Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Friday, May 18, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
corruption in a minor key
1. If you teach, and select texts for your courses on the basis of which poets (not poetry) you like personally, or owe a favor to, or are part of an organization with, or want to impress, and not on the basis of a text’s pedagogical utility -- its value to those you were hired to teach and whose intellectual welfare is partly your responsibility -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
2. If you slander or libel poets you don’t know based not on information you actually have but your own personal guesses about what type of person they might be, and / or a disagreement they had with a friend of yours many years ago, and can’t find it in yourself to forgive and / or forget but instead only to pass your bitterness on to others down through the years, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
3. If you can’t take joy in the successes of friends and / or those who are not friends but whose work you recognize as having substantial artistic merit, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
4. If you choose when and where to write a poetry review on the basis of personal allegiances and not genuine admiration for the work you’re reviewing, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
5. If you choose which poets to read based on anything other than your admiration for their work -- their clothes, their haircut, their power and influence, their friends, the extent to which you see them or their lives as a mirror of your own, their physical proximity to you or to someone/ something you want -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.
Seth Abramson, Northern Poetry Review, courtesy (wie so oft) Woods Lot, the rest here
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt, in association with Waterstones: Poets on Poets, Carcanet, 1997.
To mark National Poetry, Day Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Poetry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late fourteenth century and ending in the early twentieth, and to provide brief headnotes to describe their choices. The result is an anthology with a difference. From Gower to Yeats, from the old and the new worlds, the selectors and the selected converge in a volume of wonderful poetry and rich surprise.
A wonderful book, available for download [at a site which I'm now told installs a virus. Gawd. OK, link deleted, but the book is also for sale, see below.]
[Sorry, should have been clear: the book is also available for purchase on Amazon.co.uk, here.
]
Monday, July 12, 2010
WWw
Earth has not anything to show more fair
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty
The City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open to the fields and to the sky
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep
The river glideth at his own sweet will
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep
And all that mighty heart is lying still
[checking online, I first come across a couple of sites that give the line as given as 'never did the sun more beautifully steep' - I think: can that possibly be right? the prosody is all wrong... find other sites which offer the line as remembered, but also have the line 'This City now doth like a garment wear' - which feels completely wrong because I have been misquoting the poem for 30 years but is probably right.]
[I once talked to a woman at Oxford who said Wordsworth was her favourite poet. I made some sort of appalled noise, thinking of the acres of dreary verbiage Ww had written, and she said, Yes, but you don't judge a poet by his worst work, you judge by the best. ]
The reason I did not know what to do when I went to college was that I had been an avid reader and majoring in English looked the obvious thing to do but I thought picking apart texts would destroy the thing I loved. It's not that I don't like picking things apart - this is what I like about philosophy - but I did not like - the thought of deploying a discourse on this poem is pretty horrible. If I am in a big city and cross a bridge at dawn the poem comes to mind. It seems to me that it could be embedded in a different social practice, something like the Japanese tea ceremony. The purpose of the Japanese tea ceremony was to have a social occasion where rank, wealth were set aside: when first introduced, at any rate, it was very simple. So one could have a social occasion where people turned up and each person recited a poem. (Any kind of literary discourse, these days, is obviously embedded in a system of social signifiers: the economy of academia means every discourse arrives with its obsolescence on the horizon.)
I talk too much.
He said I hunt for haddock's eyes
Among the heather bright
I make them into waistcoat buttons
In the silent night
And these I do not sell for gold
Or coin of silvery shine
But for a copper halfpenny
And that will purchase nine
I sometimes dig for buttered rolls
Or set limed twigs for crabs
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
For wheels of hansom cabs
And that's the way-- he gave a wink--
By which I get my wealth,
And very gladly will I drink
Your honour's noble health
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed a design
To keep the Menai Bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine
I thanked him much for telling me
The way he got his wealth
But chiefly for his wish that he
Might drink my noble health
And now if e'er by chance I put
My fingers into glue
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe
Or if I drop upon my toe
A very heavy weight
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old man I used to know...
The hapless WWw here
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty
The City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open to the fields and to the sky
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep
The river glideth at his own sweet will
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep
And all that mighty heart is lying still
[checking online, I first come across a couple of sites that give the line as given as 'never did the sun more beautifully steep' - I think: can that possibly be right? the prosody is all wrong... find other sites which offer the line as remembered, but also have the line 'This City now doth like a garment wear' - which feels completely wrong because I have been misquoting the poem for 30 years but is probably right.]
[I once talked to a woman at Oxford who said Wordsworth was her favourite poet. I made some sort of appalled noise, thinking of the acres of dreary verbiage Ww had written, and she said, Yes, but you don't judge a poet by his worst work, you judge by the best. ]
The reason I did not know what to do when I went to college was that I had been an avid reader and majoring in English looked the obvious thing to do but I thought picking apart texts would destroy the thing I loved. It's not that I don't like picking things apart - this is what I like about philosophy - but I did not like - the thought of deploying a discourse on this poem is pretty horrible. If I am in a big city and cross a bridge at dawn the poem comes to mind. It seems to me that it could be embedded in a different social practice, something like the Japanese tea ceremony. The purpose of the Japanese tea ceremony was to have a social occasion where rank, wealth were set aside: when first introduced, at any rate, it was very simple. So one could have a social occasion where people turned up and each person recited a poem. (Any kind of literary discourse, these days, is obviously embedded in a system of social signifiers: the economy of academia means every discourse arrives with its obsolescence on the horizon.)
I talk too much.
He said I hunt for haddock's eyes
Among the heather bright
I make them into waistcoat buttons
In the silent night
And these I do not sell for gold
Or coin of silvery shine
But for a copper halfpenny
And that will purchase nine
I sometimes dig for buttered rolls
Or set limed twigs for crabs
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
For wheels of hansom cabs
And that's the way-- he gave a wink--
By which I get my wealth,
And very gladly will I drink
Your honour's noble health
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed a design
To keep the Menai Bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine
I thanked him much for telling me
The way he got his wealth
But chiefly for his wish that he
Might drink my noble health
And now if e'er by chance I put
My fingers into glue
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe
Or if I drop upon my toe
A very heavy weight
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old man I used to know...
The hapless WWw here
Poems recited 10.00-10.55 am, 23.09.09, 1325 Avenue of the Americas
There is a wide, high passageway at street level through the fortress that is 1325 Ave. of the Americas. On 22.09.09 she came to identify the building. On 23.09.09 she came at 10.00 for an 11.00 appointment, afraid of getting lost and being late. She was in a state of abject terror. She sat on a bench reciting poetry and smoking to calm her nerves.
She thinks of herself as someone who never reads poetry. Then she realises that she takes the OCT of the Iliad with her on even short trips. She's lazy, it's true: she should be more adventurous. She has poems in her head: lines flash through the head throughout the day, if she has to wait at a bus stop, at the hairdresser's, in a supermarket queue she will go through some of the poems she knows. So of course most of the poetry she encounters during a year is the stuff in her head. She learnt 'Courage! he cried, and pointed toward the land' sitting through a boring English class in 9th grade, leafing through the anthology: if idly standing at a bus stop 'Courage! he cried...' is the poem likeliest to come first to the mind.
'Courage!' he cried, and pointed toward the land;
'This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.'
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemèd always afternoon...
She thinks she learnt 'The White Knight's Tale' around the same time :
I'll tell thee everything I can, there's little to relate,
I saw an agèd agèd man, a-sitting on a gate.
'Who are you, agèd man,' I said, 'and how is it you live?'
And his answer trickled through my head like water through a sieve.
He said 'I search for butterflies that sleep among the wheat;
I make them into mutton pies and sell them in the street;
I sell them unto men,' he said,' who sail on stormy seas,
And that's the way I get my bread, a trifle if you please.'
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one's whiskers green
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen
So having no reply to give
To what the old man said
I cried, 'Come tell me how you live!'
And thumped him on the head...
[She had been reciting the poem for years before she realised the agèd man was angling for a tip. 'I thanked him much for telling me the way he got his wealth, But chiefly for his wish that he might drink my noble health' is the sort of mistake she makes all the time.]
This often flashes into the head unprompted. Also 'That is no country for old men', 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan', 'Earth has not anything to show more fair', 'My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains', 'Carecharmer sleep, son of the sable night' - it's not that these are her favourite poems (she's not sure which those would be), they're just the poems that come to mind most often. (How often depends more on how much time she happens to spend in queues than on an inclination to 'read' poetry; this is, obviously, why she should be more adventurous.) If she has a long wait she brings up more. They are not very recherché, the selection being strongly influenced by a couple of anthologies and a few other fairly predictable sources. When she checks them against the original text, which she seldom does, she finds that mistakes have crept in.
Poems recited 10.00-10.55 am, 23.09.09, 1325 Avenue of the Americas
Come my Celia, let us prove...
Carecharmer sleep, son of the sable night...
Jabberwocky
Sailing to Byzantium
Ode to a Nightingale
We stood by a pond that winter day...
(The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird awing...)
Wind, wind, wind in the old trees
The White Knight's Tale
Wild Swans at Coole
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...
Tender only to one
Why dost thou dally, Death, and tarry on the way...
Song of Wandering Aengus
The Lotus-Eaters (Courage! he cried, and pointed toward the land...)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes...
Earth has not anything to show more fair...
The world is too much with us, late and soon...
Kubla Khan
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part...
Beginning of Apology of Socrates (ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων οὐκ οἶδα. ἐγὼ δ᾽οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπ᾽αὐτῶν ὀλίγου ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπελαθόμην...)
Now she is like the white tree rose
Ode to Autumn
The Walrus & the Carpenter
Time will say nothing but I told you so...
This lunar beauty...
Margaret, are you grieving...
These are not the only poems & passages she knows, but they are the ones she thought of on 23.09.09 between 10.00 and 10.55 am.
O Sunflower, weary of time
That countest the steps of the sun
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done
Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Climb up from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go
[In her 2nd (and last) year at Smith she was assigned a paper on this poem and O Rose, thou art sick. She was then very ignorant. She thought that it would be cheating to read anything anyone else had written about the poems. She went to the college library and found the books on Blake and looked at books and essays on other poems, to get an idea of the sort of thing that was wanted: she felt rather guilty about this, but she eased her conscience by reading only work which made no mention whatsoever of the assigned poems.
[When she was at Oxford, a sign in the Examination Schools said Gowns Shall Be Worn In All Lectures. With the exception of Andrew Mason of Corpus, no one wore a gown to lectures. Everyone knew that this rule was not enforced.
When she began her D.Phil., she made a mistake. It was common knowledge that Oxford had only introduced the doctorate to appease Americans, who needed the degree if they wanted to pursue academic careers in the United States. At Oxford, it had been standard practice for those who stayed on to spend several years reading widely, rather than immediately locking themselves into a highly specialised research topic: this was the system which had produced great scholars like Peter Brunt and Sir Ronald Syme.
She knew perfectly well, of course, that the rubric in the Examination Regulations and Decrees specified that a candidate for the D.Phil. must submit a piece of work which represented a 'substantial contribution to knowledge'; this presupposed that the candidate would identify a topic and carry out original research on the topic. Since everyone knew that this was all nonsense - this was not the way scholars like Brunt and Syme were produced, the degree was merely a convenience for Americans - it had never occurred to her that anyone would take it seriously. When she got a note in her pigeonhole assigning a supervisor and asking her to arrange a meeting, when the supervisor expected her to find a topic of research, this came as an unpleasant surprise. A topic? She had taken it for granted that she had been given 3 years' funding to read widely and lay down a solid basis for a life's work as a serious scholar.
[She expects to get things wrong. She expects things to go wrong.
[
She thinks of herself as someone who never reads poetry. Then she realises that she takes the OCT of the Iliad with her on even short trips. She's lazy, it's true: she should be more adventurous. She has poems in her head: lines flash through the head throughout the day, if she has to wait at a bus stop, at the hairdresser's, in a supermarket queue she will go through some of the poems she knows. So of course most of the poetry she encounters during a year is the stuff in her head. She learnt 'Courage! he cried, and pointed toward the land' sitting through a boring English class in 9th grade, leafing through the anthology: if idly standing at a bus stop 'Courage! he cried...' is the poem likeliest to come first to the mind.
'Courage!' he cried, and pointed toward the land;
'This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.'
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemèd always afternoon...
She thinks she learnt 'The White Knight's Tale' around the same time :
I'll tell thee everything I can, there's little to relate,
I saw an agèd agèd man, a-sitting on a gate.
'Who are you, agèd man,' I said, 'and how is it you live?'
And his answer trickled through my head like water through a sieve.
He said 'I search for butterflies that sleep among the wheat;
I make them into mutton pies and sell them in the street;
I sell them unto men,' he said,' who sail on stormy seas,
And that's the way I get my bread, a trifle if you please.'
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one's whiskers green
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen
So having no reply to give
To what the old man said
I cried, 'Come tell me how you live!'
And thumped him on the head...
[She had been reciting the poem for years before she realised the agèd man was angling for a tip. 'I thanked him much for telling me the way he got his wealth, But chiefly for his wish that he might drink my noble health' is the sort of mistake she makes all the time.]
This often flashes into the head unprompted. Also 'That is no country for old men', 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan', 'Earth has not anything to show more fair', 'My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains', 'Carecharmer sleep, son of the sable night' - it's not that these are her favourite poems (she's not sure which those would be), they're just the poems that come to mind most often. (How often depends more on how much time she happens to spend in queues than on an inclination to 'read' poetry; this is, obviously, why she should be more adventurous.) If she has a long wait she brings up more. They are not very recherché, the selection being strongly influenced by a couple of anthologies and a few other fairly predictable sources. When she checks them against the original text, which she seldom does, she finds that mistakes have crept in.
Poems recited 10.00-10.55 am, 23.09.09, 1325 Avenue of the Americas
Come my Celia, let us prove...
Carecharmer sleep, son of the sable night...
Jabberwocky
Sailing to Byzantium
Ode to a Nightingale
We stood by a pond that winter day...
(The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird awing...)
Wind, wind, wind in the old trees
The White Knight's Tale
Wild Swans at Coole
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...
Tender only to one
Why dost thou dally, Death, and tarry on the way...
Song of Wandering Aengus
The Lotus-Eaters (Courage! he cried, and pointed toward the land...)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes...
Earth has not anything to show more fair...
The world is too much with us, late and soon...
Kubla Khan
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part...
Beginning of Apology of Socrates (ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων οὐκ οἶδα. ἐγὼ δ᾽οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπ᾽αὐτῶν ὀλίγου ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπελαθόμην...)
Now she is like the white tree rose
Ode to Autumn
The Walrus & the Carpenter
Time will say nothing but I told you so...
This lunar beauty...
Margaret, are you grieving...
These are not the only poems & passages she knows, but they are the ones she thought of on 23.09.09 between 10.00 and 10.55 am.
O Sunflower, weary of time
That countest the steps of the sun
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done
Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Climb up from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go
[In her 2nd (and last) year at Smith she was assigned a paper on this poem and O Rose, thou art sick. She was then very ignorant. She thought that it would be cheating to read anything anyone else had written about the poems. She went to the college library and found the books on Blake and looked at books and essays on other poems, to get an idea of the sort of thing that was wanted: she felt rather guilty about this, but she eased her conscience by reading only work which made no mention whatsoever of the assigned poems.
[When she was at Oxford, a sign in the Examination Schools said Gowns Shall Be Worn In All Lectures. With the exception of Andrew Mason of Corpus, no one wore a gown to lectures. Everyone knew that this rule was not enforced.
When she began her D.Phil., she made a mistake. It was common knowledge that Oxford had only introduced the doctorate to appease Americans, who needed the degree if they wanted to pursue academic careers in the United States. At Oxford, it had been standard practice for those who stayed on to spend several years reading widely, rather than immediately locking themselves into a highly specialised research topic: this was the system which had produced great scholars like Peter Brunt and Sir Ronald Syme.
She knew perfectly well, of course, that the rubric in the Examination Regulations and Decrees specified that a candidate for the D.Phil. must submit a piece of work which represented a 'substantial contribution to knowledge'; this presupposed that the candidate would identify a topic and carry out original research on the topic. Since everyone knew that this was all nonsense - this was not the way scholars like Brunt and Syme were produced, the degree was merely a convenience for Americans - it had never occurred to her that anyone would take it seriously. When she got a note in her pigeonhole assigning a supervisor and asking her to arrange a meeting, when the supervisor expected her to find a topic of research, this came as an unpleasant surprise. A topic? She had taken it for granted that she had been given 3 years' funding to read widely and lay down a solid basis for a life's work as a serious scholar.
[She expects to get things wrong. She expects things to go wrong.
[
Sunday, April 11, 2010
ben arrivati ad Hameln
Jonathan Galassi has a post on the FSG poetry blog about poetry in translation.
Galassi has just finished translating the poems of Leopardi, a project which has taken 10 years (in part, no doubt, because he is also President of Farrar, Straus & Giroux); the book is due for publication in the fall.
The blog tells us Mr Galassi will be adding occasional thoughts on poetry during the course of National Poetry Month. When we note that the date of the initial post was 1 April, and that the 11th is upon us, we can't help feeling that we are in the presence of the highly effective habits we should very much like to acquire.
Galassi has just finished translating the poems of Leopardi, a project which has taken 10 years (in part, no doubt, because he is also President of Farrar, Straus & Giroux); the book is due for publication in the fall.
The blog tells us Mr Galassi will be adding occasional thoughts on poetry during the course of National Poetry Month. When we note that the date of the initial post was 1 April, and that the 11th is upon us, we can't help feeling that we are in the presence of the highly effective habits we should very much like to acquire.
national poetry month
Farrar, Straus & Giroux are sending out a daily poem through the end of April. You can sign up here.
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