"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" That is the question. Yes, Heidegger, that's a pretty good originary question. I might go further back and ask why is there matter at all? But an originary question one gets asked a lot is "What first got you into poetry?" and variations thereof.
I had two 'big bangs' or inflations, or 'mini-bangs'. One courtesy of Auden when I was about 13 but one much earlier, when I was about seven years old, courtesy of Miss Campbell and Beowulf.
Ah, Miss Campbell, exotic and intoxicating on so many levels: a substitute teacher (a fresh face), an energetically tousled redhead, a lover of poetry, and a Canadian. In Huddersfield, at the start of the 70s – man's footprints freshly planted on the Moon – Miss Campbell was a sign of futurity and opportunity for me.
When the time came for her to leave ahead of our seemingly endless six-week summer holidays, she chose to leave us with two things on that poignant Friday afternoon: proper fresh popcorn and Beowulf.
Having only eaten pre-packaged, sweet soggy cardboard like Butterkist, I'd never seen popcorn made like this. I didn't know you could make it. Actual, neutron star-dense kernels of real corn. Hot oil. A sealed pan. A hail storm within the pan, and then an overflow of bright white and yellow corn-novae. Miraculous. But more so after butter and salt were added. From that day on my tooth became a savoury tooth and has remained so.
And, as we munched, she turned herself into live cinema by reading a modern translation of Beowulf to us. Terrifying. Suspenseful. Gory. Electrifying. I've no idea which translation she read to us. Look at how many there are:
but it made me realise how exciting, troubling, suspenseful and entertaining poetry could be. Not that it always is. And not that is should be or has to be. But it was a great start for a seven-year old.
Years later I relished Seamus Heaney's 1999 version, which translates "Hwæt!" as "So." which is exactly how my Irish aunties begin every new story: "So."
So, I'd like to mention that there is a brand new translation missing from the list above, by Meghan Purvis. It begins, as playfully and colloquially as Heaney, with:
Stop me
if you've heard this one before: the lands up north,
hoar-bent, frost-locked, need deeper plows
to dig them. Here is one.
I haven't ventured much further than this yet but I'm on my way, with my popcorn, and memories of Miss Campbell.
All right, let’s all try and remain calm. I’m not going to
go up the front steps and walk through the front door, here. I’ma go around
back and come in through the kitchen window. So I need you all to be patient.
FIRST CONCEPT.
What I call “social” reading. What do I mean by that. I mean reading
contemporary poetry in a spirit of (a) wanting to know what’s going on in
Poetryland, and (b) shopping for friendships. This is rather different from
reading like a normal person, who simply wants a good time. People who read socially (in the sense I’m advancing here)
don’t mind as much if they’re not having a good time. They are playing a
different game, with different stakes. They want to know “the lay of the
land”—and that means they have to map the swamps and the abandoned parking lots
just as much as the places where they might want to be. For a certain kind of reader,
that knowledge by itself is
enough to make the suffering worthwhile, and if you add to that the potential
for discovery with all its attendant thrills—the possibility of finding
uncharted isles where dinosaurs still live or whatever—you get some idea of the
stakes involved for the “social” reader. The deal is you get a map going, and then you can give directions.
I also mentioned “friendship shopping.” Here’s where
Facebook comes in. Today, the supreme ease with which you can have a written
conversation (boing!, right there, instantly) with somebody whose poetry does it for
you—and how quickly thát can turn into friendship, sex, children, a new
civilization—well! this is another good reason to put up with the inevitable
boredom involved in the mapping project….
SECOND CONCEPT.
Virtually every one of you reading these words answers the description I am
giving here. You piss and moan about it, but you want to know what’s going on
and you want to “get into it” with people. It’s just like with music when you
were in high school. You were studious—you just didn’t call it that. You wanted to know all
there was to know about glam rock or rap or whatever the fuck was your deal. We
were all like this. Metal. Psychedelic shit. Beck. The difference is: With
poetry, you can “friend” Beck, and Beck has nothing better to do than chat with
you, ’cuz he’s lonely and starved for praise….
THIRD CONCEPT (hold tight for this one). Americans ignore Canada a lot. Apropos of poetry,
there is a certain amount of reasoning involved, and that reasoning is elegant
and convincing: “Why would I fuss with Canada, when I haven’t even read _______
[some American poet]? I’ll come ’round to Canada later.” Also, many American
poets have a certain amount of resentment towards Canadians, on account of the
way the ones who come down here almost always parade their scorn of US
backwardness and obnoxiousness (which would be fine, except they act like they
don’t expect you to agree).
But here is precisely where I take my first step through the back window and into the kitchen sink. Listen: There is no actual reason to
think of Canada as a separate country. Thinking of Canada as a separate country is like thinking
of the states of New York and Pennsylvania as separate. You can, if you insist, but the warrant
for doing it is slender. Who in the world is gonna stop her ears and say,
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna know what’s going on in Philadelphia; I’ll get
to Philly after I’m done with the rest of the US….” (I deploy {PA + NY} as my
example here because those two states’ combined populations = the total
population of Canada. Plus most of Canada’s people live right there in that
zone anyhow.)
—But here’s the clincher.—Go back to Concepts 1 and 2. Admit it: you are a social reader. You can’t get enough of charting
the cliques: the Cool Kids, the Freak Shows, the People Who Can’t Write for
Shit but Are Total Babes—OK, then! there’s this whole other neighborhood you
haven’t been to yet…. It’s right there across the street, and you’re putting off
checking it out ’cuz you’re silly!
I’m not saying Canada is this golden Shangri-la where
exciting things are happening, 24/7. No, the whole beauty of what I’m driving
at is precisely that Canada represents more of the same of what we already got,
down here—more Cool Kids, more Freaks, more friends, more everything! You can’t
get enough, right? You wanna know all there is to know, right? Well….
FOURTH AND FINAL CONCEPT. Daoism. I have in mind, in particular, the emphasis in the
Daodejing on “actionless activity”—and stealth. You probably see where I’m
going with this.
The Canadians don’t need to know about any of this
plan. We will simply
annex them, mentally. We’ll quietly start reading them, and caring about them,
and reviewing them. We should submit to their online journals. We need to know
what those journals are.
Again: There is no need to announce. Indeed, we want it to
go down such that “when our work is done, our task accomplished, throughout the
country, people will say it happened of its own accord” (Daodejing 17).
My brothers and sisters, join me in this. Go, reread the
Daodejing and let us march upon the Canadians with our minds. They cannot
resist us if we have the Dao on our side.
This is perhaps my favorite piece of conceptual writing.
***
Over the weekend I found myself in the judges' room for a
high school Speech & Debate final (true story!). I asked one of the English
teachers there whether poetry was a hard sell to her students, thinking I
suppose of the oft-stated consensus that of all the genres poetry's the most
resistant, the least popular, the swath of the textbook one rushes past to get
to the plotty parts. "Not at all," she said, whether because they
thrive on its intensity or simply through their tech- & hip-hop-enabled
comfort with compression and linguistic multifariousness. “The problem is
novels. It’s very hard to convince them that reading anything lengthy is
worthwhile.”
***
What the villagers call that empty space of weeds, that
grove or knoll where my mother was baptized. Not __________, but ___________.
Not церква but коcтьол, kościół, the word in the banished
tongue.
Shibboleth? [can’t
hear you.]
Ear of corn? [can’t
make out the word.]
She coughs. The body’s own water pools in the crevice of her
clavicle. The wind ripples the lake so shallow now that no fish can winter
there.
In addition to writing some of the most singular books of
poetry of the last decade (2002’s O
Cidadán, 2009’s Expeditions of a
Chimaera with Oana Avasilichioaei, 2010’s O Resplandor, among others), Moure has published translations of
the equally uncategorizable Galician poet Chus Pato, as well as a brilliant
translation/reimagination of O Guardador
de Rebanhos by Fernando Pessoa, or by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa
famously recalibrated the task of the poet as the creation of personae rather
than poems, conjuring the myriad personalities who then undertook the labor of
drafting the writings associated with his name.
Moure gives the adventure of Pessoan heteronymity a
political and sociolinguistic spin; as the above passage suggests, her work
crosses and recrosses geographic and linguistic boundaries as it details its
author’s encounters with real and imagined figures and events. Pato figures
tangentially as a correspondent, while more central is the elusive Elisa
Sampedrin, an authorial alter ego who appeared previously in O Resplandor. Sampedrin reflects upon
Moure as Moure reflects upon the dark history that sent her own mother from the
Ukraine to Canada in the first half of the last century.
Naturally enough, both Moure’s champions and her detractors
tend to frame her work in relation to the post-structuralist theory that has
informed avant-garde writing for almost two generations now. One will encounter
citations of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in her writing, and the
passage above with its fragmentation and erasures invites assimilation to the
familiar gestures of language and post-language writing.
But the heteronym is both an anticipation of and a deviation
from the vertiginous deconstructions of later theory. Pessoa’s writings offer
us a vision of identity plural and dispersed, circulating through the
linguistic productions of a system of personae. But through imaginative
investment the counterfeit becomes real, accruing an undeniable particularity.
In Moure’s work, as well, the destabilization of identities and unsettling of
comfortable reading habits goes hand-in-hand with the production of new and exhilarating
reading possibilities, generated out of the incessant layering of linguistic
strata, and thereby new existential possibilities. As Johanna Skibsrud puts it
in an unusually perceptive reading of Moure, “hers is not an interest in
language as a fact in itself..equally her intention is not to arrive at a sense
of greater senselessness. Moure’s poetry is instead interested precisely in the
‘explosivity across membranes’ that E.S. represents in The Unmemntioable.”
What Moure’s work seems to call out for (and what Skibsrud’s
reading to some degree attains) is a criticism that can trace out its processes
of destabilization and reconfiguration. In particular, her writing manifests a
kind of self-consciousness often associated with the “metafictional,” but which
is intensified and qualitatively altered through the medium of lyric, as well
as via her text’s multilingual slippages. So much of contemporary writing is
sick with knowingness; Moure’s signal achievement is to parry the inescapable
reflexivity of her poetry with a countervailing urge to unknowing.
***
This fall, Wave Books will publish the collection Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, which I
edited. Among other pieces, the book contains the entirety of Lax’s 1962
collection New Poems, which I consider
one of the underread gems of 20th-century American poetry. Here’s
one poem from that collection:
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
How do you read
a poem like this? How do you know when you’re finished with it?
One’s inner cynic might answer that it’s pretty easy to
read, and even easier to be finished with. (Criticism often seems to launch
from the premise that the poem is guilty until proven innocent, as though never
being taken in is the highest virtue.)
“My kid could do that,” is the old and shamelessly
philistine way of attacking art that dispenses with traditional conventions;
variations on it persist in museums and journals to this day. To which Lax’s
longtime friend Ad Reinhardt would respond, “Your kid must be a genius!” &
he or she probably is.
Well readers, tonight is my last post and I’m writing about writing communities.
I never realized how important having a writing community was until I didn’t have one anymore. I started my MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College right after I graduated from my BA at SUNY Binghamton in 2002. I was 22 and eager to study with one of my favorite poets, Marie Howe.
That fall, I expected to be among many other fresh-faced college grads ready to start their MFA’s, but I wasn’t. To my surprise, most of my classmates were at least 5-10 years older than me, (some even older than that) and I felt like the odd one out. It didn’t make things any better that I had a job three days a week in Manhattan and couldn’t stay late on campus even if I had wanted to. Living at home on Long Island, helped me out financially, but being on campus only two days a week created a disconnect. I didn’t quite realize it until I stood at graduation with my graduating class and realized I barely had anyone to talk to.
I graduated in 2004, and moved out of my parents’ house and into Manhattan. Over the next 4-5 years, I worked full time and did a second Masters in English Education at Hunter College. I was barely writing. When I did I write, It was awful and I just wasn’t motivated. I chose to be out with friends, rather than being alone at my desk. I didn’t even know why I called myself a “poet.” I barely sent poems out to magazines and I barely went to literary readings.
Todd Swift's work is as playful as serious work gets to be. Nothing is labored; the poet's pleasure principle matches that of his readers. He has a swift wit capable of savage laceration. He sneaks in crafty literary allusions when you don't expect them and is far from a gullible traveler.
An outsider even at home, he stands at an unusual tilt to the universe. Being a Canadian in London in the year 2011 is a different proposition from being an American in Paris in 1950, but it has its own charms and perils. In an image that suggests the broad historical and wide geographical context for these poems, the peripatetic poet suspects that wherever he goes, "Fear [will] set up its beachhead / Turning a sandy honeymoon into D-Day."
"England is Mine" is an arresting title. It reminds me a little of "England Your England" (Orwell), "England Made Me" (Graham Greene), and W. H. Auden's question in "The Orators": "What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?" Swift's title also benefits from the homophone that is its last syllable: "England is mind." To write about England as imagined and then as found is a romantic project, and for all the comic energy in his poems, Swift is a romantic poet, writing in the shadow of Yeats ("we were the last romantics") on the one side and Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin, the poets of disappointment, on the other.
The exemplary title poem begins by donning Larkin's bicycle clips "down the hill to Hull" and progresses through quaint images (Pimm's, the "Hardy-grey" sky, Jack the Ripper, and bobby's your unarmed uncle) to arrive at an idea of "England" that owes as much to preconception and illusion as to invention or perception.
In disjunction Swift finds a certain poignancy. The word "Go" begins one of his poems but is separated by a line space and a parenthesis from "the cherry blossoms" -- as if the poem were ruefully aware of Edmund Waller's "Go, lovely rose" as an antecedent, an irresistible anachronism.
In another mode entirely, Swift makes empathetic use of the first-person-plural:
Employed or freelance we stand alone Enjoying June tea and this promised sun, Because inside is darker, dustier and more about What's been than what's to come.
Swift loves words and they love him back. When I read his poems, I feel like pulling out my notebook and writing a poem. Every time. He proves that inspiration is contagious
In the January 2011 issue of Harper’s, Philip Lopate writes eloquently, as ever, about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals, recently published in twovolumes by the Library of America. I’m always happy when anyone mentions Emerson, especially at length. While Mr. Lopate more or less gets it right (or as right as one can in a 6-page magazine article), I take issue with one statement: “Still, I sense a resistance to Emerson on the part of the young, a falling out of fashion.”
When, back in the early 1970s, when Harold Bloom published his essay on "The Sorrows of Jewish American Poetry," a spate of letters protested that the Yale professor had underrated various contenders. Here is what Leon Slonim of Toronto wrote:
<< Were it not for the fact that A. M. Klein comes from supposedly provincial Canada, he would long ago have received the recognition he deserves, as “the most distinguished Jewish poet writing in English in this century.” >>
Having read and loved some of Klein's poems, I am eager to read more and to learn more about this Montreal-based poet. Readers in the know, please respond. -- DL
From a distance, Britain (the UK), can appear a weird place – especially these days. It’s just had a week of travel chaos with its skies completely shut down due to an Icelandic volcano. It is in the midst of a major election (to be decided in 12 days) that has been wildly galvanised by its first ever leaders debate on television (!). And one of its most popular TV shows is (still) Doctor Who, about an undying eccentric “time lord”. Current hit records include Kate Nash’s “My Best Friend Is You” where a chirpy British lass writes about sex and dating in frank terms, and Paul Weller (of The Jam) wanting to “Wake Up The Nation”.
Britain has been slow to come out of the recession, and, with its youth knife crime, wildly drunken villages and inner cities, class divides (whole swathes of the population still can’t easily access college education), and obsession with celebrity (especially overpaid footballers and size-zero models and starlets) is sometimes called Broken Britain. For others, like Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, richer than Prince Harry, Britain seems to be working just fine. It’s been observed that America and England are divided by a common language, and, as Hugh Kenner was one of the first critics to point out, the British love-affair with international modernism in art and poetry was of limited duration, to say the least.
Charles Bernstein and John Ashbery are coterie poets here, read by few and feared by most who do read them – let alone Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams. Few American (or Canadian) poets are published in the UK. There is a sense of isolation, even xenophobia, in some poetry quarters – and why not? The popular Tory party wants to pull out of membership in Europe. This is a kingdom united, more often than not, in the idea of its superior difference.
A Spanish man who rides the métro daily, open-palmed, delivering a discourse on his
poverty, puts his face to the chimpanzee’s glass.
To be in there. Warm hay and tires,
oranges, and look how the mother presses the young
one close.
If he took this city by the neck and shook, would the strand break, pearls roll into corners?
The métro runs under, faces he could spend an hour watching if the earth were made of glass.
Stephanie Bolster edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Molly Peacock, series editor). Published in The Antigonish Review #135, Autumn 2003, as part of “Ménagerie du
Jardin des Plantes,” a series of nine linked poems, "Comfort" will appear in Stephanie Bolster's new book,A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, due out from Brick Books in 2011.
The unicorn made of stitches by hands by the thousands of hours in Ghent or Bruges or possibly
years. The unicorn held in a ring of pickets his beard and buckled collar and blood
where they caught him. All around the flowers with the names of
Venetian glass the hellebore and unbidden berries. All
around a place they went to day and night the candles
straining the eyes. Skin softened by wool the sheep in the
field the wolf. At this great distance the horn is the
pinnacle as tall as the beast is rampant its tip a
single thread squinted over an instant still flinching.
Poem of the Week, Canada’s
poet laureate’s website (http://www.parl.gc.ca/poet) on 28 May 2007 (Ottawa, Ontario).
Stephanie Bolster edited the 2008 edition of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. Her new book, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, is due out from Brick Books in 2011.
