1.
I have this idea for a new kind of review. Call it a “gallery” review. Just a long list of quotations, individual lines mostly. Maybe a few two-fers and three-fers. At any rate: the best lines from the book, cherry-picked and re-typed by the reviewer. No commentary at all.
I’m prompted to this idea by the fact I’ve been doing it for years with my friends. It’s the first thing I do when anybody sends me their manuscript, if I’m giving it a good read. I read the thing, and underline all the good stuff (using a ruler and a light green pen), and then I assemble a long email, retyping all the best bits. Sometimes those little galleries are so exhilarating, they’re well worth sending to other people besides the poet. I’ve sent my “58 Bits from Robert Fernandez’s We Are Pharaoh” to at least four people besides Robert.
This kind of review wouldn’t be for everybody. Some citizens just got to have that analysis. Got to have that graduate-student, name-checking prose.
Me, I just go by good lines anyway. Actually, now I think of it, Auden says almost the exact same thing somewhere. That the quotes in a review are usually the only part worth reading, if you’re trying to actually get anywhere. Must be in The Dyer’s Hand. At any rate, now that everything’s online, isn’t the thing I’m calling for rather tenable? There are no spatial limitations on the internet.
2.
Another good idea. A kind of hybrid poetry manual that would be partly poetics and partly Kama Sutra. A hodgepodge of tips for writing good poetry, mixed up with tips for appreciating each other’s good looks and getting each other off. The two themes should be treated as if they are absolutely equivalent, same exact status—almost as if they are the same topic throughout.
This is a good idea. And, you know, they actually did have books like that in medieval India. I’m thinking of those collections of erotic epigrams, where it’s thing after thing after thing about bodies, and then there’ll be one like this:
The gold of poetry
gets smelted and refined
from the speech of
unreflective men.
Let us go
cheerfully among them
with poised minds.*
(*Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, trans. Andrew Schelling. Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1991. Page 45. The poem is credited to Varahamihira.)
3.
I have an emendation suggestion. Marvell’s “The Garden.” Look at this stanza:
When we have run our passion’s heat
Love hither makes his best retreat:
The gods, who mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race;
Apollo hunted Daphne so
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
Do you get that? Marvell’s being witty. Apollo ran after Daphne, not so he could have her, but so she would turn into a laurel. He wanted the laurel. And Pan didn’t want the girl; he wanted the reeds (so he could make his little Peruvian flute thing). Get it? Marvell’s playfully driving home the idea that plants are better than people.
Good. But look at that last line. Shouldn’t it be “not FOR a nymph, but for a reed”—? Every time a new edition of Marvell comes out, I check to see if the editor has anything to say about this. Nothing ever happens. I’ve never seen it printed any other way besides the way I have it, above.
Am I looking at it wrong? I can’t see how “as” works there at all. Surely Marvell wrote “for.” (Comment stream’s open, nerds. I wanna hear somebody defend that “as.”)
4.
Speaking of emendation suggestions. My student Margaret Kuchler had a lot to say about how to fix up “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” She had to memorize it for school (she’s sixteen), and was quite insistent that the alterations supplied by her struggling memory pretty much carried the authority of Poetic Truth. And they did. Look at these lines:
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done . . .
Maggie was all, “Had got no business being there—not ‘to be there’. ‘To be there’ is sickening and wrong….”
She had a lot of these. Four out of five of ’em were spot-on. Sometimes she didn’t know what to do to fix the lines; she just knew she disapproved. Anyway, of course I did not withhold from the child my theory that what she was doing is the Right Way to correct verses….
APHORISM: Memory is the better poet.
Greetings, Mr. Madrid. I will take the bait, and defend "And Pan did after Syrinx speed / Not as a nymph, but for a reed." First and foremost, it wants to make sense and it does; or, it makes the sense it wants to make; or, again, it offers the sense it wants us to make of it. I'd add to your reading the suggestion that the gods have foreknowledge of these metamorphoses (in fact, they directly or indirectly cause them), but they pursue love (or, as we read this today, they stalk it) anyway—they play the game. You skip to the utility, the clever turn: beauty becomes song (or the means of song, or the ends). (Of course, the glory belongs to Marvell, who takes Appollo's laurel.) OK. Let's assume, though, that Marvell wrote "as" in that last line. Or do we need to read it as "for" in order to read the poem as we have? Actually, if we read the stanza's transformations in terms of an objectification of love (and the "hunted"—yikes!—loved one), "as" makes good sense. Pan wants to use the nymph as a reed. He does not pursue her "as" a nymph; he pursues her "for" her reediness [ima read ima reed ima read]. Furthermore, the language change (from "as" to "for") reflects the linguistic metamorphosis of "nymph" to "reed." What would Syrinx have to say about this? Maybe: Blow me, Pan.
Posted by: Jeff T. Johnson | May 13, 2012 at 11:49 AM
i LOVE the quotations idea OMG but i'm coming back to try to defend the AS after i celebrate mother's day.
Posted by: lucy | May 13, 2012 at 11:49 AM
Just to repeat, more flatly and dully, JTJ's point.
Apollo pursued Daphne for the laurels she would be come, Pan pursued Syrinx for the flute she would become. Neither wanted nymph as nymph. One so that she would grow into a tree, the other for the reed...
God pursues girl, god loses girl, god gets garden.
Posted by: jsc | May 13, 2012 at 12:05 PM
Gotta say, cut through JTJ's self-satisfied patter, he's got a point, & so does JSC. I'm convinced, pardner. Sorry.
Posted by: Michael Robbins | May 14, 2012 at 01:13 AM
I have to admit, sadly, that I didn't even understand how "as" was possible before, and now I do. It still sounds like hell to me, but.
Listen, I'll tell you what I told Kateri. My deal is I can't shake my grammatical intuition that when you say something like "I spoke to her as a friend," it is surely *you* who are being the friend. So when the lines say Pan chased after Syrinx "not as a nymph," I'm like, Well, duh! why would he want to take on the form of a nymph and then chase her?
I know, I know . . .
"He chased after her, not {insofar as she was} a nymph, but {because he wanted} a reed." Got it, got it.
I still think the {for/for} version is better, though.
Posted by: Anthony Madrid | May 14, 2012 at 02:57 AM
oh yeah, what he said.
i might also add that it's pretty random what sounds funny or wrong to our ears or senses of grammar. e.g., like to the lark at break of day arising; shall i compare thee TO a summer's day, etc. Maybe if a poem was written by a copy editor, it might be interesting to consider the meanings of commas, etc.; but poets and editors of poetry are/were generally such poor copy editors that (as a former copy editor), I would go insane if I read poetry with these kinds of copy-editing concerns in mind.
Posted by: Lucy | May 14, 2012 at 01:25 PM
It's Cioran, says the thing about quotes is what's good to read...
Posted by: I. | May 15, 2012 at 02:41 AM
So A . . . I've been thinking a lot about the erotics of Marvell's Georgics, and have decided that in addition to what you and JTJ and JSC say is going on, what "not as a Nymph" also gets you is a kind of literalism--Pan doesn't want the female body, he wants to fuck natural objects. Earlier in the poem, apples drop themselves upon the speaker’s head; nectarines and peaches crush themselves upon his mouth. This is a compensatory fantasy in which natural objects—unlike woman, unlike one’s readers—capitulate, unbidden, to the speaker’s desires. The eroticism of the poem is ecological: sex with fruit, and grass and trees. “Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass” (l. 39-40). What do you think? --Sandra
Posted by: Sandra | May 16, 2012 at 10:20 AM
(What I meant by pointing to lines 39-40 is that this scene is consistent with the later inversion of Ovidian myth--the desire FOR trees and reeds. It's a kind of rape scene: the flowers fell/fuck the speaker, the speaker falls on/fucks the grass.) Is this nerdy enough for ya?
Posted by: Sandra | May 16, 2012 at 10:59 AM
Hmm. I feel like it's misleading to say Marvell wants to fuck the stuff! I mean, *kinda*. But isn't it more like he's saying the peach and the melons and the grass are actually *better* than sex? His whole drift is "What do we need sex for when we have nature?" How paltry kisses are, compared to that peach, etc.
Pan and Apollo, too. They don't wanna screw. They want reeds and leaves. ’Cuz reeds and leaves are nice! They trip you up? No matter, they catch you softly. No rape here. Rape is what happens over there in Ickyland where you have to deal with real women.
Anyway, such is my reading of this upside-down poem.
Posted by: Anthony Madrid | May 16, 2012 at 11:11 AM
I wrote a long blah blah blah in response. Shorter version is: I agree with you. Natural objects are preferable to human ones. Question is: why? how? I don't know how one can write eroticism--the pastoral and Ovidian erotics of the hunt--out of Marvell's substitutions. Long version has to do with georgic as the genre of motivity, pastoral of quiescence, Marvellian allegory as committed to a horizontalizing of the relationship between (human) tenor and (non-human) vehicle. See? Blah, blah, blah.
Posted by: Sandra | May 16, 2012 at 12:42 PM
But see, I still think you're resisting the spirit of the thing! You're wanting sex to be The Thing, primary. If he falls on the grass, it's really sex. But Marvell's whole deal is about turning that worldview upside down. Sex is off yonder and it's no damn good. Right here where it's green you get all the sensual delight (and even play!) you could possibly ask for. Part of his point is that not all amorous delight has to come out as sex.
For sure you know Žižek's joke about how somebody was telling him that if he (Žižek) didn't want to share his Chinese food at a restaurant, that was because he didn't want to share his lover's body with other people. Žižek wanted to know why it cdn't be understood the other way on: He doesn't wanna share the lover's body because he doesn't wanna share the Chinese food.
Same kinda reversal going on in Marvell. *You would think* the garden is just a consolation prize, but it is The Thing. Sex is the pale substitute.
(Wait, is this one of those deals where we're both saying the same thing, and I'm just being dense?)
Posted by: Anthony Madrid | May 16, 2012 at 01:21 PM