The Best American Poetry

3 Quarks Daily Contest

If you've read a blog post here that you loved, you can nominate it for a "Best Arts and Literature" prize from 3 Quarks Daily.  We like 3 Quarks for its interesting mix of posts from around the web about  science, design, literature, current affairs, art, you name it.  I've had my favorites, what are yours? 

-- sdh

The Trouble Clef – Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 [by Lera Auerbach]

The National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. asked me to write program notes for one of the Kennedy Center's "Focus on Russia" programs this season. One of the works in the program was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4.

Tchaikovsky’s 4th symphony was written between 1877 and 1878, during the most turbulent year of Tchaikovsky’s life and is closely associated with two women – one whom he married that year and the other, whom he never met in person. In the tradition of the romantic excesses of his time, his wife cast a demonic shadow over his life, while the other woman remained an angelic presence.

In late March of 1877 Antonina Miliukhova wrote Tchaikovsky a letter, confessing her love for him. She was a former student whom he did not remember meeting twelve years earlier when she was 16. Tchaikovsky’s response to her letter was similar to that of Onegin to young Tatiana in Pushkin’s famous novel-in-prose. Tchaikovsky stated clearly that the feeling could not possibly be mutual and that their life together would be a domestic nightmare. To this, Antonina requested he grant her one meeting, just one meeting before she would end her life which would be impossible and meaningless without Pyotr Ilyich.

Shortly after receiving Antonina’s first letter, Tchaikovsky started his work on the opera “Eugene Onegin”. Tatiana’s famous letter to Onegin plays a central role in Pushkin’s novel and in the opera. Clearly, both Pushkin and Tchaikovsky sympathized with Tatiana. After receiving Antonina’s first letter Tchaikovsky was shocked by the parallel to Tatiana. “It seems to me as if the power of fate has drawn to me that girl”, Tchaikovsky wrote to Nadezhda von Meck – his patron, his muse, his best friend and confidant, someone he never met face to face, but with whom he exchanged over 1000 letters and to whom Symphony No.4 is dedicated.

There was one more reason for marrying. Shortly before Antonia’s letter, Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother, Modest, that he had made a decision to get married soon, although he did not yet know to whom. He felt he needed to acquire the status of a married man in order to stifle the scandalous rumors about his numerous homosexual encounters. Homosexuality was considered a dishonorable crime in the Tsarist Russia and was punished by arrest and exile to Siberia. Tchaikovsky hoped that by marrying Antonina, he would appear “normal” and all talk about his homosexuality would stop.

The wedding took place on July 6th and a few weeks later Tchaikovsky ran away to his sister’s estate in Ukraine, where he composed like a madman for six weeks. After returning to Moscow to his eager and bewildered wife, he suffered a panic attack and eleven days later attempted suicide by throwing himself into the river at night. He was hoping to catch pneumonia. He did not even catch a cold.

Divorce in Russia was possible to obtain only on the grounds of infidelity. Tchaikovsky was afraid that a trial in court could potentially expose his homosexuality. Besides, Antonina did not wish to get divorced from her famous husband and for the rest of his life blackmailed him for financial support which he diligently and generously supplied on the promise that she leave him alone. What happened to this real-life Tatiana? Antonina Miliukhova gave birth to three children from unknown fathers and abandoned all three, leaving them at an orphanage, where all three died. She spent the last twenty years of her life in a psychiatric asylum where she died in 1917, eight months before the Bolshevik Revolution, from which Rachmaninov and other numerous Russian artists fled to the West.

Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Anatol about that turbulent time of his marriage: “There is no doubt that for some months I was insane, and only now, when I am completely recovered, have I learned to relate objectively to everything which I did during my brief insanity. That man, who in May took it into his head to marry Antonina Ivanovna, who during June wrote a whole opera as though nothing had happened, who in July married, who in September fled from his wife, who in November railed at Rome and so on – that man wasn’t I, but another Pyotr Ilyich.”

The 4th Symphony is dedicated to “my best friend” – the other woman in Tchaikovsky’s life, his supporter, patron and commissioner – Nadezhda von Meck. She believed in Tchaikovsky’s talent and made it financially possible for him to resign from teaching, enabling him to dedicate himself fully to composing. She supported him from the time he was 38 years old to age 49. We all should be forever grateful to Nadezhda von Meck – without her, Tchaikovsky’s greatest works might not have been born.

At von Meck’s request Tchaikovsky wrote an explanation, something similar to program notes about the symphony, which greatly harmed the reception of the symphony. For generations, music critics argued over his words instead of listening to his music and understanding its scope and impact.

There is a monumental, larger-than-life breadth to this symphony. It is similar to an epic, where all essential questions of human existence are brought forth and examined with a life-or-death intensity.

The 1st movement, Andante sostenuto – Moderato assai, quasi Andante – Allegro vivo lasts as long as the remaining three movements together and draws a parallel to Beethoven’s 5th symphony, forming a musical dialogue between two great symphonists. The fanfare, representing Fate, creates a memorable terrifying opening. The emotional openness and daring intensity of this music are incredible. Music and emotion are inseparable, but only a few have dared to be so vulnerably open in their art. The form of the 1st movement is not typical – it is a curious blend of a formal structure with the freedom of a tone poem. Tchaikovsky had trouble with structural canons. His thematic material doesn’t lend itself naturally to development. He was a great melodist and his melodies are so complete and emotionally full within themselves that the only natural way to develop them is to repeat in different ways. This is why there are so many repeats and sequences in Tchaikovsky’s music instead of actual developmental material, as in the Germanic tradition.

The 2nd movement, Andantino in modo di canzona, is of a reflective, melancholic nature. Tchaikovsky recreates the feeling of a Russian landscape. The material he uses is original, but inspired by Russian folklore – a technique later adopted by Igor Stravinsky. The writing for solo woodwinds is vocal, almost operatic. Tchaikovsky admired Rossini and was influenced by Rossini’s vocal writing. Tchaikovsky’s music combines elegance and power with great attention to detail. The 3rd movement is Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato – Allegro. It resembles a painting, an arabesque, a dance of shadows. In 1877, shortly before the creation of the 4th symphony, Tchaikovsky’s first ballet “Swan Lake” premiered. Imagine the world before “Sleeping Beauty” or “Nutcracker”. Tchaikovsky, with his creation of “Swan Lake”, brought ballet music to an entirely new level. He adored dancers and greatly enjoyed writing for the ballet. Much of his music lends itself naturally to dance.

The 3rd movement of the symphony shows an unprecedented 97-note-long pizzicatti passage for the string basses and one of the world’s shortest, but most nightmarish solos of exceptional difficulty for piccolo.

Finale – Allegro con fuoco – is full of excitement and intoxication with life – a rush of energy beyond control, suggesting that life is worth living in spite of all the struggle and tragedy. This music takes virtuosity to the edge of what is possible. Tchaikovsky uses a well-known Russian folk-tune, “In the Field Stood a Birch Tree”, as one of the themes. He also re-introduces the material of the 1st movement, although its appearance seems to be a calculated (or miscalculated) dramatic device rather than an organic development.

This music of great emotional contrasts, so essential for the Romantic era, is in striking contrast to all the known portraits of Tchaikovsky, in which he always appears looking like a clerk or a banker, someone who could hardly be suspected of harboring any passion at all, not to mention suffering the great turmoil of Tchaikovsky’s life. It is as if everything that he tried to conceal from prying eyes, he turned into music, where it flourished freely and burned with painful honesty.

Tchaikovsky conducted at the opening of Carnegie Hall. Although in his younger years he suffered from terrible stage fright, later in life he enjoyed success as a conductor of his music. Tchaikovsky’s symphonies are an important chain in symphonic development. He draws a bridge between Beethoven and Mahler. He dares not to turn away from any emotion, but instead magnifies it to symbolic and epic proportions. His music is so personal that it becomes universal.

I cannot finish this essay without mentioning Tchaikovsky’s death. For many years it was attributed to cholera. During Soviet times, all the materials relating to his last days were censored and concealed. Latest findings show that Tchaikovsky died nine days after the premiere of his 6th symphony by an enforced suicide – he was sentenced so by a “Court of Honor” which consisted of Tchaikovsky’s fellow alumni from the St. Petersburg Imperial School of Jurisprudence. If he failed to succeed with suicide, his homosexuality would be exposed to the tsar and to the Russian public along with the evidence they had gathered. If indeed true, and I believe it is, this is one of the most tragic deaths in the history of Western Music and one of the greatest losses for humanity as Tchaikovsky died at the very height of his artistic power. He was 53.

Malachi Black, Guest blogger February 21-26

 This week we welcome Malachi Black as our guest blogger.  Malachi is literary editor of The New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.  His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Southwest Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI Online, Pleiades, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.  His poem “Traveling by Train” was selected by Mark Strand for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2008.  In 2009, Black was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship.  Read Malachi Black's PoemsOutLoud interview here.

Welcome, Malachi.

In other news

Congratulations to Lawrence Epstein on the publication of Political Folk Music in America from its Origins to Bob Dyan.Those of you who follow Larry's Dylan Watch know how passionate and compelling a writer he is on all matters Dylan related. Pick up a copy of this book for his lucid examination of the troubadours who wrote some of America's most popular and enduring music.

London Calling

Weather permitting, we're flying to London tomorrow for two events.  Join us if you can:

Sunday, February 28, 3:00 - Jewish Book Week : Drawing on his acclaimed A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,  David Lehman will  delve into the American songbook—the compendium of music written from the 1920s to the 1960s that includes Broadway hits, Hollywood musicals and Tin Pan Alley tunes.  He'll be in conversation with writer and filmmaker Naomi Gryn.  Highlights of Gryn's wide-ranging career include playing a hairdresser in The Crying Game and winning a gold D&D award shortly before abandoning what might have been a lucrative career as a commercials producer to make documentaries for radio and television.  Venue: Royal National Hotel,Bedford Way,London WC10DG.  For information and tickets go here.

Monday, March 1, 7:00 PM: David Lehman and Mark Ford will  read in support of Oxfam's Young British Poets DVD project. Several leading younger British poets will open the night: Emily Berry, Liz Berry, Kayo Chingonyi, Luke Kennard and Heather Phillipson. The Oxfam shop, 91 Marylebone High Street, London W1. More information here. 

-- sdh

Evolution and Literature (by Malachi Black)

My last two posts have dealt with change in literature over time, and whenever those two words are paired (change and time), I inevitably think of Darwin.  I’ve long been a proponent of the Darwinian point of view.  And while I find certain applications of evolutionary theory less tenable than others, the scope of its applicability is downright remarkable:  the theory has been useful in organizing and understanding topics ranging from human psychology to economics to science itself.  It’s therefore surprising to me that no one (to my knowledge, at any rate) has tried to apply it to the field of literature.  After all, literary criticism is elastic enough to accommodate Marxian, Freudian, and even Eco-critical considerations—why not entertain a Darwinian view? 

 

Unlike the infamously unfriendly archaeological fossil record, literature’s “geological record” is, in comparison, remarkably intact, and its yield is particularly rich.  In fact, we can trace literary heredity as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is estimated to date from as early as the third millennium BCE, relatively shortly after the invention of writing (sometime in the latter half of the fourth millennium BCE).  A record of literary history such as this provides for the literary evolutionist a vast and supportive foundation upon which to build empirically based insights into the nature of literary change (on both macro- and microevolutionary levels) over the course of the written word’s fruitful five thousand year history.

 

Although I’m unaware of any systematic effort to apply the logic of evolutionary theory to literature, Richard Dawkins’ concept of the “meme” represents an important movement in that general direction.  In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins describes the “meme” as a “[self-] replicator… a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”  It exists in many forms, including “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, [and] ways of making pots or of building arches.”  As with genes, memes succeed in self-perpetuation by virtue of self-replication as they struggle to survive in light of a Malthusian competition for resources and living space—or rather, for “radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, and library shelf-space.”

 

Prosper and Long Live [a gesture suggestion for depression by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 My Beautiful Bleaders,

I’ve got something to sell you about.  It’s a show and tell.

It’s about signs and gestures and how we get new ones.  Our world's top six might be: thumbs up, peace, thumbs down, rock and roll, and fuck you.  Try them right now in quick secession.

I can use my face to flash you some quick information, as a flashed sad-face means bad news.

Great news for people with low self-esteem is: eyes wide and a shake of the head to suggest disbelief, mouth downturned, shoulders up, then… jazz hands.

We ought to have a simple gesture for thank you.  The best we have is hands pressed palms together and a little tilt of the head, toward face-down.  That’s easiest to recognize but any sign that needs two hands has limitations.  You can ask for the check or for a bottle opener with one hand.   I guess the bow of the head alone, with slightly lidded eyes, actually works for thank you.

I’ve been thinking about this.  Say we had a gesture that meant: “I feel so terrible I can’t stop thinking about death” which specifically does not signal a breakdown of the normal social walls.  I’m thinking of Spock’s "Live Long and Prosper" but upside down.  You flash that at a stranger and if she is feeling bone awful also, she flashes it back, while someone having an okay time right then flashes back a supportive upright LLP.   The symbol should be quick, deniable.  If you want to start a conversation you have to try it through normal means and risks.  What I am suggesting is just an unspoken semiotics of support.

Excellent work staying alive since I posted last.  Now stay alive until I have an opportunity to encourage you yet again.  At the latest, one week from now, but I feel all stealth posty, like I may sooner paste up un autre placard rather than later.

Love you,

Jennifer

ps Chewy words are tasty as nougat, no?  Nu?  Here's lookinat chewkid.  wordy your mother.  peas out. 

pps Would you like to be Happy All the Time?  Simply read this book: The Happiness Myth.

 

Rhymes With Bob Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan structures his songs through rhymes. Given his skills, the results can be comforting, jarring, or rousing. But why do Dylan's rhymes work so well? Why are rhymes in any song often so enchanting?

Rhymes are pleasing to the ear. They are also pleasing to the brain because in a rhyme the second word becomes more familiar to us than if there had been no first word to rhyme with. Our brains like what's easy to think about and don't like what's difficult to think about. (Psychologists call this "cognitive fluency." Songwriters don't.)  Beyond the attractions of repetitive sounds, a rhyme offers the mystery of an unexpected affinity between two or more words that are seemingly different.

The coincidence of two or more words that rhyme suggests a linguistic order missing from the chaos of ordinary life. Rhymes hint at an alluring land of English, a place of beauty and design. But there's a danger to rhymes as well. Rhymes are mysterious and inexplicable. We have to confront mirror images and doubles, worlds that complicate the simplicity that the rhyme seemed to bring.

For songwriters, rhymes make it easier for audiences to memorize the material. It's no accident that nearly every popular song is written using rhymes. But rhymes can be traps, forcing songwriters to write words they don't want to all for the sake of having to rhyme.

Rhymes are often associated with simple, childlike feelings. Yet they can be a form of attack, a battering ram of words pounding away at the listener. That's why the rhymes in Dylan's protest songs work so well. They keep hitting us with their power, and the repetition forces us to confront what is being protested. The rhymes all through "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" reinforce Brown's growing despair and retrospectively explain his final, desperate action. Consider the concluding verse of the song:

There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born.

Anyone can hear obvious rhymes. It's the great lyricist who can hear what the rest of us can't. Dylan can hear that "farm" sounds like "born," and "born is the the perfect word, not only standing in contrast to the people Hollis Brown has killed but also in providing hope (for new people have replaced the dead) and a warning (don't let what happened to the Brown family happen to these newborns).

Similarly, rhyme as a form of attack works well in angry love songs. In "Idiot Wind," Dylan writes:

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth.
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Or take another pair of lines from the song:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.

The rhyme is more exact but is still unexpected. Additionally, it magnifies the subject of the song from beyond the angry subject to the singer himself and then to Washington. It's a neat shift of ascribing idiocy from an external partner to the internal self to the political.

The battering ram effect can also be seen in poignant love songs such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and attack songs about so-called friends, such as "Positively 4th Street" with lines like:

I know the reason
That you talk behind my back.
I used to be among the crowd
You're in with.

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don't know to begin with?

Here Dylan uses what is technically known as "feminine rhyme" in which the rhyme comes from the penultimate words (or syllables), in this case "in with" and "begin with." That is, Dylan's rhymes are far from simple. He doesn't just use traditional end rhymes. Additionally, he uses alliteration (repeating consonant sounds) and assonance (repeating vowel sounds creating internal rhymes in a line.) Here are some beautiful lines from "Mr. Tambourine Man":

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

The assonance of "fate" and "waves" and "deep" and "beneath" and the many examples of alliteration add to the rhymes and startling images to create the attractive world the tambourine man offers.

And that's why nobody rhymes with Bob Dylan.

For information about my new book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, visit my web page here.

Renovation Redux (by Malachi Black)

Part of what got me going yesterday was some rather provocative discussion of innovation and art that has recently taken place on two blogs:  Ron Silliman’s and Big Other.  (I learned of the latter from the former.)  I’m unfamiliar with A D Jameson, the author of the Big Other post, but I have read Silliman’s blog irregularly for the last couple of years.  I sincerely appreciate the efforts of both men to get a handle on what is indeed an incredibly dynamic and complex issue.

 

I suppose that I’m interested in renovation in part because it seems to me to represent an historically significant midpoint between the extremes of Absolute Innovation and Absolute Convention, which Jameson sensibly ties to the unfamiliar and the familiar respectively.  (These surely represent the more moderate ends of a lengthy continuum between outright plagiarism and utter incomprehensibility, per Frank Kermode.)  Silliman, however, dismisses the ‘renovative’ initiative that I view as so central to the course of Western literature:  "That which forwards the evolution of poetry, something that occurs raggedly & in fits & starts, is really the heart of writing practice, the pump that breathes life into verse & makes it relevant to our lives.  This is why Charles Olson was a major poet and Robert Lowell a wasted minor talent at best.... Hybridism wants to be new & it wants to be the well-wrought urn.  For the most part, it accomplishes neither.  Above all else, it is a failure of courage."  Let's leave aside the issue of courage (I can't be persuaded that a text as audacious as Paradise Lost, which is an overt effort at hybridization or renovation, is anything but an act of incredible daring).  

 

The Kiss [by Italo Svevo]

The first kiss, I gave you as coldly as I would have put my name to a contract; the second, I gave with enormous curiosity to analyze you and myself, but in fact, I didn't analyze anything and understood nothing, as I was still feeling a kind of timidity that froze me; at the third kiss, and those which came after it, I could feel in my arms the sweet girl I had been searching for, and all that was left of my youth.  Now, I understand the whole business less and less; what's certain is that my powers as analyst are not what I thought they were.  I don't know the color of your eyes, your hair often surprises me, and I still don't really know your kisses.  Mine too have a strange quality; not passionate warmth, to be sure, because I'm careful, very careful, that they shall not be more than you allow them to be.  I don't want to be violent, I want to be gentle and kind.  My greatest pleasure lies in feeling that I've changed -- I don't care to say grown young again. 

-- letter from Italo Svevo to Livia Veneziani (from "Memoir of Italo Svevo" Marlboro Press, 1991). 

-- sdh

An Image of John Keats

In response to the post below, marking John Keats' death on this date in 1821, here is a remarkable photograph of Keats' life mask by artist Benjamin Haydon.

This photograph, and others like it, can be found in Joanna Kane's book, The Somnambulists: Photographic Portraits From Before Photography (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2008). Using traditional and digital techniques, Kane photographed life and death masks from the late 18th/early 19th centuries, and created portraits like this one that almost seem ready to speak.