the coffee philosopher

Posted on March 8, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Corum

I finished the three books of Michael Moorcock’s Swords Trilogy, featuring Corum.

They’re fast reads, but I found a little unengaging. I’m not sure that Moorcock was all that into Corum. Or rather, he tries for a more high fantasy tone that just doesn’t fit him – or what one wants from one of his books. There is a cool bit of magic, where Corum, who has had his left hand and eye severed and stabbed with a burning poker, respectively, has them replaced by the hand and eye of two alien gods, brothers. With the eye, he can see into a sort of hell populated by the last group of people he has killed and the hand can summon them to fight him (giving him a new group of hell soldiers to fight for him in the future). That’s pretty cool, I think we can all agree. But overall, Corum is a little dull and doesn’t seem to be all that badass of a warrior, not compared to other Moorcock fantasy creations.

I seem to recall that the second Corum trilogy, the Chronicles of Corum, was a lot darker. Taking place in a dying world and generally pretty fatalistic. Sounds a little more interesting, though I don’t think I’ll be rereading it anytime soon. Maybe an Elric novel… Sailor on the Seas of Fate was he first one of those I read and always a favorite. And even if Elric’s three dimensionality and moral ambiguity was always a little overstated, he had a sentient sword would sometimes kill his friends without asking and drain their souls. And it would do this a lot more often than Corum dragged his soldiers from hell out to fight and, really, these aren’t things you should skimp on.

Posted on March 6, 2014March 5, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Protest Poetry And Dissident Poetry

For some reason, I decided to re-read bits of a speech that the late great Adrienne Rich had given upon the occasion of being given an award (her remarks were published by Norton as a sort of chapbook under the title Poetry and Commitment).

She references the American poet James Scully, who (according to Rich) calls ‘protest poetry’ conceptually shallow, reactive, predictable, and typically featuring hand wringing from the sidelines. She then includes brief quote from Scully:

Dissident poetry, however, does not respect boundaries between private and public, self and other. In breaking boundaries it breaks silences, speaking for, or at best, with the silenced; opening poetry up, putting it into the middle of life… It is a poetry that talks back, that would act as part of the world, not simply as a mirror of it.

This struck me because it came after some conversations with my father about political poetry, or, rather, its relative absence, at least in American poetry. And, of course, the recent passing of Amiri Baraka, the poet formerly known as LeRoi Jones.

Maybe Baraka exemplified best what Rich talks about, being committed.

She defends Shelley’s much maligned line about poets being unacknowledged legislators because Shelley did not know how nor conceived that he could separate his deeply held, liberal political views with his poetry nor that any other poet could. They were all from the same wellspring.

This just all sort of falls when I’m reading a lot of politically minded poetry. I picked some bell hooks the other night and am also reading Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and even (though it’s not poetry) Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (with an obnoxiously long foreword, I might add).

In honor of all this, here’s my terrible, awful attempt at what Scully would rightfully sneer at as protest poetry. He would probably also note that rhyming is not really my strong suit. Well, at least it’s political. I guess. I’ll almost certainly live to wish that I’d burned it, instead.

Rick Scott: An Ode

At last, I come arrayed

In the fanfare of the common cracker man

Humble, tacky but no frayed –

Dispatching notes of great jay

And for your acknowledgement and unhesitating belief, I have prayed.

The winnings you have won,

The challenges you have overcome –

Nothing to the great evil I have undone!

Tidings of unvarnished truth I bring!

My great employment, great employments wrought.

Corporate friends with good goods come to kiss the sun kissed ring,

Promises kept to a tee – seven hundred thousand on the nose!

My regal and trustworthy success a contrast to the old, faded king.

My jealous enemies name me Skeletor™

And cry that my greatest victories I falsely forge

But their spiteful, jealous facts I will ignore!

Your tax dollars I have given

To my honest, grafting friends

And for you, eight dollar an hour jobs, promised then forgiven.

No vow was ever truer kept:

Every poor man’s dollar, every corporation’s promise, only slightly riven.

And to those shallow, faithless, disbelieving fools who say

I promised you more jobs than just those created by Obama’s daring play,
Do not throw those lying tapes, videos and quotes in my face – nay, I say, nay!

Posted on March 5, 2014March 4, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Meeting – From The Mouths Of Babes

Because it’s what smart people do.

Krausian theater.

The end of brutalist worship in DC.

‘Type Rider II: The Tandem Poetry Tour’ – I know, cool, right?

Posted on March 1, 2014February 28, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on February 27, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on February 26, 2014February 25, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – My Blood Is Superior

Just give it up already. You’ll be healthier.

I could write on a train. In fact, I’m pretty sure I already have. So. You know. Call me.

Is poetry not literature, but something else? Was it, but is no longer?

The honest answer is: maybe?

I don’t know. All of them?

What we can learn from Schiller about the beautiful. It’s not mentioned, but Elaine Scarry wrote a great book on beauty, called On Beauty and Being Just and I recommend that. I honestly haven’t read the Schiller book in question. I don’t actually think I’ve read any Schiller, unless you count the chorus to Beethoven’s Ninth. My local public radio station has taken to playing just the second movement of the Ninth. That’s like half a handjob. I mean, yeah, it feels good, but without the finale, I’d really rather you didn’t even start it.

Posted on February 25, 2014February 25, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Elegies’

She’s a poet I’d read about a lot. For some reason, I thought she was more recent than she is – that she had begun writing more in the fifties and sixties, but the poems that make up Elegies were written in the late thirties and the forties. They are not, strictly speaking, war poems (but, really, how can anything in poetry be definitely said to be anything, strictly speaking; even forms like the sonnet and haiku have been reimagined so that I question whether anything in poetry should be defined strictly), but are inspired (depressed?) by the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

I guess that to her contemporaries, she was considered a ‘difficult’ poet, but to the modern ear, it’s hard to hear. She seems quite direct by comparison to much contemporary poetry (which is not a criticism of contemporary poetry; I find J.H. Prynne nearly impossible to suss out, but find his poetry amazing, nonetheless).

There is a strong current of melancholy running through it, which you might expect from an elegy, but they’re not really elegies. They’re dedicated to her lover, who she only knew briefly, before the Spanish Civil War separated them. He died in 1938, but she didn’t know until 1943.

And it’s not a melancholy towards the ravages of war. Or, at least, not exactly (not ‘strictly speaking’).

The first elegy, Rotten Lake. It reminds me of Tolkien. Specifically, the mood behind the end of Return of the King. Not the one you saw in the movie, but the one in the book, where the hobbits return to the Shire and find that Saruman and Wormtongue have turned the beautiful fields and hills of the Shire into an industrial wasteland. A not subtle statement about how Tolkien perceived returning to English country life after the First World War. Rukeyser isn’t mourning pastoralism, but she is saddened by the coarsening, by the decline of a place where memories are strong.

I wanted to quote this bit from the fourth elegy, Refugees:

We bear their smile, we smile under the guilt,
in an access of sickness, “Let me alone, I’m healthy!”
cry. And in danger, the sexually witty
speak in short sentences, the unfulfilled.
While definition levels others out.

What a great phrase, ‘the sexually witty.’ Can’t you visualize it? Powerful, virile, venal, sad.

The sixth, River Elegy, may be my favorite. And not just because it’s the shortest. There is a theme of water (and water being symbolic of sex), but the river comes across in this great propulsivity of language. No formalism here, just thick stanzas of desperate desire, movement, and fear of loss. I would be curious to know when it was written, what was happening in the wars? The elegies that follow are more melancholy, looking over the loss of wars, but this one seems to be still holding out hope. Was it written before she knew for certain her lover had died? After, but digging deep to pull out some hope, or not hope, but desperation. Like a shark, keep moving or the hope dies, but secretly just moving out of fear of stopping. Because the later elegies are more… stopped. In the eight elegy, she writes: I see it pass before me in parade

She is still and the world is moving.

Posted on February 25, 2014February 21, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on February 24, 2014February 21, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Two Violinists

This month, I was lucky enough to see two of this century’s most lauded violinists: Anna-Sophie Mutter and Joshua Bell.

Bell played a beautiful Mendelssohn violin concerto in E minor, while Mutter played a Sebastien Currier piece (composed for her) called Time Machines and a Dvorak violin concerto.

Mendelssohn is just great, and a violin concerto by him, especially one in a melancholy minor key, is always going to be great. Bell was showy and brilliant, but the comparison to Mutter was instructive. The pieces she played – a contemporary and fragmented piece that was as much a dialogue between violin and orchestra as it was a concerto for violin and orchestra, and a good, romantic, but not very (to my ears) exceptional early violin concerto by Dvorak – were far less showy than the moody, frantic Mendelssohn but you could tell: Mutter plays better with others. Her interaction with the orchestra… you could tell the difference. Just because I love Mendelssohn, I liked the music played by Bell better than that played by Mutter, but I suspect that Mutter is a better performer, overall, to see. Or, at least, a better example of classical music’s cooperative qualities.