The other night, the Folger’s poetry reading was titled, Drama & Verse: Simon Armitage and Peter Oswald.

It was a wonderful night, except that both men took oddly exceptional steps to distance themselves from poetry and towards drama.

Oswald performed a reading of an verse adaptation/translation of an Italian folktale. It was a wonderful experience, done in a mixture of modern and timeless (not timeless, in a cheesy, ‘this is eternal’ sense, but rather in lacking in major, time-sensitive stylistic signifiers beyond ‘modern, post-Austen English) language and also in iambic pentameter.

The iambic part was cool, because earlier that evening, I had been talking about iambic pentameter with my mother and how much of Moby Dick is written in – or in something close – to iambic pentameter. Another reminder that that meter doesn’t have to stick out like an attention-seeking anachronism.

Oswald also did the adaption of Mary Stuart that I’m seeing on February 11. I bought a copy and had him sign it to my mother. She’s been wanting read about figures from Elizabeth I’s time who aren’t actually Elizabeth I. However, I can’t give it to her until I read it and while I started reading it, I decided that I don’t want to finish it until I see the play. But I like it so far.

I’d read Armitage’s translation of Gawain & the Green Knight earlier and enjoyed it thoroughly. So I splurged and bought his translation of The Death of Arthur. Not to be confused with the Malory one. Apparently, this one is known at the AMA or Alliterative Morte d’Arthur. You learn something new every day.

I just wish either man had been more willing to step forward from their roles as translators and (verse) dramaturgists and say, ‘I am a poet and this is poetry.’ I would have been quite happy with that.

The moderator was somebody named Smith from the British Embassy, serving in some cultural capacity. He had a that longish, semi-leonine mane of white hair that only the English and French seem to ever adopt. He looked rather like someone who could have played Doctor Who (a bit of the Third Doctor, Pertwee, in his look; and Armitage looked a bit like a more dour Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton).

Rae Armantrout reminds me of Kay Ryan. Maybe it should be the other way, but I read Kay Ryan first, so there you have it.

Armantrout is more intensive, sadder, more melancholy, more interior, and maybe more urban. I’m not sure about that last one. It’s not that Armantrout writes about cities and Ryan writes so much about nature or the country, but Armantrout’s ‘voices’ are not of people living close to nature. I don’t know. Anti-pastoral voices, perhaps?

Her short, abrupt lines and abrupt (though never jarring) enjambments and brief, tangentially connected stanzas convey a voice trying to pierce through the overwhelming haze of sensory overload. Not a uniquely contemporary sensory overload (‘curse the internet and television for their incessant distractions!’). No, this is more ancient, though still modern. Think Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

The poems are implicitly political in their critique of society, though she stumbles when becoming explicitly political. There is a poem that ends by drawing a metaphorically comparison between a cat licking himself and Fox News and, yeah, it’s funny and I can’t say it’s wrong, but all it does it paper over a certain triteness and a too, too direct manner. Armantrout excels at obliqueness.

Similarly, a prose poem loses the effects she achieves elsewhere and never convinces me that this particular poem had to be a prose poem. A prose poem must have a reason for being what it is. I’m not saying a reason that can explained in words, but like obscenity, I know it when I see it. And I don’t see it.

She is an amazing poet. I’m looking forward to having her sign it when she comes to read the Folger Shakespeare Library next month.

I am not going to finish this book. I’m just not.

It contains the complete poems of his crowning poetic achievement (sort of his Leaves of Grass) – Émaux et Camées.

Émaux et Camées is brilliant. It’s decadent. It’s supremely erotic. Gautier the poet, the voice, the eye stares lustily at the genitals of an androgynous statue, as do others around him, each praying that hidden there are the sex organs of their choosing. The translation is wonderful and I give it full credit for succeeding in translating it into rhyming English.

Now, I’m reading poems from an earlier book by Gautier: España

Sweet Mary, mother of God, is it boring. Ugh.

And it’s so sad, because when, in December, I was reading through Émaux et Camées, I was so happy. Thrilled. What a find! And then. The disappointment. It’s taken me a month to accept that it’s just not getting better and I’m not going to read it all.

C’est la vie, eh?

I bought this book at the Strand in NYC. I entered the store half an hour before closing. In less than ten minutes, I’d spent $49 on books. Seven books total.

The first piece, Ode I, won me over quickly with lines like:

I am, she says, bereaved, with a double-edged
grief sharp as a Cretan axe………..

The “…….” represents missing parts of the poem.

And then:

here in our town that is washed
into loveliness in the evening sunlight….

Tell you can’t dig that? I had no idea that Cretan axes were famed for any particular sharpness, but you are instantly caught up in the simile. It reminds me of the opening line to William Gibson’s Neuromance: ‘The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.’ You’d never heard such a metaphor before (nor seen the art design style based around ‘pale Milanese plastics’) but you are instantly transported in time and space by it. Same with Cretan axes, I say.

After my good time reading Virgil, I’m thinking that I need to add more classical Greek and Latin poetry to my diet. It seems to agree with me.

And one thing I learned – epinician poems are poems celebrating the winners of sporting event. I mean, it was obvious that the poems were doing that, but I didn’t know that’s what epinician meant. Apparently, the ‘nic’ comes from Nike, the goddess of victory.

The old standby of the occasional poem (which is to say, a poem written for a particular occasion, not some poem only read infrequently) has really fallen out. You have poems written by poet laureates for presidential and gubernatorial inaugurations, but beyond that, the only occasional poet I can think of is Calvin Trillin and no one is going to confuse him Bacchylides.

On a related note, did you hear about the South Carolina kerfuffle? The state’s poet laureate, who has read at the last three inaugurations, had her spot cut from the program. The official word is that there wasn’t time for the two minute reading, but no one believes that. While celebrating the state, it also mentioned things like slavery and migrant labor and the state’s conflicted past and future, which is just not cool to acknowledge, apparently. Would you be surprised if I told you that the governor of South Carolina is a Republican? Of course, you’re not.

Poetry East is a magnificent journal! A throwback of high culture and, as often as not, high modernism. It trucks heavily in translations and, if fault is to be found, it is that it can resemble a sort of poetry-centric Lapham’s Quarterly. I first came across it in a Barnes & Noble in the Christiana Mall in Delaware whilst on my way back from New Jersey.

The theme and title of this issue is Paris, but that’s not entirely an accurate one. It’s really about surrealism in the twenties and thirties, as well as surrealism’s antecedents. And really, that should be ‘Surrealism,’ capital ‘S.’ Not Surrealism as a modified adjective, but as a capital noun – Breton, et al.

Within are Surrealists and their close cousins: Appolinaire, Eluard, Dali, Soupault, Man Ray. Also, antecedents like Baudelaire. Also, for some reason, Proust and Huysmans.

I do love Eluard, in particular. As a little thing that stuck out for me, Eluard’s poems were transposed with a little essay by Dali and also reproductions of some of his works. The Dali essay mentioned Gala, who was had been Eluard’s wife, before leaving him for Dali. So, there’s that.