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On Valentine's Day, the day before Harold Arlen's birthday, the day after Eileen Farrell's birthday, listen to this song with
Music by Harold Arlen
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
Vocals by Eileen Farrell
Instrumentals by Leonard Bernstein
then follow with the same duo doing "Some Other Time
((lyrics Comden and Green, music Bernstein)
"Stanzaic Choreography," a phrase coined by the witty Angela Ball, has been favorably chosen to describe the dance of words and ideas going on every week on the Next Line, Please column. And especially now, as we have not one, but five collaborative poems in progress. Each has three stanzas, missing only a final word.
For the poem designated as A1, we have lines submitted by Lutz Ebersdorf, Diana Ferraro, Donald LaBranche, Stephanie Cohen, and Katie R. A poem now with nine authors:
I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident;
I protected him; even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have, [David Lehman]all grown up, as if entire chapters were skipped. [Lutz Ebersdorf]
Their wake precedes dawn. He opens his eyes. [Diana Ferraro]
The wine had turned sour, and the pickled fruit [Donald LaBranche]
smacked us awake in winter, real like medicine. [Stephanie Cohen / Katie R]
Charise Hoge proposed “The Wrong Side of the Bed” as a tentative title.
For the third stanza of A2, let's start out with a line from Millicent Caliban:
I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]When, like a thieved wallet, the house emptied, [Stephanie Cohen]
we saw the blackbird-clustered face of night. [Donald LaBranche]
No absolution. Spirits, bring me absinthe, [Pamela Joyce]
a doleful pour not tasted before. [Charise Hoge]Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens [Millicent Caliban]
in an empty house, in which I return the thief’s wallet
and then ingest the salt of absolution, [Donald LaBranche]
the final pinch of grass in a sandwich bag? [Stephanie Cohen]
And a nod to Stephanie’s working title: “Bender.”
Eric Fretz offers three-quarters of the third stanza of B1; with two lines compressed from Katie R to bring the pirouette to a soft landing:
I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]When feathered darkness lifted up her hood
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too; [Christa Overbeck]
returning birds, retreating foes, [Beth Dufour]
the ache you blame on age and episodic sleep. [Stephanie Cohen]If I could only sleep the length of clouds
and leap the length of August days again,
the snow would melt off blackbirds’ backs and bud [Eric Fretz]
in a blackened crown of night and crows. [Katie R]
Eric’s nominee for the poem’s title is “This Was Glory, Too.”
J. F. “Jeff” McCullers joins in on poem B2:
I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]When feathered darkness lifted up her hood [Christa Overbeck]
I worshiped in the temple of her trees. [Millicent Caliban]
Blackbirds scattered at the blast. The snow now [Pamela Joyce S.]
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too, [Christa Overbeck]and shook with cold or fear or joy. I could not tell. [Christa Overbeck]
Come, sing to the snow something new [Donald LaBranche]
amid the shouts of others. The snow my pillow. [J. F. McCullers]
Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens? [Millicent Caliban]
Two possible titles for B2 are “Divine Guides” (Clay Sparkman) and “Gloria” (Josie Cannella). A simple “Blackbirds” (David Lehman) might also work.
The fifth poem to come forth was submitted by Maureen, who took what we had and did her own choreography with it:
I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
with each cross-boned bottle, dreamt
reality quenched: two children killed—
I ached in feathered darkness.God, no thanks I gave for episodic sleep,
when hood of night, that temple, lifted
and I, mind weak, saw what I worshipped
rent—not once but twiceas blasts un-wrung from limbs of trees
in snow a thick of blackbirds, mourning
all I too well know.
So now what we need is a final stanza—or rather, five. For A1, A2, B1, and B2 that means a quatrain; for Maureen’s submission, a three-line stanza would complete the sonnet. Good luck!
Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!
At the age of 92, Willis Barnstone is a miracle. The translator of The Gnostic Bible (2003) and The New Covenant: Commonly Called The New Testament (2009), he has turned over the grounds of Greek and Aramaic, and unsettled dogmatic readings. Jesus, for example, became Joshua, his real name. The poetry of the Bible, seen mostly as exemplary before Barnstone, became poetry in his rendering of The Poems of Jesus Christ (2012.) Barnstone knows languages and he knew and translated Borges. He also brought into English Heraklitus, Sappho, and Machado, alongside many volumes of his own vigurous verse. Recently he has revisited the entirety of Guillaume Apollinaire. This is about half the canon of Western civ reborn in American Lyric Space. It baffles me that he was never Poet Laureate of the United States. He is a founder. I hereby nominate him for the Laureate laurels. Reading his latest poem is watching Laocoon and the snakes. The snakes might win but we won’t remember their names. Barnstone’s we will, and he’s working with Keats.
ALL CREATORS HAVE A CONTRACT WITH TIME
by Willis Barnstone
When Guillaume Apollinaire, near death, begged
For help, “Save me, doctor, I’ve so many
Things to say,[1] neither a bootlegged
Truck-load of medicines, a Christmas tree,
Or 7 railroad cars loaded with caviar
Could save him. The flu was a bayonet
In the heart of 50 million, the Czar
Of Murder, more than generals in lorgnette
And clouds of medals could invent to kill
A nation’s youth. We artists have a soul,
A mortal one. We need time to fulfill
Our unique creations, our dream to bowl
A 10-strike each time we roll our hope
In a new work. Marketing garners fame.
But the artists’ god is time, time to pen,
To paint. and to compose. No fame is shame
And sorrow, but worse is absence of time,
The motor grease, the black harbor where words,
Brush strokes and music notes suddenly chime
And George Herbert leaps from his grave, birds
In hand, clocks wound, to wake the dead, equip
Them with right glasses. Then they and we read
A book, linger in galleries, and flip
A lock in time to grant new decades, seed
New lands in Castilla. Lucky, I wrote
81 books. No vanities. But I
Need at 91 a decade to smote
The Devil of Disorder deep in me. Try
I do to choose among my sonnets 5
Hundred so that A Rose in Hell will buy
Me hope for a lifelong project. I freeze
Thinking I’ll leave a mess. And I’ve a ton
Of stars I’d like to roam, and so I seize
Whatever Little Prince asteroid I watch,
Tame, and steal into my poetry barn
Or fiction ranch. Stars brighten. Lest I botch
It all, I’ll work desperate like a sophomore
Before finals. The incompletion of
A life tames raw infinity. Male whore
And conman, I publish anywhere that
Will run my sheets of life as verse. Like you,
Like every artist, born hungry I’m fat
In vision. Old days I could disappear
In China, France, Greece or Spain. I try still
With my last sous. Nothing new in my fear.
The artist is a gambler who will win
And lose. Time be kind. If I stay around
I’ll droop from stars, quake like a mandolin
In a wild Java ensemble. Go back to school
And teach so I can blue my head. What’s best
Write, compose, paint? Or be a patient fool.
I’ve no contract with time but try to stretch
The years with time to write, gymming my flesh
With pushups, mind with verse. I must not kvetch,
The contract is impossible, yet know
The goal keeps me fanatic. I won’t be here
To check things out. Look at the rolling brow
Of the ocean. In splashing foam, I swim
Unseen. Please overhear a gleeful miser.
Listen. Hear clouds coughing an unheard hymn.
2019
Sauvez-moi, docteur, J’ai tant de choses à dire.
Karine frowned as, to hide her doubt, she looked down into her wine glass.
The wine was white. This was after ten in the evening.
As I see it, nightmare’s original recipe. She took a false sip.
She’s never been crazy, so she never does really understand how terrifyingly uncomfortable living in one’s skin may be. Though usually on the money, the importance of some things may escape her.
We were meeting for a drink at la Comète, whose street sign looks like the emoji; I had just seen the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine’s Plaisirs inconnus (https://vimeo.com/269886819), (something like “Fresh pleasures”), at Palais de Chaillot – the Théâtre National de Danse. The idea of the piece was to put the accent on the performance (and its dancers) by hiding the names of the programs’s five well-known choreographers as well as its stage, lighting and costume designers.
The Ballet’s artistic director Petter Jacobsson says that anonymity reduces the affect of expectation. Onlookers might be able to renew the pleasure of first meeting with the choreographers by meeting them anew in the dancers. I counted nine segments in one hour and fifteen minutes of program; at beginning and end, the stage was bisected with a thick check transparent plastic curtain of contemporary colors; otherwise light. The idea seemed to add depth and breadth to the stage: a lot of womb space for the performance.
Unlike many people around me seemed to, I didn’t recognize any choreographic style and did not feel teased.
But then I never can do. I never can put my finger on the music either, even the most well known.
Anyhow, I said to Karine as I sat down, the river is never twice: live performance is to get the new as new is made in the mix of performers, place, set, onlookers, weather and the crowd on the streets bus and metro. What seemed to me to be a mocking Bolero was really nice, because the humor let some real sensuality filter through – why Bolero, a march suitable to snappy uniforms, jackboots and feral shouts, is considered erotic has always been beyond me. A march recalls us to duty, perhaps, when we are bloody sick of our usual sex partner?
But, “Karine”, I said, just as my pint was delivered to the table, “The very best segment of the dance for me was three couples, two slightly in the back and one in front – Perhaps it was a tribute to American musical-style dance? Made me think of that”.
The hands and arms of the front couple came so close as they sought each other that I thought, Well, that’s really as close as you ever get, isn’t it?
“Just to the point where skin galvanism makes potential lovers aware that resistance starts where desire flowers”, I told her.
“Then the man and the woman began to dance. The woman fell, tripped. She was a charged wave shaping into her beloved’s orbit. And he, Karine, he was all head, arms, back, legs, feet, all regard, a Sun to her coruscating Venus. He confronted that woman. He caught that woman in his arms.
He spun that woman then spilled her for that she purled like the rainbow’s arc”!
Then the woman went sprawling! The man stood in disarray!
Bébé, “I was shocked. Almost, I was hurt. No, I was hurt”. And then, in a single, spontaneous spring the woman threw herself into arms that found strength only as they felt her need them.
“It was gorgeous. And then it occurred to me, Karine, that confidence, springing to or catching up, builds the join that lets us seem to come together. That’s the strength of Plaisirs inconnus, too”.
The various the anonymously-written choreographic segments of Plaisirs inconnus were arranged by CCN-Ballet de Lorraine performers. They included Jonathan Archambault, Amandine Biancherin, Agnès Boulanger, Alexis Bourbeau, Clara Brunet, Thomas Caley, Pauline Colemard, Justin Cumine, Giuseppe Dagostino, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Flavien Esmieu, Nathan Gracia, Tristan Ihne, Vivien Ingrams, Petter Jacobsson, Margaux Laurence, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Amélie Olivier, Elsa Raymond, Rémi Richaud, Ligia Saldanha, Willem Jan Sas, Céline Schoefs, Luc Verbitzky.
I'm still spending most of my reading time with Mindy Aloff's magisterial anthology "Dance in America." The volume spans three centuries and includes work by our most important dance critics along side poets (yes!), choreographers, literary figures, and dancers. While I'm learning a lot about dance and writing from the contributors, there's also much to be learned about putting together an anthology and writing head notes, those helpful guides that orient readers to the work that follows. Here's a remarkable sentence from Aloff's brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's essay "On Dance and Dance Writing."
Novelist by ambition, essayist by temperament, filmmaker and playwright by will, public intellectual by circumstance, political activist by moral imperative, bisexual by nature, high-school graduate at fifteen, wife at seventeen, college grad (Phi Beta Kappa) at eighteen, mother at nineteen, acclaimed for her courage, damned for her arrogance: Susan Sontag's life was so full, and her friendships and love affairs around the world were so plentiful, that one wouldn't thing she'd have enjoyed much leisure to follow a demanding art form as theatrical dance.
Sontag's essay is wonderful, of course, but it's Aloff's sentence that has stayed with me. Doesn't it make you want to keep reading?
Two weeks ago, we began a journey in which each step lead us to yet another line to another stanza, beginning with the opening line: "I spend my days in an expanse of spirits." This week, the dedicated writers of NLP continue to build not one, but two poems.
The opening stanzas, posted last week, are composites of lines provided by Pamela Joyce and Koahakumele (poem A), and Jay Ronson and Patricia Wallace (poem B). For next week, quizmaster Lehman seeks a third stanza and a tentative title for each poem.
And just to make it more interesting, David Lehman has given us multiple possibilities within poems A and B. One possibility, which we shall affectionately call "A1," joins Angela Ball’s lines 5-7 and David's line 8, with this most enchanting result:
I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident;
I protected him; even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have. [David Lehman]
Not only are there the allure of dreams and mourning, but the introduction of parents and unborn children, which can only mean one thing: high levels of drama.
Comprised of lines from Stephanie Cohen, Charise Hoge, Donald LaBranche, and Pamela Joyce, "A2" extends the cocktail motif, incorporates the blackbirds from poem B, and welcomes a second type of “spirits.”
I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]When, like a thieved wallet, the house emptied, [Stephanie Cohen]
we saw the blackbird-clustered face of night. [Donald LaBranche]
No absolution. Spirits, bring me absinthe. [Pamela Joyce]
a doleful pour not tasted before. [Charise Hoge]
As for the B poem, B1 combines two lines from Christa Whitsett Overbeck and singles from Beth Dufour and Stephanie Cohen:
I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]When feathered darkness lifted up her hood
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too; [Christa Overbeck]
returning birds, retreating foes, [Beth Dufour]
the ache you blame on age and episodic sleep. [Stephanie Cohen]
I love the description, "feathered darkness," as it echos the motif of the birds while furthering the plot: the feathered darkness lifts the veil (or the hood) and provides us with a realization of glory.
For B2, Christa’s striking lines form the sandwich inside which live lines from Millicent Caliban and Pamela Joyce S:
I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]When feathered darkness lifted up her hood [Christa Overbeck]
I worshipped in the temple of her trees. [Millicent Caliban]
Blackbirds scattered at the blast. The snow now [Pamela Joyce S.]
about my head, I saw that this was glory too [Christa Overbeck]
Here, the blackbirds gain more significance, and the winter landscape glows with divinity.
Now you have four options. Please submit either a three-line or four-line stanza—and, if you wish, a tentative working title for the poem of your choice.
Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!
And too much of nothing
/Can make a man a liar /It can 'cause one man to sleep on nails
/It can 'cause others to eat fire
/Everybody's doin' somethin'
/I heard it in a dream
/But when there's too much of nothing
/It just makes a fella mean/Say hello to Valerie,/Say hello to Karine/ send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.
– Too Much of Nothing, Bob Dylan (Peter, Paul & Mary)
Marion Lévy’s Training performance piece doesn’t have enough monologue to be stand up but is physical enough for comedy; it’s in the lineage of silent film, Charlie Chaplin tossing and twirling that globe or Buster Keaton putting up that Sears Roebuck house – when the body had to tell a story as well as act as a foil for emotions other than desire.
I went walking with Karine last Sunday – Beelzebub, can she promenade! Last Sunday alone, arm-in-arm under more than occasional douches of freezing rain, from the Eiffel Tower rive gauche to the Institut du Monde Arabe then from Pont Marie rive droite to the Eiffel Tower.
AlI along the route we took, we clung to each other; I clung to Karine. Sometimes, Karine laid her head on my shoulder. The cloud of her hair was delicious. She has recently changed it from silver blonde to jet black; it is brittler than ever: little shards of it mixed in the needle-sharp freezing spray pissing into my face from the grey grey cap of boiling cloud above.
When I forced myself to look up, used my eyes, took the glacial rain in my face, I saw that cracks and fissures on high tore out a thin ragged line of horizon back lit in neon-white.
When I finally could, I told Karine that when I saw that pale light once before long ago, I decided to stay here forever. Karine replied that she wants to live forever, though she added that it isn’t very likely. I put my arm around her waste and pulled her as close as I could.
This vigorous, almost mad, walk provoked thoughts of my upbringing.
I was shaped a Panglossian Positivist. A Panglossian forces him- or herself to believe – and righteously forces others to believe – that everything is going for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that there is nothing behind the curtain and that, if some impetuous little dog proves the contrary, the humbug that puffs and stiffens the great and powerful Oz is meant only for my good.
Contrary to what you might think, Panglossianism is tough-minded and unforgiving in proportion as everything must be just fine. Panglossism denies that almost everything is a process begun in the middle of some other process. Life is a heavy thing to be seen and experienced in a particular, uncarping, way.
I really don’t believe, until I saw Marion Lévy’s Training that I had ever seen anyone mock at Panglossism, so I was amazed but rather delighted at her piece. I have missed a lot in my misspent life, so maybe I’ve just missed the criticism. But, as I say, I had never personally been able to respond to it farther than by clinging on to some woman or another and an inarticulate snarl. And, I think, nobody much thinks that Panglossism, such an optimistic-sounding approach to an apparently troubled world, also pressed and pursued by solid and progressive American ladies such as my Mother as well as every talent or reality-TV show in the world, could possibly ever be meant to break the spirit of mortal children. So, I think nobody much has dared to take the risk of mocking it.
Until Marion Lévy, whose piece just assumes that Pangloss has got under our skin because, I think, since I was brought up, everyone has learned to speak Panglossism and construct an aggressively unanswerable rhetoric of success and excellence out of it. An especially obvious symptom of Panglossian triumph are people who could be enjoying their lives more than ever who are working harder than ever for less money than ever. And this is the true genius of Panglossism: these overworked and underpaid consenting adults blame nobody and nothing but themselves and their own supposed shortcomings.
Panglossism is as attractive, as hard for me to answer, as my Mother always was – “Where does all this negativity come from?” she might say, as follow on to some anodyne remark of mine, countenance amazed. It was of course the amazement that wounded.
Although it is obvious that in a world of process and evolution, “goals” and “challenges” have to be invented, Panglossism depicts them as natural occurrences, not deus-ex-machinas. Marion Lévy’s shtick, as I told Karine, shows how the pursuit of “excellence” indeed, the very belief in one’s “excellence” – think Rhianna’s “Diamonds in the Sky” – is actually a belief in some sort of external “success”, that is, the mastery of some externally contrived “challenge” or “goal”. Since, as noted, everything is a process begun in the middle of some other process, “goals” and “challenges” have to be invented, either by the people set above you or, in a desperate effort to beat those above you to the punch and prove a hollow “independence” – by your deluded self.
I expect, I told Karine, that that’s why Marion Levy’s Training begins at the gym, where she shows how calisthenics, an activity that meets you on your own terms if ever there was one, has become a “training” for “excellence”. It is comic because the pursuit of an “excellence” that exists only in a Panglossed imagination renders the protagonist’s efforts absurd. What sane person would do such a thing? Indeed, it’s amusing to see the poor thing scamper around in narcissistic desperation when she could simply enjoy the effort of doing well and for herself. And so Training goes.
Marion Lévy has perhaps invented a new comic commonplace. Twirl that ball, feckless dictator! Bung up that love nest, new husband! Pursue that excellence, Pangloss! I hope so, because, Panglossism will kill us more surely than the ungainly truths it always seeks to deny. And, Karine, I said, although the younger people around me laughed at Lévy’s riffs, physical and linguistic, it’s not funny.
Here's to Ida Lupino on her birthday (February 4).
The Bigamist
I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
of the brilliant noir movies
Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.
Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angels
(Ida herself, who has a baby).
Watching The Bigamist you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
and continue to function.
an even more difficult conundrum when the contradictory ideas are
Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino.
For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.
First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:
In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.
Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.
She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.
Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”
The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.
Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:
yes! radiant lyre speak to me
become a voice
Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.
Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:
To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…
Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:
Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.
In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.
We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:
When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…
Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:
It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.
Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!
Connelly Center Cinema 6:15 (St. David’s Room) Reception and Book Signing to follow the reading
This event is sponsored by the Honors Program, the Villanova Center for Liberal Education, the Department of English, and the Department of Humanities.
For more information, contact James Matthew Wilson, at [email protected]
I am thinking about satire. The literary genre, not the political kind, though that can be useful as well. In these times, comedy can be the thing that really helps us survive. And most of the best comedians these days that deal with political topics are having a field day with satire. But that’s not poetry.
The OED informs us that satire’s etymology is uncertain. One idea was to connect, via the root that gives us “saturate,” to the Latin expression lanx satura, or “full dish,” i.e. a miscellany of prose and verse. Another theory is that the word is of Etruscan origin, with obscure significance. Satire was also at one time associated with satyrs, and thus with the genre of satyr plays.
Satire as a literary genre began in Rome, and the first practitioner of it whose work has survived was Horace, in his poems known in Latin as Sermones, which could perhaps be translated nowadays as Riffs. Roman satire is appealing to me because of its form.
There is something about the form that seems quite modern to me. Like Propertius in his use of elegiac couplets, Horace, in his first book of Satires, published in 35 BCE, when he was 30, takes advantage of a conversational tone to give the poems an expansive, improvisational quality. Satire 1.9 is almost a Frank O’Harian “I do this I do that” poem. As the poem tells it, Horace is walking along the street in Rome when he is accosted by a drag of a person, who pesters Horace to introduce him to his patron, Maecenas. Horace is only saved at the last minute by a plaintiff in a court case against this person who drags him off to court.
Between Horace and Juvenal, there was another Roman satirist, Persius. Kenneth J. Reckford’s 2009 book, Recognizing Persius (Princeton) is an excellent introduction to this poet, who died at 27 and left six satires that we still have today. Reckford writes:
Persius gives us traces of an Aristophanic contest, or agon, between the Old Literature and the New: between the rugged old Classical authors like Pacuvius and Accius, nostalgically misremembered and praised by grumbling elders, and the smooth, effeminate, precious, hyper-Alexandrian verse beloved by modern youth, all about orgiastic Maenads and self-castrating Attises. It is all special effects nowadays, all style and no substance. Modern poetry has no balls. And not just poetry: for rhetorical pleading in the lawcourts, once the vital center of Roman political life, has also become theatricalized; defendants give artificial performances for show, just as their prosecutors do, and both sides hope mainly for applause. Underlying the parody is a dangerous thought. As Tacitus was later to demonstrate in his Dialogus, oratory atrophied under the empire because the lawcourts’ decision-making power had been taken over the emperor; what was left was flattery and self-display.
Horatian satire is generally considered to be lighter than that practiced by Juvenal some hundred years later. That has something to do with the times each poet lived in. Horace was writing at the height of the Augustan age, and what’s more, he was part of that emperor’s inner circle. Juvenal wrote during the period from Nero to Hadrian. Although he started publishing later in life, the fact that he survived the reigns of 10 emperors is in itself a testament to his shrewdness.
Rolfe Humphries’ translations of Juvenal, published in 1958, still have valor and bite to them. In his introduction, Humphries writes:
To Quintilian, and to Roman scholars and critics less well-known, the word satirehad a meaning, and connotations, less narrow than it has for us. Into these, and into the history of the art form, we need not go, for satire, as Juvenal writes it, cries with the saeva indignatio, the slashing sense of outrage, that we associate with the term. He is Swift’s cousin; we can feel at home. Not comfortably so, of course not, for this man is too good a hater.
What he hated were the ways of the world that Ovid, roughly a century before, had loved so dearly. Beau monde, haut ton—these did not amuse Juvenal. As for meretricious Rome, he shared the sentiments of (this too would have revolted him) an African king, Jugurtha the briber, dead before Ovid was born, who had called the city “venal and doomed if it only could find a purchaser.” It had found, Juvenal thought, more purchasers than one, and more than one debaucher. He did not like it at all, and he said so.
And finally, not a satirist, but a poet with a brilliantly satirical mind, as, in essence, many Roman poets were. The epigrammist Martial lived from 40 to 104 CE, meaning that he overlapped extensively with Juvenal. In poet Art Beck’s new translation, Martial: Mea Roma (Shearsman Books), we are given a sense of what makes this poet so eternally enticing. He’s famous for his lustful blasts, but he can be subtly philosophical as well. Here’s one in the latter vein that in a few syllables gets behind a famous myth in a way I would never have thought possible:
The Lyre
It returned Eurydice to the great poet: but then he lost her.
Because he loved with neither trust nor patience.
I’ve been looking at a lot of art about death lately. It isn’t hard to find.
A close friend is drawn to art about despair: dystopia, satirical monuments, a pointing-out of destruction and consequences. Fewer and farther between, he says, is the opposite. It’s hard to find a serious art about hope.
But I think that many young artists are doing just that. They know if they can't transcend a bleak vision of a future planet, there may not be much planet left for them.
This month, I’m posting the work of Sofía Córdova, whose art is a profound vision of human survival and empathy. I believe we can only want what we can imagine. Right now, our government wants to spend billions of dollars on symbolic infrastructure—the same leadership that responded with paper towels as three to five thousand Americans perished during and after Hurricane Maria.
Sofía Córdova was born in Puerto Rico, works in Oakland, and is featured in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sofía Córdova
Meltwater Pulse 1A, 2016-2018
Taxidermy rooster, pheasant tail, cast head of hornbill, wire, resin, oil paint, wood, steel pipe, sand, black seamless, dried flowers, metal conduit
This is an installation by Sofía Cordova. It depicts a familiar scene: A bird perches on a branch. But it doesn’t look like any bird you’ve ever seen before, and the tree is a log spiked on a steel beam.
In this work, the final frontier is not space but the next great extinction (and what, if anything, comes after). This bird has made it through the apocalyptic event. Its body is patched together from a rooster, a pheasant, and the cast head of a hornbill. Was this creature created by mutation or code? It rises with its wings outstretched from a reconstituted tree.
The title feels both chilling and hopeful. The melting of glacial ice and the permafrost will absolutely change life as we know it, altering the climate (it is -65° in Chicago right now, thanks to a polar vortex) unlocking ancient viruses and bacteria, and releasing rock-eating sulfuric acid. But Pulse is life, enduring even through change that is currently unimaginable.
Is it only a matter of time before the whole scene pixelates into a very different sort of resurrection? In the face of climate and human chaos, it is a monument to survival.
This is a piece about change, but it is also a piece about human bodies.
A clue to understanding this series is a performance, BILONGO LILA: Nobody Dies in a Foretold War. This performance was staged at Mills College Greek Amphiteater in 2017.
Note: In lieu of credits, the first 3 minutes introduce the performers and musicians, who are graduate students from the university.
The performance begins at [3:00], with the words: “The important thing to remember is that time has officially ended. Close your eyes and trust my voice. You have come a long way to learn how to die all over again.”
I’m including it even though it is long, split-screen, and it should be seen in person--or at least much, much bigger.
1,500 years into the future, survivors of humanity are struggling to mutate and piece together a new culture, on a planet made strange by the aging and corrupted digital interventions of late technological capitalism. The environment is a digital projection (including pixellating oceans, ruined cities, and lush forests). The set is made of reclaimed sails—another nod to aged-out technology.
Córdova leaves room for the performers to improvise, and at times (especially in the beginning), the message can land a bit on the nose. But in a culture of fake news and alternative facts, this directness feels more courageous than simplistic.
The performance is about possible futures, technological capitalism, and corruption, but most powerfully it is about bodies. In her world, human survivors recognize and transcend the cultural myths of biology, identity markers, and violence to create a more hopeful society, even on a vastly altered planet. At [26:39], words of science fiction writer John V. Marsch appear on the screen: “No it was not necessary for us to lose our appearance for you to gain it.” In the foreground, two dancers perform a melting pas de deux of mutation and perhaps love, melding into a single creature in the pink light. Painted musicians vocalize the sounds of nature and technology, while on their music stands, laptops are flipped open alongside sheet music.
There are elements of science fiction, dance culture, Afro-futurism, medicine songs, Santeria. The work also quotes Ursula K. Le Guin. There is a hopeful sense that like this bird, the most fluid of us may survive.
“I was writing poetry and singing since she [his aunt Mimi, with whom he lived] had me. All the time I used to fight and say, 'Look, I'm an artist, don't bug me with all this maths. Don't try and make me into a chemist or a vet, I can't do it.' I used to say, 'Don't you destroy my papers.' I'd come home when I was fourteen and she'd rooted all my things and thrown all my poetry out. I was saying, 'One day I'll be famous and you're going to regret it. I'd seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard-on. I'd wondered who wrote them and thought I'd try one myself. Mimi found it under my pillow. I said I'd been made to write it out for another lad who couldn't write very well. I'd written it myself, of course. When I did any serious poems, like emotional stuff later on, I did it in secret handwriting, all scribbles, so that Mimi couldn't read it.” — John Lennon, The Beatles Anthology
I am listening to Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott’s performance of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on WQXR. It’s Schubert’s birthday, and also Philip Glass’s. And I am thinking that John Lennon’s song “Julia” is as good as Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” They both rely on an ostinato pattern, and they are about the same length. Schubert used a pre-existing text; Lennon wrote his own ode to his mother, who may have been bi-polar and with whom he had a complicated but very meaningful relationship.
I am trying to learn to play “Julia” on the guitar. So I am watching a YouTube tutorial (props to my son Isaac, who has learned to play largely via YouTube tutorials combined with his dedication and skill!). The instructor makes a good point. To the casual listener, “Julia” flows along easily as anything, giving the impression that Lennon is lightly strumming the guitar, and allowing the listener to focus on the highly evocative lyrics. But when you start to break down what he is actually playing, first of all it is an impressive technical performance, and second, as often with the Beatles, songs that sound simple reveal harmonic complexities in their chord choices and rhythms.
The point is, you might never have known this — though somewhere you feel it, listening to the song — had you not taken the time to learn in depth what this great artist has actually done to create the effect. And this is quite like the process of translation. Translating takes you deeper inside something, where, hopefully, there can be a moment in which you gain a greater respect for another artist’s work.
Coincidentally, while I am working on my translations of Hesiod’s poems, some poems of mine are making their ways into other languages. I wrote a poem for Nicolas Leong and Judy Chung’s project of combining Nicolas’s photographs of Italian sites with texts by contemporary writers. Here is the poem:
Better at finding pleasure
That and that one, they
Look down over city
See near windows lit up
A life in each, a Rome
The winter moon haloed
Distant desires, some fulfilled
Would there be time?
Bells roll in, assurance
A trunk cracked, cut in logs
A garden to repair to
That and a figment of light
Nicolas and Judy wanted a translation into Italian, as they will be presenting this project in Rome, so I reached out to Brunella Antomarini, an Italian critic and translator, who, with the help of painter Donna Moylan, turned around the translation in a couple of days. It was interesting to me, receiving their translation, as it caused me to think more deeply about my own poem. For the phrase “Bells roll in,” they used the phrase Partono le campane. I knew that partire is the Italian verb for “to leave, depart,” but I did not know that it can be used for the beginning of something, music for example. While I was learning that, I wrote to Brunella that the phrase “Bells roll in” is meant to evoke that moment when the church bells start to ring, from various churches. It should evoke those moments in the day or night (in this case) when that happens. But also, the phrase itself, “rolls in,” is used, for example, to describe mist or fog coming in to cover a previously clear situation. So, the idea here is that bells have a physical quality that starts to come in to the situation of the poem. It’s different from just saying, “Bells start to ring” or “I hear bells” or “I begin to hear bells.”
And now I am seeing everything as translation. Going back to the Beatles, in the beginning they were translating the sounds and poetry of Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and others. There’s a terrific bio pic, Nowhere Boy (2009), directed by photographer and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson, about John Lennon’s teenage years, the period when he discovered music, met Paul McCartney and George Harrison, formed The Quarrymen, and started performing and writing songs. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon, Kristin Scott Thomas as his aunt Mimi, and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother, Julia. The film too is act of translation, bringing a story, of which there are only tantalizing glimpses in photographs and interviews, to life.
Finally, another act of translation at the intersection of music and poetry for which I remain eternally grateful. For a number of years, while he was director of Young People’s and Family Concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, David Amram led a group called The Beatles Magical Orchestra. They faithfully recreated, with exactitude and loving enthusiasm, some of the Beatles’ later, more complex songs. You can find them all on YouTube. Here is my favorite, their recreation of “I Am The Walrus.”
They even include a different radio recording of the bit from the end of King Lear! It is beautifully filmed, allowing the viewer to focus on individual contributions.
Radio
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
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
