There will be poetry reading tomorrow night and another on next Thursday night at DC’s undoubted center for poetry, Bridge Street Books.
I won’t pretend to recognize the names of these poets, but I’m still going to try to make it to both readings because Bridge Street is good at bringing in innovative poets, as well as many local ones.
This Canto contains a lot of talk about taxation, something the finance obsessed Pound often harps on.
But a little more interesting to me is something briefly touched on in the last couple of Cantos – what one might call the ‘Christian problem’ (though Pound consistently spells it ‘Xtian’ in this Chinese themed sections).
‘You Christers wanna have foot on two boats
and when them boats pull apart
you will d/n well git a wettin’ ‘ said a court mandarin
tellin’ ’em.
Ajax (described in the Iliad as ‘Ajax of the Seven Fold Shield,’ a reference to the size and thickness of his shield, having seven layers of leather or hide) and the cunning Odysseus performed two very different roles. Odysseus was cunning and sneaky, while Ajax was gigantic wall who physically held the invading Greeks together (at one point, near the beginning of the Iliad, the Trojans are driving the Greeks back into the water, with soldiers drowning and their ships on the verge of being burnt; eventually, Zeus decides to save the Greeks from total destruction, but before the god stepped in, it was Ajax who kept things together, physically pushing back several charges and rallying the troops into some kind of formation to hold the line).
Poor Ajax, the hard worker, was taken advantage and finally lost it and tried to throttle the Greek commanders. Meanwhile, Odysseus never failed to get rewarded for his work behind the scenes.
Hint: the CEOs getting billions on bonuses are Odysseus and the rest of us are Ajax.
Today is Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day in the city of Santa Cruz!
Hat tip to Mayor Ryan Coonerty and the Santa Cruz City Council for recognizing an American treasure.
The Sixtieth Canto continues with the theme of a cosmopolitan and worldly China, but from a first person perspective, as if by a Chinese official. Nonetheless, the language is very American colloquial. For example, the Dutch are described as ‘poifik tigurs‘ (“perfect tigers”).
Referencing the previous Canto, four Jesuit fathers are given credit for introducing Galileo to China (though that seems odd, since this is supposed to be the year 1693).
Ironically, the narrator ends by musing if China should not, in fact, begin to close itself off from the West.
Because of work, I suspect I won’t make it, but Philip Levine is reading at the Library of Congress at 7pm tonight. The AFL-CIO has been promoting this, so I would expect a good crowd.
Originally published at Belladonna*
What does a poem do? Let me rephrase that: what does a poet do? I wake up at 8, let the dogs out, read on the train to Manhattan, work 10-6. After work I take classes or teach, read on the train home, have very late dinner with Amy and fall asleep. Just before I drift, lines start going through my head and so I stir and I write them down. This is usually after midnight. I write them down in the dark.
When I tell people that I work full time and attend grad school and teach, they look at me funny. I don’t remember living another way, though, ever since I emigrated to the US. For a while I tried the broke in Brooklyn thing – eating two bagels a day, feeling heroic in a roachy flat – but I got writer’s block from the hunger and the filth. I did not thrive on punishment. I was not Vallejo. Coming from a country where jobs are at a premium, and having no economic or social support system in the US – as much as capitalism made me retch, electing unemployment felt disingenuous. So I worked.
It’s hard to figure out what kind of work is appropriate for a poet. A few months ago a poet I admire wrote on a blog that a poet should not be a bureaucrat and administrator — a poet should be a poet, live for the art. Blue collar work was not even mentioned. So, let’s see, regular jobs are unpoetic, but then I read elsewhere that teaching is even worse – academic jobs are somehow deemed “not real,” as though academia were a virtual realm like the internet but counted even less. Staying at home in a different arrangement also doesn’t seem to do a poet good – mom poets are not paid for their work of mothering and often can’t go to readings and travel, poets fortunate enough to have a private income can’t mention it lest they be dubbed trust-fund babies, itinerant poets who move from colony to colony can’t keep a boyfriend or girlfriend to save their lives, poets with government grants are sellouts. Most of you in the room have been pegged as one or the other. Prestige & stigma are doled out in a random system of poet-castes that shift & refract differingly depending on the site you’re reading, the people you’re chatting with.
I listen and I am confused. I eat. What should I eat? I sleep – where? Does it have to be uncomfortable? Can I earn my rent or must I only accept donations, like a fortuneteller? I really don’t like being told what to do, especially by people who are not paying me. Why should a poet be a stranger to any human experience? Maybe it’s only my communist upbringing speaking. All I know is that everything is real and every work counts. Writing counts. Bricklaying counts. Pushing paper typing pouring coffee counts. Mothering counts. Everything counts and everything belongs to a poet, belongs in a poem.
What should a poem do? Auden wrote in lovely flowing lines that Poetry makes nothing happen. Maybe it’s just atomic physics, but nothing looks a whole lot like everything to me from here. How does it make you feel if you switch those two and say that Poetry makes everything happen? Now substitute Poetry for Poet: a poet makes everything happen. Now turn around and look at your friends here – isn’t it funny? It’s completely true: Aphra Behn: a spy, Marianne Moore a library assistant, Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman and Amy King teachers, Vanessa Place an attorney, Hanna Andrews an editor, E. Tracy Grinnell and Rachel Levitsky publishers – poets are making everything happen all over the place. And that means that we also change everything.
The Chinese history involved in this Canto struck me as bearing interpretation as a rejoinder to the misperception of China as being a closed and insular society that was later forced open by Western powers.
Within the Fifty-Ninth Canto are diplomatic meetings with the Tsarist Russia, the reading of Galileo’s works, and an emperor playing Bach (‘who played the spinet on Johnnie Bach’s birthday‘).
The opening struck me a little:
De libro CHI-KING sic censeo
wrote the young MANCHU, CHUN TCHI,
less a work of the mind than of affects
brought forth from the inner nature
here sung in these odes
The phrase ‘less a work of the mind than of affects‘ struck me as something I wished to have thought of, as an apt description, not so much of books, than of certain people.
P.S. I have kept my promise to read and write about three Cantos but I will publish them over the course of three days (perhaps giving me time to get off my butt and read some more over the next couple of days and start to seriously catch up).
If so, then Steve Kettmann has an easy way you can help. Give your family and friends books as presents over the holidays. That’s not so hard, is it?
the coffee philosopher 