Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/reso...s/detail/89288

Article for Teachers and Students
Why Write in Form?
Mastering the traditional ways to forge new ones
By Rebecca Hazelton


When we think of mastery, we think of practice, and when we think of practice, we often think of repetition. Violinists spend much of their early years running scales before their fingers automatically and thoughtlessly assume their proper positions on the fretboard. Ceramicists must learn to wedge clay and center the clay on the wheel before they can successfully make pots. Outside art and music, basketball players put in countless hours perfecting their lay-ups, ballet dancers’ toes bleed inside their pointe shoes, and swimmers crisscross the length of a pool countless times hoping to shave milliseconds off their time.

Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty. In art and in sport, we acquire muscle memory by putting our bodies through movements over and over, repeatedly challenging our skills and abilities and refining our technique. If making a bank shot in pool was easy, we’d all be pool sharks.

In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms. But for many writers—and I’ve been guilty of this as well—this notion can elicit not just avoidance but also outright opposition. It’s easy enough to look at the current literary landscape and say there’s no point to practicing these old forms. Most journals don’t seem interested in publishing formal poetry, and though there are some fantastic poets working in form today, they are in the minority. Even when there is a resurgence of interest in form (such as New Formalism), it’s seen as an outlier, even reactionary.

Perhaps some of this opposition stems from a common misconception. Unlike other arts—and perhaps even other forms of writing—readers and writers alike often associate poetry with feeling, not technique. Part of this may stem from a misunderstanding of William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry, in which he begins, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. …” His wording encourages a reading in which poetry simply occurs and does so uncontrollably. If this is the part of the quotation that sticks with you, it’s no surprise that you might associate poetry more with emotional intensity and less with the how of its conveyance. But in the second half of that quotation, Wordsworth tempers his original statement: “... it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Those unexpected and powerful feelings are actually being observed at a calming distance from that emotion.

More important, Wordsworth’s statement doesn’t acknowledge the structure that serves as a scaffolding for those feelings, a framework that makes a poem more than just cathartic release. It doesn’t acknowledge form. Why would it? For Wordsworth and his contemporaries 200 years ago, form was assumed. If a poem didn’t rhyme, readers could be sure it employed some sort of metrical scheme.

Associating poetry with feeling can seem very egalitarian because everyone has feelings. Although that’s true, not everyone is a poet, and the message of this model of art is actually exclusionary: it doesn’t offer an aspirant poet a pragmatic path forward because it hides the real work behind the scenes. What is an aspiring poet supposed to do in this model—feel harder?

I want to clarify that some of the best poets have qualities that can’t be practiced. It’s that ill-defined, hard-to-put-your-finger-on something that separates merely technically proficient writing from the work we call genius. Whether we have that spark is out of our hands, but we can have all the inspiration in the world, and it won’t matter if we can’t express it well. Setting aside romantic notions of poetry and dealing with the nitty-gritty of technique gives all of us the ability to improve our poetry. We all, with practice, might move others to feel something that we have felt or to see the world as we do. If we’ve got that spark, technique gives us a way to share it. For my money—mind you, I am a poet, so that’s not much—writing in form is one of the best ways for poets to practice technique.

Even if you have no desire to be a “formal” poet (and no one says you must choose a side!), the skills you learn by grappling with form are skills that will serve you well in free verse. Poets who tune their ears to iambs and trochees are poets who have a better sense of a line’s rhythm. After all, free verse isn’t entirely without meter—rather, its meter just doesn’t have a consistent, discernable pattern. Look at these lines from the second stanza of W.S. Merwin’s “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year”:

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older

The first line of this stanza catches my ear. I hear a pattern: WALKing in | FOG and | RAIN and | SEEing | NOTHing. There are five feet to the line, a dactyl followed by four trochees. Such a musical line in a free verse poem arrests readers, even if they don’t recognize why.

Because the first line seems metrical, I look more carefully at the second line. I hear it like this: I iMAgine ALL the CLOCKS have DIED in the NIGHT. I want all to be unstressed so that “all the CLOCKS” and “in the NIGHT” are matching anapests. I like that idea because it nicely links the two images. But when I say the whole line aloud, I keep stressing that ALL. The line doesn’t seem metrical, but it almost does. Viewed in the context of the previous line, Merwin sets up a metrical pattern and then lets it dissipate. This structure reinforces the sense of the lines, in which clocks, the keepers of order, have lost their power.

What about those last lines? I would argue that they aren’t just unmetrical but anti-metrical. Because Merwin doesn’t use punctuation in the poem, it challenges our sense of syntax. The first and second lines are complete clauses; it’s no great challenge to our sensibility to view the line breaks as the missing punctuation between them. But in lines three and four, independent clauses butt up against each other in the same lines. This gives the lines a rushed quality, a sense that things are running together. To my ear, it also has the effect of flattening the stresses in the line. I hear stresses on CHOOSE and YOUNGer, but on the whole, the lines have a monotone quality. This effect amplifies their meaning. In the first two lines, the speaker indulges in a fantasy in which time ceases to matter. But as the stanza continues, the lines rush together just as time rushes on, and the conclusion of the fantasy (“I could choose my age / It would be younger”) only confirms its impossibility (“so I am older”).

I very much doubt that Merwin, while composing this poem, said to himself, “I’m gonna slip a line of iambicpentameter into this free verse poem just to mess with them.” Instead, I suspect that he had spent some time in the past reading and writing metrical poetry and employed these techniques more or less unconsciously. His knowledge of meter attuned him to the line’s rhythm. Imagine if he had instead written “WALKing in the FOG and RAIN, SEEing NOTHing.” Suddenly, it’s a very different poem; we lose the rhythm of walking.

Meter is like allusion. We use it all the time whether we know it or not—it’s inescapable. Just as the idea of two kids in love from warring families can’t help but conjure up Romeo and Juliet, so too does language fall into patterns that evoke older associations. We do this without even thinking; free verse poetry is littered with meter. By writing intuitively, we naturally fall in and out of meter. But if you’re unable to identify that meter and understand how it is or isn’t working with your meaning, you’re abdicating a large degree of control.

I begin with meter because prosody is the first formal element to leap to most poets’ minds and perhaps the most intimidating. Rhyme is probably the second and has a worse reputation. Many of us think of poetry with a set rhyme scheme as old-fashioned and just bad. Here’s an example of what may come to mind when we think of formal, rhymed poetry:

It was biting cold, and the falling snow,
Which filled a poor little match girl’s heart with woe,
Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street,
Crying, “Who’ll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!”

These lines are by William McGonagall from his poem “The Little Match Girl.” I hope you’ll forgive me for picking on him a little. He was a fascinating figure—former Shakespearean actor, self-styled “Knight of the White Elephant of Burma”—but not a great poet. When rhyme is bad, it’s really bad, and it’s bad because we know what rhymes are coming. Of course he rhymes snow with woe. I know that from the moment I see the word filled. But—ignoring meter for the moment (and McGonagall seems to, often)—imagine if those lines instead read, “It was biting cold, and the falling snow / scraped the match girl’s heart hollow.” I’m not saying it’s brilliant, but in this version, we don’t know exactly where the line is going before we get there. There’s a little bit of surprise, not to mention personification and image.

But what makes this rhyming poem “bad” isn’t just that McGonagall is picking expected rhymes. It’s that you can see him working so hard to get to them. We may look at a poem like this and think that the writer lacks control over the language—but what we’re really seeing is a poet who can’t give up control. The meter and even the line length in his work is all over the place because McGonagall knows what rhyme he wants and will do whatever he can to get there.

It’s an unfair comparison, but take a look at the first two stanzas of “Two Violins,” by A.E. Stallings:

One was fire red,
Hand carved and new—
The local maker pried the wood
From a torn-down church's pew,
The Devil's instrument
Wrenched from the house of God.
It answered merrily and clear
Though my fingering was flawed;

The rhyme new/pew is straight and simple, but as a reader, I don’t see pew coming until I get to church. At that point, the rhyme slips easily into place. Likewise, the second stanza’s rhyme of God/flawed feels natural and unforced, and pairing the idea of imperfection with that of God further reinforces the almost sacrilegious origins of this violin, “the Devil’s instrument.” There’s a sense of the inevitable with rhymes such as these, yet there’s also surprise.

I’ve heard more than one creative writing teacher say, “I had to ban rhymes in my workshop.” Believe me, I sympathize. Reading bad rhyme can feel as though someone is intentionally trying to hurt you. But those wooden or clumsy rhymes are still going to be present in free verse poetry; there will simply be fewer of them. Formal poems lay these deficiencies bare. When we prioritize a rhyme’s completion over syntax or sense, then rhyme is only a problem to solve, not a tool to amplify meaning. Creating a poem with a graceful rhyme scheme asks us to experiment with many different structures to improve our fluidity and even our vocabulary. Yes, we’ll write a lot of clunkers on the way. Struggling with rhyme in a formal poem, successfully or not, means the rhymes we use in free verse will be more subtle. We’ll better understand the effects of pl

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Article for Teachers and Students
Why Write in Form?
Mastering the traditional ways to forge new ones
By Rebecca Hazelton


When we think of mastery, we think of practice, and when we think of practice, we often think of repetition. Violinists spend much of their early years running scales before their fingers automatically and thoughtlessly assume their proper positions on the fretboard. Ceramicists must learn to wedge clay and center the clay on the wheel before they can successfully make pots. Outside art and music, basketball players put in countless hours perfecting their lay-ups, ballet dancers’ toes bleed inside their pointe shoes, and swimmers crisscross the length of a pool countless times hoping to shave milliseconds off their time.

Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty. In art and in sport, we acquire muscle memory by putting our bodies through movements over and over, repeatedly challenging our skills and abilities and refining our technique. If making a bank shot in pool was easy, we’d all be pool sharks.

In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms. But for many writers—and I’ve been guilty of this as well—this notion can elicit not just avoidance but also outright opposition. It’s easy enough to look at the current literary landscape and say there’s no point to practicing these old forms. Most journals don’t seem interested in publishing formal poetry, and though there are some fantastic poets working in form today, they are in the minority. Even when there is a resurgence of interest in form (such as New Formalism), it’s seen as an outlier, even reactionary.

Perhaps some of this opposition stems from a common misconception. Unlike other arts—and perhaps even other forms of writing—readers and writers alike often associate poetry with feeling, not technique. Part of this may stem from a misunderstanding of William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry, in which he begins, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. …” His wording encourages a reading in which poetry simply occurs and does so uncontrollably. If this is the part of the quotation that sticks with you, it’s no surprise that you might associate poetry more with emotional intensity and less with the how of its conveyance. But in the second half of that quotation, Wordsworth tempers his original statement: “... it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Those unexpected and powerful feelings are actually being observed at a calming distance from that emotion.

More important, Wordsworth’s statement doesn’t acknowledge the structure that serves as a scaffolding for those feelings, a framework that makes a poem more than just cathartic release. It doesn’t acknowledge form. Why would it? For Wordsworth and his contemporaries 200 years ago, form was assumed. If a poem didn’t rhyme, readers could be sure it employed some sort of metrical scheme.

Associating poetry with feeling can seem very egalitarian because everyone has feelings. Although that’s true, not everyone is a poet, and the message of this model of art is actually exclusionary: it doesn’t offer an aspirant poet a pragmatic path forward because it hides the real work behind the scenes. What is an aspiring poet supposed to do in this model—feel harder?

I want to clarify that some of the best poets have qualities that can’t be practiced. It’s that ill-defined, hard-to-put-your-finger-on something that separates merely technically proficient writing from the work we call genius. Whether we have that spark is out of our hands, but we can have all the inspiration in the world, and it won’t matter if we can’t express it well. Setting aside romantic notions of poetry and dealing with the nitty-gritty of technique gives all of us the ability to improve our poetry. We all, with practice, might move others to feel something that we have felt or to see the world as we do. If we’ve got that spark, technique gives us a way to share it. For my money—mind you, I am a poet, so that’s not much—writing in form is one of the best ways for poets to practice technique.

Even if you have no desire to be a “formal” poet (and no one says you must choose a side!), the skills you learn by grappling with form are skills that will serve you well in free verse. Poets who tune their ears to iambs and trochees are poets who have a better sense of a line’s rhythm. After all, free verse isn’t entirely without meter—rather, its meter just doesn’t have a consistent, discernable pattern. Look at these lines from the second stanza of W.S. Merwin’s “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year”:

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older

The first line of this stanza catches my ear. I hear a pattern: WALKing in | FOG and | RAIN and | SEEing | NOTHing. There are five feet to the line, a dactyl followed by four trochees. Such a musical line in a free verse poem arrests readers, even if they don’t recognize why.

Because the first line seems metrical, I look more carefully at the second line. I hear it like this: I iMAgine ALL the CLOCKS have DIED in the NIGHT. I want all to be unstressed so that “all the CLOCKS” and “in the NIGHT” are matching anapests. I like that idea because it nicely links the two images. But when I say the whole line aloud, I keep stressing that ALL. The line doesn’t seem metrical, but it almost does. Viewed in the context of the previous line, Merwin sets up a metrical pattern and then lets it dissipate. This structure reinforces the sense of the lines, in which clocks, the keepers of order, have lost their power.

What about those last lines? I would argue that they aren’t just unmetrical but anti-metrical. Because Merwin doesn’t use punctuation in the poem, it challenges our sense of syntax. The first and second lines are complete clauses; it’s no great challenge to our sensibility to view the line breaks as the missing punctuation between them. But in lines three and four, independent clauses butt up against each other in the same lines. This gives the lines a rushed quality, a sense that things are running together. To my ear, it also has the effect of flattening the stresses in the line. I hear stresses on CHOOSE and YOUNGer, but on the whole, the lines have a monotone quality. This effect amplifies their meaning. In the first two lines, the speaker indulges in a fantasy in which time ceases to matter. But as the stanza continues, the lines rush together just as time rushes on, and the conclusion of the fantasy (“I could choose my age / It would be younger”) only confirms its impossibility (“so I am older”).

I very much doubt that Merwin, while composing this poem, said to himself, “I’m gonna slip a line of iambicpentameter into this free verse poem just to mess with them.” Instead, I suspect that he had spent some time in the past reading and writing metrical poetry and employed these techniques more or less unconsciously. His knowledge of meter attuned him to the line’s rhythm. Imagine if he had instead written “WALKing in the FOG and RAIN, SEEing NOTHing.” Suddenly, it’s a very different poem; we lose the rhythm of walking.

Meter is like allusion. We use it all the time whether we know it or not—it’s inescapable. Just as the idea of two kids in love from warring families can’t help but conjure up Romeo and Juliet, so too does language fall into patterns that evoke older associations. We do this without even thinking; free verse poetry is littered with meter. By writing intuitively, we naturally fall in and out of meter. But if you’re unable to identify that meter and understand how it is or isn’t working with your meaning, you’re abdicating a large degree of control.

I begin with meter because prosody is the first formal element to leap to most poets’ minds and perhaps the most intimidating. Rhyme is probably the second and has a worse reputation. Many of us think of poetry with a set rhyme scheme as old-fashioned and just bad. Here’s an example of what may come to mind when we think of formal, rhymed poetry:

It was biting cold, and the falling snow,
Which filled a poor little match girl’s heart with woe,
Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street,
Crying, “Who’ll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!”

These lines are by William McGonagall from his poem “The Little Match Girl.” I hope you’ll forgive me for picking on him a little. He was a fascinating figure—former Shakespearean actor, self-styled “Knight of the White Elephant of Burma”—but not a great poet. When rhyme is bad, it’s really bad, and it’s bad because we know what rhymes are coming. Of course he rhymes snow with woe. I know that from the moment I see the word filled. But—ignoring meter for the moment (and McGonagall seems to, often)—imagine if those lines instead read, “It was biting cold, and the falling snow / scraped the match girl’s heart hollow.” I’m not saying it’s brilliant, but in this version, we don’t know exactly where the line is going before we get there. There’s a little bit of surprise, not to mention personification and image.

But what makes this rhyming poem “bad” isn’t just that McGonagall is picking expected rhymes. It’s that you can see him working so hard to get to them. We may look at a poem like this and think that the writer lacks control over the language—but what we’re really seeing is a poet who can’t give up control. The meter and even the line length in his work is all over the place because McGonagall knows what rhyme he wants and will do whatever he can to get there.

It’s an unfair comparison, but take a look at the first two stanzas of “Two Violins,” by A.E. Stallings:

One was fire red,
Hand carved and new—
The local maker pried the wood
From a torn-down church's pew,
The Devil's instrument
Wrenched from the house of God.
It answered merrily and clear
Though my fingering was flawed;

The rhyme new/pew is straight and simple, but as a reader, I don’t see pew coming until I get to church. At that point, the rhyme slips easily into place. Likewise, the second stanza’s rhyme of God/flawed feels natural and unforced, and pairing the idea of imperfection with that of God further reinforces the almost sacrilegious origins of this violin, “the Devil’s instrument.” There’s a sense of the inevitable with rhymes such as these, yet there’s also surprise.

I’ve heard more than one creative writing teacher say, “I had to ban rhymes in my workshop.” Believe me, I sympathize. Reading bad rhyme can feel as though someone is intentionally trying to hurt you. But those wooden or clumsy rhymes are still going to be present in free verse poetry; there will simply be fewer of them. Formal poems lay these deficiencies bare. When we prioritize a rhyme’s completion over syntax or sense, then rhyme is only a problem to solve, not a tool to amplify meaning. Creating a poem with a graceful rhyme scheme asks us to experiment with many different structures to improve our fluidity and even our vocabulary. Yes, we’ll write a lot of clunkers on the way. Struggling with rhyme in a formal poem, successfully or not, means the rhymes we use in free verse will be more subtle. We’ll better understand the effects of pl

PRESENTED BUT I DO NOT AGREE WITH ALL OF IT.
Rhyme is far harder to compose in than is free verse, prose , etc....
Thus many ill -equipped to write using rhyme come up with thousands of reasons why they dislike or do not write in rhyme.
I write in rhyme primarily but also do free verse when I am lazy!
I could easily write a hundred short free verse poems a day--but why do so?
Could I do a hundred rhyme poems a day? NO.....
REASON WHY IS ONE MUST THINK 4 TO 8 VERSES AHEAD WHEN WRITING IN RHYME .
WHERAS FREE VERSE ONE CAN GO ON A RAPID FLOW....

Granted, I've been told by poets that I collaborate with -- that I am by far, the fastest composer of poetic verse, that they've ever encountered.
Ive written a 32 verse free verse poem in 11 minutes--my average time for a 32 verse in rhyme is about 32 minutes, which most other poets call that 32 minutes lightning fast.
Some tell me that it takes them several days to write a 14 verse sonnet!
Which I often do in 6/7 minutes.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Voltair...ow%20Essay.htm

Voltaire an Essay
---------------------------by Clarence Darrow


Clarence Darrow's essay on Voltaire was first hand-typed and edited from two sources by Cliff Walker. It was then published here, with around a dozen minor edits by Tom Merrill, who also provided the intro below. After Tom made his edits, which involved some educated guesswork, by amazing good fortune he was able to obtain the essay in the form of a small printed booklet that Darrow distributed at his lectures. The text below was revised after Tom carefully consulted Darrow's printed lecture notes. If the reader notices possible "quirks" of grammar or punctuation, please keep in mind that Tom thought it best to remain faithful to Darrow and the work of his genius. In fact, Tom thought the essay was "flawless, a virtual miracle of enlightenment" and that "any miniscule compositional flaws that could possibly have suggested themselves could just as well have been ignored, since fussing with them seemed a virtual violation of natural perfection."

In the handsome essay below, famous American civil libertarian Clarence Darrow, perhaps best remembered for his notable performance in The Scopes Monkey Trial, which took place in 1925 in Dayton Tennessee and contested the constitutionality of a new law banning the teaching of evolution in that state, or possibly for his successful defense in Chicago a year earlier of precocious teenage "thrill" murderers Leopold and Loeb, pays unabashed tribute to a brave and tireless champion of free speech, decency tolerance and social justice by the name of Francois-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, a name he said he adopted in the hope it might bring him better luck.

Darrow's essay is an unreserved paean to Voltaire's life and mind. His obvious deep admiration for the prolific French author and pamphleteer, whose lifelong heroic outspokenness against the forces of tyranny and oppression in a time and place in which the price to be paid for open opposition to church and state and a harshly imposed social order was vastly higher than it is today—in the West at any rate—is a very encouraging thing to encounter and serves as a reminder that the better legal minds may still be our best hope for social progress short of the sort of upheaval that began in France very soon after Voltaire's death in 1778.


Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694. At that time, Louis XIV was on the throne in France. Though long years of profligacy and dissipation the lords and rulers of France had reduced the country to poverty and the people to slavery and superstition. France was nothing but the king and the favorites of the court. Noblemen, priests and women of easy virtue were the rulers, and people lived only to furnish them amusement and dissipation. Everyone believed in miracles, witchcraft and revealed religion. They not only believed in old miracles but in new ones. A person may be intellectual and believe in miracles, but the miracles must be very old.

Doctors plied their trade through sorcery and sacred charms. Lawyers helped keep the poor in subjection; the criminal code was long, cruel and deadly. The priest, the doctor and the lawyer lived for the rich and helped make slaves of the poor. Doctors still believe in sorcery, but they administer their faith cures through a bottle instead of vulgar witchcraft. Lawyers still keep the poor in their place by jails and barbarous laws, but the criminal code is shorter and less severe.

When Voltaire was born there was really but one church which, of course, was ignorant, tyrannical and barbarous in the extreme. All creeds are alike, and whenever there is but one, and the rulers honestly believe in that one, they are bound to be ignorant, barbarous and cruel. All sorts of heresies were punishable by death. If anyone dared to write a pamphlet or book that questioned any part of the accepted faith, the book was at once consigned to flames and the author was lucky if he did not meet the same fate. Religion was not maintained by the precepts of the priest, but by the prison, the torture chamber and the fagot. Everyone believed; no one questioned. The religious creeds, while strict and barbarous, did not interfere with the personal conduct of any of the rulers. They were left free to act as they pleased, so long as they professed to believe in the prevailing faith.

France was on the verge of bankruptcy. Her possessions were dwindling away. There was glitter and show and extravagance on the outside; poverty, degradation and ignorance beneath. It was in this state and at that time that Voltaire was born. He was a puny child, whom no one thought would live. The priest was called in immediately that he might be baptized so his soul would be saved.

Voltaire's father was a notary of mediocre talents and some property, but his name would have been lost, excepting for his brilliant son. His mother was his mother, and that was all. In his writings, the most voluminous ever left by any author, he scarcely mentions his mother a half dozen times. He had a brother and sister whose names have only been rescued from oblivion by the lustre of Voltaire. No one can find in any of his ancestors or kin, any justification for the genius of Voltaire.

Had the modern professors of eugenics had power in France in 1694, they probably would not have permitted such a child to have been born. Their scientific knowledge would have shown conclusively that no person of value could have come from the union of his father and mother. In those days, nature had not been instructed by the professors of eugenics and so Voltaire was born.

In a few days, his parents and nurse grew tired of waiting for him to die, and while he was yet a child, his education was left in charge of a priest named Chateauneuf. His teacher drew a salary as a priest, but was irreligious, profligate, clever and skeptical in the extreme. He was kind-hearted and good-natured and fond of his pupil, who was also his godson, and did his best to keep the young mind free from the superstition of the age.

Before he was ten years old, it was plain that the young Voltaire had a clever mind. At that age he was sent to a boys' school in France. His body was lean and thin and his mind was keen and active, and neither his body nor his mind changed these characteristics to the day of his death. At the school he says he learned "Latin and nonsense," and nothing else. In two hundred years, the schools are still teaching Latin and nonsense. The course of Latin is the same, but the kinds of nonsense have somewhat changed. At the school he was not like the other boys. He did not care for games or sports. While the other children were busy with youthful games he was talking with the fathers, who were the teachers in the school. In vain they tried to make the boy join the rest in play. He turned his eyes to his professors and said, "Everyone must jump after his own fashion." One of the professors, who was close to him, remarked, "That boy wants to weigh the great questions of the day in his little scales."

While a boy at school he began to write verses, not, of course, the easy, fluent, witty poetry of his later years, but still verses of such promise and originality as to attract the attention of his teachers. The one father who disliked him at school, in answering a brilliant retort of the child, said, "Witch, you will one day be the standard bearer of Deism in France."

On his return from school, about fifteen, his father decided to make him an advocate. He picked out the profession for his son, as most fathers do, because it was his own; but Voltaire's early efforts at poetry had given him the ambition to write and he insisted that he should not follow his father's footsteps, but devote his life to literature. This his father would not consent to. "Literature," said the parent, "is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society, and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger." But even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past, a respect for precedents; believe in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be incompatible with the practice of law. While he was studying law, he was writing verses: verses that were wicked, sacrilegious, and sometimes malicious. He was also making up for the play he missed in youth and was having a gay time with his friends. On account of some boyish scrape, he was sent by his father to Caen and, although in a way under restraint, at once captured the society and intellect of the town. His father seeing something of the boy's brilliancy, sent him word that if he would come back home he would buy him a good post in the government. "Tell my father," was the answer, "I do not want any place that can be bought. I will make one for myself that will cost nothing." Later in his life, in writing the story of the great dramatist Molière, he said, "All who have made a name for themselves in the fine arts, have done so in spite of their relations. Nature has always been much stronger with them than education." and again, "I saw early that one can neither resist one's ruling passion nor fight one's destiny."
Voltaire is only one illustration of the wisdom of these remarks. The usual is always mediocre. When nature takes it into her head to make a man, she fits him with her own equipment and educates him in her own school.

His father got him a post in Holland, where he wrote more verses, and fell in love, or at least thought he did, which comes to the same thing. He was forbidden to see his mistress. After various difficulties in meeting, she wisely concluded that the chances were so uncertain, she had better take someone else. Naturally this serious matter made a deep impression on a boy. He concluded there was nothing to live for and turned more deliberately to literature for consolation. He went seriously to work and never stopped until he died at eighty-four. Had he been able to marry the girl, then—but what's the use in speculating upon that?

Louis XIV died in 1715. His reign was splendid, corrupt and profligate. The people were hungry and turbulent; the notables tyrannical and insolent. The last few years the king was the absolute monarch of France, and he was ruled by a woman and a priest. The news of his death was received with joy by the multitude. Young Voltaire was at the funeral. This funeral resembled a fête more than a day of mourning.

Voltaire by this time was known for his epigrams, his rhymes and his audacity. The salons of Paris were at once opened to him. Whatever else he was during his life, he was never dull, and the world forgives almost anything but stupidity. Commencing early in his life, most of the epigrams and brilliant satires in France were charged to Voltaire. On account of a particularly odious epigram, he was exiled to Sully. His keepers found him a most agreeable guest, and he was at once a favorite in the society of the place. "It would be delightful to stay at Sully," he wrote, "If I were only allowed to go away from it." He spent his time hunting, flirting and writing verses. In his verses and his epigrams he could flatter when he thought flattery would accomplish his end, and by this means his exile was brought to a close and he returned to Paris after an absence of about a year.

No sooner was he back, than a violent attack on the government appeared. This was at once charged to Voltaire, who had in fact not written it. During this time he had been writing his first play, which had been accepted and was then on rehearsal at the theater, but on account of the anonymous verses, which he did not write, he was sent to the Bastille. A few days after he was placed in prison he signed a receipt for "two volumes of Homer, two Indian kerchiefs, a little cap, two cravats, a night cap and a bottle of essence of cloves."

It was some time before he was given a pen and ink, which all his life he needed more than anything else; but without these, he began to compose a new play. He was able to carry in his mind whole cantos of the play and, as Frederick the Great said, "His prison became his Parnassus." Voltaire was not the first or last man to convert a prison into a hall of fame. A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.

It was while in prison that he changed his name from the one his father gave him—Arouet—to the one he has ma *************

.............................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Louise%...ture%20Bio.htm

The HyperTexts

Louise Bogan: Poems and Quotes

Louise Bogan has long been one of my favorite poets, and it's a shame (actually, a travesty) that she isn't better known today. In my opinion she's a major poet; some critics obviously agree, as she has been called "the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century." On this page we have published some of her finest poems, including the hard-to-find "After the Persian," followed by an essay by Jeffrey Woodward on Bogan's poem "The Mark." — Michael R. Burch, editor, The HyperTexts



Louise Bogan Quotes

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.
Perhaps this very instant is your time.
I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.
Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.
In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.
It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life ... Illness, old age, and death—subjects as ancient as humanity—these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,
What most perturbs the mind:
The heart-rending homely people,
Or the horrible beautiful kind?

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.
It is deathless And it isn't for you.



After the Persian

I

I do not wish to know
The depths of your terrible jungle:
From what nest your leopard leaps
Or what sterile lianas are at once your serpents' disguise
and home.

I am the dweller on the temperate threshold,
The strip of corn and vine,
Where all is translucence (the light!)
Liquidity, and the sound of water.
Here the days pass under shade
And the nights have the waxing and the waning moon.
Here the moths take flight at evening;
Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo.
Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap
Close to the cool ground,
Shining in a profusion
Celestial or marine.

Here it is never wholly dark but always wholly green,
And the day stains with what seems to be more than the
sun
What may be more than my flesh.

II

I have wept with the spring storm;
Burned with the brutal summer.
Now, hearing the wind and the twanging bow-strings,
I know what winter brings.

The hunt sweeps out upon the plain
And the garden darkens.
They will bring the trophies home
To bleed and perish
Beside the trellis and the lattices,
Beside the fountain, still flinging diamond water,
Beside the pool
(Which is eight-sided, like my heart).

III

All has been translated into treasure:
Weightless as amber,
Translucent as the currant on the branch,
Dark as the rose's thorn.

Where is the shimmer of evil?
This is the shell's iridescence
And the wild bird's wing.

IV

Ignorant, I took up my burden in the wilderness.
Wise with great wisdom, I shall lay it down upon flowers.

V

Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.

Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.




Song For The Last Act

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.



Roman Fountain

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.



Juan's Song

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes
Who is it, then, that love deceives?



The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I may find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind's avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.



Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.



Chanson un Peu Naïve

What body can be ploughed,
Sown, and broken yearly?
But she would not die, she vowed,
But she has, nearly.
Sing, heart sing;
Call and carol clearly.

And, since she could not die,
Care would be a feather,
A film over the eye
Of two that lie together.
Fly, song, fly,
Break your little tether.

So from strength concealed
She makes her pretty boast:
Plain is a furrow healed
And she may love you most.
Cry, song, cry,
And hear your crying lost.



Sonnet

Since you would claim the sources of my thought
Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
The reedy traps which other hands have times
To close upon it. Conjure up the hot
Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow
Devised to strike it down. It will be free.
Whatever nets draw in to prison me
At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.
My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell
That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown
Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69663

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Public Poetry?
Thomas Sayers Ellis’s Skin, Inc., Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation, C.D. Wright’s One with Others, and Elenor Wilner’s Tourist in Hell.
By David Orr
Introduction

All poetry is public, in the sense that every poem implies an audience. But some publics are more public than others. Most contemporary poets, for example, address a public that consists only of close friends, professional acquaintances, and a few handy abstractions like the Ideal Reader and Posterity. This kind of public is very different from (and much smaller and more homogeneous than) the one that buys novels by Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. And of course both of these audiences pale beside the public that we usually think of as “The Public”—the ocean of humanity that votes in elections, watches the Super Bowl, and generally makes America what it is, for better and worse. Poetry has famously little contact with this last and largest public. Indeed, the only such “Public” appearance by a poet in recent memory was Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the inauguration of President Obama, which earned a predictably ambivalent reaction from segments of poetry’s own public.

But if poets don’t often find themselves reading before a million citizens on the National Mall, that doesn’t mean they don’t address issues of national concern. The question is, which public gets to hear those public thoughts—and exactly how public are they, anyway?

All poetry is public, in the sense that every poem implies an audience. But some publics are more public than others. Most contemporary poets, for example, address a public that consists only of close friends, professional acquaintances, and a few handy abstractions like the Ideal Reader and Posterity. This kind of public is very different from (and much smaller and more homogeneous than) the one that buys novels by Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. And of course both of these audiences pale beside the public that we usually think of as “The Public”—the ocean of humanity that votes in elections, watches the Super Bowl, and generally makes America what it is, for better and worse. Poetry has famously little contact with this last and largest public. Indeed, the only such “Public” appearance by a poet in recent memory was Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the inauguration of President Obama, which earned a predictably ambivalent reaction from segments of poetry’s own public.

But if poets don’t often find themselves reading before a million citizens on the National Mall, that doesn’t mean they don’t address issues of national concern. The question is, which public gets to hear those public thoughts—and exactly how public are they, anyway?



Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems,by Thomas Sayers Ellis.
Graywolf Press.$23.00.

Thomas Sayers Ellis’s Skin, Inc. follows up his 2005 collection The Maverick Room and focuses on the always fraught issue of race in America, particularly race in American literature, and even more particularly, race in American poetry. The book is roughly 170 pages and is divided into seven sections, some dominated by eponymous long poems (“The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song,” for instance), others organized around a theme (“Gone Pop” consists of fifteen poems about Michael Jackson). The work here is conspicuously public in the largest sense, which is to say that Ellis talks about issues of obvious societal concern in a manner that smart general readers might follow, and possibly even admire or criticize. He is blunt, rude, sometimes intentionally clumsy, and determined to get some awkward things said, fair or not. It’s an admirable and sadly unusual thing for a contemporary poet to attempt.

Nor is it easy to pull off. As Ellis realizes, speaking broadly isn’t a matter of writing simply or straightforwardly; on the contrary, there’s an appealing slyness to Ellis’s best poetry that recalls the cagey work of Gwendolyn Brooks, who remains one of the touchstone poets of the modern era. Indeed, in the strongest poems in Skin, Inc., Ellis proves himself a true heir to Brooks’s uncanny talent for addressing multiple audiences while still remaining faithful to her own ambiguities and ambivalent feelings. Most poets, faced with the challenge of such audiences, produce poem-by-committee blandness (q.v., September 11th, poetry thereof). Ellis’s approach, however, is utterly distinctive, even as he happily tosses everything but the kitchen sink onto the page. The diction here ranges from “discourse” to “mo betta” to “eeeeeeeeeeeyow”; forms run the gamut from the villanelle (“A Few Excuses”) to visual poetry (“The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song”); and as if that weren’t enough, Ellis throws in photographs and footnotes. The overall effect is of a table sagging with the day’s labor of a manic chef, and individual results can sometimes be similarly excessive (the visual poem is better as an eye chart). But the best work is enriched by its sense of superabundance, as in the beginning of “Or”:

Or Oreo, or
worse. Or ordinary.
Or your choice
of category

or
Color

or any color
other than Colored
or Colored Only.
Or “Of Color”

or
Other

Ellis has an excellent ear, and he uses it here to convey the uncertainty and possibility that surrounds any discussion of race (as Ellis is well aware, the conjunction “or” can be both prison and key). The strongest poem here is “The Identity Repairman,” which takes up the labels—for example, “Negro” and “Colored”—that have attached over time to African-Americans. Here are its final sections:

black

My heart is a fist.
I fix Blackness.
My fist is a heart.
I beat Whiteness.


african american

Before I was born,
I absorbed struggle.
Just looking
at history hurts.

So the heart is a fist (as in Black Power) that “fixes”—repairs—Blackness. But “to fix” also means “to hold in place,” and “to neuter,” allowing Ellis to quietly suggest both the strength and the limitations of the label. Similarly, when the fist becomes a heart that “beat[s] Whiteness,” the victory is necessarily incomplete, because it requires the perpetuation of the thing beaten: the idea of Whiteness is circulated like blood (the heart beats it) even as it is overcome. In work like this, Ellis is writing some of the finest, truly public poetry of our time.

But there is, it has to be said, another, less interesting side to Skin, Inc. This is the side that still clings to an exalted idea of the public that we call the poetry world, and especially the poetry world as filtered through the lens of Cambridge (Ellis went to Harvard). It’s helpful here to pause and think again about the idea of a poem’s “public” presence. When Ellis writes as he does in “The Identity Repairman,” he’s writing for almost anyone who’s ever thought about what it means to talk about himself or herself “as” something. That audience is large, heterogeneous, and interesting. And when he’s writing about poetry—not the poetry world, but poetry itself—that audience, too, is heterogeneous and interesting, if not necessarily large. But who’s the audience for lines like this from “The Judges of Craft”?:

Someone in charge decides.
Someone in charge
designs.

A someone considered worthy of width,
wider than content,
country,
continent.

I have disappointing news, but there’s a big silver lining. We discussed your poems at length and with admiration and excitement, but in the end we didn’t find one in this batch that we felt would be a great début for you in the magazine. It’s just that so many of them are about writing, and we try to shy away from poems explicitly addressing the subject of writing—much less the politics of the writing scene. But you are definitely on the screen here, and I’m only (and deeply) sorry I took so long.

Yes, there is actually a poem in this book that includes the text of various rejection letters that Ellis apparently has received from poetry journals. Imagine a gifted and widely acclaimed operatic tenor pausing mid-song to deliver a rant about how Opera News once failed to mention him in an article, and you’ll have some idea of the jarring note this performance strikes. Along the same lines, Ellis pauses elsewhere in Skin, Inc. to compare John Ashbery’s rhythm and imagery unfavorably to that of “bling-bling,” and to snipe at “the Grolier,” a poetry bookstore in Harvard Square where he apparently worked as a college student.

The problem is not that these criticisms are undeserved. Maybe the editors who sent Ellis rejection notes are indeed insensitive. Maybe Ashbery does pale in comparison with Lil Wayne. Maybe the bookstore was a lousy place. The problem is that these criticisms seem unambitious when compared with the provocations in Ellis’s better work. Who, after all, even knows what “the Grolier” is? Contrary to Ellis’s suggestion, one odd local bookshop isn’t symbolic of “American Poetry,” much less “American Literature,” and considerably much less “American Society.” At most, the store is representative of a provincial subculture in the American poetry world, and on the list of things that are of great cultural import, that probably puts it about even with wherever Boston-area Renaissance Faire participants go to get their tunics hemmed. A writer this good ought not spend his time peeling potatoes this small.

That said, the motivation here isn’t hard to fathom, or to sympathize with. There’s a lingering insecurity behind the swagger in some of these poems, and because Ellis is a tough-minded poet, he’s reluctant to admit (much less surrender) to that uncertainty. So he stands his ground; he pushes back. The instinct is entirely to his credit, but when the thing that makes you feel belittled is itself tiny, then the consequences of such a response can be unfortunate. And there is almost nothing tinier than the poetry world, just as there is almost nothing bigger, stranger, and more disturbing than the bloody country that contains it. It’s clear throughout Skin, Inc. that Ellis is equal to this latter, larger challenge; in his next book, maybe he’ll make it the sole focus of his considerable attention. If so, we will all be, if not repaired, at least made slightly better.



The Cloud Corporation,by Timothy Donnelly.
Wave Books.$16.00.

Timothy Donnelly, like Thomas Sayers Ellis, is a talented writer who has recently released a second collection that isn’t short. But for the most part, the similarities end there. Donnelly’s new book, The Cloud Corporation, is a nearly immaculate exercise in haute academic style, from its aggressively quirky titles (“Team of Fake Deities Arranged on an Orange Plate”) to its deliberately affected tone and pose (“Roll back the stone from the sepulcher’s mouth!”), to its frequently Jamesian syntax (sentences here regularly wind through six or seven lines). On top of that, we have diction borrowed equally from business-speak (“optimize my output”) and the vernacular (“I was totally into it”); the deployment of bizarre phrasing generated by collage (“a consistent sweat paragraph”); a mood of pessimism, anxiety, and unhappiness (“We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us”); general distaste for finance and / or capitalism (“To His Debt”); and finally, a fundamental reliance on abstraction (“the sky again // the temple of the mind perceiving it”). If you were trying to concoct a recipe involving every flavor in the cupboard of the hip contemporary poem, you would come up with The Cloud Corporation. It is the epitome of Our Moment.

And it is, in many respects, a strong statement on the vitality of that moment. That may seem an odd way to put things, given that Donnelly spends roughly 135 of the book’s 140 pages being depressed in some way or another. He is depressed by conspicuous consumption (“the circuitry that suffers me to crave // what I know I’ll never need, or what I need but have / in abundance already”). He is depressed by empire-building and militarism (“that photograph / of women and children shot down by an American / battalion”). But mostly, he’s depressed by the fact that he spends a lot of time inside his own head (“thoughts / lilt back to the terms of this existence, its fundamental // insignificance”). This could all easily end up as sub-Stevensian moping, a sort of “Auroras of Ugh.” But Donnelly is an astonishing technician who is capable of finding nearly infinite shades in the gray of his malaise. Consider the beginning of “Antepenultimate Conflict with Self”:

The times the thought of being pulled apart from
you comes as a relief have now come to outnumber
those it startles me like light from a hurricane
lamp left burning unattended dangerously near
the curtains of the theater we both attend and are.

To unpack: the thought of being separated from his own self now relieves him more often than it threatens him with a sense of impending dissolution (and, of course, who is “he” if not himself). Also, the thought of dissolution is worrying like the prospect of a hurricane lamp threatening a theater (Metaphor #1) that is both attended by the poet and his self (Metaphor #2) and composed of the poet and his self (Metaphor #3). The key to this stanza is its speed, which Donnelly intends to mimic the crazy tilt of the ideas he’s assembling. The lines, with their heavy breaks (“hurricane / lamp”) and densely-packed, interrelated metaphors, come out almost as an exhausted gaspor gulp (it’s not surprising when Donnelly later defines a unit called the “snailsdeath” as being “roughly // equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human / throat”). And if Donnelly’s technical skill is impressive, his humor can be winning. “The world tries hard to bore me to death,” he notes at the beginning of one poem, “but not hard enough.” You can be as mopey as you like when you write this well.

What makes the book more than simply an example of highly polished competence, however, is its peculiar combination of whimsicality and desperation. “Desperation” isn’t a word you’d expect Donnelly to be fond of; it’s all too often a eu

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...homas-traherne

Thomas Traherne
Poet Details
1637–1674

Unlike the major figures of the "Metaphysical Revival," John Donne and George Herbert, whose works were widely known and discussed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thomas Traherne is almost wholly a discovery of twentieth-century scholarship. In his own lifetime he published only one book, Roman Forgeries (1673), and, as a clergyman he did not rise to prominence. So obscure is his background, in fact, that scholars once argued about what family and even what part of the country he came from. Biographers have not gone far beyond Anthony Wood, who in Athenæ Oxonienses (1691, 1692) claimed that Traherne was of modest parentage from the Welsh border area, that he attended Brasenose College, Oxford, took an M. A. in 1661, and was soon assigned a living in a parish near Hereford. Later, he was made chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, a connection which was to prove extremely important in identifying him as the author of some anonymous works thought of as indicative of the author of the Centuries and Poems of Felicity . Not long after Wood's account John Aubrey published in his Miscellanies (1696) a brief description of some visions related by Traherne, a basket floating in the air and an oddly attired apprentice, which presumably show his particular piety. If the few biographical remnants can be believed, he was a devoutly religious man, known for his charity to the poor and his rigorous devotional practices. As the anonymous author of the preface to A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation (1699) writes, "He never failed any one day either publickly or in his private closet, to make use of her [the church's] publick offices."

Even though much of the Traherne canon remains unpublished, the discovery of his work is one of the great stories of modern literary scholarship. In the winter of 1896-1897 William T. Brooke came across two manuscripts at a London bookstall. Thinking that they might be the work of Henry Vaughan, he showed them to Alexander Grosart. Convinced that they were Vaughan's, Grosart prepared to bring out a new edition of Vaughan, and, had he lived, it appears that he would have done so. After his death in 1899 the manuscripts found their way to Bertram Dobell, who decided they were the work of someone other than Vaughan. Brooke's acquaintance with an anonymous work, A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation, part of which he had anthologized in The Churchman's Manual of Private and Family Devotion (1883), proved helpful to Dobell. After study he recognized that the author of the manuscripts and the author of A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation were one and the same; but who was that author? The preface to the latter work, hereafter referred to as the Thanksgivings, identified him as chaplain to "the late Lord Keeper Bridgman." Once Dobell consulted Wood, the connection between Bridgeman and Traherne was established. Traherne was known to have written Christian Ethicks (1675), and Dobell discovered that some verse in this work was almost identical with a passage in one of the manuscripts, thus confirming Traherne's authorship. This manuscript, called the "Centuries," was made up of short prose passages interspersed with a few poems. Half of the other manuscript comprised poetry; the rest was devoted to prose extracts and notes. Dobell brought out an edition of the poetry in 1903, and in 1908 he published the "Centuries" as Centuries of Meditations.

Yet there was little that could be added to Wood's biographical sketch. It is known that during Traherne's residence as a student at Brasenose, Oxford was an outpost of Royalist sentiment, and, in fact, the last military outpost of Charles I's forces. Even after the Royalist cause was lost, Oxford remained the center of Royalist publications. Traherne was there for the last eight years of the Protectorate; and, although the Puritans had power, student and faculty sentiment was never with them. The central issue for Traherne (and for many others at Oxford, no doubt) was ecclesiastical thought and practice. It was on the great issue of church government that Traherne wrote the only one of his works that would appear in his lifetime, Roman Forgeries, published anonymously in 1673. Traherne died the following year and was buried on 10 October in Teddington (near Hampton Court) under the reading desk of the church where he had preached. A disputatious essay, Roman Forgeries betrays its academic origins. Speaking in propia persona, Traherne claims that the work grew out of an argument that he had with a Roman Catholic. Having just emerged from the Bodleian Library, Traherne encountered a friend, who introduced him to his cousin, with whom Traherne was soon at loggerheads over the correct definition of a martyr to the Catholic church. Discussion turned, first, on what is unique to the Roman cause (as that would determine the numbers of martyrs Rome could legitimately claim), but it soon devolved into contention over the issue of the ancient documents on which church authority purportedly rested. According to Traherne's account, the other young man, apparently in frustration, denied that it made any difference whether or not contested documents were forgeries. Leaping on this statement as his point of departure, Traherne advanced his own thesis that the early church was uncorrupted by arbitrary power.

More than any of his other writings (except perhaps for certain entries in his unpublished "Commonplace Book"), Roman Forgeries exhibits Traherne's training as a scholar. It has been suggested that the work might have been Traherne's M. A. thesis. The work proceeds from the narrative of this heated exchange on various doctrinal issues (transubstantiation, papal authority, purgatory, the doctrine of merits, and so on) to the textual thesis of the volume, which Traherne presents dramatically. He braces his friend's cousin: "You met me this Evening at the Library door; if you please to meet me there to morrow morning at eight of the Clock, I will take you in; and we will go from Class to Class, from Book to Book, and there I will first shew you in your own Authors, that you publish such Instruments for good Records; and then prove, that those Instruments are downright frauds and forgeries, though cited by you upon all occasions." Traherne's interlocutor gives a flippant response, but agrees to continue the debate, and the thesis unfolds.

The tone of Roman Forgeries is at times so intemperate that some Traherne critics have felt obliged to apologize for it. This is a little bit like apologizing for an epic because there is violence in it; the flaw of intemperate diction in Roman Forgeries, if it is a flaw, is a shared feature of polemical treatises of the time. As modern readers look back at the issues involved in Roman Forgeries, they might be tempted to think of the participants as excessive or naive. But this may reflect a twentieth-century preference for such words as "xenophobia" to describe phenomena once delineated as "nationalism." One need only look at areas of controversy—economic, social, and military policies, for instance—to recognize how a tone of intemperance persists as part of polemical rhetoric, even though the subjects of controversy have changed considerably. Certainly Roman Forgeries exhibits erudition far in excess of most current doctoral dissertations in the humanities. Yet it must be admitted that Traherne stacks the deck by eliminating questions of doctrine. Furthermore, he insists that the only legitimate claims for Catholic authority date from before the year 420. Making the pronouncements of the Nicene Council the virtual equivalent of Scripture, Traherne builds his case for the earliest practices as the only ground of ecclesiastical order. The fact that the Vatican housed most of the relevant manuscripts, then, "proves" Traherne's major thesis that the documents had been corrupted, misused, or suppressed. Roman Forgeries builds on a conspiratorial theory of history, which goes hand in hand with the abusive tone of the work—in this respect atypical of Traherne's poems and Centuries.

Christian Ethicks: Or, Divine Morality. Opening the Way to Blessedness, By the Rules of Vertue and Reason concerns many of the same issues, but the latter work is more concerned with the theological implications of Calvinist thought on freedom and necessity. Besides, this posthumous work is not at all polemical. On the contrary, parts of it are imbued with the themes and style of the Centuries and poems. With Christian Ethicks, Traherne comes as close as he gets to sustained theological discourse, and yet this work (as the subtitle suggests) is more ethical than religious in nature. Indeed, many features of the work can be construed as part of a reaction against the overheated, legalistic aspects of the controversy surrounding Calvinist thought on predestination. In this way, Traherne's work can be seen as a reaction against such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes; Traherne resists the tendency toward a conventional ethics. (History gave the victory to his adversaries in at least this matter.)

Yet, like Hobbes and Francis Bacon before him (in the unpublished "Early Notebook" Traherne includes a lengthy extract from Bacon's De Augmentis Scentiarum , 1623), Traherne was fascinated by the "new science," in particular, by its notion of infinite space, which he incorporates in some of his best writings. The interest in science of religious poets of the time is not sufficiently appreciated today; critics interested in "demystifying" the beliefs of poets like Herbert and Traherne are particularly inclined to ignore it in favor of an emphasis on their retrograde attachment to liturgical forms and the like. In any case, Traherne implicitly denies in Christian Ethicks the secular foundation of ethics by refusing to recognize any difference between justice and the other virtues. He stresses the individual's free and open access to the infinite enjoyment of "Felicity": "WHEN our own Actions are Regular, there is nothing in the World but may be made conducive to our highest Happiness." The only apparent obstacle to this enjoyment is a failure on man's part to exercise the God-given capacity of will: "This I would have you note well, for the intrinsick Goodness and Glory of the Soul consists in the Perfection of an excellent Will."

It may sound as if, in the end, Traherne succumbs to a Calvinist view of man's incapacity to preserve the innocent "seeing" of the infant, but nothing could be more remote from his thought on the subject. He recognizes human limitation, but he does not emphasize it, and he surely does not build a system of belief on it:

IT is a great Error to mistake the Vizor for the Face, and no less to stick in the outward Kind and Appearance of things; mistaking the Alterations and Additions that are made upon the Fall of Man, for the whole Business of Religion. And yet this new Constellation of Vertues, that appeareth aboveboard, is almost the only thing talked of and understood in the World. Whence it is that the other Duties, which are the Soul of Piety, being unknown, and the Reason of these together with their Original and Occasion, unseen; Religion appears like a sour and ungratefull Thing to the World, impertinent to bliss, and void of Reason; Whereupon GOD is suspected and hated, Enmity against GOD and Atheism, being brought into, and entertained in the World.

The crucial word in this thoughtful passage is "bliss." If one knows oneself, one knows the infinite love of God, which is infinitely expressed:

HE that would not be a stranger to the Universe, an Alien to Felicity, and a foreiner to himself, must Know GOD to be an infinite Benefactor, all Eternity, full of Treasures, the World it self, the Beginning of Gifts, and his own Soul the Possessor of all, in Communion with the Deity.

By a perhaps mysterious geometry of the cosmos, the soul is like a multifaced sand crystal, infinitely extended because of its connection--"Communion"--with God. Thus, one of the poems included in Christian Ethicks

reads:



In all Things, all Things service do to all:

And thus a Sand is Endless, though most small.

And every Thing is truly Infinite,

In its Relation deep and exquisite.

The "Sand is Endless" because it presents the self with an occasion to see and know infinity. Traherne's expression here is not logical; nor do the chapters of Christian Ethicks proceed logically. The order of the cosmos--and of the work--may seem like disorder, but it is illuminated in the smallest segment: "its Relation deep and exquisite."

The more one reads Traherne, the more one is struck by the incantatory effects of repetition. Traherne piles up words and phrases, proliferating synonyms, as if to suggest that individual segments, isolated by junctures in periodic sentences, might--or might not--suffice to convey a sense of the immensity of the infinite world:

THE Sun is a glorious Creature, and its Beams extend to the utmost Stars, by shining on them it cloaths them with light, and by its Rayes exciteth all their influences. It enlightens the Eyes of all the Creatures: It shineth on forty Kingdomes at the same time, on Seas and Continents in a general manner; yet so particularly regardeth all, that every Mote in the Air, every Grain of Dust, every Sand, every Spire of Grass is wholly illuminated thereby, as if it did entirely shine upon that alone. Nor does it onely illuminate all these Objects in an idle manner, its Beams are Operative, enter in, fill the Pores of Things with Spirits, and impregnate them with Powers, cause all their Emanations, Odors, Vertues and Operations; Springs, Rivers, Minerals and Vegetables are all perfected by the Sun, all the Motion, Life and sense of Birds, Beasts and Fishes dependth on the same.

Passages like this, critics have argued, suggest a new attitude, associated with the romanticism that was to emerge a century later, concerning man's relationship with nature. Because of his themes of nature and of childhood innocence, Traherne is often compared to William Wordsworth. But his radically synecdochic style has more in common with William Blake or Walt Whitman. For them, the word is a miniature epiphany of divine love in the world; and it is this theme, which is poetic but which, for Traherne, bore important theological implications, that carries over from Christian Ethicks to his poems and Centuries."

As for Traherne's poetry, only the poems in Christian Ethicks and Thanksgivings appeared during the seventeenth century. The great critics of the Restoration and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--Wordsworth, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin--had never heard of Traherne. It has been suggested that the famous opening of Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," "To see the World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour," owes something to Traherne's Centuries : "You never Enjoy the world aright, till you see how a Sand Exhibtieth the Wisdom and Power of God." But there is no evidence that Blake ever saw the manuscript of the Centuries, which was not "discovered" until 1875, and not published until 1908."

Furthermore, even though several volumes of Traherne's writings appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, critical attention was slow in coming until the publication in 1958 of H. M. Margoliouth's two-volume, Clarendon Press edition of Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings. Other editions followed, and, from time to time, sch .........................

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[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69643

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Poetry And, Of, and About
Language, the law, and lazy power.
By David Orr

The anthology on my desk is titled Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, edited by David Kader (a law professor at Arizona State) and Michael Stanford (a public defender in Phoenix). I’m both a lawyer and a poetry critic, so asking me to discuss this book would seem to present an especially harmonious pairing of subject and analyst—like handing an animal cracker recipe to a zoologist-pastry chef. And indeed, flipping through, I find plenty of work that appeals to me as a reader of poems who is also, when necessary, a filer of briefs. We have some well-chosen passages from Spenser (“Then up arose a person of deepe reach, / . . . / That well could charme his tongue, and time his speach”), an intriguing poetic performance from the seminal jurist Sir William Blackstone (“The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse”), and a number of more recent efforts that, while mixed in quality, manage to give the reader a sense of the ways in which contemporary poetry can encompass legal subjects. Lawrence Joseph’s “Admissions against Interest,” for example, nicely captures the atmosphere of nervous, chilly efficiency that permeates American corporate law, as in the beginning of the second section:

Now, what type of animal asks after facts?
—so I’m a lawyer. Maybe charming,

direct yet as circumspect as any other lawyer
going on about concrete forces of civil

society substantially beyond anyone’s grasp
and about money. Things like “you too

may be silenced the way powerful
corporations silence, contractually”

attract my attention.

Not the warmest way in which to regard legal thinking, but then, the average lawyer’s existence rarely bears much resemblance to the life of Ben Matlock, let alone Atticus Finch. Poems by Browning, Kenneth Fearing, and the underrated William Empson are similarly successful at engaging with legal concepts and language. As with any anthology, there are a few pieces that don’t quite come off (“Why does a hearse horse snicker / Hauling a lawyer away?” asks Carl Sandburg, inviting prosecution for felony anthropomorphizing). But the project as a whole is a pleasure for the casual reader, as any collection of good poems ought to be.

And yet something here is slightly troubling. Not the book itself—or at least, not this book in particular. Rather, there’s something unsettling in the preposition that anchors this anthology’s title: poetry of the law. The phrasing is an interesting choice. One can understand, of course, the practical reasoning behind it; for one thing, that “of” permits the inclusion of poems whose relation to the law is, to put it mildly, tenuous. For instance, John Ashbery’s “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse” begins:

We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine.
We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home.
We nestled in yards the municipality had created,
reminisced about other, different places—
but were they? Hadn’t we known it all before?

Title aside, this poem isn’t “about” the law in any meaningful sense; it could just as easily have been called “Déjà vu Redux” or “Concerning the Halibut, However, We Were Sadly Uninformed.” We’d read it exactly the same way. But if we say the poem is “of” the law rather than simply “about” the law—well, surely that provides more room to maneuver. And it’s comforting, isn’t it, to suppose that pursuits like law and poetry aren’t really “about” each other in the almost aggressive way that instruction manuals are about food processors, but rather are as delicately interrelated as sea and shore, or bees and roses.

* * *

Are they, though? And what does that “of” really signify, anyway? In order to answer that question, it’s first necessary to recognize that an anthology like this one isn’t simply positioned between two subjects, but two audiences. The first is the one I mentioned earlier: the general, casual reader; the person who picks up a book called Poetry of the Law because he’s a lawyer who’s always liked Whitman, or because he’s a poetry reader whose beloved Uncle Ralph was a public defender in Gatlinburg. The second potential audience consists of scholars, and more particularly, as the editors of Poetry of the Lawput it, “scholars of law and literature.”

That description may require some explanation. Most people probably would assume that the phrase “scholars of law and literature” is meant to refer to scholars of law and also, separately, to scholars of literature. But what Kader and Stanford actually have in mind here is a specific movement in the legal academy known as (bingo) “law and literature.” As they put it:

In 1973, James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination inaugurated the scholarly study of law and literature. Since then, it has burgeoned as an academic field, yielding dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and several specialized journals.

They aren’t kidding. The past two and a half decades have given us Law and Literature(a journal edited at Cardozo School of Law), Law and Literature(a book by Richard Posner), Law and Literature: Text and Theory(by Lenora Ledwon), Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives(by Ian Ward), A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature(by Kieran Dolin), and Law and Literature: How to Respond When the Epistolary Novel Files a Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to frcp 12(b)(6)(okay, maybe not that one). In any case, there’s a lot of material out there. “Yet for all the richness of this scholarship,” as the editors observe, “[the law and literature movement] has focused almost entirely on fiction and drama.” So part of the goal of Poetry of the Law is to demonstrate that poetry, like its sister arts, can provide “considerable new matter worthy of study.”

And who wouldn’t want that? But when we’re talking about new matter worthy of study, we should acknowledge that the project taken up by Poetry of the Law is different from that of anthologies focused on, for instance, bicycles or basketball. This is a distinction that gets elided, however, when the editors assert that this book

fill[s] a striking gap in the universe of contemporary poetry anthologies, which includes, after all, multiple collections of poems focused on such central human concerns as love, war, and politics, as well as...more specialized topics like travel, sports, dogs, cats, birds, flowers, mothers, fathers, and poetry itself.

That sounds reasonable. But an anthology of poems about love might include work from Rilke, Szymborska, and Li Po; the same goes for an anthology about travel. Poetry of the Law, though, includes only poets from the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, and could therefore be more accurately titled Poetry of the Common Law Tradition, Extending into Modern American Jurisprudence—or more simply, Poetry for the Modern American Law School. It’s not entirely correct, then, to say that this book intends to give us poems having to do with a “central human concern” (like love) or interesting things that pretty much everyone can look at or participate in (like roller coasters or birthday parties). This is, rather, a book that aims at something a little more peculiar: uniting the specific, local incarnations of two modern practices. It’s a book about combining academic disciplines.

* * *

And with that, the dread word “interdisciplinary” descends. Before going any further, though, I’d probably better explain what I mean by referring to poetry as an “academic discipline.” As countless letters to Poetry have demonstrated, the academic status of poetry is a subject that gets poets riled up—and while being riled up is often a fine thing, especially for poets, it’s usually best to save that sort of energy for subjects that deserve it. So the claim here is modest and, I think, inarguable: At present, the single largest institutional factor in the world of American poetry is the American university system (as opposed to, say, the world of corporate publishing or the non-profit arts sector). Poets are largely employed by universities or are trying to become so; the audience for poetry, such as it is, exists largely within the university; and a large part of the distribution of poetry in the us is handled by universities, typically by means of academic presses. The art form, as Mark McGurl put it recently in The Program Era, “has been all but entirely absorbed by institutions of higher education.”

For reasons I’ll explain shortly, I believe the “all but” in McGurl’s characterization is an essential qualifier. But for now, the point is simply that poetry exists in large part as a manifestation of creative writing departments (and again, I’m neither praising nor condemning this structure, merely acknowledging that this is the lay of the land). As such, poetry is now exposed to the same anxieties that all academic practices face, one of which is simply the anxiety that comes from realizing that one’s fellow practitioners are modern academics arranged in (or maybe confined in) a discipline.

The critic Louis Menand believes this anxiety helps account for the intense popularity of interdisciplinary studies, the university trend that motivates and sustains books like Poetry of the Law and has given rise to such academic sub-specialties as the philosophy of physics and evolutionary psychology. Interdisciplinarity is, as Menand puts it in The Marketplace of Ideas, simply “the name for teaching and scholarship that bring together methods and materials from more than one academic discipline,” and “there are few terms in twenty-first-century higher education with a greater buzz factor . . . No one, or almost no one, says a word against it. It is evoked by professors and by deans with equal enthusiasm.” Menand himself is skeptical about this excitement, however, and speculates (this is a long quote, but bear with it):

Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor . . . is a source of anxiety. . . . Academics have been trained to believe that there must be a contradiction between being a scholar or an intellectual and being part of a system of socialization. They are conditioned to think that their workplace does not operate like a market, even as they compete with one another for status and advantage. Most of all, they are ambivalent about the status they have worked so hard to achieve. Interdisciplinary anxiety is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture.

So the desire to reach toward other disciplines often isn’t so much a way of combating the limits of one’s own methods as a manifestation of a deeper co

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69713

Prose from Poetry Magazine
I Thought You Were a Poet
A Notebook.
By Joshua Mehigan

Samuel Johnson, in his life of Dryden, reports that throughout the spring of 1686 the fifty-six-year-old laureate could often be seen strolling Leicester Field at daybreak, barefoot, in his nightclothes, skimming dew from leaves into a glass beaker. Dryden apparently ignored anyone who addressed him during these excursions. The beaker full, he would disappear into 44 Gerrard Street to work, in the same nightclothes, on The Hind and the Panther. No one is sure what Dryden did with the dew. Johnson admits uneasily that he is supposed to have drunk it, though Green and Giordani argue that he used it to boil gallnuts for ink. According to neighbors, Dryden sometimes leaned from his study window during work and in an inaudible whisper asked passing children or carriages to be quiet while elaborately pretending to shoot them down with bow and arrow. At 1:00 pm sharp, Dryden would scratch out his last five couplets, rise from his writing desk, pray, dress, and walk to his day job as Historiographer Royal, where he behaved normally. At day’s end he went home, dined with his wife, took laudanum, and slept with an upholstered wood block for a pillow.

In my experience, if a contemporary reader of poetry has never before heard this account of Dryden, it can add considerable interest. I know this was true for me, and I made the whole thing up. I like Dryden well enough (what I’ve read) and I don’t mean to suggest he’s not great, only that today, as Ian Ousby says in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, he is often “admired but not quite enjoyed.” This phrase surely describes the reputation of most Augustan poets, and I wonder if it could have anything to do with their sense of balance and self-control, with their methodical technique and taste for grace and wit—in short, with their relative sanity. Part of the fun of a poet is rehearsing the legend, even if it’s false. In Dryden’s case, whatever gossip exists—his cruel taunting of Thomas Shadwell or his Catholic conversion—may seem tame if you’ve heard the one about the Blakes playing Adam and Eve in the garden. But poetic eccentricity is a game of continual escalation. Like the gossip it creates, it’s both sensational and boring.

•

Onward from Enheduanna, poets seem almost required to manifest some degree of psychic disturbance, whether as a true affliction, a poetic persona, or a pose. “Despondency and madness” were the expectation before Wordsworth, and reached pandemic proportions in the twentieth century. Readers are disappointed by poets who aren’t at least a little mad, which is to say visionary, melancholic, tormented, debauched, or somehow awry. The prodromal period in English-language poetry seems to have been the eighteenth century, otherwise known for its high appraisal of order and reason. But some minds we might imagine as tidy—Johnson’s, for instance—are thought to have been privately a little off. Things really got rolling with William Collins, Christopher Smart, and William Cowper, and then it was one small step to Thomas Chatterton, whose decision to drink arsenic at seventeen helped make suicide cool. (Henry Wallis’s Tiger Beat portrait shows the garret window ajar so that Chatterton’s soul can escape.) Smart was the eldest of this wave to put florid psychosis into his writing, but Blake made poetic capital from it, positioning himself not as a lunatic but a seer. On the continent, Hölderlin was smitten by both Apollo and madness. Now the gate stood open, and out flew Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and John Clare, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who followed Chatterton, along with all Miss Flite’s other birds, including Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

In Paris, as everyone knows, Gérard de Nerval walked his lobster Thibault on a ribbon through the Palais-Royal gardens. American lunacy found its apotheosis in Poe. And where Blake’s madness had mirrored Ezekiel’s, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud sought transport in dissipation. By Modernism, the greatest poets are like the villains on the old Batmantv show, each known for his or her own inimitable brand of eccentricity, whether it’s Marianne Moore’s tricorn, Cummings’s typography, or Pound’s broadcasting career. This is also the period when sane poets begin composing poetry reminiscent of schizophrenia, like these lines from Gertrude Stein:

Do I see cake Do I do the reverse of acting
Yes Do I feel sensually deceived
thoughts in mental suggestion in increase of
senses in suggestion
senses deceptive
in in deception deception deception
deception
vanilla lemon as lemon vanilla as the beginning
of in in suggestion suggestion suggestion
suggestion of the suggestions as the
beginning of in suggestion

Real despondency and madness also continued, with a host of poets whose lives have earned wider repute than their poems. Meanwhile, many poets said to define our period, from Eliot to Ginsberg, and from Ashbery to Jorie Graham, have forged styles that echo the dislocations of madness: fragmented language, surreal imagery, oblique thought, shifting points of view, violent emotion. Surrealism, Dada, Imagism, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, Language Poetry, and Flarf all adopt one or more of these characteristics as constitutive. But the power of this general stylistic tendency can also be felt in the work of popular poets like Mary Oliver, of traditionalists like Anthony Hecht and Donald Justice, and perhaps also of most mfa students.

•

On the subject of poetry and mental illness, I can’t pretend to impartiality. First, I and many of my closest friends and acquaintances are poets. Second, I’ve been extensively treated for what insurance companies resourcefully call “behavioral health” problems. While I have often behaved in behaviorally unhealthy ways, I should add for clarity’s sake that I am also diagnosed with disorders thought to be caused not by behavior at all but by inborn neurochemical imbalances. Many of my closest friends exhibit “behavioral health” issues as well, sometimes diagnosed and sometimes not, but plain to everyone. As someone preoccupied with both madness and poetry, I’ve often wondered what’s lost in the gap at the center of the collocation “mad poet.”

•

The above-quoted passage isn’t really the writing of Gertrude Stein but, according to Dr. Silvano Arieti, author of Interpretation of Schizophrenia, that of “a very regressed schizophrenic.” This is the last time I’ll lie for effect (here).

•

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else. It’s true that these sciences are still young and still vexed by Freud’s ghost. But, in spite of horrors like insulin shock therapy, lobotomy, and overmedication, they’ve given us the crucial knowledge that insanity is not caused by supernatural forces, lovesickness, or wrath. They’ve dispelled unhelpful belief in conditions like spirit possession, tipped uterus, astral misalignment, and humorous imbalance. True, older medicine created those beliefs. But science, unlike magic, has the advantage of changing course, and slowly there emerge life-changing legislation and therapies. In 1961, Michel Foucault worried about the consequences of this new paradigm, but fifty years later the Stultifera Navis sails upstream to the heart of Poetryland. In his conclusion to Madness and Civilization, discussing Artaud, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh, Foucault writes: “madness is precisely the absence of the work of art.”

•

I had a philosophy professor, once, who visited the ussr in the late fifties for a debate. He met people in the countryside who fretfully asked whether he thought Sputnik would discover Heaven.

•

Fashion, which hyperbolizes everything until it’s both excessive and compulsory, must have something to do with the literary dimension of poetic madness. Still, nothing could be more obvious than the fact that some deep connection exists between “madness” and the compressed thought and emotion typical of memorable art. When I haphazardly list twenty-five poets I’ve known—most, as it happens, with books, and some with big awards—the group includes two suicides, two attempted suicides, twelve on meds, three who’ve been committed, and two treated with electroconvulsive therapy. There are fifteen addicts, mainly recovering (eleven alcoholics, assorted coke and heroin addicts, and an opium addict). Only three have no mood issues or addictions. But these aren’t simply occupational hazards. Extremity, natural and artificial, often helps poets wrest something sublime from the “dividing and indifferent blue.” For many poets, it is crucial, whether as a pitiful love obsession or a belief that one is actually Lord Byron.

•

Could I be conflating “visionary” and “mad”? Maybe. But I’ve never had a vision. I’ve never known anyone who has had a vision without drugs or severe illness. I therefore assume that most visionaries are either psychotic or shamming, or that they are imitating other visionaries who are psychotic, shamming, or imitating. If this assumption holds, it may be that much recent visionary poetry is written by imitators imitating imitators imitating imitators imitating imi ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70040

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Sharp Biscuit — Some Thoughts on Translating
Notes from a guilty business.
By Michael Hofmann

A handful of lucky or gifted poets fill their lives with poetry. I’m thinking of the likes of Ashbery, Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Les Murray. They write, respectively wrote poems, it seems to me, practically 
every day, the way prose writers write their novels. The date at the bottom of Mandelstam poems. Plath poems. It’s a question of the force of the gift, the pounds-per-square-inch of the Muse. Heaney, too, comes close. The rest of us strike compromises, do something else “as well,” mostly teach, in a handful of cases, do other, unrelated work, have “a job” in the “real world.” The job is the enemy of the poetry, its successful, favored rival (the job is everything, the poem nothing; who wants the poem, and who doesn’t want the job?), but may also be the dirt from which the poetry grows. Such, anyway, is my hope, translating.

•

Meetings with remarkable translators. To coin a phrase. The first was Ralph Manheim (translator of Grass and Handke, then as now the two most prominent living German authors, but also of Brecht and Céline and Danilo Kiš and any number of others — Mein Kampf, anyone?), who invited me to drinks at his flat in Paris. A native of Chicago, if  I remember, and one of the great generation of American translators that was produced by the war. 1980, 1982, something like that. Six o’clock. Yard-arm time. I turn up, meet him and his charming wife, who has suffered a stroke and whom he is looking after. 
I feel a bond with him: the unusual, “thin” spellings of our names, he has only one n in his, I have only one f in the same place, plus he is exactly fifty years older than me, born in 1907. We talk about the vexatious Handke, who is also living in Paris, and with whom he says, in a gallant adaptation of the German idiom (which exists in the negative form), “ist gut Kirschen essen,” you can share a bowl of cherries, i.e., a companionable and generous and uncomplicated sort. I demur, but he says it, and he may after all be right. (Years later, I am with friends in Paris. Very late, long after supper, there is a knock on the door, it is Peter Handke, who only ever walks everywhere, 
unannounced, with his hat full of  mushrooms he has picked. They are straightaway cooked and eaten, and I am surprised by Handke, who is tanned and strong and kind, and has a firm handshake, and I think about the cherries, and the Manheims.) I drink a beer, they both have whiskey. Ralph has come from his office in another building. The sense, then, of  it being a job, that he keeps regular hours, locks it up and comes home. Doesn’t allow it to sprawl greedily or disfiguringly over his life. I think, if  I think at all, of  my father who writes at home, giving dictation — furthermore — to my mother, in what passes for our living room. His writing is everywhere, fills the airwaves, fills our family space, governs our lives like national economy.

Then Joseph Brodsky, some time later in the eighties, in the Tufnell Park flat of a friend of  his. Espresso and Vecchio Romano in a somewhat redundant, spotless kitchen. (He wrote about Auden’s “real library of a kitchen” in Kirchstetten, but I guess that for him and in his life, most of the action will have been in, so to speak, the real kitchen of this or that library. As he said, “freedom is a library”; it isn’t a kitchen.) “Circumcised” cigarettes. The practiced fingers pull out the sponge, pull out the fluff, discard the fluff, return the sponge. Only then is it safe to smoke. He is translating Cavafy, whom he loves. The classicism, the history, the anonymity. Into Russian. He has brought with him from New York a Russian portable typewriter he is using. Greek into Cyrillic. In bourgeois north London. A bizarre, Conradian phenomenon. The translator as bacillus.

Maybe one more. A rare (for me) gathering of translators in New York City, perhaps some awards ceremony, I don’t remember. We fill the front stalls of a theater somewhere, feeling unusually 
effervescent, like a gathering of missionaries, or spies on day release. Optimistic. Righteous. Both full of ourselves and among ourselves, unter uns. Ourselves alone — Sinn Féin. The charabanc effect. To make things better/worse, Paul Auster is brought on to address us. Then someone announces that Gregory Rabassa is of the company, somewhere right and front of  us. A slight, stooped figure rises, bows. From the stage, a beam tries to pick him out, to try and somehow give him some plasticity. I don’t think I would recognize him on the street. The first translator I was aware of, I read his Marquez when I was twenty, and doorstepped his London publishers. (Remember Marquez’s praise for him as “the best Latin American writer in the English language”?) A little pencil mustache, maybe? An imperial? I doubt myself, and think probably I’m making it up, extrapolating, literarizing. We applaud frantically. Such are the heroes of a secret business, a guilty business, even.

•

I translate to try to amount to something. When I first held my first book of poems in my hands (the least extent acceptable to the British Library, forty-eight pages including prelims), I thought it would fly away. To repair a deficit of  literature in my life. My ill-advised version 
of Cartesianism: traduco, ergo sum. Ill-advised because the translator has no being, should neither be seen nor heard, should be (yawn) faithful, should be (double yawn) a plate of glass. Well, Kerrang!!!

•

Many, if not most translators, operate with an acquired language, or languages, and their own, which is the one, according to Christopher Logue, they have to be really good at. (I never trust people who translate both into and out of a language: isn’t there something unsanitary about that, like drinking the bathwater?) That brings a certain dispassion to their proceedings, a lab coat, tweezers, a fume cupboard. But both my languages are “my own”: German, my so-called mother tongue, and English, which I have no memory of  learning at the age of four, and was the language I first read and wrote in. Both are lived languages, primal languages: the one of family and first namings, and now, of companionship and love; the other of decades of, I hope, 
undetectable and successful assimilation in England. Which should I be without?

I was happily bilingual till my mid-twenties, when I began, by economic necessity, to translate. The matching of my two languages is an inner process, the setting of a broken bone, a graft, the healing of a wound. Perhaps it can even be claimed that in me German is in some way an open wound, which is soothed and brought to healing by the application of  English. Translation as a psychostatic necessity. Look, there is no break in my life, no loss of Eden, no loss of childhood certainties, no discontinuity, no breach, no rupture, no expulsion. English, then, as a bandage, a splint, a salve.

•

Late on in my translation of my father’s novel of small town Germany in the thirties and forties, The Film Explainer, about his grandfather, my great-grandfather, you may read:

Anyone who now saw Grandfather on the street, under his artist’s hat, with which “he shields his thick skull from others’ ideas” (Grandmother) no longer said: Hello, Herr Hofmann! He said: Heil Hitler! Or: Another scorcher!

Yes, this one is ontologically and humorously important to me, it’s a family book, the hero’s name is Hofmann, and I identify with everyone in it, because they’re all a part of me: the vainglorious oldster (like me, a wearer of hats), the acerbic Grandmother, the anxious-to-please small boy — but even beyond that, the expressing of that history, its domestication in English, gives me immense satisfaction. Where is the rift, the breach, if it is a matter of chance whether you say the Terry-Thomas “Another scorcher!” or the truly villainous “Heil Hitler!” It could just as well have happened to you, it implies, and: look, I am making a joke of it, and: how can you think I am different. I am putting together something in myself, and in my history.

Hence — though of course no one likes a bad review — the way 
I react unusually badly (it seems to me) to mistakes (I do make them) and to readers’ or reviewers’ rebukes. It interferes with my healing, my knitting-together, my convalescence. It tears off a bandage, and scrapes open my hurt, or my heart. Don’t disturb my circles, I think.

•

Translation is the production of words, hundreds of thousands of words, by now many millions of words. I prefer short books, I am lazy, I am a poet, one page is usually plenty for me. But even so, the long books have snuck up on me, and passed through me. The Radetzky March perhaps 140,000 words. Two long Falladas, two hundred thousand apiece. Fallada short stories, another hundred thousand. Ernst Jünger 130,000, and with a bunch of other war books — how did I get into that? — comfortably four hundred thousand. Sixty books, millions and millions of words, like millions and millions of numbers, like π, an unreal number. Once I notice myself starting to repeat (    . . .    3141592    . . .    ), I promise myself, then I will stop.

•

This is all distraction on an industrial scale, the “still small voice” of poetry decibelled over, my puny resources vastly overstretched, the six-stone weakling unhappily running amok with a chest expander. 
In the Nietzsche  /  Jünger way, it will either kill me, or make me strong. Again, how did it happen? Out of fealty to my novelist father: prose. Out of my German nature: Tüchtigkeit, energetic production, industry, diligence. Out of dissatisfaction with my own slow, wool-gathering, window-gazing methods: all-consuming tasks in unbroken 
sequence. Out of a desire to make more — and heavier — books: translation. Given his druthers, what does moony Narcissus take upon himself? — Why, the labors of  Hercules!

•

If you want someone to look after your sentences for you, who or what better than a poet? If you want someone to regulate — enterprisingly regulate — your diction, cadence your prose, hook a beginning 
to an ending, jam an ending up against a beginning, drive a green fuse through the gray limbs of clauses — a poet. If you’re looking for prose with dignity, with surprise, with order, with attention to detail. That’s why the first item in Tom Paulin’s book of electric free translations, The Road to Inver, is his version of the opening of  Camus’s The Plague. Prose. Well, up to a point.

•

And the resources, the tools? Well, they ca ..................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69680

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art
To hell and back, with poetry. 
By Carolyn Forché

The letter arrived on a series of plain postcards in Joseph Brodsky’s penciled cursive, mailed separately from his newly imposed exile in Ann Arbor, Michigan, very near the township of my childhood. They contained his advice to a young poet brash enough to send her youthful efforts to him. You should consider including in your poems more of your own, well, philosophy, he wrote. And on another card: It is also a pity that you do not read Russian, but I think you should try to read Anna Akhmatova.

It was, I believe, two years earlier that I had read excerpts from the transcript of Brodsky’s trial in the former Soviet Union, condemning him to forced labor. When asked on what authority he pronounced himself a poet, he had answered that the vocation came from God. Now he was advising me to read Akhmatova, and so that winter I went into the stacks of the Library of Congress and found a volume of her poems, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Kneeling on the floor between the shelves, I read a passage no doubt well known to readers of Poetry:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said, “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

Akhmatova referred to this passage as Vmesto predisoviia (Instead of a Preface), adding it as prologue to her great poem, “Requiem,” written during the years of her son Lev Gumilev’s imprisonment. The poem was her podvig, her spiritual accomplishment of “remembering injustice and suffering” as experienced within herself and as collectively borne. Anna’s friend, Lidiya Chukovskaya, remembers her subsisting on black bread and tea. According to the research of Amanda Haight:

She was extremely thin and frequently ill. She would get up from bed to go and stand, sometimes in freezing weather, in the long lines of people waiting outside the prisons, hoping against hope to be able to see her son or at least pass over a parcel. . . . The poems of “Requiem,” composed at this time, were learnt by heart by Lidiya Chukovskaya, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and several other friends who did not know who else was preserving them. Sometimes Akhmatova showed them a poem on a piece of paper which she burnt as soon as she was sure it had been committed to memory. . . . In a time when a poem on a scrap of paper could mean a death sentence, to continue to write, to commit one’s work to faithful friends who were prepared to learn poems by heart and thus preserve them, was only possible if one was convinced of the absolute importance and necessity of poetry.

As I was still in my early twenties and educated in the United States, I hadn’t thought of poetry in these terms. I had not yet encountered evil in anything resembling this form, and had not yet, therefore, imagined the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination, nor conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation: to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in supplication and without need of response. If it were so—if description were possible, of world and its sufferings, then the response would be that smile, or rather something resembling it, passing over what had once been her face.

“Requiem” meditated on the fate of Russia in her torment, marking the stages of suffering, as one would visit the stations of Christ’s passion. Akhmatova wrote it in the cry of a woman who had become all women. In the poem’s progression, Akhmatova takes leave of herself and becomes vigilant beyond all wakefulness. By turns she accepts and disowns her pain, survives, forsakes the tribute of remembrance, and consigns her monument to a prison wall.

I was as yet unaware that most of the prominent twentieth-century poets beyond the English-speaking countries (and even some within them) had endured such experiences during their lives, and those blessed to survive wrote their poetry not after such experiences but in their aftermath—in languages that had also passed through these sufferings; languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in the line breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech.

Aftermath is a temporal debris field, where historical remains are strewn (of large events as well as those peripheral or lost); where that-which-happened remains present, including the consciousness in which such events arose. This is writing to be apprehended “in the light of conscience,” as another Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, once wrote. As such, it calls upon the reader, who is the other of this work, to be in turn marked by what such language makes present before her, what it holds open and begets in the reader.

•

In his Ethics and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas writes:

The witness witnesses to what is said by him (through him, or as him). For he has said “Here I am!” before the other one; and from the fact that before the one other he recognizes the responsibility which is incumbent upon him, he finds himself having manifested what the face of the other one has meant for him. The glory of the Infinite reveals itself by what it is capable of doing in the witness.

This witness is a call to the other (perhaps in both senses, as the other within the poet, and the one other whom the text addresses), very much as in the face-to-face encounter of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, later elaborated and extended by Levinas as

an awakening that is neither reflection upon oneself nor universalization. An awakening signifying a responsibility for the other, the other who must be fed and clothed—my substitution for the other, my expiation for the suffering, and no doubt for the wrongdoing of the other. An expiation assigned to me without any possible avoidance, and by which my uniqueness as myself, instead of being alienated, is intensified by my irreplaceability.

This awakening is also a readerly coming to awareness before the saying of poetry which calls the reader to her irrevocable and inexhaustible responsibility for the other as present in the testamentary utterance. A poem is lyric art, but Levinas claims that

a poetic work is at the same time a document, and the art that went into its making is at once a use of discourse. This discourse deals with objects that are also spoken in the newspapers, posters, memoirs and letters of every passing age—though in the case of poetry’s strictly poetic expression these objects merely furnish a favorable occasion and serve as pretexts. It is of the essence of art to signify only between the lines—in the intervals of time, between times—like a footprint that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice.

This voice is the saying of the witness, which is not a translation of experience into poetry but is itself experience.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, writing on the work of Celan, proposes

to call what [the poem] translates “experience,” provided that we both understand the word in its strict sense—the Latin ex-periri, a crossing through danger—and especially that we avoid associating it with what is “lived,” the stuff of anecdotes.

But a poem, in its witnessing, “arises out of experience that is not perceived as it occurs, is not registered in the first-person ‘precisely since it ruined this first person, reduced it to a ghostlike status, to being a “me without me.”’” So the poem’s witness is not a recounting, is not mimetic narrative, is not political confessionalism, and “it is not simply an act of memory. It bears witness, as Jacques Derrida suggests, in the manner of an ethical or political act.”

•

The “poetry of witness,” as a term of literary art, had not yet had its genesis, but soon after learning of Brodsky and Akhmatova I began an epistolary friendship with the late Terrence Des Pres, author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, in which he cites Akhmatova’s preface to “Requiem” as epigraph to a chapter on the survivor’s will to bear witness. Within months of meeting Des Pres in the summer of 1977, I traveled to Spain to translate Claribel Alegría, herself a poet in exile, and in January of 1978 was welcomed by one of her relatives to El Salvador, where I was to work as a documenter of human rights abuses in the period immediately preceding a twelve-year civil war (working closely with associates of Monsignor Óscar Romero, then archbishop of San Salvador, and with my contact in the International Secretariat of Amnesty International.)

If asked when I returned from El Salvador for the last time in those years, I have said March 16, 1980, a week before the assassination of Monsignor Romero. After thirty years, I now understand that I did not return on that date, that the woman who traveled to El Salvador—the young poet I had been—did not come back. The woman who did return wrote, in those years, seven poems marked by the El S ............

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/feat...s/detail/89565

True Bones
The many appetites of Jim Harrison.
By John McIntyre

Though his reputation owes much to his fiction and memoirs, Jim Harrison, who died this past March at the age of 78, regarded the 14 volumes of poetry he published between 1965 and 2016 as the essence of his work as a writer. Poetry was “this fantastic invocation,” he wrote; his fiction “sometimes strike[s] me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life.” He received his first major recognition as a writer for his poetry, a Guggenheim award in 1969, and he approached his work as a poet with humor and reverence informed in part by his Buddhist practice. “To write a poem you must first create a pen that will create what you want to say,” he wrote. “For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime.”

That working lifetime for Harrison the poet spanned 50 years and hundreds of poems. Joan Reardon called the great food writer and gastronome M.F.K. Fisher a “poet of the appetites.” Harrison could rightly share the distinction. His poems frequently draw on his knowledge and enthusiasm at the table. A section from the title poem of his 1989 collection, The Theory & Practice of Rivers, consists of such detailed descriptions of food that it’s practically a cross between a recipe and an elaborate menu. “Early Fishing,” from In Search of Small Gods (2009), recalls a simple meal his father prepared for the two of them after a fishing trip, and “Vallejo,” from the same volume, laments the poet César Vallejo's impoverished diet. These moments in Harrison’s poetry distill the matters that preoccupied him in his acclaimed book of food essays, The Raw and the Cooked (2002). During his final years, he wrote a column on his culinary fixations for the Canadian literary journal Brick.

Yet Harrison’s hungers extend far beyond food, to weather, color and light, flesh, laughter, and all the beauty and variety of the natural world. This commitment is evident from his earliest published work, Plain Song (1965). In “Poem,” Harrison features “a bobcat padding through red sumac” and a “dead, frayed bird” with “beautiful plumage, / the spoor of feathers / and slight, pink bones.” That precision and specificity in writing about nature quickly became hallmarks of Harrison’s poetry. Yet his early work often registers as grave and spare, a bit restrained, as in poems such as “David,” again from Plain Song:

He is young. The father is dead.
Outside, a cold November night,
the mourners’ cars are parked upon the lawn;
beneath the porch light three
brothers talk to three sons
and shiver without knowing it.

Plain Song also finds the subject of “Dead Doe” “curled, shaglike, / after a winter so cold / the trees split open.” There are lyrical glints and moments of mystery elsewhere in the book, as in “Return,” in which Harrison writes of “A spring day too loud for talk / when bones tire of their flesh / and want something better.” In “Suite to Fathers,” he writes, “In the night, from black paper / I cut the silhouette of this exiled god, / finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.” In the context of Harrison’s body of work, such poems are more akin to gesture drawings than fully executed canvases.

Three books later, with the poems in Letters to Yesenin (1973), Harrison’s sensibility assumed its full dimensions. In “North American Image Cycle,” we find Harrison dispensing advice to President Nixon:

More mad dogs and fewer streetlights, Mr. Nixon. That advice
will cost you a hundred bucks, has been billed for that amount ...
The mad dogs
can be gotten from Spain, cheap. And everyone loves
to throw stones at streetlights.

The poems in Letters to Yesenin were born in the wake of Harrison’s doubts about his ability to create the life he wanted for himself. He found ways to earn a living, but as he noted in his memoir Off to the Side, “the most obvious economic lesson of all became obvious: survival work requires your entire life.” That meant stifling himself as a poet and facing the accompanying depression at his inability to find a suitable balance. Harrison had struggled with depression for years, remarking in Off to the Side that he’d “clocked seven depressions in my life that might qualify as ‘clinical,’ beginning at the age of fourteen.” Now, during the most trying period he’d yet faced, he contemplated suicide. As a means of coping with his own crisis, Harrison turned to the life and work of the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide at age 30. He wrote prose poems to Yesenin daily, and the practice gradually brought him a new equanimity. Afterward, it was as if Harrison had stepped from the darkness with a new balance, an affirmation of his purpose. In Letters to Yesenin, he paired reflective moments with a generous dose of humor, sometimes wry, sometimes absurd. Consider this moment, in which he finds an unexpected plot of wild mushrooms a tonic for the world’s disinterest in him and his work:

The mushrooms helped again: walking hangdoggedly to the granary
after the empty mailbox trip I saw across the barnyard at the base
of an elm stump a hundred feet away a group of white morels. How
many there were will be kept concealed for obvious reasons.

There’s Harrison’s literal appetite here, but he also demonstrates that a poet of the appetites must live at the ready, open to the next opportunity that awakens the senses. When he spies a high school graduation ceremony on his way to the bar, he writes, “June and mayflies fresh from the channel fluttering in the warm still air.” Harrison bears down and offers a coda: “After a few drinks I felt jealous and wanted someone to say, ‘Best of / luck in your chosen field,’ or ‘The road of life is ahead of you.’”

This is the same poet who, on the previous page, observes:

we must closely watch any self-
pity and whining. It simply isn’t manly. Better by far to be a cow-
boy drinking rusty water, surviving on the maggots that unwittingly
ate the pemmican in the saddlebags.

This is humor as a complementary element, humor as seasoning, an essential ingredient in Harrison’s work.

Harrison grew up in rural Michigan, honing his love of the natural world as the son of a county agricultural agent. If there’s a single, defining episode from his childhood, it’s the loss of an eye at the age of seven. He had a “quarrel with a neighbor girl near a cinder pile in a woodlot behind the town hospital,” he writes in his 2002 memoir Off to the Side. “She had shoved a broken bottle in my face, and my sight had leaked away with a lot of blood.” In the wake of his compromised vision, Harrison seems to have redoubled his efforts at taking in the world around him. He speaks to this focus in “The Golden Window” (2009):

With only one eye I've learned
to celebrate vision, the eye a painter,
the eye a monstrous fleshy camera
which can't stop itself in the dark
where it sees its private imagination.

He pairs that attention to detail with a sense of openness and wonder, as evidenced in “Tomorrow,” which begins, “I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow / by I don’t know what.” Beyond his attention and perceptiveness, Harrison’s eye—his literal eye—gradually emerges in his poems as a motif, both regulating his vision and serving as the object of playful references. Consider “Counting Birds” (1989):

As a child, fresh out of the hospital
with tape covering the left side
of my face, I began to count birds.
At age fifty the sum total is precise
and astonishing, my only secret.

Harrison understood exaggeration as more than simple untruth. He used it as a form of possibility as well, a malleable, speculative element. Sometimes what’s said pales next to what could have been said or, better still, should have been. “Of course, the reader should be mindful that I'm a poet, and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less,” he writes in a preface to After Ikkyū & Other Poems (1996). Still, he reliably knows when to opt for an extra stitch and when to apply one in a bolder color.

His years of Buddhist practice helped him cultivate humility and restraint. Those readings and meditation also informed his changing attitudes toward mortality. Whereas the younger Harrison took a somber view of death, in “After Ikkyū,” he writes “Time gets foreshortened late at night. / Jesus died a few days ago, my father / and sister just before lunch.” Though his early portrayals of death are notable for their concrete detail, as he aged, Harrison approached the subject with a sense of wonder bordering on mystical, as in “Insight,” in which he writes from the perspective of the recently dead, observing that mourners “are singing but the words / don’t mean anything in our new language.”

“The cost of flight is landing,” Harrison writes in “The Present.” Such low-key philosophical moments anchor much of his work. It’s also fitting that a man with such outsized appetites should consider the costs attached to the choices available to him. Those calculations never impinge on Harrison's essential gratitude, though, for all life has offered, or the large heartedness that underpins his work.

Years before the end of his life, Harrison imagined the occasion on which he would reveal the secret number of birds he had tallied over the years, in the aforementioned “Counting Birds”:

On my deathbed I’ll write this secret
number on a slip of paper and pass
it to my wife and two daughters.
It will be a hot evening in late June
and they might be glancing out the window
at the thunderstorm's approach from the west.
Looking past their eyes and a dead fly
on the window screen I'll wonder
if there’s a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.
O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud,
into the marvel of this final night.

How lovely to picture Harrison singing himself to the end, preparing for his next journey. He always did travel well.

Originally Published: May 31st, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70058

Prose from Poetry Magazine
To Our Readers
Poetry's new editor on the motive of the magazine
By Don Share

“I’ve received some letters asking me to state publicly my editorial position    ...”

Ezra Pound’s injunction to “Make it new” seems not to apply to the question of what an incoming editor of this magazine intends. Though Harriet Monroe established Poetry’s vision in an editorial in her first issue (“The Motive of the Magazine”) and in the famous “Open Door” policy published in the second, the question gets asked anew when there’s a change at the top of our masthead. In 1949 for example, when Hayden Carruth became the editor, one of the magazine’s long-standing guarantors posed it, commenting that though Poetry’s policy may have been clear to the staff, it certainly wasn’t to her. (“You don’t seem to get enough important names,” she complained.) Called upon to make a definitive statement, Carruth wrote that though he thought the answer was inherent in the magazine’s pages, it was: “we aim to publish good poems.” Sensible as this seems, he only lasted a year in the job. When Karl Shapiro took over from him in 1950, Time magazine sent a reporter to ask what his editorial “policy” would be. Shapiro was “horrified,” he later said, because — 
either ignoring or embodying the “Open Door” doctrine — he’d “never thought of a literary magazine having a policy.” Nevertheless, in his third issue he wrote that the explanation for the “persistence” of  Poetry magazine was threefold: it discovered and encouraged “new talent,” presented the new work of known poets, and preserved a month-to-month record of American poetry. No surprises there, in spite of which Shapiro lasted but five years. Understandably, the succeeding run of editors, from Henry Rago and Daryl Hine to John Frederick Nims and Joseph Parisi, published no introductory statements on the subject, and let the poems speak for themselves.

Then ten years ago next month an editorial, less than two pages long, appeared. Poetry’s new editor, Christian Wiman, began calmly enough, with the neutral-sounding words quoted above. But that first sentence was a ruse, for Wiman memorably inaugurated his tenure by indicating a distaste for poets who have a poetics (“bores”), describing an office under attack by submissions from “a horde of  iambic zombies,” admitting a suspicion “that ‘editor’ and ‘idiot’ are synonyms” — and imagining ruthless future readers who “will look at all these poems into which we’ve poured the wounded truths of our hearts, all the fraught splendor and terror of these lives we suffered and sang”    ...    and giggle. All he wanted, he announced, was “poems from poets whose aim is way beyond Poetry magazine, indeed, beyond all magazines.”

I don’t see how any post-Wiman editor could top that.

I’m recounting this history to let myself more or less off the hook. Changes will surely come as I take over from Chris, with whom 
I worked these last six years — years that proved him to be one of the magazine’s canniest and most stalwart stewards. Though editors, like poets, must avoid cliche, I’m happy to admit up front that his will be hard footsteps to follow. It’s an honor, but an even greater
 responsibility, for me to take over from him. And I hope in the 
issues to come readers feel that the vision of the magazine is being refreshed, without disruption to its proven record. The “motive” of the magazine, as Harriet put it, will remain what it always has been: “to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school,” to be, that is, eclectic.

In thinking about my predecessors’ work, and wondering how to live up to it, I’ve asked myself why Harriet Monroe’s original and originating policy has endured so well. It’s fascinating to note that Harriet knew her own mind, but when it came to poetry she had a sixth sense that guided her in spite of  herself. Her own taste was for a poetics that, though she called it “new,” was rooted, like Modernism itself, firmly in the late nineteenth century. She liked, and wrote herself, poems that seem hopelessly dated now. Fortunately, that countervailing sixth sense allowed her to make literary history. She invented a box, you could say — and promptly set to work thinking outside it. Her magazine was, therefore, like she was: unpredictable, difficult, and infuriating. As a consequence of these traits, we can now take for granted that poets such as Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Pound, H.D., Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and many more, are part of the pantheon of English-language poetry. Their poems, confounding and aggravating to readers when they first appeared in our pages, exemplify what Peter Quartermain calls “stubborn poetries” — opaque at first, this was work that became clearer and dearer to us over time.

Of necessity, then, but also by inclination, I’m going to take the long view, which means taking risks with unpredictable, difficult, and infuriating work — just as all my predecessors have. The value of “stubborn” poems, apart from the considerable pleasure of thinking about what they’re up to, is that they get us to focus our attention and sharpen our critical skills, something we need more than ever in an age, like ours, of distraction. As it happens, poems teach us how to read other poems, so I’ll always be looking over my shoulder as 
I move forward: a bad way to walk or drive, but a time-tested way of editing Poetry. The composer Van Dyke Parks, when asked about the tension between eclecticism and traditionalism, said that it was wonderful when somebody called him a “futuristic traditionalist.” 
I hope to be called that someday, too.
A glance all the way back to 1914 fortifies and emboldens me. Quartermain’s essay in this issue takes as an epigraph these lines from William Carlos Williams’s “At Dawn”— 

O marvelous! what new configuration will come next?
I am bewildered with multiplicity.

Nearly a century later, Poetry receives about 120,000 poems a year. At the dawn of my tenure as editor, I share Williams’s exuberance: it’s a joy to be bewildered with poetry’s multiplicity. Faced with the new, poems from the past still accompany us. So let me issue an invitation to readers with a stanza from another poem from the time of the magazine’s founding, Robert Frost’s “The Pasture”:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

Some serendipitous lines from Alice Fulton’s “Make It New,” in this issue, may also suffice:

It will be new

whether you make it new
or not. It will be full of neo-

shadows. Full of then — both past and next,
iridescent with suspense.

Originally Published: October 1st, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69863

Prose from Poetry Magazine
October 1947
By Paul Durica

In October 1917, on Poetry’s fifth anniversary, Harriet Monroe looked back at the founding of the magazine while acknowledging that the “second period of our history” had begun. The “five-year endowment” that had financed Poetry had run its course, and Monroe wondered if, in a time of war and economic upheaval, there was still a place for the magazine in American art and culture. “Poetry may not be a grand enough portal,” she wrote, “and the lamps that light it may burn dim in drifting winds; but until a nobler one is built it should stand, and its little lights should show the way as they can.” Of course, the magazine survived—on the tenth anniversary, Monroe was looking forward to finding “abler minds and even more liberal auspices” that could sustain it well into the future—and subsequent anniversaries have been marked in a variety of ways. The sixtieth anniversary issue, for example, focused on the first appearances of poets long associated with Poetry, including James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. The most visually striking memorial can be found in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue, which contained a Poetry timeline paired with photographs of contributors and ending with the following image of the soon-to-be vacated Erie Street office. In the accompanying essay, “543 Cass Street,” co-editor Marion Strobel reflected upon how the office had become a museum to Monroe, who had died in 1936:

Work goes on at her desk; many of the same photographs, the “poets gallery” which she herself hung in the Cass Street office, pepper our present walls; her Louis xvi clock, accurate as ever, still ticks time, and still, as then, we pay no attention to it.

In Monroe’s time, as now, the editors knew that, as Strobel wrote, “yesterday’s poet, whom we love, is not the one we are looking for.”

Originally Published: October 1st, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70178

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Larry Eigner, Six Letters: An Introduction
By George Hart

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote over three thousand poems on a manual Royal typewriter (a bar mitzvah gift) with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Disabled by a forceps injury at birth, Eigner lived with cerebral palsy his whole life; able to walk only with support or assistance, he made his way through the world in a wheelchair. Until his father died and his mother was too old to care for him, he lived at home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, writing many of his poems in the glassed-in front porch that served as his office. In 1978, Eigner relocated to Berkeley, California, at first living in a communal house for adults with disabilities and then residing with poet-friends, mainly Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin, who also served as his caregivers.

In late 1949, Eigner heard Cid Corman reading Yeats on his Boston radio program This Is Poetry. Eigner didn’t like the manner in which Corman read Yeats’s poetry aloud and wrote a letter to tell him so. 
A long friendship and correspondence between the two poets followed. Through Corman, Eigner was introduced to Robert Creeley, whose Divers Press published his chapbook From the Sustaining Air in 1953. Creeley and Corman were both associated with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school of poetry, and through them Eigner began reading Olson’s Maximus Poems and the work of modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.


Throughout the fifties, Eigner absorbed Olson’s theory of Projective Verse, and he was grouped with the Black Mountain poets in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking The New American Poetry anthology in 1960. Of the poets in this group — Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov (Corman chose not to be included in the anthology) — Eigner might be the one who put Olson’s theories to work most productively. Projective Verse, with its emphasis on the exchange of energy between poet and reader, and the typewriter as a means of graphing or scoring words on the space of the page, seems particularly well-suited to Eigner’s embodiment and temperament. The fact that Olson put so much stress on the stance of the poet and the poet’s breath as a form of measure, which might seem to discourage someone like Eigner who had difficulty walking and speaking, makes Eigner’s achievement even more impressive. In excerpting Eigner’s correspondence for this special feature, Jennifer Bartlett and I have chosen to focus on passages in which he writes about, or directly to, Olson regarding his poetry, poetics, and other Black Mountain poets.

In his review of The New American Poetry, published in the July 1961 issue of Poetry, X.J. Kennedy chided Olson for his proposal that the typewriter can replace meter as a means of graphically scoring the poet’s breath, writing, “Who would have thought his Corona portable an instrument of such sensitivity?” In 1962, the September issue of Poetry included six poems by Eigner and a review of his first full-length collection, On My Eyes, by Galway Kinnell, who also found fault with Projective Verse’s claims for the typewriter. He writes,

The real value of getting rid of rhyme and meter, I had supposed, was in order to throw the responsibility for the poem wholly on speech itself. Here this is not done. The laying out of a kind of score by typewriter-spacing only supplants those old devices with a newer one, which is, this time, not even integral with the words.

The four-volume Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier (Stanford University Press, 2010), provides enough examples for readers to judge for themselves whether or not Eigner succeeded in using the typewriter as Olson had proposed, but there is no doubt that a 1940 Royal typewriter is integral to his words. Without that bar mitzvah present, wisely chosen by his mother Bessie and purchased by an aunt, we may never have heard his voice.


•



Because it was difficult for him to insert a piece of paper into the carriage of his typewriter, Eigner tended to use as much of the page as possible before starting another (a habit also motivated by his obsession with saving paper). He would commonly type multiple poems on a single sheet, and when writing in prose he would type as close to the margin as possible, or fill up the margins with additional notes and comments after writing the main text. We have indicated relevant marginal comments made by Eigner in brackets. Eigner also used abbreviations to save time while typing. Some are standard abbreviations such as yrs for years or bk for book, but some are produced by Eigner omitting letters in his own elliptical way — wndr for “wonder,” for example, or grp for “group.” We have retained these when the context clarifies what word is meant, or added a bracketed word if needed. Eigner occasionally mistrikes the keys on his typewriter — 
we have silently corrected any such obvious mistakes but have left misspellings and other typos. Two other idiosyncratic uses of the typewriter should be mentioned: Eigner often indicated poem titles by inserting a space between each character and he indicated notes or asides by overstriking an open and close parenthesis to form his own piece of punctuation. These have been retained. Material omitted from the letters by the editors is indicated by bracketed ellipses.

— George Hart

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69917

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Introduction
Joan Mitchell and the art of painting a poem.
By Laura Morris

“My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields   ...   it’s more like a poem, and that’s what I want to paint.”


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Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 to Marion Strobel and James Herbert Mitchell. Her mother (a fiction writer, editor, and poet) was an associate editor at Poetry magazine from 1920 to 1925 and remained affiliated with the magazine for more than forty-five years. Because of Strobel’s involvement in literary circles, Mitchell grew up in a home filled with books and often visited by poets and writers, including T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mitchell’s father was a dermatologist, as well as an amateur artist who encouraged her to observe the visual world closely and to dedicate herself to a chosen path. When she was young he took her to the zoo, the Field Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where they would draw and paint watercolors together, and look at paintings by Mitchell’s early favorites: Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse.

As a child, Mitchell wrote poems, including “Autumn,” published 
in Poetry in 1935 and reprinted in this portfolio. Although she stopped writing soon afterward, poems and literature would remain sources of inspiration and comfort throughout her life. Her library contained well-worn volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, William Wordsworth, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Jacques Dupin, Pierre Schneider, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and others.

As an adult, Mitchell developed friendships with many poets and writers, including O’Hara, Schuyler, Beckett, and the authors whose reminiscences are included in this portfolio: Paul Auster, Bill Berkson, Lydia Davis, Nathan Kernan, and John Yau. (She and Marjorie Perloff did not know one another.) She collaborated on 
numerous illustrated books of poetry, made pastel drawings on typed poems, and often read poems when preparing to paint. She titled several paintings after poems particularly meaningful or beautiful to her.

Although Joan Mitchell lived most of her adult life in France, her childhood memories of  Lake Michigan — and the trees and vast fields of the Midwest — were always with her as part of the inner landscape that she drew upon while painting. Feelings of places, especially the Chicago of her childhood, never left; as she often said, “I carry my landscapes around with me.” Her paintings are visual distillations of feeling and experience, abstract translations of the flux and movement of the natural world, of  light, color, space, and form. They transform remembered landscapes and experiences through a masterful use of color and remarkable ability to attain balance and stillness in the midst of dynamic motion. They are at once contemplative and exuberant, restless and calm, strong and fragile, defiant and tender.

Like a poet, Joan Mitchell strove for precision. Her canvases contain nothing superfluous. Although her work might initially appear spontaneous and immediate, she worked slowly and deliberately, with an intense focus on the relationships of colors to one another, on the structure and space of the whole canvas, on gesture and line. Her multi-paneled paintings bear a particularly palpable kinship to poems in their structure and inherent rhythm. Like poems, her paintings are organic constructions in which each element — in this case brushstrokes rather than words — is necessary and essential, in delicate balance with those surrounding it.

Mitchell was generally averse to writing about art. She believed that paintings should be seen and not read, that they are ultimately 
indescribable, complete in and of themselves. As John Ashbery wrote: “Paintings are meaning and therefore do not have a residue of meaning which can be talked about.” Still, Mitchell did greatly admire some writing about art, and the writing she respected most was by poets: Jean Genet on Giacometti; Antonin Artaud on Van Gogh, Rilke on Cézanne. In fact, this passage from Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne could describe Joan’s work as well as it does Cézanne’s:

As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand beneath them as acceptingly as possible, it’s as if they were doing something for you.… It’s as if every place were aware of all the other places — it participates that much; that much adjustment and rejection is happening in it; that’s how each daub plays its part in maintaining equilibrium and in producing it; just as the whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium.



Joan Mitchell: At Home in Poetry will be on view in the Poetry Foundation gallery February 4 – May 31, 2013. The exhibition includes the large-scale quadriptych painting Minnesota (1980), as well as photographs, letters, and books of poems illustrated by Mitchell, and explores her relationships and collaborations with poets.