Literature – Page 69 – the coffee philosopher

Posted on August 15, 2014August 14, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

‘The Fall Of America: Poems Of These States 1965-1971’ By Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg, I would argue, wrote two great poems (Howl and Kaddish), one good poem (America) and then a bunch of other stuff.

Is that unfair? He was the outstanding public figure of a movement that was hugely influential and played and outsized role in the creation of a certain idea of the artist. The idea of the artist as shaman, perhaps. Yet his own work was, I can’t help but feel, a chronicle of diminishing marginal returns.

I can’t remember if this scene was in the book, but in the movie Trainspotting, Sick Boy uses the career of Sean Connery to illustrate a point about the tragic, downhill slope of life. Connery was James Bond and then everything else he did, if you’re honest about, Sick Boy argued, was ‘shite.’

America, despite moments of brilliance, is Ginsberg’s Untouchables. Sure, Connery won a best supporting actor Oscar for it, but really, does it hold a candle to having been the indelible presence he was as Bond? Bond, in this case, being a stand-in for Howl and Kaddish.

As a result, I had a huge problem getting into this little book. I’d re-read Howl and Kaddish and was struck by their power – a power that I’d forgotten. Now, I wish I had stopped there. Unlike the others, this one appears more deeply unstructured – a sham Whitmanesque, propulsive journey (and definitely with Whitman’s signature form – the long lines interspersed with deep indentations), but without Whitman’s careful (if exuberant) craftsmanship.

Posted on August 14, 2014July 6, 2016 by the coffee philosopher

‘A Treatise Of Civil Power’ By Geoffrey Hill

I saw Hill read once and he was an engaging and erudite (without being obfuscatory) reader, but at the time, I chose a to buy a collection by one of the less known poets in attendance, but when I was browsing Politics & Prose while waiting out some traffic, I saw Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power on sale and couldn’t resist.

It’s a damn melancholy book. I keep on thinking that it’s referring to some Latin treatise by a Cicero or Tacitus type of character, but it’s actually a reference to Milton and he draws heavily on seventeenth century English history and a Miltonic style (and very Miltonic enjambments). In writing poems about centuries old quarrels and the (usually failed) efforts to resolve them peacefully and successfully, it’s difficult not to take away a deep pessimism from the poems. Without being terribly dense, the poems also manage to have a strange feeling of density. Maybe it’s the archaic style (I’m also reading some Ben Jonson and while his poems, with their irregular spelling and very different modes of writing than our current ones, are more difficult to read, their is an airiness to them that you don’t find three quarters of a century later).

He also wrote an entire poem in memoriam of the British philosopher, Gillian Rose. I had to look her up. Apparently, they had some kind of quarrel and he wrote (fondly? sadly? regretfully) of her prickliness and their disagreements (whatever they were). So even when he moves forward in time, it’s still powerfully melancholy. And melancholy is the right word. Not sad. Something with a cavernous, time-spanning and more baritone to it than ‘sad.’ Something like ‘melancholy’ (though I don’t remember that he ever referenced Burton’s book/poem/treatise sui generis, Anatomy of Melancholy).

Posted on August 13, 2014August 11, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – Remembering Gary

How Gary Gygax came to leave TSR.

I’m on the side of the antifree.

What’s your chair look like?

Posted on August 10, 2014August 1, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on August 9, 2014August 1, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on August 8, 2014August 6, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – Through The Wardrobe

I’ve never read Grossman… and I still may not. There are a lot of books on my ‘to read’ list, after all, and I’m not feeling like moving him up to the top of the queue. But now, I want to go back and devour C.S. Lewis. The picture is the cover of the edition I read as a child. It was the only one available at the time and sometimes it was sold in a big, boxed set. Mother searched everywhere to find all the books for me – this being back in the days when the internet was something that only DARPA used. They’re still magical books to read and Grossman touches on something very true when he notes the great economy of language in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. Great economy, but economy that feels very luxurious. I’m always amazed when I go back and read about the delicious foods that Tumnus the Faun served to Lucy: I remember sardines on buttered toast, in particular. But when I go back, it’s not as long as I remember. I remember it being a great, neverending feast with richly described (and very English) delicacies, but it’s really only a paragraph or two. If you want to move beyond the Narnia books but are wary of his Christian apologetics, try A Grief Observed about his own grief following the death of his wife and about grief in general.

Holy c–p! Slate.com published a review of a book of poetry! Should we have a party?

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

Ezra Pound: Canto LXXIX

Pound is on a roll. This was a fun one. The opening tastes of The Wasteland – or, rather, the Pound who contributed so much to the final form of The Wasteland.

Though he still peppers it with Chinese characters and uses the Roman names of some deities, the feel is very Greek (and he does pepper it with many Greek words).

and on the hill of the Maelids
in the close garden of Venus
asleep amid serried lynxes
set wreathes on Priapus

I’m not entirely sure why Pound seems obsessed with lynxes in this one. He’s really obsessed.

O lynx, guard my vineyard
As the grape swells under the vine leaf

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

‘Jejuri’ By Arun Kolatkar

I’m not sold on this collection, on the whole, but then something like ‘Chaitanya’ reaches out and grabs you by the throat.

Chaitanya
sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya

he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods

But a few, really great poems don’t detract from my overall impression: these are not particularly masterful poems. Maybe it is because these were written in English (not translated into English) and his poems in his native Marathi account for his small fame.

Or maybe I just don’t get it.

Posted on August 4, 2014August 1, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

The ‘Poundian Form’

Having just re-begun reading The Cantos, it was appropriate that I came across a reference to the form of his masterwork that pulled me up sharply and made me take notice:

The intertextual reference to Fray Durán, alongside the phrasal fragments and use of colons to separate images, takes a Poundian form, that of the Cantos Pound — the poetry coheres through a series of disjunctive sutures — demonstrating what Perloff means by her question about taking up the experimentation of the early twentieth century. This is an ideogrammic method applied to Mesoamerican mythology. The poem is crammed with vagueness, and its strokes lend only the slightest impression of its context.

That’s from an article in Jacket2 about avant-garde Latino poetry. It made me think about my struggled with Pound and whether the remark about cohering through ‘a series of disjunctive sutures’ could be a skeleton key of sorts? And the pit about Marjorie Perloff’s remark reminded me of how important Pound’s experimentation was to the younger me and how eternally relevant high modernism remains.