roman Catholics in 1945: faithful Catholics were not required to believe it, but they were allowed to. Five years later Pius XII declared ex cathedra that the doctrine was now obligatory, an indispensable component of the regular teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

I mention this partly for its intrinsic (and bizarre) interest, but it also has a bearing on American poetry. Those familiar with the career of Robert Lowell know that he converted to Roman Catholicism around 1940. They also know that he left the church at the end of that decade. He himself attributes his decision to the promulgation of the doctrine of the Assumption in his poem “Beyond the Alps,” dated 1950. “Who could believe, who could understand?” he asks in a poem both personal and historical. My guess is that he was motivated by other factors as well, for example, his non-canonical divorce from Jean Stafford and remarriage with Elizabeth Hardwick. But the poem doesn’t bring other reasons forward and concentrates instead on the historical role of the Church and the papacy, as contrasted with secular and cultural history.

These topics are on my mind because I’ve begun working on a play about Lowell in the late 1940s. Having written poems, fiction, and essays, I decided it was time to tackle the remaining genre, and on ground that was familiar. I met Lowell only twice, in the last year of his life, and Elizabeth Hardwick perhaps a half dozen times after that. But sometimes small suggestions are enough to go on, at least, I hope they are. I'm sort of feeling my way forward, so wish me luck.

Instrumental Poetry and the Environment

2008-07-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

In contemporary poetry there is an interface between environmental activism and poetry, but I’m not sure how well known the leading figures in it are, or how many people read their publications. My guess is they haven't received much attention. I assume Green poetry falls under judgments directed against any kind of poetry attempting to be “instrumental,” that is, to change how we feel, think, and act. The battle-cry for the anti-instrumentalists is Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen,” a statement he amplified by asserting that history would be exactly the same if no poems had ever been written. That’s shocking from someone who admired science and the scientific method as much as he did. It’s not a statement that can be proved or disproved and therefore qualifies as fairly idle speculation. If we look at his biography, we can understand why he might make it, disillusioned as he was by the Spanish Civil War and by the bad poems with political content written by Stalinists during “the low dishonest decade.” But as is so often true with Auden, he overstated his case; he seems to have enjoyed provocative comments for their own sake. The preponderance of the evidence is that poetry has in fact made a difference in history. Relevant arguments have been made elsewhere and involve figures as notable as Dante, Milton, Blake, Whitman, Yeats, Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Instead of rehearsing them here, I’d like to analyze the attitudes that underlie the assertion that poetry “makes nothing happen.”

Begin with Eliot’s description of poetry as “a superior entertainment.” If poetry’s value is only as entertainment, why should we care more about poetry than we do about Broadway musicals, standup comics, movie thrillers, TV's "Desperate Housewives," video games, and poker playing? Sweden doesn’t give Nobel prizes for those things, so clearly they aren’t generally regarded as important to global culture. Eliot’s loophole is, no doubt, that very Eliotic adjective “superior,” which he doesn’t bother to define. Knowing what we do about him, we can speculate that superiority involves playing on the keys of a refined knowledge of the Western tradition, the use of original, carefully chosen language, and a serious engagement with contemporary reality. If that’s what he meant, then “instrumentality” is still on the table, or at least being purveyed under the counter. Poetry is being asked to keep us in touch with crucial works in the tradition, to influence how we use language, to strengthen our grasp of what is real, and to hone our ethical faculties. Those are certainly "instrumental" uses for poetry. For some readers, the next step would be to translate a clarified sense of justice into some kind of activism, and it's only this instance of "instrumentality" that is ever criticized.

My sense is that the majority of the readership is uninterested in or actively dislikes poems with ethical, political and activist aspects. Why is that? Possibilities: activism is a kind of work, it’s only occasionally fun, and we are a fun-loving people. We like to be entertained, but we don’t like the “superior” part of entertainment. We think we’re short on time and money, so we don’t want to expend what he have on noble causes; our discretionary income should go for new Japanese cars or tickets for the Superbowl; our free time should be spent skiing or watching the latest episode of "Law and Order." Because poems about injustice (unless we are the object of it) make us feel guilty, we dismiss a poetry of engagement as inartistic and ineffective. American culture is the culture of self-affirmation. We like people and things that “make us feel good about ourselves.” We like to attack others, but we don’t enjoy taking our own inventory. The attitude of “I am totally cool” can be raised to the national level so that the United States comes to be described as “the greatest nation on earth.” Another statement that can’t be proved or disproved, it’s interesting mainly as an index to the national character. Anyone attempting to prove it, though, would have to reckon with statistics on infant mortality rates here; the inaction of Federal government where clean energy is concerned and its failure to address environmental issues like water pollution and global warming; the huge disparity between American wealth and American poverty; chronicles of greed like the implosion of Enron and the adventurism of the mortgage industry; the persistence of racial prejudice and homophobia; the disparity between salaries for men and those for women employees; and the shockingly high percentage of incarcerated people. (One in seven Americans has or has had a relative in prison.) By mentioning these things, I've just qualified myself in some quarters as an "America hater." But self-correction is actually a form of self-respect. If I didn't give a damn about my native land I wouldn't bother to point out its errors and misdeeds, I'd do something more fun.

*

I’m spending the summer in Rhode Island and recently took an excursion to a stretch of the shore south of Narragansett where, instead of beaches, land meets sea in rock outcroppings big waves crash against with breathtaking drama. It’s just one of thousands of beautiful natural sites in this vast country whose great good fortune is to have an amazing variety of geological formations, climates, plants, and animals. And yet there is a sector of the population who doesn’t seem to recognize the value of this inheritance. You can’t walk on the Narragansett Bay rocks without constantly stumbling over litter left there by visitors who don’t feel any obligation whatsoever to take their garbage with them when they leave. Worse still are the graffiti announcing profundities like “Jake Loves Brittany, May 2003.” By now Jake has gone on to Stephanie or Tiffany, but so what: his bright pink graffito is still there and will be for a century unless someone with special training, polluting chemicals and tools comes to erase it, an expense not included in state or local budgets. What’s wrong with this picture? Why are kids brought up here to think it’s cool to deface natural sites that belong to everyone? Does this sort of thing bother anyone else, or is it just me? I suppose it’s just me, the indefatigable reformer, Cassandra prophesying to an unheeding Trojan populace. Nobody likes a scold, and I apologize for being one. What’s my problem, why can’t I get with the program and just let it all slide like everybody else? I really don’t know the answer, but I do know that the impulse is instinctive, pre-rational. When I see someone brutalizing another person or an animal or a landscape, I first feel sick, and then I feel angry. I'm also preaching to myself here, since I'm aware I don't devote enough time to fighting the abuses that cause me so much chagrin. Sorry about that.

Spontaneity and aesthetics

2008-07-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

Spontaneity’s a quality roundly appreciated—bingo!—in ordinary experience and in art. OK, but do we know what it means? First, look at its Latin origin: sponte, an adverb applied to actions “done of one’s own free will, voluntarily.” The associations the adjective “spontaneous” calls to mind are freedom, youth, improvisation, surprise, absence of forethought or calculation; and by extension, absence of guile. At the opposite end of the scale are qualities like restraint, planning, discipline, editing, plotting, and even conspiracy. Spontaneity’s usually associated with humor or at least a fresh view of things. We like it when we encounter it in people because, hey, they don’t seem worried about what impression they’re making on us; they’re relaxed and help us relax, often through laughter. (Although: if all the world's a stage it must also be true that some people are good enough actors to seem convincingly spontaneous; clowning is a skill like any other.)

In poetry, spontaneity’s embodiments include informality, avoidance of sequential argument and compositional structure, use of jokes, non-standard grammar, and a vigorous delivery, all of it couched in a “speechly” tone and diction (even slang and cusswords). Yep, spontaneity’s down with interjections, contractions, & abbreviations, etc., abrupt shifts in syntax or subject matter, emotive italicization, and emotive punctuation—the dash, the question mark (or double question mark), and the exclamation point. And, like, why the fuck not, dude?! Why indeed.

Elizabeth Bishop once said the three qualities she most liked in poetry were spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery. Those sound good to me; but I recognize that there is some tension between the first and the others.

Common negative terms applied by critics to poems include: “plodding,” “stuffy,” “stiff,” “dry,” “academic,” “old-fashioned”; all of these are failures spontaneity can alleviate, with its vitality, its freshness, its unpredictability, its subversive humor.

Granted that spontaneity is a value in art, what needs explaining is that it has become the supreme value in our poetry, the one that trumps all others. It seems that the majority of readers now expect a poem to sound like improvisation, not shaped by revision, its words tumbling out of the mind directly onto the page. Allen Ginsberg even made an aesthetic credo of this approach with his “first thought, best thought” manifesto, where he seems to have thought the unrevised life and unrevised text were in harmony with Buddhist philosophy. The aesthetic behind Creeley’s poetry (and many of his followers) seems close to this. A poem is, what, just the uncensored record of your mental/verbal activity at a particular moment. Many of Frank O’Hara’s poems read like they're exactly that, which helps explain why his star is so high these days. And after all, even sobersides Wordsworth said that poetry is, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Just possibly the phrase “recollected in tranquility” will explain why Wordsworth’s spontaneous and powerful feelings found expression in words and lines so thoughtful as those in “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations” Ode.

The bias for spontaneity involves an assumption about the psyche and its relationship to artistic creation, in which the unconscious mind is regarded as unsurpassable, and the thoughtful, editing part of the mind is held to be an enemy to sincerity and vitality. This bias begins in the Romantic period, is upheld by the Surrealist aesthetic (at least in the practice of “automatic writing”), and finally by the permissive atmosphere of American art that began in the 1960s. We see it consciously or unconsciously supported in aesthetic manifestoes like Ginsberg’s, which devalue revision; by experiments of avant-garde performance artists like David Antin, who used to simply stand up and speak ad lib into the mic, and by a sizable critical literature that is dead set against the use of meter, rhyme, and verseform because these involve planning, second thoughts, and revision, an approach some critics spontaneously term “fascistic.”

Obviously, a first-thought-best-thought aesthetic rules out verseform composition, though perhaps not blank verse. There are many poets now publishing who can instantly produce pentameter lines without stopping to count on their fingers, pentameters more complex than “the University of Michigan,” or “So who told Kevin he should punch you out?”

It also rules out other kinds of poems: extended narratives; philosophical arguments; precise descriptions of natural phenomena, people, or artworks; close, dialectical analysis of autobiographical events and feelings about these; balanced self-evaluation or balanced perceptions about other people; textual “architecture”; verbal economy and distilled expression. Because spontaneity is almost inseparable from humor, its tendency is to undermine seriousness and to clash with tragic subjects. When writing about, for example, the death of someone you loved, you don’t want to sound like you’re, um, you know, a goof or whatever.

Spontaneity is one of satire’s strongest resources, and since so much poetry now being written is nose-thumbing, ironic, and deflationary, we get a lot of spontaneity among the new poets on the block. And it’s almost always welcomed as being “fresh,” (that word used to have a secondary sense, which might be relevant here), unpretentious, and, like, sooo not what academics want you to write. The fact that it has a sell-by date and stops seeming fresh after a few years is ignored year after year and decade after decade as new practitioners appear on the scene.

I’ve suggested before that the way we write reflects the way we live our lives. And our nation is—spontaneous us!—the world capital of spontaneity, of “whatever,” of impulse-buying, of fast food, of maxing out credit cards, of tactless comments, of road rage, of spontaneous combustion in public opinion, of Columbine-style massacres, of launching military operations without forethought and planning; and of rushing into publication.

I like humor in poetry and I like the spontaneity that gives the impression that a poem is--no, seriously--being spoken rather than written. I also recognize that, when this quality is combined with precision, nuance, careful reflection, interesting word choices and sonic texture, the quality is an artistic illusion, what could be called spontaneity of the most calculated kind. Given how long it took Elizabeth Bishop to complete her poems, their apparent and charming spontaneity can only be the result of long labor and careful revision.

No one seriously questions that the first source of artworks is the unconscious, the irrational, the realm of dream. But the best artworks are those that take impulses from the dark and fishy deep and combine them with elements of a conscious art. The unconscious is universally distributed, but not all people are artists. Only those who develop the skills and reflexes needed for art can hope to produce works of lasting value. I disagree with Yeats when he says the “only singing school” is found in “monuments of unageing intellect.” But certainly that is one of the places where we learn to (let’s avoid flowery poesy and not say "sing") write.

New Jersey and Poetry

2008-07-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I took a trip to New Jersey, which sounds less interesting than the trip actually proved to be. I wonder if anyone has written an article or book about poetry and the Garden State? I suppose the study could begin with Camden, the last dwelling of Whitman and the location of his grandiose tomb. For the twentieth century, the overshadowing figure is Williams, and anyone enthusiastic about American Modernism has to make the pilgrimage to Paterson and maybe Rutherford as well, as I did many years ago. The choice of Paterson as the site for Williams’s American epic is odd, even allowing for the fact that the author wanted to write about his immediate environment. But he shows that the city has an interesting geology and historic past and that it is in some ways emblematic for American history in general. You also sense a certain anxiety, an anxiety of avoidance, call it, with respect to the megalopolis whose towers you see from the eastern part of the state. Note, too, that the poem ends with a vista of the great city on the Hudson. The poem startled everyone when it appeared because it included prose documents relevant to its subject. In so doing, Williams was taking Pound of The Cantos a step further, and Pound himself can be understood as working in a tradition established by Whitman, who wrote “documentary” poems like “Song of the Exposition” and other poems that include factual information about the United States in the second half of the 19th century. I used to have a quote from Octavio Paz (now mislaid)about this aspect of the American tradition. Our willingness to include hard fact in our poems sets us apart from the Continental European tradition and its Latin American inheritors, a tradition which always strives to move poetic subjects into the realm of timeless myth, dream, or psychological interiority. This is a bit less true for British poetry, which is nurtured in a strongly empirical philosophical tradition. (Two days ago was the 210th anniversary of the composition of Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.” We know that because he dated the poem “July 13, 1798,” surely the first time a poem was assigned a date, but not the last.)

Paterson is also remarkable for its inclusion of letters from one of Williams’s woman readers, who outlines the dilemma of women in a social order that relegates them to a secondary position, merely on the basis of gender, not ability. Some of the letters accuse Williams directly, and it's hard to imagine any of Williams’s contemporaries making room in their poems for this sort of critique. We can view it as a form of masochism or else a commitment to justice. I don’t, for my part, see how it is possible to have such commitments without seeing oneself as, to a greater or lesser degree, in the wrong. It’s difficult or impossible always to do the right thing, and more characteristic of the American temperament to self-praise and blame others rather than to engage in “autocritique.” American as he was, Williams was able to take stock and find himself wanting—as did Whitman in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” Some poems of Lowell’s and Berryman’s acknowledge wrong-doing, but these are rare examples in our poetry.

Part of my Jersey excursion involved Atlantic City, which is hard to explain except as part of a decades-long project to see every large or notable city in America. I’ve been in all fifty states and visited all their cities except Las Vegas and Milwaukee. (Invitations welcome.) Anyway, an excursion to Atlantic City is like suddenly finding yourself in the “Monopoly” board game, because the street names are the same, big hotels are everywhere (often fused with the casinos), and the overwhelming motive for both topoi is greed. So Atlantic City is a little compendium of the United States, with a good percentage of these contributing a street name. The extreme contrasts of prodigal expenditure and desperate poverty are also very American. A common idiom in our version of English is the phrase, “You bet!” and staking everything on a single roll of the dice is as American as cherry pie. Uncle Sam has set up here a paradise for venture capitalism--at least, it used to be. And if we seem these days to be losing our shirts, maybe Fortune’s wheel will turn in our favor again a few years down the pike. Or maybe it won’t, and we’ll end up like Atlantic City’s street people, shirtless, penniless, homeless, and gazing out at dawn over the sea, a blaze of visionary stupor in our eyes.

My trip also took me down the shore route on the long sand bar that begins at Ocean City and continues down to Cape May—surely one of the largest aggregates of vacation houses in America (hundreds of them now up for sale). But the wetlands along the way provide a welcome relief from repetitive beach architecture, and, just south of Strathmere, you find the natural preserve of Corson’s Inlet State Park. I read Ammons’s poem of that name for years without ever bothering to determine where it was. It’s not in the Outer Banks of North Carolina as I assumed, but in the New Jersey equivalent. I’m guessing he discovered it during the years when he was employed in his father’s glass-making business, which was located in New Jersey. Imagine a maritime confluence of sand dunes, water, wetlands, and sea, all blending into each other as the poems describes. It’s the poem of Ammons’s I like best, along with “The City Limits.” But I confess to being not much interested in the bulk of Ammons’s poetry, certainly not his epic Sphere: The Form of a Motion. Something went wrong in Ammons’s career, and I don’t know enough about his life to say what. Fame? Teaching? Bad marriage? Alcohol? Maybe it's fair to say that constructing a career in poetry is comparable to a game of Monoploy or a night at Caesar's Palace.

Princeton is not so much local as national and international, the university poets in, but not of, New Jersey. In recent decades the best poems about the state were written by Robert Pinsky, a native son, and Stephen Dunn, who lives in Port Republic. On the return trip I made a detour to Robert’s home town, Long Branch, which was a resort in the 19th century, less so when Robert grew up, but now a notable one again, with huge, luxury vacation condominiums built along the seafront. Remnants of the small town pictured in Pinsky’s poetry are still to be seen, as well as the long concrete walk above the beach he speaks of. But I don’t know if he still has relatives that live there. As for the New Jersey poems by August Kleinzahler, I don’t see much in them. This is a poet that everyone else seems to adore, so it’s apparently a blind spot of mine. Fortune’s wheel: who can make it spin slower or faster? Faites vos jeux, messieurs. “Place your bets, gentlemen.”) And then, Rien ne va plus. (“No more bets.”) Some will end up with a hotel on Boardwalk or Park Place, and some will Go Directly to Jail, without passing Go or collecting $100. Albert Einstein of the Princeton Institute said he didn't believe God threw dice, but quantum physics suggests the opposite. Life in the aleatory universe, love it or leave it.

Pleasure and Wisdom

2008-07-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae.
(Poets wish either to instruct or to delight.)
—Horace, Epistles, “Ars poetica”

Delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy: instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs as it delights.
—John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
—Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”

“Delectare” can also be translated “to please,” and the overwhelming consensus about all the arts, and not just verbal art alone, is that they must please us. “Il faut plaire,” according to Flaubert, and one section of Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is subtitled, “It Must Give Pleasure.” But what is aesthetic pleasure, and how does a text provide it? First by appealing to one or more of the five senses. Painting appeals to the visual sense, music to the auditory, and so forth. Texts first and foremost appeal to the auditory sense, and poetry in particular is designed to do this through verbal rhythm, the harmonious or artfully cacophonous placement of consonants and vowels, the changes in voice pitch and amplitude, and the management of semantic tone. Texts can also appeal to the other senses indirectly by finding verbal equivalents to, for example, visual information, as when Marvell speaks of “the fountain’s sliding foot,” or describes oranges hanging on an orange tree as “golden lamps in a green night.” Verbal analogues for visual experience are most effective (as in the preceding examples) when they use tropes, metaphors, or figurative language. Who can say why, but a release of surprise and pleasure occurs when the mind deciphers a metaphor and reconstructs the image that first imprinted itself the poet’s mind. Something like, “Oh, I never thought of that similarity, but how apt it is!” In the same way, a poem can find verbal equivalents for all the senses, and when these do seem accurate and fresh, the reader experiences an incidental or considerable uprush of delight.

To the auditory pleasure mentioned above could be added another, something we could call “visceral pleasure,” experienced by someone who reads a poem aloud. Vocal performance involves a large number of muscles, beginning with the diaphragmatic muscle that pushes air up the throat into the mouth and around tongue, teeth and lips to produce sounds we recognize as language. This aspect of verbal pleasure is available only to those who read aloud, which may be why we get an extra increment of pleasure when we perform, say, a poem by Hopkins, whose lines call for an unusual expenditure of articulate energy. The audience for such a performance may of course vicariously construct the visceral experience of the performer, but the construction stands at one remove; so it’s fair to say we haven’t received all a poem has to offer until we have read it aloud.

Works of art have to go beyond the purely physical or sensory domain, though, and appeal to the mind—to thinking, to emotion, to the information-seeking faculty, to reason, and to the irrational or dreamy part of the psyche. And verbal texts can do this more effectively than any other art form because their medium is language, and obviously language goes beyond simple sensation; it is inseparable from thought and from the interpretation of perceived events.

Texts appeal to the mind by representing events that are unusual or interpreted in unusual ways or brought to mind by word combinations that we have not heard before. At this point the instructive part of artworks enters in. A poem provides us with fresh “information” or access to experience. It seems to be innate with human beings that we hunger for new information, a profounder grasp of what is happens to us, a more nuanced reading of circumstance than the understandings we already possess, and a sharpened sense of how words behave and create meaning. Kinds of information may be exalted, as with religious vision or philosophical insight; but they may be less imposing than that. One of the strengths of English-language poetry after the Second World War was its use of autobiographical fact to make available to the reader kinds of experience not part of the familiar mainstream of middle-class life. Where marginalized groups were concerned, the conveying of fact, and feeling about fact, was useful in the task of self-definition for members of those groups and probably contributed to social progress in the form of legislation against discrimination based on class, race, gender, or sexual orientation or, again, to a more enlightened approach to treating the mentally ill or those whose childhood experience left psychological scars.

(An aside: to those objecting that legislators and Presidents don’t read poems, I submit that some of them do—Bill Clinton, for example, with whom I exchanged a couple of letters during his Administration. Furthermore, statesmen all follow the news. Journalists all read novels. And novelists read poetry, at least, all the novelists I’m acquainted with do so. An insight first brought to light in a poem can be adapted for fiction and may then strike a journalist as something that could be turned into a news story. And so on.)

The instructive content of poems is not of course always concerned with personal or social issues. We have many valuable poems dealing with scientific, or religious, or philosophical subjects. We have poems that help us to see the natural world more clearly and presumably to care more actively about its preservation from destruction. We have poems that shed new light on historical topics or geography or cities or on other works of art or illness or animals or psychology or sexual experience. We have poems that explore the dreamworld in a way that makes it valuable to waking life as well. We have poems that examine language itself in all its variety. The conveying of various kinds of new information and insight is part of what we expect from art, so that, when we don’t find it, we are disappointed, displeased.

That said, we can’t get past the truth that instruction is in itself not enough to make a good poem. There must also be pleasure. (Or pleasures: not only those described above, but others as well that I hope to touch on in later blogs.) As I survey the citations put at the beginning of these comments, I’d like to add another: Poets must instruct and delight. A poem that doesn’t instruct will fail to please; and a poem that doesn’t please will fail to instruct.

American Diversity

2008-07-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

It’s summer and people spend daylight hours in leisure activities, which means they’re not online that much. But I wanted to make something I said in the previous blog a bit clearer: if there really is no interest in these posts, I’m going to give myself a break and devote the time spent on them to other things. The sign of there being interest is discussion of the content.

It’s the national holiday, and my way of marking it, after noting that the majority of United States citizens are descended from Northern European immigrants, is to celebrate the minorities who are not. Beginning, obviously, with the first inhabitants of this continent, whose land those immigrants took from them. Which doesn’t mean that Indian nations are gone or that Indians haven’t made an incalculable contribution to our civilization. Our place names alone: more than a quarter of the States have mellifluous Indian names, hundreds of cities and towns do, and so do thousands of rivers, mountains, lakes, and swamplands. Many museums have collected the startlingly beautiful art made by our first nations, whose bold and subtle instinct for form and color is encapsulated in pottery, bone ivory, leatherwork, beadwork, weaving, jewelry, painting, wood and stone carving and domestic and sacred architecture (see the Mesa Verde, Taos and Acoma pueblos, and the numerous ritual mounds built at different points in Indian history). Also, we have examples of Indian poetry both in the original languages and in American English. For the latter, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Ai, and Carter Revard. (How many readers are aware, incidentally, that poets Richard Wilbur and William Jay Smith have Indian ancestors?) Of the many excellent Indian fiction writers, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie are the most prominent. And then nearly everyone recognizes, I think, that much of the inspiration for today’s ecological or “Green” activism originated in Indian reverence for the natural world and commitment to a responsible stewardship of it.

I pass on to the staggering debt America owes to citizens descended from African ancestors. I’m going to put aside the vast material contribution made by enslaved peoples to the building of this country’s roads, plantations, canals, domestic and civic architecture (see Monticello and the University of Virginia), bridges, masonry and ironwork. I’ll also pass over the critically important work of social prophets and public servants like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Angela Davis, and Shirley Chisholm. Instead, let’s consider the artistic input. American English has been inflected and enriched by the variant speech patterns of its Africanist population. With his characteristic tactlessness and snobbery, Eliot said the he left his native St. Louis and came to Harvard speaking with “a n— drawl.” He soon got rid of it, but maybe he shouldn't have or, anyway, kept enough to enliven some of the dull patches in “Ash Wednesday” or “The Four Quartets.” The range of African American poetry is huge, which includes metrically skilled poets like Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Marilyn Nelson, but also artists drawing on less strictly codified folk sources like the hymnody of the “spirituals,” or blues form, or a verse counterpart to jazz improvisation, these techniques blended with the “free verse” approach to poetry. This group includes Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks again, Lucille Clifton, Robert Hayden, Audre Lord, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Elizabeth Alexander, and Natasha Trethewey. Needless to say, many of the best American novels are written by African Americans—Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Charles R. Johnson, and Ernest Gaines, to mention only the most famous. American literary culture has also been expanded and deepened by the work of original African American critics like Albert Murray, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, Darryl Pinckney, Ernest Gaines, and Hilton Als.

To take up the role that Africanist influences have had on American popular and classical music is too large a task for this blog. A few posts back, I described rock music as “America’s gift to the world,” but in fact it is really African Americans’ gift to the world, given that rock originates with Africanist syncopation, the blue-noted musical scale, and melodic ornamentation, as modulated through ragtime, blues, Dixieland, bebop, gospel, and free jazz. There are too many singers, instrumentalists, and composers drawing on these traditions to list here, but we all know who they are.

I turn to that part of the population with Iberian ancestors, among the very first immigrant peoples to inhabit this continent. Four or five of the States have Spanish names and, again, thesame is true for hundreds of cities and towns and geographical features. Actually, we have the fourth largest hispanophone community in the world, and Spanish language has contributed a notable number of words and idioms to American English. Within this part of the population there are wide differences: New Mexican Latino culture is not the same as Cuban American culture, which is not the same as Puerto Rican or Dominican or Colombian American culture. Dozens of writers on the contemporary scene are Latino or have Latino ancestors—among novelists, Julia De Burgos, Jaime Manrique, Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz; among poets, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Gary Soto, Julia Alvarez, Alberto Rios, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Martin Espada, Sonia Sanchez, Pat Mora, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Rigoberto Gonzalez. (Also, the poet Dana Gioia, whose mother was Mexican American.) And if we turn to music the Latino contribution is among the liveliest on the scene, with the Latino community serving as a conduit and reviser of popular music from Latin America, whether dance styles like the samba, tango and salsa or small band and orchestral styles imported from Mexico or Cuba.

I often wonder if America has shown sufficient gratitude to its Asian American, its Italian American, its Greek American, its Middle Eastern, and its Jewish American communities. But I’ve been warned not to write long blogs, so I will stop here, on the assumption that the point has been made. When we praise the achievements of the United States, we are praising a mosaic made of many contrasting components, all of them caught up in a process of cultural osmosis that alters each contributor. There would be something entirely fitting if the next American President, in addition to possessing qualifications independent of ethnic origin, could also in his physical person symbolize that part of our nation whose ancestry is drawn from parts of the globe other than Northern Europe. Can we make that happen?

July

2008-07-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Home again. And, as is so often the case when you go abroad and return, home comes a bit more sharply into focus. You could propose a parallel with language: when you learn another language you understand the nature of your own more clearly.

The following thoughts come as the result of reading two articles, the first, an essay by Sam Tanenhaus titled “Summer and Smoke, an American Cauldron,” which appeared in the June 29, 2008 New York Times; and the second, Reginald Shepherd’s blog for June 27 about Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry and a follow-up volume that contained prose statements by poets in that anthology about the poetics and/or ideologies that stood behind the poems they wrote.

Tanenhaus establishes a connection between hot weather and political revolt and makes a survey of works of American imaginative literature in which hot weather plays a role. It’s certainly true that early English colonists were appalled by the heat of the American summer, and the date July 4 (or July 2, to follow history more accurately) is a hard fact in support of the idea that high temperatures put revolutionary tempers on the boil. The Declaration of Independence and the ensuing war, besides establishing an American polity separate from England’s, also forged the characteristic American stance, isotopic for many pursuits and endeavors beyond the military or political. The United States is the most Oedipal of world nations, founded by an act of rebellion against the Fatherland. And the posture of rebellion, of resistance to authority, can be found in all aspects of our lives. Exemplary heroes in American history and fiction are the revolutionary (Patrick Henry), the frontiersman who detests towns (Daniel Boone), the forest scout with native skill and intuition (Natty Bumpo), the righteous avenger (John Brown, Nat Turner), the nonconformist who refuses to be “sivilised” (Huckleberry Finn), the “rough” who sounds his “barbaric yawp” over the rooftops (Walt Whitman), Hemingway (the man and his fiction), the muscular and sexually overwhelming maverick (Brando in The Wild One or A Streetcar Named Desire), the rebel who expresses himself automotively (James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause), and the artistic rebel who jeers at the academy and lights out for the territory of the new and experimental.

I guess it’s not necessary to state that the stances outlined above are masculinist, which doesn’t mean that a few women haven't been allowed into the club and become honorary males once they have passed through hazing rituals and demonstrated qualities of heroism and defiance—Annie Oakley, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Martha Gellhorn, and, moving to other nationalities, La Pasionaria and Beryl Markham.

Reginald Shepherd points out in his blog essay that only a small number of women were included in Allen’s anthology. Besides that, his census of the prose statements made by Allen's anthologized poets shows that almost none of them cited a leftist political motivation for their excursion away from standard poetic practice. (Broadening the context beyond the Allen anthology and poetry alone, it’s fair to say that innovative twentieth-century artists were more often associated with right-wing politics than left—Yeats, Claudel, Pound, Eliot, the Italian Futurists, Stravinsky, Walter Hart Benton, Kerouac, and so forth.) Most of Allen’s poets espoused an apolitical attitude, ignoring the question of whether a work of art isn’t inescapably caught up in any reigning ideology that it doesn’t contest. In the Sixties a slogan we often heard or voiced ourselves was, “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.”

I’m not actually surprised, thinking about it, that the Allen mavericks weren’t much interested in politics because, after all, political concerns are part of a general nexus of responsibility. And it is precisely responsibility to any authority that the American rebel has consistently refused. And this has become doubly true in the artistic sector. If we try to go below the surface and discover what psychological forces determine this attitude, we certainly find the Oedipal national character as a reinforcement for the habit of valorizing self-assertion over responsibility. But I think it is also an isotope with other American cultural and social forces. The famous American “permissive upbringing,” for example, which so astonishes Europeans. And along with it, Dr. Spock’s recommendations as to non-regulated feeding schedules and toilet training for infants. More than with any other culture, American culture is the culture for and about the child—the freedom and spontaneity of the child who doesn’t have to interrupt play with quiet time or with boring tasks. “Toys R Us,” the popular toy franchise tells us, and American childhood stretches indefinitely into periods other cultures would assign to adulthood.

The loathing for restrictions acquired in infancy of course operates in adult life. The typical high school hero in America is the one who sasses “teach,” cuts classes, and does as he damn well pleases; and the archetype remains active after school ends. His grammar is populist, he can’t spell, and hates reading. His ideal is a kind of helter-skelter play that acts to reinforce the sense of self. He smokes if he wants to, drinks a lot, drives his car or bike as fast as he can, eats what he wants to eat (he says broccoli is spinach and the hell with it), beds down whoever he wants to bed down, and leaves behind the girls he’s tired of going to bed with. So powerful and magnetic is this archetype for Americans, the embodier of it never finds himself without women willing to go along for the ride behind him on his Harley hog, whether or not they are aware of the risks involved.

Innovative or maverick artists may amount to milder instances of this archetype, yet they will even so display its characteristic defiance, self-assertion, and refusal of responsibility to outside authority. Art is play for this temperament, and anyone attempting to imbue it with the implication of responsibility will be hated as much as the teacher who gives homework assignments and bad grades. Responsibility is the unwelcome parent who barges into your private room and tells you to be tidy; or insists that you eat your broccoli; tells you you can’t entertain your girlfriends overnight; or warns you that you’re going to have to work hard and support yourself by legitimate means. Art-as-play cannot tolerate any restrictions; and when it has discoverable content, much of that content is likely to be a repudiation, sometimes savagely restrictive, of restriction. (Anyone doubting that artistic embodiers of this archetype still exist—or that there is a public to support them—should look at the career and extraordinary success of August Kleinzahler.)

Let’s concede that there is something appealing about the notion of art as pure play burdened with no responsibilities. The idea takes us back to elementary school where our art instructor praised our finger paintings and the music lady was happy to see us bang on a tin can with a spoon in some jerky rhythm of our own invention. When we were little, art was sheer fun, it didn’t have to prove anything. Mom would always put our crayon drawing of a house with smoking chimney and whiskery cat next the footpath on the fridge door and make us feel like geniuses. Actually, I see no objection to writing a poetry of pure play, in accordance with the writer’s predilections and uncensored mental activity. Anyone who wants to make art of any kind for himself or herself alone certainly has the right to do so. Private pursuits are private pursuits; since they doesn’t encroach on anyone else’s freedom, they should not be subject to regulation or even precise expectations.

It’s only when we decide we must publish that the notion of responsibility comes into it, as with all phenomena involving the res publica. When I publish something, I have to demonstrate that, one, I’m doing no harm and, two, that I am worth the public’s time and resources. To publish is to engage the social contract. Art brought to the public must somehow justify the expenditure of effort and material resources bestowed on it. I’m tolerant enough myself to think that there is even a value in a work of art that celebrates pure play and self-assertion alone, irrespective of any “redeeming social value.” That’s to say, such a work was well worth doing as the history of art unfolded--and perhaps more than once. But by now it has been done hundreds and thousands of times. The point has been made; so how can we continue to be interested in more recent works that keep sawing away with this idea? Refusal of responsibility isn’t news. Back in the day, the only Emperor may have been the Emperor of ice-cream, but what if we’re tired of all Emperors now, including the ice-cream clown?

“Aut prodesse, aut delectare volunt poetae,” said Horace. “Poets wish to instruct or else to please.” I want to look at this proposition, and talk about what values poetry can exemplify. But, since blog entries shouldn’t be long, so let's postpone this. Anyway, with the mercury at 85 F., it’s no good to be slaving over a heated computer. To be continued—that is, if anyone finds any value in this topic. If not, I won’t trespass further on your time.

Warsaw

2008-06-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

I got into Warsaw on Sunday afternoon and, after a rest, went out at dusk for a walk to the Old Town. I should say it’s a reproduction of the original, with only a few remnants of the original buildings, but on the whole, it looks accurate and plausible. Maybe the stonework doesn’t have the precision that you could expect in the 18th century, but the overall effect seems much better than its Disney equivalent would be. The biggest task must have been the reconstruction of the Royal Castle, a pinkish, reddish palace with central copper steeple. My sense is that the Castle and the Old City in general will look better and better the older they get, there being so substitute for time and weathering. I wandered around several of the streets, including a sort of promenade on the northern end, which offers nice views of that part of Warsaw. A little more strolling and then I made my way back to the hotel. People had said that there was no point in going to Warsaw, but I began to see they were wrong. From my hotel window, after I turned out the light, I could see several lit-up high-rise buildings farther west and south: the oldest was the Palace of Culture and Science, dating to 1913, which somehow missed being bombed. The others were newer—a Marriot, a Novotel, and then something corporate but unidentifiable; they twinkled in the distance against a blue-black sky.

Next morning I found my way to the Jewish Cemetery, which is at the edge of the neighborhood called Muranów, once the old Jewish quarter of Warsaw, that is, before the Second War. It was of course leveled (as depicted in the film The Pianist), and what is there now is a series of streets with large apartment blocks, plus green areas around them. Anyway, I first looked in at the Cemetery, which clearly goes back into the 19th century. Wandering at random I saw graves of differing ages, many dated in the 1950s, but nothing later than that. The dates earlier than the 1930s marked those who were lucky enough to live out their life span before the horror descended. And the names I read are names we know back in the States as well: Bernstein, Halpern, Judt, Broido, Balaban, Mandelbaum, Wilner, others. The graves are close together, under a thick growth of trees that, on this particular day, were swaying and sighing in the wind. There were also “symbolic graves,” memorials put up by children or grandchildren (often American) for bodies that were never found. Also, a general monument for those who died in the Holocaust; and another specifically for those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April and May in 1943. I added a little pebble to those heaped up on the memorials by earlier visitors. There was a tour group going about from place to place, and I must have looked strange to the people in it. In situations like these I can’t avoid wringing my face up into a knot, I suppose as a way of tyring to handle the feeling of tragedy.

I’ve been reading about a woman named Irena Sendler who died this past April at the age of 98. She saved the lives of some 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, as part of her work with an organization called Zegota, the Polish Council for Aid to Jews. She was a Catholic social worker, who, along with a colleague named Irena Schultz, donned a nurse’s uniform, went into the Ghetto and did what she could for a small percentage of the 500,000 people locked up there. That involved bringing in food, clothes, medicine, and typhoid vaccine—activities that would incur the death penalty if discovered. Once the transports to Auschwitz began in earnest, the Zegota decided to rescue children, who could more easily be spirited away than grownups. Sendler set up an escape network and, to move more easily in the Ghetto, wore a Star of David armband as a disguise. She found ways to smuggle out the children—in coffins, sacks, trunks, and even through the sewer system. The children were given new names and placed in orphanages and convents or among sympathetic Gentile families, where they were kept till the end of the war. In October of 1943, Sendler was denounced by someone and taken to Pawiak Prison where she was tortured. But she never revealed the whereabouts of the children or named her accomplices. Her legs were broken so many times she never walked properly again. Receiving the death sentence, she was saved by a sudden raid that the members of Zegota staged. Whereupon she went to work again, under another identity. After the war she tried to reunite children with their parents—when the parents were still living, that is. She was one of the first “Righteous Gentiles” honored by Yad Vashem in Israel. Often mentioned for the Nobel Peace Prize, she didn't receive it; but was recognized in many other ways, for example, Poland’s Order of the White Eagle, the nation’s highest honor. Less ambiguous a figure than Oskar Schindler, she would be a good subject for a film, and in fact there is, apparently, one being discussed.

Broiling under noonday sun in the first really hot day I’ve had during this trip, I walked along Anielewicz Street, named after Mordecai Anielewicz, the leader of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943. (Could there be a film about him as well?) Anyway, I wandered around what was once Muranów, looking for remnants of the Ghetto, but none were visible, just apartment building after apartment building. Eventually I came to Willy Brandt Square, where a temporary structure has been set up, announcing that a new “Museum of the Holocaust of Polish Jews” was being scheduled for completion in 2011. In the meantime, information about Polish Jews from that era was being gathered by an oral history specialist named Judyta Hajduk. Those whose families were part of the tragedy can contact her at: jhajduk@jewishmuseum.org.pl. Meanwhile, posted around the information center were pictures in a little exhibition produced by Polish children on the theme “Muranów and Myself.”

Nearby is a monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, its value not so much artistic as historic. In black stone and bronze it represents some of the insurgents who chose to die rather than to continue in the holding pen and death chamber that the Ghetto had become. I recall the poet Grace Schulman speaking of her aunt Helen, who, when she saw that the Uprising was going to fail, climbed to the top of a tall tower and, having wrapped herself in the Polish flag, leapt to her death. Grace actually put the event in a poem published many years ago.

Also, I recently read a moving memoir by Jafa Wallach, a Polish woman now in her nineties and living in the United States. It’s about her experiences surviving the German occupation—not in Warsaw but in a small town near the German border. She and her husband and other relatives were hidden in a basement by a Polish Gentile, who managed to keep them alive until Liberation. The title is Bitter Freedom: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor.

There are many facets to Warsaw and I never expected to exhaust them in a short visit. I had a ride on the Warsaw Metro, which is clean, efficient, and, unusual for Europe, air-conditioned; and continued along several stops and got out near the Polytechnic Institute, walking from there to Lazienki Park, sometimes billed the “Royal Park,” since it was established in the late 18th c. by Poniatowski during his brief reign. Apart from the trees and casually organized plantings, there is a lake at the center of which sits a lovely 18th c. pavillon. Bridges from either side lead to it, and there are terraces in front and in back to welcome anyone who might make the journey by a pleasure boat. Corinthian columns, a central pediment with sculpture, and statues along the roofline make for an un-ponderous classical effect. Of course there always has to be a jarring note, in this case a gaggle of peacocks that wandered about in the area, making their pitiful cries as they dragged their finery in the dust. But they were easily ignored, nobody forces you to adopt any sort of deference toward their ostentatious color and the little bottle-brush crown on their heads.

I’m trying to think of some general observations to make. The thing about travel is that it takes time before all that you have seen and done register their full effect on you. Sometimes the impressions received issue in writing, either poetry or prose, and sometimes not. But nothing I know of makes history come so alive as being in the places where it occurred. Probably a third of my education I owe to the journeys I’ve made. I’ve always tried to avoid going to countries whose languages were entirely unknown to me. I broke that rule this time, and the negative effect is unmistakable. It prevents getting to know anyone who doesn’t happen to speak English. It makes getting necessary information very hard. I didn’t always find that even hotel clerks knew much English. And when the languages are very far from familiar prototypes (as with Hungarian and Polish), signs and directions are little help. I'd wanted for a long time to make the trip, postponed it, and finally moved forward. But it’s not an experience I’m eager to repeat. Next time I have to arrive with at least some of the language available to me.

Yet, perhaps the analogy to make is reading poetry in translation. You know you’re not getting the full offering of what is in the original. But if your choice is to read a translation or else never have any idea at all of what a poem by, say, Akhmatova, or Zbigniew Herbert, or Adam Zagajewski is, then of course you will read the translation. Acknowledging the drawbacks, I’m still glad I traveled in Hungary and Poland.

Let me conclude the trip by mentioning that, over the Wisla (Vistula) Tiver near my hotel, I took pleasure in seeing a beautiful suspension bridge, a modern one. If not designed by Calatrava, then an imitator of him must have done it. It’s the sort of bridge where the suspension wires look like a harp, strung from a central pier at the middle of the river to the roadbed on either side. I’ve so far been unable to find out who designed it. But I did learn the Polish word for “bridge.” It’s short and sweet: “Most.”

From Warsaw

2008-06-23T01:46:00.000-07:00

Things are beginning to move swiftly now as I wind up my trip. So I won’t have a chance to go into much detail about my last days in Krakow. There would be something to say about the great outdoor food market just north of Florianska Gate, the one called Stary Kleparz, if I had time. But I can mention finding some delicious fresh strawberries there, not those huge, hard, sour things they sell in the U.S. And I could also mention seeing the Leonardo portrait (“The Lady Holding an Ermine,” one of only six extant Leonardo paintings in the world) at the Czartoryski Museum; or their Rembrandt (“The Good Samaritan”). On the other hand, a lot of this blog has been concerned with painting, so I’ll let that go.

I did meet with Adam Zagajewski yesterday at the little Kawarnia on the corner, which styles itself “Hamlet Café.” I got know Adam and his wife Maia eight years ago when we all stayed at a writers’ colony called the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland. When he walked in, I saw that I had aged a bit since then, though nothing drastic, really. We both had a plate of good pierogi and launched into a long summary of what we’d been doing. He is now a fellow of the Center for Social Thought at the University of Chicago, a loosely organized group of fellows in several disciplines that gather in the Second City in hopes that something useful will emerge from their association. I know that John Coetzee was there for a while, and the poet post was held by Mark Strand until a couple of years ago when he went to Columbia. Adam had taught a term at Houston for many years, but that is now past. A few months every year in the States does him good, he says, otherwise he is in Krakow, that is, when he isn’t attending conferences and poetry festivals. He’d just been in Sienna, to attend a celebration of Zbigniew Herbert, on the tenth anniversary of the great Polish poet’s death. And before that at a poetry festival in Norwich. So he isn’t idle at all when on this side of the Atlantic.

We never got around to the question about the special excellence of Polish poets. But maybe I will take it up with him in letters or e-mail posts. I suppose now I think of him as a pal as much as a great poet. There is always a little tension between those two things.

We said goodbye and I took a stroll around the neighborhood, where I stumbled on a celebration in Plac Wolnica, near the Ethnographic Museum. A stage had been set up and young men and women in a version of traditional Polish costume were dancing a version of Polish folk dances. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of either, but the effect was charming, a pleasant change from the usual watered-down American pop thing you get in Europe. I went back to the hotel for a little rest, then out again later on because there was to be a Midsummer festival along the Vistula. In the old days, young women used to make wreaths and attach candles to them and then float them on the water as part of Midsummer Night’s festivities. If a young man fished a wreath out of the water, its maker was sure to be married before the year was out. If the wreath sank, no such luck. I don’t know why I imagined anyone nowadays would bother with such a corny activity (well, maybe because of the Polish dancing that afternoon). What was planned instead was a vast outdoor rock concert on the banks of the river, with probably ten thousand people sitting on the grass for a mile of its stretch. I don’t know where the performers were. I never saw them, only a huge video screen on the opposite side of the river, with loud amplifiers to make sure we heard it all. I can say the language was English, but otherwise--. Behind us were set up street food stands and souvenir racks with glowing fluorescent wands, etc. The crowd was mostly young, but some oldsters were there as well, such is the attraction of large communal gatherings. The crowd struck me as subdued, I mean, compared to American equivalents on similar occasions. No one stood up to dance or even responded to the rhythm, just sat or stood quietly and listened. I didn’t hang around for long since really large crowds make me nervous, and the numbers were increasing every minute. It gave me food for thought, though. None of us realized back in the mid-Sixties, when we were listening to the Supremes, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Bob Dylan or Janis Joplin, or watching the light show at Fillmore West or East that rock music would sweep the globe as it has—after movies, the globe’s preferred art form. Both of them, for better or worse, America’s gift to the world. I guess you could add Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski to that.

Historic and Artistic Poland

2008-06-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

This has the weakness of all generalizations about nationality, but a mood I sense among the Poles is not so much melancholy as something sharper: a disappointment, an anger, whose roots are no doubt historical. If you look at Polish history, you’re confronted with a panorama of ill-advised international alliances, devastating wars, and regime changes that come and go in dizzying succession. Throughout all this you see the Polish people constantly trying to secure an independent and functional state, an idealism defeated over and again. You also see large outside powers like Prussia, Russia, and Austria redrawing Poland's national boundaries to suit themselves, not the nation being partitioned. The Second World War begins on Polish soil and incurs fierce bombing raids from the Allies, so that Warsaw is reduced to rubble. But liberation from the Germans only delivers the country into the hands of Soviet Russia, a new Ice Age sent down from the North. The post-Communist years have seen the Poles stumble out into the light of day and try to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Full integration into the E.C. community has moved slowly, but it got another boost this last week when France agreed to allow Polish workers to take jobs in France. But will that mean a drain on the young and talented who can’t find work in Poland? Possibly. The road ahead won’t be easy. But at the least Poland is a sovereign nation, no longer a tributary to larger powers. Unless being in a position of economic dependence amounts to a loss of sovereignty.

Krakow is a Holy Land. Nowhere outside of Rome have I seen so many seminarians, clerics, and monastics thronging the streets. Furthermore, the laity pours into the city’s many churches throughout the week, at various hours in the day. But remember that loyalty to the Catholic Church, here as in Ireland, also implied loyalty to one’s nationality. Stalin quickly saw that it wasn’t going to be easy to pull the Poles away from their religion and to embrace a materialistic ideology. He failed, his successors failed, and in fact one of the forces that broke the Soviet stranglehold was the papacy of John Paul II. So no wonder that pontiff is adored in this city where he served for more than a decade as archbishop. His image is everywhere, in photographic reproduction, in stone, in bronze. An analogy might be the feeling that liberal Anglicans have for Bishop Tutu of South Africa.

Yesterday I visited Wawel Castle on a hill not far from Kazimierz. The guidebooks say people have lived on that hill since the Neolithic period 50,000 years ago. As the highest spot in the Vistula River valley hereabouts, it was the natural choice for a fortification. Walls upon walls, castles upon castles were built here over the centuries. Since Krakow predated Warsaw as the capital, kings were crowned in the Wawel Cathedral and lived in the Castle, these including Yadwiga, Sobieski, and Poniatowski, Poland’s last king. “State” rooms and private rooms in the Castle contain remnants of these various reigns, often in the form of portraits or else objects belonging to this or that vanished ruler. High walls, towers, oddly angled additions, dozens of rooms with coffered ceilings and tapestries from Brussels. I only wish you could see the paintings more clearly. Lighting is generally poor and you’re kept at a distance from many of them by a silk rope. When you really can’t see a painting, the substitute is to look out the window for a view of the rooftops and spires of Krakow. At that distance none of the tourist nonsense is perceptible. As for the Cathedral, it is of necessity grand, given the royal tombs it contains, with a lot of marble, gold, and silver. Possibly historic and dynastic sentiment outweigh the aspect of holiness here, but that's in the nature of things.

I mentioned the spires of Krakow. They are all topped with cupolas made of copper worked in a variety of shapes—some squareish like little pillows, others octagonal with rounded tops, some like cloves of garlic, and some combining more than one of these formats. Many of the spires sprout still smaller spires around their rim, these sometimes tipped with little gold balls. It’s as though the steeple were a tree-trunk with branches. Spanning centuries of construction, the church buildings come in many styles. A Gothic church built of brick was a new concept to me, but there are several here in that material, though the arches and groining in most cases will be stone. Perhaps the most beautiful brick Gothic is the Mariacki Church in Market Square, with two spires of differing shape, one of them ornamented with smaller spires and gold balls. The interior is a riot of color, beginning with the nave, painted in several colors to form a complex pattern, the colors extending up to a ceiling dyed dark blue and flecked with hundreds of gold stars; and on to the stained glass windows in the chancel, very tall, slender, and composed of hundreds of small panes intricate in red and blue and sea-green. Add to this an elaborate polychrome altarpiece, plus the marble and gold of side altars, and the carved wood of pulpits, and you get an overwhelming effect of visionary color, Ad Maiorem Gloriam Dei, I guess one could say. At the austere end of things, I took a liking to little St. Adalbert’s, also on the square, pre-Gothic, in fact, the oldest church in Krakow’s center. Try as I might I can’t recall who St. Adalbert was, and this is the first church of that name I ever recall seeing. Very plain, too, and clearly old was the handsome church of St. Andrew’s on Grodska Street, though I haven't been able to see the interior.

A question that has been turning around in my mind is this: Why has Polish poetry been so distinguished in the postwar period, even or especially under Communist rule? I don’t know the answer, but just listing names (of an older generation) is evidence enough: Milosz, Herbert, Szymborska, Rozewicz, and now Adam Zagajewski. I’m supposed to meet him for lunch a few minutes from now, so I will ask and see what he thinks.

From Krakow

2008-06-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

A problem with keeping a regular blog dealing with travel is that when you try to see what there is to see, the end of the day finds you too tired to write about what you’ve seen. Nothing like complete coverage is the goal of the impressions recorded here, it's just a few out of the thousands of thoughts and feelings that a given day includes.

I'm writing from Krakow now, and it won’t be easy now to look back and talk about Budapest in close detail. But let’s see. I mentioned crossing over to Buda but didn’t describe my stroll through the Castle precincts (the original castle was destroyed by the Austrians, and all that remains is a section of strongly built wall called--not sure why--“the Fishermen’s Bastion”). There is, still, the old Mathias Church, more properly, Our Lady of the Buda Castle. But it was made over in the 19th c. into something perhaps attractive but thoroughly inauthentic; and then the makeover began to erode and collapse; and now is being restored in a maze of fencing and scaffolding. For me the main attraction of Castle Hill is the residential and administrative architecture there, long streets filled with Austro-Hungarian baroque façades in muted colors, many with white trim and sometimes sculptural ornament. Covered alleyways lead to parallel streets and some of courtyards are open, allowing glimpses into leafy and flowery prettiness. From there I walked south, past the rather modest but attractive house allotted to the President of the Hungarian Republic and on to a vast domed palace (much larger than Vienna’s Belvedere) that once belonged to the House of Savoy and now is used as a state art gallery and National Library. All along the Buda prospect you get stunning views of hills to the north, of Pest, the Danube, and the bridges spanning it. And the air this past week was flooded with the scent of linden flowers, that powdery, spicy fragrance that marks the approach of the summer solstice. The scent was so powerful I began to feel as though it had narcotic properties, instilling a dreamlike, pain-free mental state, useful to block mounting protests sent up from my footsoles. Eventually, I walked down a series of steps and paths until I reached the river level, caught a trolley and went back to my hotel for a nap.

Another day I went back over and climbed Buda’s other hill, the one called Gellèrt, which rises next to the Gellèrt Hotel and thermal baths. (No, I didn’t go to any of the spa establishments this time; in hot weather a steam-bath seems redundant.) It was a steep ascent through a fairly wild park, but, taking things slow, I arrived at the summit in half an hour, without feeling too much out of breath. There you find a military monument built of travertine, with an obligatory heroic bronze sculpture, but military monuments always switch off the observer in me. I was quite content with the city views there and glad to feel cooling breezes. It was also a chance to make my farewell to Budapest, and then walk back down to catch my trolley.

I saw a ballet at the Hungarian State Opera House, which was completed in the 1870s and resembles Paris’s Palais Garnier, on a smaller scale. The interior is highly ornamented, with a ceiling fresco, vast brass chandelier, and columns sporting decorative gilding. But, as Henry James once said, “I can stand a good deal of gold.” The ballet was a version of The Taming of the Shrew, a play whose “fable” is its least appealing feature; even Shakespeare sometimes nodded. The dancing was very good, though, especially the person who danced Kate (Alesja Popova), excellent as a "shrew" and fully convincing as an elegantly restrained wifey willing to allow Petruchio to cover her hand with his boot. Anyway, it’s fair to say that at the curtain the audience went wild, concluding with rhythmic clapping that changed tempo seamlessly several times a minute as though someone were dictating the beat. A moment of communal ecstasy that left the visitor a bit at a loss, I mean, after about ten minutes of the clap-clap, clapclapclapclapclap. "I came to see dance, not to make noise," he mutters grumpily. No, the performance part was fine. So maybe there was one good legacy from the Soviet period—the dance training that was available in Moscow.

Hungary hasn’t yet recovered from the Communist years, and apparently the present-day government is a dud. You see foreign investment pouring in, evidenced by the luxury hotels along the Danube on the Pest side and a tiled mall termed “Fashion Street,” lined with the all brand names you thought you’d left back home. But, no, here they are, urging everyone to consume, consume, consume. Building, rebuilding, and restoration is everywhere, yet the fortunes being made haven’t really trickled down to the populace, not yet. You sense the poverty strongly. Lots of begging and picking through rubbish bins, not to mention drink and cigarettes used for their pain-killing punch. Also, outdoor prostitution, which always saddens me. When money is scarce, women are the first to feel the pinch. Hard times. But the Magyars are valiant people, I sense; they have the fortitude to see it through. Budapest will become as glittery and shiny as all the prosperous cities of the West.

As said above, I’m in Krakow, staying in a battered, old, not yet refurbished district called Kazimierz, ten minutes' walk to the Old City. Kazimierz was once the Jewish ghetto, I mean, when Krakow still had Jews. There are several synagogues in the area, some quite old. And a Foundation for Jewish Culture. And lots of menorahs displayed in shop windows. Yet very few Jews now actually live here. They either went to America, or Israel, or Auschwitz. If you admired Spielberg’s Schindler’s List you’ll be interested to know the events recounted in the film occurred here, just as much of the footage was shot here. I think I found the very courtyard of the enamel factory shown in the film, at No. 12 Joszefa ulica (Josepha Street). It will or will not detoxify the location for you when you hear that the courtyard now hosts two outdoor restos, one of them with umbrellas advertising Carlsberg.

In the past decade Kazimierz has become the arty-bohemian neighborhood of Krakow, but I can see that phase drawing to a close, given that posh restaurants and galleries and less than posh souvenir shops have begun to spring up. The old quarter will be made over for the tour buses—in fact, I saw a tour bus there today. There’s still a good bit of the unvarnished funkiness, especially around Plaz Nowy, which has an open-air market for fresh produce as well as flea-market type antiques, or at least trinkets. But soon enough the sooty walls, cracked and exposing interior brick, will be repaired, hosed down and spun dry, and everything will be camera ready for annual tourist invasion from Italy or Germany or the U.S.A. We saw it happen in the West and East Village in New York, and in SoHo and Chelsea. We saw it happen in the Quartier Latin and the Marais in Paris, and Notting Hill and Camden Lock in London and in the picturesque parts of Prague. Moral: when you do discover something interesting and unspoiled, keep it to yourself. Nothing fails like success.

The historic Old City is very close already to being unbearable, especially around the Rynek Glowny (Market Square) where, in addition to the proliferation of sprawling outdoor cafés with Segafreddo umbrellas that block the view, someone has taken it into his head to set up opposing ranks of viewing stands, preparing to celebrate football, no doubt, or pop music or beer; anyway, some event entirely out of synch with medieval and Renaissance Krakow. Why can’t they have these things on the outskirts of town? Who decided to allow them to add to the unavoidable noise and crowding of the centro? Nobody seems to care. Anway, the result is I haven’t so far been able to get any sense of the scale or general effect of the Square, no matter that it is Krakow's largest public space, laden with Polish history. Nobody cares. It’s circus time in the old town tonight.

A welcome change from the razzmatazz was a visit to the Collegium Maius, the oldest part of Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, which dates back to 1364. Founded by Casimir the Great, it was given a boost a few years later when King (yes, King, the title wasn’t gender-specific) Jadwiga, who survived her husband Wladislaw Jagiello a number of years, decided to sell all her small valuables and jewels to increase the College’s endowment. (Jadwiga or Yadwiga becomes Hedwig in German and Edwige in French, by the way.) A local heroine then; and another local hero, John Paul II, saw to it during his papacy that she was beatified, so she is now King and Saint. As for the College itself, its most famous student was Nicolas Copernic, discoverer of heliocentrism; and one of the College treasures is the first globe in history to include a representation of the New World. All sort of astrolables, orreries, triquetra, and other instruments of early navigational science are displayed in the rooms. Plus donations made to it over the centuries by various patrons. The atmosphere of learning merits reverence. Over the architrave of the entrance to the large hall known as the Aula, I saw the Latin phrase PLUS RATIO QUAM VIS, i.e., “More Reason Than Force.” How little interest in that sentiment those who populate the present moment ever experience. If you want to clear a room, just mention the word “reason.” Watch people glaze over and turn back to their various manias, you know, fast cars, fast food, celebs, cool clothes, stag parties, fast sex, digital toys, and war. Reason can stay cloistered in its little cloisters, thank you very much. And the mad Roman holiday of global unreason goes skateboarding along on its merry way, bowling everything down in its path.

No, I won’t be going on a bus tour to Auschwitz or Birkenau, close as they are to this city. Years ago, during a trip to Munich, I frog-marched myself to see Dachau, purportedly one of the milder camps (based on the fact that it was built on German soil, which must not be dishonored). The Nazis solved the dilemma by putting the worst camps outside the Fatherland. I did go and see Dachau, but… never again. I know the death camps are there. That’s enough.