I found that quote in an essay by Alan Shapiro in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The quote is attributed to Donald Davie.
I’m also interested in new ways to read Pound (though it’s been a while since I did) because, like Heidegger or like Man Ray, his personal/political history make it hard to disentangle from the aesthetic. And here’s this great summation: we don’t untangle because we can’t. And the idea of reading Pound with ‘anguish.’ What a concept. Amazing.
Ho Xuan Huong was an eighteenth century Vietnamese poet. By profession she was a ‘second wife’ – something more formal than a concubine, but less than a first wife. Apparently, she was the second wife of two men (one of who, based on her poetry, she loved very much; another, based on her poetry, she despised).
The poetry is very beautiful and you see the Chinese influences (she was important by virtue of having been an early adopter of writing in Vietnamese, sort of like a Southeast Asian Dante; most poets before, had written in Chinese characters; but it’s not surprising that it still reads, to me at least, like English translations from the Chinese).
In the English translation, she is very earthy. By ‘earthy’ I mean that she writes beautifully of the natural world (though I wouldn’t call it pastoral or bucolic) and that her poems are often incredibly filthy. It’s like reading Anais Nin (some day, I’ll have to write about reading Nin in Delaware).
Three-Mountain Pass
A cliff face. Another. And still a third.
Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:the cavern’s red door, the ridge’s narrow cleft,
the black knoll bearded with little mosses?A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,
showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary
and shaky in the knees, to mount once more?
That is one of the more erotic poems, that stays on the clean side of dirty (some of the poems have a Taming of the Shrew ‘tongue in tail’ quality or a Twelfth Night style ‘Cs Us ‘n Ts and the P comes out thusly’ affect).
H.P. Lovecraft… The man! The myth! The experimental writer! Wait? Huh?
The Aeneid never did it for me. A poor man’s Latin rendition of the The Odyssey. But several years ago, I read his Georgics in one of those small, red hardbound books by Harvard University Press (the works from the Latin have red covers; from the Greek, green) that I bought at a used book sale at the National Cathedral, supporting the St Albans School (a private, Episcopal school), After reading it, I developed a new appreciation for Virgil.
The Eclogues show off his fine, earthy sense of humor and sense of the pleasures and travails of those who live off and upon the land (mainly shepherds and goat tenders). The beautiful young men and women (and nymphs) that they love break their hearts by preferring more civilized pleasures than fresh sheep’s milk and playing pan pipes in the valleys. And, too often, soldiers and war push them off the land, with the winners of civil wars being gifted the lands, which cannot help but remind one of the great English fencing off of formerly communal grazing lands by titled landlords.
But the song competitions, as rural folk face off in verse, make it all well (thankfully so, because I was switching back and forth between Virgil and Balzac and reading the terrible misfortunes that the Frenchman inflicts on his hapless characters was doing a number of my good spirits).
May Daphnus feel the love a heifer feels, when worn
With searching for her mate in groves and deepest woods,
She kneels beside a stream in verdant sedge, forlorn,
Forgetting she should leave when darkest night appears.
Let him feel love like that — and I may never care.
I bought this not long after Amiri Baraka passed away, read the first few poems, but when I put it down, neglected to pick it back up again. Well, I did pick it back up again and I am better for it.
Let’s just get this out of the way. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones is a difficult, problematic, and prickly figure. LeRoi Jones was deeply involved in the poetic circles in and around New York City, apparently had lovers of both sexes. As Amiri Baraka, he was angry and militant and, I’m afraid, made more than a few anti-gay remarks. But he was also still LeRoi Jones, in that he was deeply influenced by the major currents of the twentieth century, especially the New York School, the Black Arts Movement, and (like another revolutionary poet, Aime Cesaire) Surrealism. Baraka was also much more political and a major figure in building black political power in Newark, New Jersey.
WISE WHY’S Y’s is deeply political, unyielding, and is weighed on heavily by the history (and, therefore, the legacy) of slavery.
We are bullets into
tomorrow
We are Changerersthese limpid blue
that packed sky
(the lost key of
which
like my own
dry frenzyis part of the hatred
that’s good
for us.
That’s from a poem entitled #20 Borders (Incest) Obsession and is intended to be read with musical accompaniment. He actually lists a bunch of tunes to go with the poems (John Coltrane comes up a lot). Because bop and post-bop jazz is the rhythm to these poems, they are often jagged. There is often rhyme, but without a rhyme scene, reflecting the work of jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Dizzy Gillespie.
In another poem is this stanza:
(Not Sociology & Social Democratic
political
Bohemianism)
I know that he’s mocking the shallow, meaningless political talk of white, coffeeshop revolutionaries… but good lord, don’t you want to be a ‘political Bohemian?’ I hate myself for thinking that, because Baraka is also right to criticize the wordy, windy impotence of ‘slacktivism’ and other such skin deep dissent.
This was a sadly sparse reading. Not empty, but perhaps just 80% full and with upper balcony totally empty. Which is too bad, but Brock gave a great reading.
McHugh was the judge of the latest Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and she chose a manuscript by Brock as the winner (thereby getting it published by Waywiser Press).
Some years back, I spent too much money on an oversize paperback by Richard Howard entitled, Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003. For the life of me, I don’t know why I bought it. I hated it. A lot of the poems are written in the voices of historical figures. I mention this, because that is much of what Brock does, only I like his poetry.
McHugh was a little confusing. She spoke a lot about personal challenges and about her support for a particular cause: people who are long term caregivers for severely disabled relatives (usually their children). At one point, I thought she was reading a poem and then she looked up and started speaking about the cause and I could never tell whether these were asides during the reading of a poem or if none of it had been a poem.
I bought and Brock read from Voices Bright Flags. Very enjoyable. He’s got a nice, light touch and recognizable style, without being repetitive. A lot of serious poems, with passages about John Brown and the Civil War and slavery, but also some light humor about being a father with an insistent toddler. I actually remembered reading the first poem in the collection, Bryant Park at Dusk, in Poetry (the magazine).
I’ll excerpt from a poem about Ulysses S. Grant. Mostly because it’s a good poem, but also because Brock drolly noted that no one writes poems about President Grant.
My heart then like a puffed-up private boasting
he’s cut the enemy’s leg off
– Not his head?
– Sir, someone else had cut that off already.
A surprisingly engaging and enjoyable poet to listen to and the usual moderate of these conversations – the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles – stayed out of the way more often the usual, perhaps because the sanguine Kleinzahler was more willing than the melancholy Hirsch and the phlegmatic Szymbist to take control of the conversation (did you see what I did there with the four humours of medieval medicine?).
In his introduction, Charles noted that the poet, despite being famous for chronicling bars and diners and working class communities, was not a Bukowski. But the impression he gave was of a Robert Pinsky writing a Charles Bukowski. Does that make sense? Probably not. Well, I’m not going to explain.
The poet signed for me The Strange Hours Travelers Keep – which both delightfully named and has a wonderful cover. He aspires to Whitman’s continent spanning enthusiasm, but there is something narrower about him. The title comes from a line of William Carlos Williams and there is something of Spring & All in Kleinzahler (who is also a New Jersey poet). He wears his learning more broadly than Bukowski (again, like Williams), but has something of Bukowski’s resentment. Williams felt resentment, too, mainly for feeling left out of the conversation in favor of folks like Eliot and Pound, but this is a different kind of resentment. Something closer, indeed, the Bukowski. But more sober and plastered over with a fine appreciation of Milton.
There is a touch of misogyny to some of these poems – a ‘character’ in a poem calling Alma Mahler a ‘slut’ or a poem about a female poet who turned cruel eviscerations of her parents and the symbolic emasculation of a husband or lover into poetical success (defined, in this case, as grants, prizes, and choice campus appointments). I couldn’t call this trend pervasive or a trend, but just frequent enough to make me uncomfortable.
Kleinzahler has these wonderful exceptions to his high culture Whitman-ism. A lot of them have this delicious French influence, particularly the Surrealists (mainly Breton), though with too much conscious logic to is zig sagging motions to be truly Surrealist (and we are talking the actual movement; not ‘surrealist’ as short hand for ‘weird’), and also bits of Antonin Artaud’s structured madness. A lengthy prose poem, not suited to excerptation, I’m afraid, but that I highly recommend and which is well worth the price of the book: The History of Western Music: Chapter 4
The best poem that is also great distillation of his more usual style is the sad and melancholy portrait of faux-genteel poverty and terrifying loneliness, The Single Gentleman’s Chow Mein.
That his poems don’t take well to being shown in excerpts is a testament to how well they cohere, even when they appear random (that touch of Surrealism) or stream of consciousness.
The Shadow of Sirius perfectly encapsulates what there is to love about Merwin and what is so frustrating about Merwin. It is one of his most accomplishments, but there is such a sameness to all of his poetry. It’s a little petty to complain, because it is such wonderful poetry, but just adding some old age (a different approach to memory and mortality) doesn’t change the fact that Merwin has been stylistically the same for over forty years. And while much of The Shadow of Sirius may be technically better than them, I still say that Merwin has been repeating shadows (pun intended) of those wonderful, powerful poems from The Lice (1968, I believe) and Carrier of Ladders (1970, I believe).
In the poem Escape Artist, writes: When they arrange the cages/for experiments/they have long known/that there is no magic/in foxes at any time
The poem is (at least partly; ostensibly) about raising animals for their fur and also for experimentation. The Merwin of The Lice would have been more engaged on the issue, but this Merwin meanders off into a gentle melancholy. Merwin was rarely fierce, but not always so passive.
But credit where credit due – I loved this short poem:
The Curlew
When the moon has gone I fly on alone
into this night where I have never beenthe eggshell of dark before and after
in its height I am older and youngerthan all that I have come to and beheld
and carry still untouched across the cold.
That poem has some wonderful touches of surrealism and tweaks the Merwin style with hints of an almost rhyme scheme (semi-heroic couplets?). I would have been happy had there been more of that and less of the rest.
First Heaney, now Kinnell. If Eavan Boland passes tomorrow, I’m going to lose it.
the coffee philosopher 