Of poetry, Marianne Moore famously wrote: “I, too, dislike
it.” I wonder what she might have said about poetry readings? Moore herself
was, I think, a charming reader, but, like her poems, also idiosyncratic.
Sometimes the recording is at fault (I have a copy of a reading she gave at the
92nd Street Y with W. H. Auden that is grainy and hard to hear), but
sometimes it’s just the way she reads—too quickly in spots, without careful articulation.
Still, it is breathtaking to hear her voice. Hearing poets read can tell you so much about their work that you might not ever catch on the
page. I remember understanding (I mean really getting, on a musical level) for the first time the
polyvocal nature of so many of James Merrill's poems when I actually heard him do all of
the voices. (I also learned that he liked to wear violet socks and Birkenstocks
with his blue blazer.)
Some poets are extremely fine readers of their own
work—Auden (though I know some folks disagree), Larkin and Bishop (both marvellous, sounding exactly as you’d expect), Geoffrey Hill (simultaneously plummy and
fierce), Brooks (delightfully musical), and Berryman (growly and antic).
Some poets are bizarre readers of there own work, but great fun to
hear nonetheless—Eliot (so Anglican), Cummings (so Unitarian), and Ginsberg, so wacked out and hip, as
in this clip of a poem he wrote while on LSD read to William F. Buckley
on Firing Line:
But many poets fail to do justice to their own work—far too many
to mention in fact. You will know immediately the kind of thing I mean—when, for example, instead of using the natural music of speech they trot out their “poetry voice.”
It’s what G. Burns Cooper, in his book Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse, calls the Generic American
Poetry Contour: “a slight but sustained rise at the end of
each line or intonation phrase.” (Hat tip to Natalie Gerber!) It's aternately painfuland hilarious to listen to. Image if Frost read that way:
gold
Nature’s first green is
hold.
Her hardest hue to
flower;
Her early leaf’s a
hour.
But only so an
The up-rising lilt is often accompanied by a breathiness that signals the numinosity of "poetry." The problem is not just that this way of reading creates an
irritating repetition in the vocal music; it’s that this arbitrary vocal
pattern actually obscures the meaning for the listener by disregarding what Frost called “the sound of sense” (though Frost had something even more
profound in mind). As Frost famously explained in an interview with the critic
William Stanley Braithwaite, originally published in the Boston Evening Transcript for May 8, 1915:
Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [ . .
prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not
understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who
are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but
whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the
sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation.
This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it in
another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each
individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of
the exact words that are being used is able to under stand the thought, idea,
or emotion that is being conveyed.
Frost worked to get the sounds of sense and of sentence
sounds into his writing. What I’m suggesting is that poets should work to preserve the sound of sense in thier performance of the poem (as a generosity to the listener, if nothing else).
The first thing to consider is how sound and sense are linked inextricably--like love and marrage, you can't have one without the other. Listen to this speech from Richard
II performed by Richard Burton:
No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
What Burton, like all of the greatest Shakespearean actors,
does so brilliantly is guide us though the complicated syntax of Shakespeare’s
verse with his voice. Where he means to continue the thought, he raises the pitch
of his voice to signal there is more to come. When he wants to let us know that
a thought is coming to an end, he drops his voice down to a full stop. (Then there is the brilliant calrity of "How some have been deposed; some slain in war,/ Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;/ Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd," each phrase lightly stair-stepping down in tone to indicate a list, then ending on the lowest tone with "murder'd"--full stop.)
All of us do this
quite naturally when we speak. We all know how to convey the sounds of grammar
and syntax with our voices. Conversation would be virtually impossible otherwise. When, however, we fall into the Generic American Poetry Contour, the sense is lost to our listeners. (And, remember, at a reading we only have
one fleeting chance to get the sense across!)
Hamlet’s advice still rings true: o'erstep not the modesty of nature. Simply speak the speech. Do less. Just
talk. To someone. As if your life depended on it. That's all.
(Tune in tomorrow for
“Speak the Speech, Part II”)
Note: I currently teach classes in performing poetry at the
92nd Street Y in New York, the West Chester Poetry Conference (scroll down), and
the MFA program at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, CO, in July. (The latter two are
currently accepting students!)
I like E. A. Robinson. I really do. No, I mean it. I really
like his stuff much of the time. Especially the lyrics. The long poems, not so
much (except maybe as sleep aids).
Well, anyway, I want to like him a lot, but sometimes I get put off by
a certain tone of . . . what? Fustiness?
Creakiness?
More and more, I’m realizing, though, that it is not always
Robinson’s voice I am hearing in the poems, or not just his voice. The more I think about his poems—such as “Reuben
Bright” and “Richard Cory”—the more I begin to understand the dramatic nature
of his work. (The dramatic element in lyric poetry is something I’ve been
interested in for a while now, and you can read more about that here. I hope that
this post might serve as an extension of some of the ideas put forward in that
earlier essay.)
For my money, “Eros Turannos” is Robinson’s greatest poem.
(This is just me talkin’ here.) I love that poem deeply and unequivocally, and
I’ve always admired Yvor Winters’s take on it, as adopting the music of W. M.
Praed’s vers de société for tragic ends. (In fact, more successfully
than Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge,
the poem uses the conventions of Greek tragedy to elevate its subject to
devastating dramatic effect.)
The poem is a love story as Gothic horror tale. A woman’s
fear of growing old alone is greater than her fear of a man she knows deep down
she should refuse. The result is a loveless union, isolation, confusion, and
despair. The poem ends with these two stanzas:
We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,—
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen,—
As if we guessed what hers have been
Or what they are, or would be.
Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea,
Where down the blind are driven.
The “we” is a choral voice (a dramatic voice!) that Robinson
uses often and which lends his poetry its particular social cast. Here is how the poet
and critic D. H. Tracy describes the effect, from an essay in Contemporary
Poetry Review:
Robinson’s use of the choral presence is innovative and, in
its particular form, remains strikingly rare. It came to him early but not
always easily: the drafts of “Eros Turannos” show that the fifth stanza, where
the “we” is introduced, went through the most revisions. The Robinsonian
“we” is not simply a means of lending generality to discourse or speculation,
or a casual way of implicating the reader. It is not the French on. It
has an understanding of its point of view, as a point of view, and is capable
of distinguishing itself from omniscience. It does not exist to characterize
itself, as in certain dramatic monologues, but to characterize another. It
would seem intuitive to a playwright, I think, but in poetry in English there
is little of it or anything like it—perhaps in Stevie Smith, or James Weldon
Johnson’s “Brothers—American Drama.” Robinson’s insight into the possibilities
of choral pronouncement arises from a serious consideration of what our
collective being is and how individual lives acquire and lose meaning in it. .
. .”
Really brilliant, this. And a real key to Robinson’s poems.
In fact, it was when I began thinking about the choral voice in Robinson that I
came to better understand one of Robinson’s most burnished chestnuts, “Richard
Cory,” a poem that I respected but never truly warmed to.
BAPsters will, of course, know the poem, but here it
is for reference:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
What has always bothered me about this poem was how
seemingly pat its theme was, i.e., Ah, life! How sad that even the man who has
everything in the eyes of the world cannot be happy with his lot. It seemed not
so much tragic as moralizing somehow, and this pat theme seemed to me to dampen
its humanity.
The poem has always been popular (Robinson, remember, was awarded three Pulitzers, only one fewer than Frost!), adapted as a
folk song by Simon and Garfunkel:
But I, I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.
The S&G version actually gets at something vital about
the poem (though it in no way rivals the beauty of Robinson’s verse-making—song
lyrics are a different sort of thing). The chorus is sung from the point of
view of a townsperson of Tillbury, the imagined village (based on Gardiner,
Maine), where many of his poems are set. (The "I" takes on a choral quality, sung in harmony by S and G.)
(I am told that Robinson once lived in this bell tower overlooking Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.)
In fact, I see now the poem is far more tragic and horrible
than I first imagined, and the way in to this new, darker understanding is through the choral voice in the poem. Look at the nasty stuff the townspeople say:
We people on the pavement looked at him
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
Then consider the tone of: “And he was rich – yes, richer
than a king.” Hear the bitter dig behind the repetition and that word king? Dang! If I was Richard Cory and
everyone’s envious eyes (the eyes of the world!) were on me all the time, I might not make a good end either.
Tracy’s observation about Robinson's poems implicating the reader is exactly right: we are the “We.”
We drove Richard Cory to this. Just as we (the town, society) helped drive the blinded
woman down the steps at the end of "Eros Turannos" (or so, I believe, it is suggested).
Or like a stairway to the sea,
Where down the blind are driven.
Driven down by themselves? Perhaps. But we are the abettors.
Robinson's poems are about us every bit as much as they are about these sorry denizens of the Vacation State.
Robinson, it turns out, was a freaking genius of poetry's dramatic context, if only we
tune our ears to hear it. I knew I liked him. But, now, like one of the Tillburyites who envied Richard Cory, I hate him, too.
How’re things? By me they’re pretty good. The sun, of late, has brightened my cold dark heart a bit, let a little light into the eternal dungeon of the winter's mind. I’ve got some seeds and seedlings into our patch of dirt: broccoli, tomatoes, scallions, basil, eggplant, corn, and I’m looking forward to the tending as much as the eventual harvest. Today is chilly and dim with laden clouds, but for the gardener, rain takes on a sweeter threat.
I’m offering today a poem by Mark Bibbins whose fabulous books are Sky Lounge and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. I love this one because it looks at a city with the smart eyes of someone who has seen it change, and changed with it.
Apology to This Neighborhood, the Two Before, the Next
Hipsters get to say
at least I’m not trendy
and the trendy turn
it around and they’re
right too. People go
to nightclubs. They
stand outside, freezing,
wearing more perfume than
clothing, and shriek until
the cops come on
horseback and close
down the street. Insert
terrible things here about
we all get what someone
else pays for. Too bad
I never cared enough
about Chelsea
but nobody could
have made it better
than Schuyler anyway
so why bother. Yes
we’re part of the problem
wherever we go
and it’s the only way
we manage to be punctual,
showing up just in time
for the real decline.
- Mark Bibbins
One reason it is good to be older is that the history of places runs through your mind when you walk around, especially if you live in a city like New York that changes all the time. Of course it’s hard to see Chelsea no longer what Chelsea used to mean, and the East Village no longer what the East Village used to be, but it is good to know the morphing pulse of the city you live in. As they often do, Bibbins’s poem here has a comical voice and weary eyes, and a wise awareness of what his own presence brings to the place he is discussing, even to the point of our showing up bringing on the final real decline -- but we know it’s not all decline since it’s a good thing the poet showed up.
My camera broke last year and I didn’t replace it until recently. I put the old memory card into the new body and there were pictures from a year ago and the kids were smaller and all the objects in the house were shifted. Time is a crazy arrow. Nothing to do but cultivate the garden and try to not let the world whittle you down as you go.
Courage my friends! Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.
Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman
Will Schutt's first manuscript, Westerly, was chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2012 Yale Younger Prize. The bookis forthcoming in April, 2013 from Yale University Press. Schutt's poems and translations have appeared in Agni, FIELD, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oberlin College and Hollins University, he lives with his wife in Wainscott, New York.
Michael Klein's books of poetry include then, we were still living, Track Conditions, The End of Being Known, and 1990, which tied with James Schuyler for the 1993 Lambda Literary Award. He has also edited Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, winner of the Lambda Book Award), Things Shaped in Passing, and In the Company of My Solitude. His new book of poems, The Talking Day, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013. He teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington and is on the faculty of the summer program at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
George Jones, who died this past Friday at age 81, had long been lauded as one of the greatest voices in country music history. He was also, along with Hank Williams, one of country music's most cautionary tales, with a history of alcoholism, substance abuse, marital woes, and career mismanagement that would have forced a lesser man into early retirement or (as in the case of Hank) an early death. Unlike Williams, Jones was never a great songwriter; he was a great interpreter of others' songs. He was very much a contradictory artist: A loner who did some of his best work in collaboration with another singer -- Tammy Wynette (his ex-wife) and Melba Montgomery most notably. And all of the problems that dogged him whenever he didn't appear onstage (which was frequent enough to earn him the nickname "No-Show Jones"), vanished when he was in thrall to his own gift, in performance, at one with the baleful sentiments he sang. He was hard on himself in every sense, and always carried with his toughness and stubbornness an air of hangdog shame, as though he felt destined to be the fool, not the master, of his life.
Jones was one of the most self-conscious, for good and ill, of great American artists. He knew his gift, he knew it wasn't so much his voice as his phrasing that was the genius part ('s why he could redeem so many lesser lyrics). But the clenched-jaw delivery can also serve as synecdoche for a man frozen, trapped: trapped by his feelings of inferiority, the unwarranted shame he felt about his class, the paralyzing sting of those in mainstream music industry who never recognized him fully, for the cruelty of country radio for abandoning him when he still had something to give. People of privilege sometimes don't understand why an artist can start to self-destruct when he feels resentment, abandonment, false praise instead of the kind of praise and appreciation of his gifts he knew he was owed. (And I'm talking about the whole arc of his career, not just the final years.) "No-Show" was a fond joke barely concealing a different diagnosis: an addictive, isolating personality that could not achieve enough comfort in his own skin. All of which makes the best music that he leaves behind more precious.
This week we welcome back David Yezzi as our guest blogger. David’s
books of poems include Azores (2008), a Slate magazine best book of the year,
and Birds of the Air (2013). His work
has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry (2006 &
2012), The Paris Review Book, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Poetry
Speaks Who I Am, and Bright Wings. He is editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American
Poets (foreword by J. D.
McClatchy) and executive editor of The New Criterion.
He is currently writing a biography of the poet Anthony Hecht for St. Martin’s
Press. Read the New York Times review of Birds of the Airhere. Read the Publishers Weekly review here. Welcome, David.
I
asked Julie Carr, who is thoroughly launched as a poet, how she would feel
about being a poet if her work had never been published. Because that does happen to some of us. Julie wrote this:
*
* *
How would my writing have been different
if I’d never been published?
This is a very difficult question to
consider, since of course I have been published. I can’t honestly imagine an
alternate history for myself, so instead I will say what being published has meant
to me.
First, it has meant that some older
poets whose work I admired and in some cases loved recognized something in my
writing that they felt they wanted to support. This recognition has been
invaluable, for I don’t, in writing poetry, seek a large audience of strangers.
I seek, instead, to be part of a conversation that matters a great deal to me.
Publishing is like being welcomed into the room, into the conversation, and
that feeling of belonging has been important to me, as it is to anyone in any sphere
of life.
Publishing a book also means I feel free
to begin a new book. If the books remain unfinished, unread, unbound, they
continue hanging around. I continue wondering if they are complete, if they’ve
done whatever it was I hoped they would do. Once out in the world in that
certifiable “finished” form, I can more or less forget about them – I can shift
my attention, feel my interests sway, take on new concerns and new forms. This,
of course, is exciting for me. It keeps my relationship to the art alive.
But there is another way in which
publishing allows the books to have a new life – a life off the page. Reading
from them, performing them in a sense, allows me to transform them into another
kind of communication. The relationship with an audience is one of shared
listening (I’m listening too as I read), and one of immediate exchange. Every
reading is, to some degree, an improvisation. And the factors that go into this
improvisation belong to everyone in the room. We are having some kind of experience
together, and I learn from it, feel it change me. This is also a way that
poetry stays vital, relevant, and present.
Of course not publishing could permit a
kind of privacy, important, perhaps, to some writers. I’ve never been, however,
the kind of writer that values being alone all that much. I’m interested in
writing as a social phenomenon. I never write alone, for there are always books
around me as I write. I’m listening to the words of others, to their rhythms,
their thoughts, their vocabularies. In some ways I feel that writing is the
most socially connected thing I do. Publishing is an extension of the
interaction that begins the moment I sit down at my table with a pile of books
on either side of me and a few on the floor. Sometimes I never open these books
– but they are always there, keeping me company as I speak with them.
I think if no one ever found my poetry
worthy of publishing, I would have done one of two things: I would have
published it myself or, more likely, I would have found a form that suited me
better. I used to be a dancer. I still consider myself some kind of performer.
If the writing of books had simply not worked out, I think I would have heard
that as an opportunity to discover other forms of art making that would. I
don’t really believe in failure for artists. I think we fail only when we set
our sights too narrowly. We fail ourselves by getting stuck on some vision of
the future that we’ve invented or inherited from the culture. There are many
ways to be an artist in the world. This is the one that makes sense for me
right now. I am sure, had I not found writing books to be functional, I would
have found another way. Making art of one kind or another is simply, for me, a
way of living. It is not a “skill” I “master” in order to “succeed.” It is a,
or the, process of living in a body with a mind.
*
* *
I
agree with Julie that publication is essential for a writer and that
self-publication is a viable option. I'm
not so sure that I myself could find another art. (I did try screenwriting, but that's another
story; anyway it didn't work out.) Creative
moments come to me in words and lines.
But I can think of a poet who became a dancer and another who became a
filmmaker.
Never
finding a publisher is unbelievably frustrating. And a waste of good poetry.
It's
also painful to read published work and to know one could do better than that,
than what somebody did for some reason decide to print.
Of
course many unpublished poems are just no good.
They get rejected and it hurts the poets but that's the end of it, or it
will be the end again. One pities
publishers' readers of unsolicited manuscripts—until they make a dumb mistake
and reject something fine. They are the
guards at the gateway to an audience in the present and maybe to the future,
and they might just not let you in. They
really do control literature, which generally consists of the "best"
of what gets published.
The
editors of magazines and the judges of contests have a terrible
responsibility. (Scholars do too, when
they uncover and edit a lost poet like Emily Dickinson—or translators when they
decide to work on a barely known novelist like Sadegh Hedayat or the once unknown
Alain Robbe-Grillet.) They give a
manuscript the chance to find many readers, to be in print, perhaps to be
remembered and reprinted. Or they reject
the manuscript and leave the writer wondering whether there is something wrong
with his or her work, commitment to poetry, hope to resonate with an audience,
and ambition.
I
was able to publish very few poems before my book Love If We Can Stand It, and they've already been forgotten. If my book had not been published, there
would have been something essential missing from my life. The poems would not have been finished, as Julie
says. But the way things nearly came
out, my only audience would have been the people at poetry readings, since
reading a poem to a group doesn't depend on the OK of an editor—though of
course even readings are administered, and one usually has to get on a list to
read.
But
some poets don't feel the need to share their work with a community or to see
their poems in print. They may get beaten
down by rejection slips or they may, as Julie notes, seek privacy. They may come to conceive their work as a
private concern.
Many
great singers never make records; they may not even try. They may prefer not to be bothered with all
the recording studios and crowds.
Emily
Dickinson called publication "the Auction / Of the Mind of Man" (poem
#709) and preferred to keep her poems in a drawer. We found out about her work only after she
was dead, but while she was alive she was just as much a poet as she is now, in
our imaginations and on our bookshelves, when we know what she was writing. She had a very limited audience if any, but
she wrote the poems. It may not have
bothered her (after a few tries) that her poems had no publisher, and she
probably felt glad that she didn't have to answer to an editor or to the
conventions of her time about dashes and capitalization. It helped her work that she wrote it for
herself.
If
you're never published, my advice is to remain a poet. Give readings. Self-publish if you can afford it. Publish online if you make sure your work is
copyrighted. Look into other media, like
audiobooks. Talk to other poets, make
connections. Enter contests—though
personally I never had any luck with them.
Query publishers. But keep doing
the writing. Someday somebody may want
the work you're doing now. If nobody
ever does, you'll still have had the satisfaction of making the poems and
getting them right. Remember that even
published poets leave unpublished poems when they die.
One
way to survive as a poet is to print your own work. Cal Kinnear once had a Hoe Washington press,
an old newspaper flatbed. He set the
type and chose the paper for the poem, sometimes issuing a poem at a time and
sometimes a collection. Les Gottesman
founded his own imprint, Omerta Press, and published 14 chapbooks (2006-12) before
Finishing Line Press took his first official book, Misuses of Poetry and other poems (2013), which ends:
Deal
The cosmos promises to
load my book
on the real hard drive.
Let's
hope so. I think it's what we all hope
for, and getting our poems printed and reviewed and read and remembered is one
way to get there. If Cal had his
printing press, Les had his inkjet printer and produced all the Omerta books
himself.
Les's
poems are funny and personal, sharp and obscure. His tightly arranged sounds and vivid words take
you somewhere but don't tell you where it is.
He's a grave jester with a speeding mind and a montage artist's control
of tone. Example:
Poems
A white hamburger led children to a
wall.
You had to be there in order to be
there.
Poems have changed
from schematic arbitrariness
to slutty impatience
like laws or cancer.
There's
some influence here from Koch and O'Hara, but it's Les's voice, his
pronouncement. Some of his poems are
readings of the world, some like the work of a prophet with no god:
Misuses of
Poetry
Jesus was right. The grammar I
undressed with my eyes had
already devised the emphatic predicate
of he-acts in space and she-acts at
the outer rings of time's
onion of conscious syrup that
the sentence wouldn't stop.
He
gets the immediate moment and can pile words like a Beat. He has published many individual poems in
magazines and online, but it takes a book of his poems to get the idea, to feel
who this Gottesman character is. The
Omerta chapbooks and the new book let one spend enough time with him, get a
sense of the worlds he builds—as in the ending of the prose poem "Day One
Two" from the Immortal Nails
chapbook:
Decisions are rented. Land is brought, and taken away. A man goes into a buried store.
The
Omerta books were distributed by the author.
In a while they'll be all kinds of collectible. But the new book, Misuses of Poetry, is available on
Amazon. And the next one will be
too: Les just won Tebot Bach's 2012
Clockwise Chapbook Competition for The
Cases (due in 2013).
Poetry
books that appeared in a few hundred copies used to have to find special
distributors. It was hard to get a book into
a store, and in fact it still is. It
helped that some bookstores focused on poetry (Cal ran one in Olympia called
Word of Mouth Books, one of the first bookstores where people could sit down
and read) or were known for their poetry sections. Amazon and its network of affiliated sellers
have made it much easier for a small edition to find readers, as long as it has
a publisher and an ISBN number. Cal's
new book, Shale Eyes (2012), is on
Amazon too, and so is mine, Love If We
Can Stand It (2012). Personally I'm
extremely glad that my book can be found in poetry bookstores as well as bought
online, and I'm glad that Amazon's "look inside" feature allows people
to read a lot of the book for free, almost as if they were browsing in a
bookstore.
Thanks
to Amazon and other retailers, it poses absolutely no impediment to U.S.
distribution that my book was published in England. For the record, there's 45 years of work in
that book, and it had to be a book because the key poem in it, "Two Greek
Women," was too long for any of the magazines I sent it to to consider
publishing—even The New Yorker, which
liked it and does publish fiction longer than that poem. For ten years I entered "Two Greek
Women" in chapbook contests and the whole book in book contests, rewriting
and rearranging the book all the time, but had no luck. I queried publishers directly, but no one
would read it. I put enough money in my
will to have the book self-published if I died without finding a publisher. Finally, in 2011, I had good luck in
England: Anthem Press, which had just
accepted my book Horror and the Horror
Film, was part of a publishing group that had a new imprint, Thames River
Press, that planned to publish new fiction.
I asked the editor at Anthem, Tej Sood, whether Thames River might
consider a book of poems, and he said it was possible and put me in touch with
the head of Thames River, Kamaljit Sood, who had my book and another poetry
manuscript that had coincidentally been submitted sent out for anonymous
evaluation, and my book was selected. A
later anonymous reader suggested putting "A New Song" first, and I
agreed and rearranged the book for the last time. The finished product looks good, was printed and
bound well, and has no typos. I'm glad I
didn't have to die for the book to see print.
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.
For
the rest of the week I'll be writing mostly about survival: what it means to keep writing even if it
looks as if your work will never get published and the difference it makes if
it is or isn't professionally published, self-published, read to a group, or
left in a drawer. It seems appropriate
to start by looking at a forthcoming anthology of poetry (and some prose) by
widows—survivors—many of whom have had no training as poets and are being published
for the first time. The book is called The Widows’ Handbook, and it will be
published in a few months by Kent State University Press. You heard it here first. Putting this book together and getting it
published was an inspiring commitment to survival, particularly considering how
many publishers declined to read the manuscript. The book was edited by two bereaved women,
Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn. I wrote
some questions for them. Lise answered
first, then Jacqueline.
Bruce: Are you both widows? Do either of you
have experience as editors or creative writers?
Lise: I am a widow; my second husband and I had been
happily married for almost twenty years when he died in October 2006. The other
editor is Jacqueline Lapidus; she lost her beloved partner, but he was not her
husband. Not having the legal status of a widow added in many ways to her
burden. As for my editing experience,
I’ve co-edited some academic books, but this is my first time editing poetry. I’ve published a few poems in collections of
poetry by linguists.
Jacqueline:
Not only that, but there was a wife—the
Lawful Awful, from whom he had been
estranged for years. I have been a
professional editor for 50 years (not counting high school newspaper) and have
been publishing poems in literary magazines since 1963.
Bruce:
How many publishers did you try before finding Kent State Univ. Press?
Lise: Fifteen queries to likely-looking places,
resulting in five submissions, all rejected; that’s not counting the publishers
who wouldn’t look at a manuscript unless it was submitted through an agent. But after we were in negotiations with KSUP,
one of the ones that just didn’t respond eventually showed serious interest.
Bruce:
Did you consider self-publishing?
Did you reject the idea, and why?
Lise: I did consider it, but Jacqueline, who has
been an editor, author, and translator for many years, was unwilling to
consider that except as a last resort. She felt that a work this substantial
deserved to be a "real book." And now we have it both ways, because
KSUP will make it available as an e-book.
Jacqueline:
In fact, I wasn’t willing to consider it
at all—not even as a last resort! Promoting
the book is hard enough without having to do distribution as well, even with
online bookstores available. And I couldn’t afford to put any money into such a
project.
Bruce:
How did you attract manuscripts? Where did you place ads or notices and
what did they say?
Lise: Jacqueline
is very experienced in this area. She placed ads in Poets & Writers Magazine (print and online) and the Seacoast
Writers Association newsletter, worded like this:
WIDOWS:
Seeking women’s poems and short personal essays (max. 500 words) about
experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure). Bereavement (sudden or
following illness/long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people’s
responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, support systems (or lack
thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), rebuilding
(including but not limited to finding new love or focus). We are a published poet/editor and a
scientist/professor, both widowed. Manuscript will be submitted to trade
publishers. Payment: contributor’s copies. Deadline: June 30, 2011. Send with
SASE for reply to: The Widows’ Handbook, [followed by Jacqueline’s address].
Jacqueline
also contacted numerous poet friends and asked them to spread the word. Some of those friends helped put her in touch
with well-known widowed poets (O’Hehir, Gallagher, Gilbert). She also selected a few widows’ poems from the
anthology Love Over 60 (eds. Chapman
& McCormick, pub. by Mayapple Press in 2010—we both knew Robin Smith
Chapman from college and Jacqueline had a poem in that collection) and from
their own books.
Bruce:
Did you rule out widowers, and if so, why?
Lise: Most women who are widowed – especially older
women – face a much harder time financially, socially, and in finding new
partners – than men of comparable ages and personal histories. For many women, the social isolation (because some
married couples stop inviting widows to join them, leaving you not only lonely
but wondering if they ever really liked you at all) and the financial hardship
compound the devastation of losing their partners. My late husband had been widowed twice before
we met – he lost one young wife in a car accident and the next young woman to
breast cancer, and he was deeply traumatized for years by those losses. So I would never consider a man’s grief to be
less deep than a woman’s. But…he found
new partners as soon as he was ready for them, and it seems that people are
always eager to play matchmaker for a nice man who wants a wife. That said, I wish we had included some older
gay men who have lost their partners, because they also often experience social
isolation and a very limited circle of possible new partners, in addition to
their grief. (The "beauty trap"
catches them as much as it catches women.)
Jacqueline:
As Lise says, in our gendered society the
social situation and status of widows differ from that of widowers. There are
other books that include both, but there had never been an anthology of poems
by widows. I wanted to showcase the aspect of widows’ lives that nobody wants
to admit. I conceived The Widows’ Handbook as an anthology of
women’s poems, not an anthology about bereavement or grief in general.
The Lorca extravaganza continues! Don’t worry if you’ve
missed some of the early events that have already happened New-York-City-wide
in celebration of this poet of mystery and intrigue. There is plenty more to come.
Happenings including film screenings, readings, talks, concerts, and exhibits
of Lorca’s art, manuscripts, and personal possessions span through July 21.
Plus, there is a beautifully re-packaged, newly released, updated version of Poet in New York available in stores now
(FSG, $17) with reproductions and inclusions of some of the material that’s
currently on view in the “Back Tomorrow” exhibit at the Wachenhiem Gallery in
the Schwarzman Building of the NYPublic Library. If you are a Lorca fan, the
new book and the exhibit are musts, and if you’re curious or ambivalent about
his work, as I have been, this is a superb opportunity to explore why Poet in New York issuch a revered
collection and why eighty-three years after Lorca’s fated visit to our fair city,
his darkly conflicted vision of Gotham is as relevant as ever.
My problem when I first tried reading Poet in New York in 2008, when the Grove edition of the poems came
out, was a twofold mix of confusion: I wasn’t able to let my logical mind
wander through the surreal images of the poems, compounded by the fact that I
couldn’t grasp that someone would write a book about how much he hated
New York. The first stanza of the book, from the poem “Back from a Walk,” is:
Murdered by the sky.
Among the forms that move toward
the snake
and the forms searching for crystal
I will let my hair grow.
The poem continues with four couplets of similarly quixotic
and frankly negative images – limbless trees, broken-headed animals, a
butterfly drowned in an inkwell – culminating with the repetition of the first
line, “Murdered by the sky.” What was I, a lover of reason, beauty, and logic,
not to mention a lover of New York City, to make of this opening poem?
Since then, I’ve not only read the introduction to the poems
– a practice I usually eschew until after I’ve read the entire book (I don’t
want my experience to be tainted by someone else’s, but in this case it was immensely
helpful) – but I’ve come to appreciate, if not entirely agree with, Lorca’s
point of view.
Lorca came to New York from Granada in 1929, when he was 31
years old, and was already known as a playwright and poet in his home country.
His purpose in coming to the U.S. was not to seek fame and fortune, but to nurse
a broken heart and have a new experience. He suspected he would dislike the
city, but he needed a rearrangement of his senses, at least so said Salvador
Dali and Luis Bunuel, former friends who panned his latest book, the popularly
acclaimed Gypsy Ballads, as being
dull and predictable. It’s fair to say that New York duly rearranged his senses
and that his work would never be dull and predictable again.
He hated the crowds: “These are the dead who claw with
earthen hands / the doors of flint where clouds and sweets are rotting.” He hated
the dirt: “Dawn in New York / has four columns of filth / and a hurricane of
black doves / splashing in putrid waters.” He hated the Hudson: “That gray
sponge!” But most of all, he hated the lust for money and the striving for more
and more. “From the sphinx to the vault there is a tense thread / that pierces
the heart of all poor children.” Lorca witnessed, first hand, the spectacle of
Wall Street when the stock market crashed in October 1929, and the death and
despair over the loss of mere money made him sick.
He found respite in the streets of Harlem in the company and
culture of Black Americans, who he identified with the Gypsies of his country.
And he was saved from the long brutal days of August in the city by a friend
who invited him to Vermont for the month. He also traveled to Cuba, which he
loved. All these adventures are chronicled in the poems, and there are moments
of sublime happiness alongside the pieces that document his less-than-enthusiastic
take on the City.
The downbeat poems of the collection give a new spin on the
notion of negative capability, where rather than being a passive conduit of the
beautiful mysteries of the world, the poet becomes the lightning rod for brutal
reality, where it’s equally viable to write magnificent and moving poems about the
world’s exposed underbelly as it is to write odes to Grecian urns.
It’s hard not to wonder what Lorca would make of today’s New
York. It is probably cleaner, but certainly more crowded. The hollow howls of
the City’s weekend and holiday carousing would horrify him, though he might
have been able to appreciate what a center of world culture we’ve become. One
thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the materialism and money grabbing. Though
they don’t read tickertape anymore, there’s still a mass of people here that worships
the stock market and aches for profit, whatever the human cost. That, above all
else, is what turned Lorca off to New York. Ah, but these months are a
celebration of his life and his work. Let’s leave “the others, those drunk
on silver, cold men,” to their own devices. Let’s just follow Lorca
through the streets for now and appreciate the city in all its dingy, horrible
beauty, and honor the poet who sang it.
For more on the program and to find a schedule of events, go
to http://lorcanyc.com/program.
When
I wrote "Old Frankenstein," the newest poem in Love If We Can Stand It, I got the first line out of nowhere. I was watching TV in the living room and
thinking about nothing. The line was
"The old man never calls" and the title came right after it. I laughed.
I got paper and a pen and started writing. By the time I got to the smoking jacket I
knew what I was doing. The whole thing
took about two hours. The poem reads:
The old man
never calls.
He quit making
us
settled down
with his bride
in a stone
cottage
went back to
his smoking jacket
wrote a book
and tore it up
they say, I
never saw it.
I learned to
talk again
in spite of
them all
every crowd
and Burgomaster
—read by
fires, by lakes
ate what I ran
across
but killed no
people
not for a long
time now.
The flesh has
not decayed, probably can't.
I carry a cane
and that explains the walk.
I dress like a
cheap old man
a man with
peculiarities
a man you'd
leave alone
to live in a
shed in the woods.
He'll die, I
won't.
He can't live
forever
and he doesn't
like it when I show up.
I haven't
tried that in twenty years.
I accumulate
birthdays like everyone else.
He could
call. His wife
could
call. My only family.
I wonder how
it will be without him.
By
line 2 of the poem I found that I had to decide between the Hammer series
(which began with The Curse of
Frankenstein, 1957) and the Universal series (which began with Frankenstein, 1931). In the Hammer series Dr. Frankenstein, played
by Peter Cushing, reappears in each sequel and builds a new monster. In the Universal series the Monster
reappears, but after Bride of
Frankenstein the doctors change; in the first two films he is played by
Colin Clive. I have a special affection
for Bride of Frankenstein and wanted
to work it in, as I had worked it into "One, or Words for Poetry," a
poem about one-syllable words:
smoke good
the fiend said
friend good
fire no good
good, bad
bride of
but we can not say the long name
not his in the first place
of the man who made him
son of
bride of,
the kids
I did not have
So
I chose Colin Clive as my doctor. Peter
Cushing was not ruled out, though. There
could have come a time when he "quit making us," us being all his consecutive monsters, and settled down. Clive makes the Monster and the female whom
Dr. Pretorius calls "the bride of Frankenstein," hence the "us"
in the Universal series sense. At first I
meant the "us" to apply to the Monster (Boris Karloff) and the bride
(Elsa Lanchester) from Frankenstein
and Bride of Frankenstein as well as
the series of monsters made by Cushing, but by the time I saw the doctor in his
smoking jacket, he was Colin Clive and the "stone cottage" was in
black and white. Then I saw the title
had made the same choice.
There
was a rule in the first three Universal sequels' titles that Frankenstein had to refer both to the
doctor and to the Monster. In the first
film, as in Mary Shelley's novel, it was meant to refer only to the doctor, but
the public was soon calling the monster Frankenstein. In Bride,
the doctor gets married and the Monster has a bride, even if she rejects him. In Son
of Frankenstein and The Ghost of
Frankenstein, there is always a relative of the original doctor. But in Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man, the name refers only to the Monster. So my title, Old Frankenstein, needed to refer both to the aged Dr. Frankenstein
and to the aged Monster, and that was no problem; it dictated the story of the
two old Frankensteins. I also thought of
Young Frankenstein, which I love, and
saw this poem as a sequel to it as well as the final entry in an imaginary
Universal series.
Another
advantage of being able to use Bride of
Frankenstein was that in that film, the Monster can talk. "I learned to talk again" is my defiant
response to the decision made in all the sequels after Bride, in which he can't speak. (The exception is that in Ghost, when the Monster has Ygor's
brain, he does briefly speak, but they are Ygor's words.) My Monster would learn, and as in the novel,
he would read.
The
doctor's torn-up book got me back to the Monster and to the end of what worked
as the first stanza, and it was seven lines.
I decided to make the poem in seven-line stanzas, not sure how many
there would be. I have written my share
of sestinas with their six-line stanzas, and I enjoy working in tight forms, as
I had done in "Slides" where each ten-line section of the poem is a
rectangle of type set halfway down the page to resemble a projected 35mm
slide. A contemporary take on the
Renaissance sonnet sequence (like Samuel Daniel's Delia), it was presented as a slide show of episodes from and
meditations on an unrealized romance. I
wrote it first in 1969 and rewrote it from 2010 to 2011, changing the plot,
cutting out half the "slides," and revising many lines and images, so
that it's now tighter and makes more sense.
It's also more honest although it remains deliberately obscure.
But
back to stanza 2. The crowd and the
Burgomaster (as the credits spelled it) came from the Universal series. I always enjoyed the torchlight parades when
the crowds get torches and search for the Monster. The Burgomasters are fools that my Monster
would look down on. The
"fires" and "lakes" are in the novel. By the end of the stanza, I had him stop
killing people. He's an old monster
conceived in the era of the slasher movie, a Jason who's given up his machete
or just uses it on trees. He's also an
old monster in approximately 1955, because he says he hasn't shown up to see
the doctor for 20 years, and I figure he did that in 1935, the date of Bride.
Of course he could have done it later in some film we didn't see.
Jason
also shows up in stanza 3, as the model for the monster living in a shed in the
woods. I was thinking of Friday the 13th Part 2. By the time I wrote about his walk and his
clothes, I was clearly seeing the Universal Monster and the way he walked when
he was played by Karloff, which wasn't as stiff as he later got, and the
thrift-shop clothes he would wear. I
thought the lines were funny and I was really enjoying writing them. With "He'll die, I won't" I
tightened up the rhythm to prepare the ending, the thing that's bothering the
Monster and making him take stock of himself and his current life.
Stanza
4 starts with a repetition of thoughts about death because I needed seven lines
in the stanza. That happens
sometimes. By line 4, I was feeling
outraged about the birthdays the monster was accumulating in solitude, I was
feeling his isolation, I was feeling that his more-or-less father (implied in
the double meaning of "old man" in line 1) and Mrs. Frankenstein should call him and certainly could. I felt he was a real character and I felt his
emotions inside me. That is a wonderful
feeling. It's like what writers mean when
they say their characters created their own dialogue. It happened to me a lot when I was writing
"Two Greek Women," which is a short epic about two contemporary
lesbians whom I made up out of two women I slightly knew who were not lovers;
mainly I made them up, and I certainly didn't know what my models (whom my
characters looked like and from whom they took their names) thought about
anything, but the characters I made up spoke words and lines and did things the
way they—the characters—would; they became real to me while I was writing, and
in that way every invention in the poem became both true and something I
couldn't miss. So that's the kind of feeling
and creating that came out as "He could call. His wife / could call."
Then
came "My only family," and the poem had stopped being funny a while
ago. The last line came to me as
suddenly as the first, and I knew it was the last line when I wrote it: "I wonder how it will be without him." Everything came together with that line,
which for me was the most creative and insightful moment in the writing. Then I went back to the top of the stanza and
wrote the redundant but not that bad "He can't live forever" to make
seven lines, and the first draft was done.
I went over it until I had things like the shed image the way I wanted them
and the correct rhythm for the line about his walk, and the poem was done.
Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman
Sharon Olds is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (Knopf) The Father (Knopf), and The Dead and the Living (Knopf), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hermost recent volume, Stag's Leap (Knopf), was awarded the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and just last week, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Olds declined. Her open letter, published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation, closed as follows: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it."
Michael Dickman is the author of The End of the West (Copper Canyon, 2009) and Flies (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award for the most outstanding second book by an American poet. Together with his brother, the poet Matthew Dickman, he is the co-author of 50 American Plays. Dickman has received fellowships from the Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Princeton University. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and, alongside his brother, in The New Yorker.
Upcoming, Spring 2013
Apr 29 Michael Klein + Will Schutt
May 6 Glyn Maxwell + Louis Jenkins
May 13 Sarah Arvio + David Kinloch
May 20 Eileen Myles + Rebecca Wolff + Season Finale Party
When
I was an English major at Columbia, I took a creative writing course from
Kenneth Koch, who changed my life.
Actually it was a class in modern literature with some creative
assignments. I have never met anyone who
knew so much about modern literature. He
assigned books we had never heard of, like Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, Pasternak's Safe Conduct, and Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro (which became my favorite novel and which I've taught for
years; a student told me recently that Woody Allen likes it too, which makes
perfect sense). He sent us out to review
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He had us read Borges's Ficciones and the latest issue of Art and Literature. And he
told us stories. One of them dragged me
into a labyrinth, made me part of it.
As
a way of explaining "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert
Quain," Koch told us that he had been sitting on a New York park bench
with Borges when Borges said that the way one could tell that the Koran was an
authentic document was that there were no camels in it. If someone had wanted to create such a book
and then plant false, artificially aged documents that appeared to establish
its existence in the 7th century C.E., that person would certainly have
included some Arabic local color, such as camels. Koch wanted to show us how Borges could read
even the Koran as a potentially false text and how the fact that there were no
camels in it could prove the Koran was authentic if one was in a Borgesian mood.
At
the time I was also taking a class in what was then called Oriental Humanities,
and the assignment for that week was the Koran (trans. A. J. Arberry). I read it with Koch's Borges story in
mind. There are two camels in the Koran.
The
question is, did Borges know that? Koch
apparently did not. If Borges did know
about the camels, then he was doing an advanced Borgesian number on Koch and
anyone to whom Koch might tell the story, expecting that someone who heard the
story and knew there were camels in the Koran would have reason to doubt its
authenticity. That was the trap that he
set, and the story ends with my hearing the story, finding the camels, and wondering
what I had been led to wonder. Or it
ends today, with my writing this.
Because
Borges may not have known about the camels.
He could simply have been raising the issue that the Koran could be a
faked and planted and falsely substantiated book. I don't know whether Koch was in on the joke
(I never discussed this with him; I was mostly too intimidated to go to
professors' office hours), and I don't know whether Borges knew he was setting
a trap. I met Borges a decade later when
he visited the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I got a chance to ask him
about the paradoxical final sentence of "Borges and I" ("I do
not know which of us has written this page"). He said there was no paradox
and that "Borges and I" was a simple record of how he felt when he
got mail addressed to Borges. So readers
may have made up the ultimate Borges, the one who lays out labyrinths for
careful readers, the one who knew Koch would someday have a student who would hear
the story, read the Koran, and be convinced that its existence was a literary conspiracy,
a student who never would guess that Borges might just have been careless and
missed the camels.
This week we welcome Bruce F. Kawin as our guest blogger. Although he published chapbooks
in 1964 (Breakwater) and 1970 (Slides), Bruce did not publish a book of poems until 2012, when Thames River Press (London)
brought out Love If We Can Stand It. He has also published nine more or less
scholarly books on literature and film, of which the most recent is Selected Film Essays and Interviews
(Anthem Press, 2013), as well as the last seven editions of Gerald Mast's A Short History of the Movies.
In other news . . .
Book Giveaway: The Collected Poems of Ai (Norton, February 2013). Tell us about your earliest memory of poetry for a chance to win one of five copies of Ai's recent collection. You can write your story in the comment field. Read Sharon Preiss's review of The Collected Poems of Ai here.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark