The Best American Poetry

Shakespeare was a Woman [by Leopold Bloom]

William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Who did? While it is fruitless to speculate or seek an individual who is but a name on a weathered gravestone, I doubt she was Emilia Bassano. Consider the envy of Iago, the female spite that takes over his characater. Or contrarily think of the male initiaive animating  Lady Macbeth:  “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.”

Moreover, we know that the difference between the sexes is obscured by the very fact that all the players, including the women, are men in the plays that were played when they played them back then.

The play itself was the thing that, in an age devoid of photocopy machines, had only one copy and no one handling it thought to treat it as an archival treasure. Who knew what when, or who among the players wrote in the margin, are open questions, and if the women are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their intelligence as cross-dressing lawyers in stilleto heels, who get to punish the unfortunate but eloquent merchant and exonerate the poor improvident  Venetian loser, that would be dismissed in court as cirumstantial evidence, for justice is blond and the real killer is unmasked only in the fifth act.

Nevertheless, the apotheosis is Cleopatra, top cat of an empire, or failing that, with her name changed to Gertrude, marrying  the king or the brother who succeeds him on the throne, becuase love equals death or the sublime, and murder is just a name for overcoming rthe influence of anxiety.

Shakespeare was a woman. For surely the sublime. And the absence that precedes it, the belatedness of all action, the play having been composed before the chief actor could have come up with a prologue. Well, just imagine Marlon Brando as Hamlet in a production with songs written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Shakespeare is God, I have long maintained, in the face of resistance from multiculturalists, nudists, feminists, poltically correct imbeciles, undersexed leftwing lunatics, bullshit artists, theorists, Dead-heads, pinball wizards, Marxists, neoconservatives and other non-traditionalists who resent the rich and sublimate their guilt into an identification with people who do what they cannot, such as kitchen patrol in boot camp, and working as a plumber.

You see, we only see what we see as Blake would say not with but through the eyes that reveal the arras behind which the pompous Prufrock is vanquished by the young hero. And the ayes have it. The phenomenon of what I have elsewhere called kenosis, an emptying of the vessel like that of a candidate for higher office. But only a woman could have done it -- inviisibly, of  course, because it had to be a secret. Only a woman could have channeled the fire and air of masculinity into the earth and water of pre-Socratic femininity.

Who was she? We may wonder. For the sublime, which can kill us but disdains to do so, exists as a thrill, which you can feel in Milton and Goethe. But Shakespeare, who hits you with it hard in King Lear, also gave birth to the human, as only a woman can.

At Princeton [by John Hennessy]

I DATED MY FAVORITE POET’S DAUGHTER, AND OTHER BUM TRIPS [by John Hennessy, July 25, 2012]

I wasn’t planning to make it to Princeton for my 25^th reunion this year. It looked like no friends were going, but all the usual preppy suspects had registered early. Did I really want to pay two thousand dollars to lodge my family for a weekend among the hordes of Reagan Youth, especially now they’d gone smug with middle age? At the last minute I got an invite to crash at a big house in town with a few of my old buddies, one of whom has never left. “You don’t even have to officially register or go to the tents,” Ted said, “just hang out at Terrace.”

At Princeton, they don’t like to feed you in the dining halls after sophomore year, so most students join an “eating club.” My club was Terrace, a run-down Tudor mansion originally built for president Woodrow Wilson, literally and figuratively around the corner from all of the other clubs. It was the first to do away with “bicker,” a selection process similar to fraternity rush, the first to open its doors to everyone—Catholics, Jews, women, gays, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, scholarship kids. I was led there by a tall, skinny, blue-haired guy with a chain in his nose at the end of an otherwise miserable Freshman Week, and for the next four years I left only to go to classes, the library, and occasionally to sleep; in our day it was a refuge for the few punks, hippies, out-GLBT community members, and anyone else who didn’t belong on campus. 

The plan to spend reunions at Terrace had just one catch: Dead Head Night. Terrace was going to be jammed on Saturday. Phil Lesh, the band’s bass player, was playing a concert of Grateful Dead songs there with his touring group, which included two of his sons, one of whom was a graduating Terrace Club member.  No offense to those folks, but talk about bringing up a slew of bad memories:

Jerry Garcia

        The last time I saw the Dead—as a tourist among my more dedicated Terrace brethren—I had a bum trip. Of course. My style was club music, the earliest days of acid house. After stuffing myself full of a variety of groceries I’ve subsequently cut from my diet, all I could think was, “Whoa, this is a religious cult. And like my own religious cult, Roman Catholicism, this one is focused on a living man. Jerry Garcia. How bizarre.” At the exit signs, backlit people danced in that herky-jerky, wrist-flapping Dead Head way. Steal your face. The hirsute guy in front of me was picking splinters from his beard. His hands left angry little dove-trails. I tried closing my eyes. But as I was peaking (troughing), all I could think was, “These people worship Jerry Garcia. Unlike Jesus, Jerry can’t bank on rising again. What the hell are they going to do when he dies?” The whole concert was ruined for me: these poor misguided Dead Heads, worshipping a mortal. Who would console them in the future?

          For that matter, who was going to console me? I needed to be talked down. After the show I went looking for my girlfriend, Maud Kinnell, whose father, Galway, had until that day been my favorite living poet, my

poetry hero. For years his Book of Nightmares, a powerful exploration of family life, had been the first collection on my golden shelf. Visits home with Maud were like entering Galway’s book.  And how I identified with him. Enough to pick Princeton, his alma mater, when I had other choices. Like him, I was urban working class, a scholarship kid at Princeton. He was even—and this I hadn’t known until a few weeks before, when Maud and I went on a spring break retreat with him to his cabin in Vermont—a fellow alumnus of Terrace Club. As for his daughter, I was even more taken with her.

         The women I’d grown up with—on the Jersey side of the Arthur Kill, near the Merck plant in Rahway, and later a block from the boardwalk in Belmar—with their tough acts, dropped R’s, and tight clothes, were all about volume: big hair, big nails, big mouths, even big hearts sometimes. Much of a muchness. I was entirely unprepared for Maud Kinnell. She was like an Athena sprung fully formed from the brain of Baudelaire. Heathcliff transgendered.  A TB-clinic refugee. Very Gothic chic. An unlikely physics student, she wore black Agnes B dresses, Victorian boots, black eye shadow, and cultivated her resemblance to Louise Brooks by bobbing her straight black hair. Sure, her father was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but her mother was dating Joseph Brodsky, a future Nobel-laureate. As a kid, she’d even watched Sesame Street with Amiri Baraka, her dad’s friend. But those living writers didn’t intimidate her. She read Proust for a laugh, Nietzsche for social hygiene, Jens Peter Jacobsen for aperitif lyricism, and Rilke for advice on love.

 God, was she obsessed with Rilke. She did her best to impress his modes upon me, especially his penchant for solitude. I was only nineteen, but still she opined that I’d never have any success as a poet until I’d learned to embrace solitude, to put my art before all other things, including—and especially—people. Even her.

(Not that she particularly like her own solitude: Within weeks of our first conversation, which lasted all night, she insisted I move into her dorm room because she hated to be apart from me. She aborted every trip home to see her folks. She’d turn around at Penn Station and come straight back to me at Princeton. Eventually we adopted an expedient policy: I agreed to go with her whenever she wanted to visit her family or friends. Enmeshed, they’d call it now.  It doesn’t take a psychologist to see it made her feel better to criticize my abstract commitment to writing.)

I wasn’t ambivalent: I hated solitude. I’d grown up with an enormous Irish and Italian family—even lived in a tiny house with my grandparents, parents, and eight of my mother’s nine brothers and sisters for a couple of years before my siblings were born. While I appreciated a daily walk in the woods, a quiet morning at the typewriter, I liked a bit of noise, family and friends around me, at the end of the day. Still do. After the bummer at the Dead concert, I wasn’t having any of it. Rilke. What did he know? Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? Where was Maud? 

After the Dead show, Maud wasn’t around: not at Terrace, not in the dorm room we bunked in together, not in the library, lab, nowhere. Then I remembered why she hadn’t gone to the concert in the first place: Galway took her to a dinner party in town. The whole dinner party had been engineered in order to introduce Maud to X (not his real name), another undergraduate, someone Galway and the other oldsters wanted to fix her up with. Before we started dating, Maud had expressed interest in X, but now we’d been together for six months, an eternity in college. Why was Galway trying to introduce them now?

X was a descendent of Chinese feudal lords on one side, one of the twentieth century’s greatest European violinists on the other. He was beautiful, impeccably dressed, elegantly mannered, and dumb as a brick. “He’s perfect for you,” Galway told her. So Maud reported, once we finally caught up with each other. I was devastated. Completely betrayed. The fact that Maud hadn’t actually gone home with X—or even made any plans to see him again—didn’t mitigate things much. How could she have agreed to go to that dinner? How could Galway have planned it? What kind of asshole names a collection of poems about his wife and children The Book of Nightmares?

I broke up with Maud, left her room, and went to Terrace Club, where I spent the night under a table, still twitching..

*

**

Well, the worst has happened, of course. Jerry Garcia died in 1995, less than ten years later. But it looks like the Dead, and all those Dead Heads, are still going strong—they’ll still turn out by the hundreds, thousands, even at Princeton, to hear the children of the Dead, grown now, playing the standards that were already oldies when I was young. Certainly they were still powerhousing the night of my 25^th reunion at Terrace Club. The place was jammed to full capacity, people were on the roof, the terraces, the lawn, even hanging out of windows from all three stories of the building. People who couldn’t fit inside the club’s property were crowded up beyond the fences, around the circular driveway, and behind the outdoor stage. The band played a host of those old songs, even the ones this amateur knew: Uncle John’s Band, Sugar Magnolia, Casey Jones, and Phil Lesh’s kids sounded even sweeter than Bob Weir or Jerry. Strangest of all, they were joined by jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, another Terrace alum, who was there to celebrate his thirtieth.

We studied Stanley Jordan’s moves, fingers pounding the neck piano-style. “It’s straight out of Robert Johnson’s playbook,” said my buddy Rob Brink, who’s presently making a feature film about the great blues guitarist. Rob and half a dozen other friends and I danced to the Dead (that’s not dancing, that’s butt-dipping, my eldest son Nicholas, an expert hip hop dancer scoffs), mostly sober, really enjoying it. Between sets we broke out our phones, showed each other pictures of our families.

“I’m so glad you married a beautiful woman,” my friend Kate said, oddly. “I always hoped for that for you.” What a strange remark for Kate, especially since I’d just been saying that Sabina Murray, my wife, grew up in Western Australia before joining her mother’s family in Manila, and she puts up with zero whinging, no self-pity. Merely a flesh wound, and I’m going to tease you if you ask for a band-aid. The fact that she’s the funniest person I’ve ever met, as well as one of the best writers in my generation, the youngest winner of the PEN/Faulkner-Award for fiction ten years ago, didn’t exactly put me off her, either.

But then I realized that Kate was one of the people who helped me through my final break-up with Maud Kinnell, almost a year after that first one the night Galway tried to fix her up with X. The exact details of that lasting argument are lost to me now, but in the run up to it I remember a deep critique of my poetry, Maud concluding, “If I don’t love your poetry, how can I love you?”

I’ve come up with several answers to that question in the years since, but they’ve long ago become moot. (Luckily I’ve gotten a little better as a poet since I left my teens, and, having generated my own company as a parent, my relationship to solitude is more easy-going these days). Those answers were even less relevant once the band began playing again. They weren’t the Grateful Dead, but then again I wasn’t that young man anymore, either. In fact, I enjoyed the band—and myself—much more than our earlier incarnations.

What a privilege it was to have them there. And I was left with that, an appreciation for that deep privilege, surrounded by Rob, the best actor I’ve ever seen on a stage, Kate, whose art installations I deeply admire, and half a dozen other old friends, some more, some less conventionally successful now, but all very intelligent, all serious thinkers, vivid, mercurial conversationalists. What an excess of privilege it had been to live there with them for four years, at Terrace, at Princeton. And as very young writers—I didn’t forget where I came from, in my old neighborhood you were taunted for reading, could get your ass kicked for writing poetry—we had access to Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates, JD McClatchy, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Paul Auster, Stephen Wright, Edmund Keeley, James Richardson, Julian Jaynes, even, indirectly, Joseph Brodsky. What an excess of access we had there.

As Phil Lesh and friends were wrapping it up, I even found it possible to begin thinking about forgiving Galway after all those years. Here’s a first step, ending this with a devastating poem of his:

SHELLEY

When I was twenty the one true
free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,
Shelley who wrote tracts advocating
atheism, free love, the emancipation
of women, the abolition of wealth and class,
and poems on the bliss of romantic love,
Shelley, who I learned later, perhaps
almost too late, remarried Harriet,
then pregnant with their second child,
and a few months later ran off with Mary,
already pregnant herself, bringing
with them Mary’s stepsister Claire,
who very likely also became his lover,

and in this malaise a trios, which Shelley
had imagined would be “a paradise of exiles,”
they lived, along with the spectre of Harriet,
who drowned herself in the Serpentine,
and of Mary’s half sister Fanny,
who killed herself, maybe for unrequited
love of Shelley, and with the spirits
of adored but often neglected
children conceived incidentally
in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s
Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley
and consigned to foster parents; Mary’s
Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse,
Shelley’s favorite, dead at three; Elena,
the baby in Naples, almost surely
Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted”
and then left behind, dead at one and a half;
Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,
whom Byron sent off to the convent
at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

and in those days, before I knew
any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,
who thought he was following radiant desire.

--GALWAY KINNELL

On Coming to America [by Anne Lehman]

David and Anne Lehman

In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, here is an excerpt from Anne Lehman's essay about escaping the Nazis and coming to America aboard the President Harding:

It was a nightmare to live in Vienna at that time. Every time the doorbell rang, we were afraid--they're coming for us!
...

 A friend of mine got me a permit to go to England as a mother's helper. This way I got out of Nazi Germany. These people, Wright was their name, lived in Southsea. He was a shipbuilder and she was a dentist. They treated me very well and he gave me English lessons every day. But I was lonely there, so after a few months I went to London, where I have some friends from Vienna. My friend Trude and I found work in the home of an English theatre producer by the name of French. Trude was supposed to be the cook and I was the parlor maid. Once Rex Harrison came to dinner. He was very friendly, a real gentleman. 
. . . 

But the American consulate finally opened its door again [having closed it in 1938] and I received my visa to go to America. How happy I was. Naturally I was worried to travel on an English ship, so my cousin from America sent me additional money and I changed my ticket to an American ship, the President Harding. I think it was the last Atlantic crossing it ever made. It took us ten days of the most terrible shaking. Everyone on board was sick and wanted to die. We were so sick that we weren't even afraid of hidden mines, and as in a dream we did all the safe drillings, etc. The last day was Thanksgiving. We had, and for me it was the first time, a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, they played 'Oh, say, can you see,' and when I finally saw the Statue of Liberty, I was really grateful to God, that he let me live and see America. 

Find the complete essay in Yeshiva Boys, by David Lehman

A group of German and Austrian Jewish refugees  in New York on board the SS President Harding. New York, United States, June 3, 1939. (source: Holocaust Encyclopedia

(Ed note: Anne tried hard to get her parents to England from Vienna but "everything took so long," and by the time she had assembled the necessary documents, England was at war and she had no way of getting in touch with them to bring them to safety. She later learned that they were murdered by the Nazis in Riga, Latvia.)

-- sdl 

 

Yeats' "Vacillation" and "Among School Children" -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 9, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

The Great Man with wife Georgie, daughter Ann, and son William

Vacillation

I

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

II

A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

V

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

VI

A rivery field spread out below,
An odour of the new-mown hay
In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou
Cried, casting off the mountain snow,
‘Let all things pass away.’

Wheels by milk-white asses drawn
Where Babylon or Nineveh
Rose; some conquer drew rein
And cried to battle-weary men,
‘Let all things pass away.’

From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What’s the meaning of all song?
‘Let all things pass away.’

VII

The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

VIII

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh’s mummy. I – though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a pre-destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

Among School Children

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and history,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way—the children's eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

 

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy—

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato's parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

 

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t'other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler's heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.

 

IV

Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

 

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

 

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

 

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother's reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts—O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise—

O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

 

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

“The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht & Arnold's "Dover Beach"

“The Dover Bitch”

 A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

See Late Romance: A Poet's Life by David Yezzi, a biography of Hecht published this year by St. Martin's Press. 

Here is Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach":

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

Anthem for Doomed Youth [by Wilfred Owen 1893 – 1918]

Anthem for Doomed Youth [by Wilfred Owen 1893 – 1918]

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

"How like a winter hath my absence been. . ."

Sonnet 97

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer's time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
  Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
  That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

Sonnet 97

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer's time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
  Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
  That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

Mick Imlah, 1956-2009

On January 12, 2009, the English poet and editor Mick Imlah died at age 52. He was the author of two books, Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader (2008). After graduating from Oxford with a first (top grade) in 1979, Imlah helped revive Oxford Poetry. He became poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1993. As Mark Ford notes in his Guardian obituary, "Imlah was in fact blessed not only with astonishing literary talent, but with the looks of a movie star. He was, in addition, a formidable amateur rugby and cricket player; both sports feature often in his poems."  

<<< He was born Michael Ogilvie Imlah, with a twin sister, Fiona, in Aberdeen. His first 10 years were spent in Milngavie, near Glasgow. In 1966 the Imlah family moved south, to Beckenham, Kent. Mick attended Dulwich college, and in 1976 was awarded a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. There he met, as his tutor, the poet who would be the most significant influence on his own development, John Fuller. In due course they would collaborate on a wonderful series of six-line poems on the counties of England, published in Poetry Review in 1986.

Imlah was fortunate in the other literary friends he made during his time at Oxford; his circle included the novelists Alan Hollinghurst, John Lanchester and Isabel Fonseca, and the poet Bernard O'Donoghue. He graduated with a first in 1979, and embarked on a DPhil on Arthurian legends in Victorian poetry. This was never submitted, but his research into the work of Tennyson and Browning is easily discernible in his early poems, which make clever use of the dramatic monologue. The title poem of his first pamphlet, The Zoologist's Bath, published in 1982, mingles fantasy and fact in a manner that would become a hallmark of Imlah's poetry: it recreates the life of an eccentric Victorian evolutionary theorist, who is convinced mankind will soon return to its original element, the sea; he therefore refuses to get out of the bath, imagining he is developing a fin.

In 1983 Imlah, along with the Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins and the poets Peter McDonald and Elise Paschen, set about reviving the long dormant magazine Oxford Poetry. So began a 25-year career in editing and literary journalism. That autumn he was appointed, with Tracy Warr, co-editor of Poetry Review, succeeding Andrew Motion. In 1989 he took over from Motion again, this time as poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, a post he held for four years. From 1993 he was poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement; it was characteristic of his absolute devotion to the business of editing and publishing the poetry of others that he insisted on vetting contributions and judging the TLS poetry competition even in the final stages of his illness. >>>

from the archive; first posted 5/18/09

"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend. . ."

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

from "Ulysses" on Bloomsday

— Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

— Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.

— He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?

The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

— That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

— Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

— I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way.

Good man, good man.

— I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five weeks' board. The lump I have is useless.

— For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.

— I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it. We are a generous people but we must also be just.

— I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the shapely bulk of a man in tartan filibegs: Albert Edward, prince of Wales.

— You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine in '46. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.

Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the planters' covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie down.

Stephen sketched a brief gesture.

— I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are all Irish, all kings' sons.

— Alas, Stephen said.

— Per vias rectas, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do so.

Lal the ral the ra
The rocky road to Dublin.

A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John! Soft day, your honour!... Day!... Day!... Two topboots jog dangling on to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.

— That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus, with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press. Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.

He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.

— Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, the dictates of common sense. Just a moment.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek heads poised in air: lord Hastings' Repulse, the duke of Westminster's Shotover, the duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris, 1866. Elfin riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds, backing king's colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.

— Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this allimportant question...

*

He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.

— Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying.

He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.

— Dying, he said, if not dead by now.

The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's windingsheet.

His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted.

— A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?

— They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

— Who has not? Stephen said.

— What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.

— History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

Prince Harry Tosses His Cap into the Ring!

Prince Harry today declared he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

When told that you need to have been born in the United States to be eligible, Harry said, "What about Henry Kissinger?"

When told that you need to be thirty-five years old to be eligible, Harry said, "I am thirty-eight years old."

Harry, the Duke of Sussex, the controversial brother of England's future king (William), married Meghan Markle in 2018, and royal watchers have talked ceaselessly of the couple ever since. The Duke addressed the exclusive Royal Club in Pacific Palisades on his birthday, the fifteenth of September. The title of his address: "There Will Always Be an England." Afterward, I caught up with him. 

"How about the rumor that King Charles was not your real father?"

"How would you like a punch in the nose?"

"No, seriously. There is a rumor that James Hewitt is your real father, not King Charles III."

"That rumor has caused me great pain over the years."

"Was Caroline Flack, who took her own life in 2020, your ex-girlfriend?"

"We had a brief fling in 2009 after our friend Caroline Pinkham introduced us."

“I knew [Pinkham] was friends with Prince Harry, and I’d never met him, so I thought, ‘Oh that’s quite exciting,’ and for a moment I perked up,” Flack wrote in her 2014 memoir, “Storm in a C Cup."

As for Chelsy Davy (right), another of Harry's exes, it is rumored that the prince's grandmother never approved of the free-spirited Zimbabwean beauty. -- Walter Carey, in Pacific Palisades, for the London Daily Gazette 

Crocus & Daffodil welcome you to Clare College

What you see when you approach the gate at Clare College, Cambridge, in March:

The vew of the bridge and the old court in the near green future:

The Hollow Crown: From Shakepeare's "Richard II"

From Richard II

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's Happening? [by David Shapiro]

What’s Happening
(“Write 19 lines under that heading and I’ll post it” – DL to DS)

1. Mostly decathected as they say in analysis: forget forget!
2.  I pause don’t dance don’t leap. "I rarely dance."
3.  I don't own the four volumes of Herzen just a sliced bio like his bio.
4. "Bankers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse"
5. What's better? Alain Delon and Monica Vitti loiter at stock exchange.
6. Someone dies, a minute of silence grows, then the beasts roar back.
7. I love stringing beads in a bead store in New Orleans. Beads in trees.
8. I wanted a random necklace to give to a random friend.
9. I was attacked for randomness. It was indeed too expected.
10. The critic's glasses are flying, and also a Mondrian flower torn apart.
11. "I am afraid of nothing. I have BEEN to Mexico."
12. Spinoza the lovable philosopher fried spiders and watched: what?
13. Don't overcome obstacles, find easiness. KK's motto from VL
14. What's happening? What am I thinking? "Do you actually think?"
15. Ron Padgett: you don't actually think I will read all this, do you?
16. Don't ever use the past tense in discussing physical beauty.
17. My friend said he was sinking into the white spaces between letters.
18. Whitman said "Leave the best unsaid----------------------------------
19. How do you end a poem? With the proper sense of endlessness.

in memory of KK

-- David Shapiro [March 31, 2009]

Previously unpublished.

Letter from London (Ten Years On) [by David Lehman]

It was spring in November, raining but once in the course of five days and that a mild midnight sprinkle, and one day the temperature climbed almost to the sixties, and you needed only a scarf, a cap, and a sweater to weather a brisk wind. Some things don't change: what Waugh called "the braying for broken glass" continues on Saturday evenings when between Covent Garden and Leicester Square we saw numerous individuals falling down drunk, and in the underground a male and female bobby were handcuffing some male and female hooligans when Stacey and I entered. I told the concierge at the hotel and he said, "this is England, and it's Saturday night."

        It was Remembrance Week, which is what we used to call Armistice Day, and now call Veterans Day, but in the States it's a day off whereas they take it very seriously here. I joined in, spending an hour with Wilfred Owen (right), the most talented of the poets who fell in World War I.To commemorate their war dead the British wear paper poppies on their lapels, and a controversy broke out when FIFA, the football governing board, declared that England's team members would not be allowed to wear poppies over their black armbands when they played a "friendly" (which is what we more ponderously call an "exhibition game") against Spain on Saturday. Well, Prime Minister David Cameron, young Prince William, and a lot of other worthies were having none of that, and the players did indeed sport their poppies during their 1-nil victory. It gave the columnists something to chew about, and this they did, and loudly. England invented scare journalism -- hell, maybe they invented journalism altogether  -- and they can certainly give US columnists lessons in raising the roof from 0 to 100 in record time, as when one such writer asserted that Germany has initiated a "stealth" program for establishing a "Fourth Reich." Joke of the week: Greece has a new Prime Minister. Angela Merkel. Repeat, this time replacing Greece with Italy.

          What surprised me was the vehemence of the hatred of Tony Blair we encountered among even people of moderate disposition. One friend even felt that the ex-PM should be brought to The Hague for war crimes.
          Last trains on the underground now leave five minutes past midnight, which is a good thirty five minutes later than in my benighted day. The food is better though expensive, and the weirdest thing is that it is easier to get a latte or any of a dozen varieties of brewed coffee than an honest cup of tea as opposed to what they quaintly call "instant tea." Favorite pub names of the week: The Fox and Anchor. The Angel and Crown. The Camel and Artichoke.

          In Oxford, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the century's eleventh year, I took part in a colloquium on peace and war in modern poetry.  Stacey and I had a lovery long lunch with Jon Stallworthy, chatting about Wilfred Owen in addition to reminiscing about days spent together in Ithaca in the 1980s. Then it was back to work. I had forgotten how early it gets dark on a November afternoon in Oxford. We had barely half an hour in the deer garden at Magdalen, and then we went to Blackwell's and bought a daybook and a volume of Schopenhauer edited with an introduction by Thomas Mann.

          And Joe Frazier died and every paper ran a full page obit, and there was Sinatra in the front row at the Garden photographing the "fight of the century," with Burt Lancaster doing color commentary for closed circuit TV back on March 8, 1971. -- DL

 

from the archive; first posted November 16, 2011. 

Chaucer Gets Canceled (part III)

Two excerpts from Calls to cancel Chaucer ignore his defense of women and the innocent – and assume all his characters’ opinions are his [plus a link to TheConversation.com

 

July 19, 2021 8.12am EDT

Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the dangers – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death.

In his July 2021 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the removal of Geoffrey Chaucer from university curricula. Edwards says he believes this disappearance may be propelled by a vocal cohort of scholars who see the “father of English poetry” as a rapist, racist and antisemite.

The predicament would have amused Chaucer himself. Jewish and feminist scholars, among others, are shooting down one of their earliest and wisest allies. This is happening when new research reveals a Chaucer altogether different from what many current readers have come to accept. My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.

***

As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem “The House of Fame.” He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

Chaucer’s own words demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that when his much underestimated Prioress tells her antisemitic blood libel tale, Chaucer is not endorsing it. Through her own words and actions, and a cascade of reactions from those who hear her, he is exposing such guilty and dangerous actors as they deploy such lies.

And was he a rapist or an abductor? It’s unlikely. The case suggests he might well have been targeted, perhaps even because of his work. Few authors have ever been more outspoken about man’s inhumanity to women.

It is bizarre that one of the strongest and earliest writers in English literature to speak out against rape and support women and the downtrodden should be pilloried and threatened with cancellation.

But Chaucer knew the complexity of his art put him at risk. As his character the Squire dryly observed, people all too often “demen gladly to the badder ende” – “They are happy to assume the worst.”

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part II)

These "Letters to the Editor" appear in the TLS of July 23, 2021 

It is indisputable that Chaucer was charged with “raptus” and that one of the meanings of the term (but not its only one) is “rape”. The question of his guilt is far less clear. The body of scholarship, both inculpatory and exculpatory, is extensive. But ultimately the issue remains unresolvable in any conclusive way. More widely, does the charge itself mean that the possibility, and only the possibility, that a writer had, or might have had, an unpleasant personal life mean that his works should not be studied?

Should “me too” become “you too”? The writers in the Chaucer Review ask “whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by moral insufficiency.” The grounds of “moral insufficiency” are never defined and are not demonstrated. These “feminist scholars” are not trying “to deal with Chaucer in new and important and – yes – difficult ways”, as Tom Bailey asserts. (He never explains what these “ways” are.) Their explicit aim is to expunge him from both canon and curriculum. Just like the University of Leicester. Different forms of political correctness create improbable bedfellows

A. S. G. Edwards
Enfield

I am the medievalist who resigned from the editorial board of the Chaucer Review in protest against the prefatory statements made by the two guest editors of Issue no 54.3 (2019), on “new feminist approaches to Chaucer”. I have as good a claim to the title of feminist as these two editors, as is shown not only by my published works but also by the fact that the permanent editors of the Review dedicated a subsequent issue in this feminist series (55.4, in 2020) to me and Carolyn P. Collette, as “feminist scholars who ave done so much to shape the study of Chaucer and direct its future”.

The issue here is not feminism; it is literary criticism. The guest editors declare flatly that “Chaucer does not share our beliefs, we know. His historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence”. This is not “quiet questioning”, as Tom Bailey puts it, but self-righteous assertion, which dictates to the reader what she is supposed to find in Chaucer before she turns the first page. And of course she will not so much find it as bring it there. To approach Chaucer with this mind-set is to substitute a grotesque caricature for the humane values that distinguish him from many other writers of his time, and that students, in my experience, are quite capable of appreciating.

One wonders whether the guest editors (or Tom Bailey) have actually read Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, in which he opens his retelling of the rape of Philomel with passionate questioning of God – why did he allow the birth of the rapist Tereus, whose mere existence pollutes the world and the minds of all who read his story, even the mind of God himself? As for Chaucer’s alleged rape (about which there cannot be absolute certainty), his sensitivity to the paramount need for female consent, as well as the wide range of meanings covered by the word “raptus”, are evident, for example, when Troilus refuses Pandarus’s urging that he should “ravysshe” Criseyde, because, says Troilus, “ravysshyng of women” caused the present sufferings of Troy; so he insists he will not “ravysshe hire” – that is, elope with her – unless she wishes him to (but of course she prefers her own plan). I also cannot refrain from quoting Hector’s superbly dignified response to the Greek envoys who request the exchange of Criseyde for the Trojan captive Antenor: “‘Syres, she nys no prisonere,’ he seyde; / ‘I not [do not know] on yow who that this charge leyde, / But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle, / We usen here no wommen for to selle’”.

Of course, these matters deserve fuller discussion, which my published work on Chaucer has tried to provide. But the final issue with the guest editors’ manifesto is that they wish to close down discussion, to “move past Chaucer”, and “demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency”. To those of us who deeply admire and love Chaucer, the charge of “moral insufficiency” rebounds on its makers.

Jill Mann
Cambridge

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Farewell to Leicester Squares! [by Walter Carey]

<<
Leicester University denies it is dropping Chaucer for being 'too white' after proposing modules on race and sexuality instead

By Dan Sales and Ross Ibbetson

The Daily Mail (21 January 2021)

• University courses featuring The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf are under threat 
• English department told of plans for a 'decolonised' curriculum via email
• Leicester today moved to deny Chaucer course was axed for being 'too white' 
• But added that it wanted its teaching to cater to the students' own interests

By DAN SALES and ROSS IBBETSON FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 11:13 EDT, 21 January 2021 | UPDATED: 16:58 EDT, 21 January 2021

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9171987/Leicester-University-denies-dropping-Chaucer-white-proposals.html
>>

Asked to comment on this new development, Professor Mallory Thomas of St. John's Wood College told Tim Kieffer of NBS News (Independent), "Anyone who uses the word 'module' in any context, but particularly the pedagogic one, and particularly in England, the land of the Mother Tongue, should be required to recite the first dozen lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and made to perform 248 hours of community service defined strictly by the archaic league of gentlemen on penalty of imprisonment in Borstal."

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part I)

Two excerpts from "Gladly wolde he lerne? Why Chaucer is disappearing from the university curriculum"
By A. S. G. Edwards

Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 2021

It was announced in January that the University of Leicester was to remove Chaucer from the English curriculum. Along with the rest of medieval literature, and some from later periods, he was to be replaced with courses on “race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity”. The announcement prompted widespread and ineffectual protests. Several medievalists at Leicester have now lost their jobs, and incoming students will henceforward be denied the opportunity to study the father of English poetry (among much else).

The reason initially given by the University for this decision was economic: these courses were not popular with undergraduates. This assertion has been questioned and the University has not presented evidence to substantiate its claim. It has been frequently asserted in the media that the real motive is a desire to “decolonize” the curriculum, a suggestion that the University has denied.

***

This is a passage from a recent essay by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu in the Chaucer Review, a scholarly journal:

<<<
[Chaucer’s] historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence. Many feminist scholars now ask … whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency. And perhaps that will be the conversation of future years, of future incarnations of medievalist feminism.
>>>

This is critical thinking in the age of Donald Trump. (I know of one eminent Chaucer scholar who resigned from the Editorial Board of the Chaucer Review over these words.) It is also another form of the impulse felt by Leicester’s administrators: the desire to remove Chaucer from the university curriculum and find “a new object of study”. But here the motives are based on pseudo-ideological grounds that seem close to personal loathing. It is easy to respond with simple arguments that refute the simplistic assumptions of these academics: to point out that the depiction of character and event by a writer is not an invariable or necessary reflection of the author’s own assumptions. But to have to do so is a stark demonstration of the ways in which thought has been replaced by kinds of unreflective dogma in some parts of academe.

The actions of radical feminists and of the University of Leicester are different forms of political correctness, one striving for “relevance”, the other seeking to suppress literary history by the invention of grounds for seeing it as offensive. Both seek a simpler academic world shaped by the doctrinaire. The proper study of Chaucer involves the appreciation of difficulty, of complexity, as, of course, does the literary and historical analysis of any significant literary figure or work. This ought not to need to be said. But difficulty and complexity have become danger words in academe. They impose on both teacher and student the pressure of effort. In the case of Chaucer, the extent of that effort is compounded by the extent of the linguistic and cultural distance that separates us from his writings. It is attractive in various quarters to find reasons not to make such effort, to assume that students are afraid of difficulty and that teachers should not challenge them. A scholarly world where we seek not to disturb or be disturbing is one in which Chaucer will not be welcome as a subject for study

A. S. G. Edwards is General Editor (with Julia Boffey) of a new edition of The Works of Chaucer, which is forthcoming.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312 

From “Game-changer: A Philosophy for Homo Ludens” [by Vid Simoniti]

For all who are wondering what the philosophers in England are up to, take a look at “Game-changer: A Philosophy for Homo Ludens” by Vid Simoniti, a review of Games: Agency of Art by C. Thi Nguyen (Oxford UP). Here are the opening grafs:

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“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” When Jeremy Bentham notoriously declared all pleasures to be interchangeable, he chose a children’s game to represent pleasures of the lower sort. What entertainment could be more banal than push-pin, a sort of Victorian “thumb war” played with pins? Since Bentham’s day, though, games have come a long way. Video games now create more revenue than television, music or films. Together with board games, they span a variety of subgenres, and foster loyal communities of connoisseurs and critics. And yet games are still largely considered to be (mere) entertainment rather than art. They are seldom given sustained attention in literary reviews, say, or in university syllabuses.

Thi Nguyen’s philosophy of games seeks to redress this bias. Games are an art form, Nguyen argues, and their medium is human agency. Just as a painter manipulates pigments to create a likeness, so a game designer induces the players to live out certain patterns of doing things. Chess compels us to deduce and to plan; poker to dissimulate and to take risks; and the ungainly choreographies of Twister push us towards hilarious self-abasement. The art of games is the creation of such “agential modes”, be they intense or jovial, cerebral or daft.
>>>

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/games-c-thi-nguyen-review-vid-simoniti/

Alicia in Wonderland: What it's like to be the only American and only woman in the contentious Oxford Professor of Poetry election [by A. E. Stallings]

It began as quickly and unexpectedly as falling down a rabbit hole, or passing through a mirror—an e-mail arrived, out of the blue, from one of the previous holders of the position, the critic Christopher Ricks. The subject line was “An Inquiry,” and it was characteristically brief:

“It came to me that you would be an excellent professor of poetry at Oxford. (Geoffrey Hill has not long to go.) Would this possibility interest you?”

An American poet day-dreams of course about certain prizes, recognition, or positions, however implausible, but the Oxford Professor of Poetry simply is not one of them—it seems such the exclusive purview of British and Irish men. In its 300 years, it has never gone to a woman or indeed as far as I am aware, to anyone outside of the British Isles. It had never crossed my mind.

But I said yes I’d give it a go, and we were off.

All at once, I found myself in a sort of Wonderland, and in a horse race (I would say a caucus-race, but not everyone will be able to demand prizes), as well as a literary-political game of chess. I was standing in a unique election, a mixture of that rarest of things, direct democracy, and one of the most rarefied: only Oxford graduates (and other members of Convocation) may vote. The position was established in 1708 by Henry Birkhead, who founded it on the notion that “the reading of the ancient poets gave keenness and polish to the minds of young men.” It was originally only open to clergymen from Merton.

According to The Guardian, “Soyinka’s backers have been keen to stress that they consider the post more like an honour to be bestowed than a job to be applied for.” I want to say the exact opposite—yet that’s too facile. Maybe instead the office could be described as an honor to be applied for, a job to be bestowed. For all its grandeur and prestige, the post is, in essence, the oldest and first Poet in Residence in education. Certainly I have been applying very hard since the middle of March. 

Numerous rules have been changed since the scandal-ridden election of 2009. To get on the ballot used to require only a dozen nominators with Oxford degrees; now it takes fifty. We hunted after the requisite nominators for a couple of weeks (among them Tobias Wolff, Christopher Ricks of course, Adrian McKinty, Chlo Aridjis), followed up on their filling out and mailing of the nominator form (which could not be scanned or faxed), and collated before sending them to the Election office. In an abundance of caution, we ended up with 73. 

Perhaps the most significant change to the process, however, is that in the last election on-line voting was introduced. (The use of paper ballots was costly, and one had to vote in person.) Overseas voters were a factor last time, but this time will be, I think, more so. It remains to be seen how social media and the internet will change the nature of the election. I suspect surprises lie in store.

It’s been an intense roller coaster too: reaching out to the press, reading virulent blog posts (note to self—do not read the comments), asking major academics and writers for support. But also exciting, even moving--generous endorsements from publications such as the TLS, and highly-regarded and popular critics such as Mary Beard and Amanda Foreman. You learn who your friends are (and foes) in the literary community. You might tower over the treetops, or find yourself at the bottom of a treacle well, three or four times a day. My immensely supportive husband, John Psaropoulos, who is a Greek journalist (though UK citizen) already run off his feet with the “crisis,” has had to do a lot more cooking than usual and more supervising of long division at homework time. I have been living for months on a diet of jittery adrenaline and arcane Oxford gossip.

The principal job requirement is a lecture a term, though the professor should also do something else—a reading, workshop, meeting with students.  But the qualifications (the candidate “must be of sufficient distinction to be able to fulfill the duties of the post”) and job description (“to participate in the wider intellectual life of the English faculty to encourage the production and appreciation of poetry”) are vague; the job is yours to define. Being a poet is not a requirement, and indeed some of the best professors have been critics. The current holder, Geoffrey Hill, a vigorous octogenarian, has been delivering rousing old-testament jeremiads to standing ovations. As a matter of policy, however, he does not meet with students. Seamus Heaney, who was professor when I was in residence, delivered compelling and humane talks; it turns out you could book an appointment to meet with him and discuss your poems, but either I didn’t know it at the time, or I couldn’t work up the nerve. Other professors, Robert Graves and W. H. Auden for instance, would meet students at cafes or pubs.  I would aim to be a Professor in that approachable mold. And I would hope that, as the first woman, and maybe almost as important, the first American apart from the naturalized citizen W. H. Auden (Rober Lowell lost to Edmund Blunden in 1966), I would also serve as an encouragement to others. 

Most of all I kept thinking, as I wandered through Oxford this past week (I was there to give a reading at Rhodes House), what a curious and curiouser turn of events the whole matter was.  As a young and insecure American graduate student twenty years ago, Oxford intimidated me:  I felt awkward, that I didn’t belong, I was out of my element.  Now I seemed to be collegially accepted, claimed even, staying at the Lodgings of the Principal of my old college, collaborating in the campaign with my former tutor, having a strategic coffee in the Senior Common Room in Christ Church, meeting with students at the Eagle and Child (watering hole of the Inklings—C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, etc.), attending a dinner at high table.  Had I made it somehow, a pale anonymous pawn, to the far end of the chessboard? 

Walking through the gorgeous gardens of Lady Margaret Hall, in their full glory at the beginning of June, by the banks of the Cherwell fringed with doilies of Queen Anne’s lace, I was ambushed by a bewildering mixture of melancholy and joy, gratitude and wonder. I would sometimes take a turn on the path and feel a stab of—not of nostalgia, since surely a place of brief sojourn in my youth could not be called home—but chronalgia, as if the soul of the young woman aspiring to be a poet, and the soul of the poet I had become, passed right through each other, coming and going.

Talbot Hall and gardens Lady Margaret Hall Oxford

It’s been disappointing to see that one major English newspaper in particular has made a narrative out of a two-man race—which I suppose is true in the sense that the two front-runners are men.  But it is also an exciting and historic time for women in Oxford.  The university recently appointed its first female Vice Chancellor (nothing Vice about it—this is the head of the university), in the Oxford’s eight-hundred some-odd years.  And St. Benet’s Hall, the last all-male college, just voted to admit female students for the first time.  Maybe good things come in threes.

It’s been a wild ride, full of thrills and confusion, bemusement and vexations, anxiety and hope.  But anything is possible as we run round and round towards the finish line.  With only days to go before the end of voter registration, and only three weeks until the end of the election, right now my odds at Ladbrokes are five to one.

-- A. E. Stallings

from the archive; posted June 6 , 2015