Requested, and served: more notes on DA Powell's poem 'corydon & alexis, redux'.
As I noted, this poem positions itself as a response to Virgil's second eclogue. Stephen points out several other echos, from Hill, Johnson, and Yeats. And another that I think is there, scattered like his 'seeds of the honey locust,' is Keats' poem 'Ode to a Nightingale'. Certainly, with 'oh, you who are young', Powell invokes the transforms his response to an ode; and in fact, what is Virgil's original form but a song of praise, an ode? There being many odes, and many apropos of this poem, it was the hemlock that drew me to Keats, 'My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk'.
Happily, for the sake of my instincts being rewarded, there are several points of intersection between Keats and Powell. The 'slight shade of those sapling branches / yearning for that vernal beau' seems to repackage what Keats describes with, 'what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, / But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet / Wherewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild'. I would be amiss to see some inspiration from 'Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies' in 'consider how quickly the body deranges itself' — each describe a body withering from disease, perhaps the ever-present (for Powell) HIV. It's as if the later poet is pointing us back to Keats' line. At this point, I may be reaching, but that linked set of rings from Corydon's song in the eclogues to Keats' ode-song being hooked to Powell as well seems too strong a line to resist.
There is another register of language altogether dissimilar from Keats, in lines such as 'guess I figured to be done with desire . . . the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush', and 'thought I could master nature.' It's a particularly American idiom at work, and I'm tempted to cite Frost particular for the simplicity of diction merging with existentialism and a mundane rustic task. But who does not owe something to Frost? And this mixing of registers is more akin to late Ashbery besides.
I would rather site Yeats' poem 'Leda and the Swan' — 'her thighs caressed / By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill' — in regards to Powell's 'how this longing grabs me by the nape', and say that the bill which is in 'nape caught in his bill' could be where the metaphor of 'the cruel banker' was born with its swanish 'white as god's own ribs'. The connection certainly adds something to the animal desire and the 'savage caring', and connects, in a round-about way, desire to both old age and nature. Still, something there is in Powell that never wants to be linked too tightly, I think, in debt to other poems.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
A Bit of This and That
I'll be returning to Powell's poem, per request from Stephen, once I get a bit of time to sit and think about it again, with reference material around me. If you haven't yet, check out his lucid comments on the poem.
* At The Weekly Standard, an article by Michael Dirda on Anglo-Catholic author Graham Greene, 'After the death of Henry James, according to Greene, "the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act." Consequently, Greene's own work--especially the major books of what one might call his middle period: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair — sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair.' I've really got to read up on him. But since I'm ignorant: any thoughts on this? True that we've become more interested in him than in his life? My first expose to Greene was in a Paris Review interview, which was one of the stranger pieces in their first collected edition — as I recall, it dealt more with his religious inclination than with his work, but that may be an inaccurate recollection.
* The TLS has a piece in commemoration of Eudora Welty's centenary, and especially her role and the influence of the Works Projects / Progress Administration. 'Born one hundred years ago this month in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in that city, she left her native state for the University of Wisconsin before attending the Columbia University School of Business, New York. She dreaded becoming a teacher like her mother and had decided on a business career, specifically in advertising. However, having seen New York City in the grip of the Depression – its queues and groups of the jobless are viewed through Mississippi eyes in another early story, “Flowers for Marjorie” – she understood the impracticability of her plan, and returned south.'
* This week's Slate poem-of-the-week is 'Eurydice: 1887', by Avery Slater.
* Really Arlen Specter? Really? I mean, I guess if you favor the stimulus bill, then you favor government intervention on behalf of the economy (and you also favor facts, which are nice), then you're a Democrat by default because it is the only meaningful divide (all the morality stuff is smoke and mirrors). But, really?
* At The Weekly Standard, an article by Michael Dirda on Anglo-Catholic author Graham Greene, 'After the death of Henry James, according to Greene, "the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act." Consequently, Greene's own work--especially the major books of what one might call his middle period: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair — sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair.' I've really got to read up on him. But since I'm ignorant: any thoughts on this? True that we've become more interested in him than in his life? My first expose to Greene was in a Paris Review interview, which was one of the stranger pieces in their first collected edition — as I recall, it dealt more with his religious inclination than with his work, but that may be an inaccurate recollection.
* The TLS has a piece in commemoration of Eudora Welty's centenary, and especially her role and the influence of the Works Projects / Progress Administration. 'Born one hundred years ago this month in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in that city, she left her native state for the University of Wisconsin before attending the Columbia University School of Business, New York. She dreaded becoming a teacher like her mother and had decided on a business career, specifically in advertising. However, having seen New York City in the grip of the Depression – its queues and groups of the jobless are viewed through Mississippi eyes in another early story, “Flowers for Marjorie” – she understood the impracticability of her plan, and returned south.'
* This week's Slate poem-of-the-week is 'Eurydice: 1887', by Avery Slater.
* Really Arlen Specter? Really? I mean, I guess if you favor the stimulus bill, then you favor government intervention on behalf of the economy (and you also favor facts, which are nice), then you're a Democrat by default because it is the only meaningful divide (all the morality stuff is smoke and mirrors). But, really?
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Poetry Month III: "corydon & alexis, redux" by DA Powell
This is the third installment of close-readings that I've been doing for Poetry Month. I've only done three, though, so I'll just keep doing it on an irregular basis. I've been trying to only discuss poems that are available for free online already, in a sign of sympathy for publishers and support for literary publications. Next up, 'corydon & alexis, redux' by DA Powell.
The title 'corydon & alexis' directs us to the second eclogue of Virgil (read it here), written around 40 BCE. In it, that great guide of Dante details the impossible love between the shepherd Corydon and the handsome Alexis, beloved of his employer. It's exactly the type of reference with which Powell can make great use in his erotic, often subversive lyrics. From the phrasing of the opening line, 'and yet we think that song outlasts us all', the poem positions itself as a response to Corydon's long song in the eclogue. However, the song of Corydon has outlasted not only Virgil, but many generations, and presumably will outlast this generation as well. Already there is an ambiguity of tone, a sense of uncertain irony or at least self-consciousness. The poem keeps this tone, walking the line between irony and near-melodrama with phrases such as 'wrecked desire' and 'oh, you who are young'.
Most compelling are the aspects of Powell's poem that continue the dialogue with Virgil, with not only the themes but the images as well, though never in direct rebuttal or affirmation. As Virgil writes, 'With plough up-tilted, and the shadows grow / To twice their length with the departing sun, / Yet me love burns, for who can limit love?' Powell responds with, 'a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters;' the elder, 'he was so dark, and you so fair,' and in response, the latter, 'how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs.' The entire third stanza of Powell's poem is a playful version of not only the idyllic scene, but also the line of desire from animal through lover, 'The grim-eyed lioness pursues the wolf, / The wolf the she-goat, the she-goat herself / In wanton sport the flowering cytisus, / And Corydon Alexis.'
Virgil's poem is one of homosexual desire, which is usually Powell's bread and butter — and so he is more than usually restrained, implicit instead of explicit: drawing from Elizabethan puns, he writes, 'as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue' (so bringing in as well Plato, of the Platonic love and the symposium); and he then engages a pun with, 'to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches / yearning for that vernal beau'. Again, there is the sense of uncertain irony. But Powell is not satirizing — the third stanza is full of real, emotionally resonant, imaginative description; the 'silly poet, silly man' is close to being just ironic, but the intellectual poignancy of his mastering nature like a 'misguided preacher' as an analogy for stipping himself of his desire is completely honest, and resonates too fully with the public problems of being a homosexual today that seemed not to exist in Virgil's idyll.
I have not yet even begun to discuss the sounds and formal strategy of Powell's work. His Whitman-esq long lines, his enjambments, his idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization (or lack there of), are all the formal aspects of the lyric voice. It allows him to capture the rambling off-the-cuff sounds of phrases like 'guess I figured to be done with desire' but not letting the language become stale; he pairs theses platitudes against his smart, evocative, often surprising images:
'what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue'
There is an enjambment of types of language here, made more jarring by the use of the end-line as a comma, or semi-comma. There is also a slight, slight echo as well between 'sideburns and charming smile' and 'sip of hemlock, I'd expire'. It's really a well-crafted set of lines, or stanza in this case — though not unusual for such an excellent poet.
The title 'corydon & alexis' directs us to the second eclogue of Virgil (read it here), written around 40 BCE. In it, that great guide of Dante details the impossible love between the shepherd Corydon and the handsome Alexis, beloved of his employer. It's exactly the type of reference with which Powell can make great use in his erotic, often subversive lyrics. From the phrasing of the opening line, 'and yet we think that song outlasts us all', the poem positions itself as a response to Corydon's long song in the eclogue. However, the song of Corydon has outlasted not only Virgil, but many generations, and presumably will outlast this generation as well. Already there is an ambiguity of tone, a sense of uncertain irony or at least self-consciousness. The poem keeps this tone, walking the line between irony and near-melodrama with phrases such as 'wrecked desire' and 'oh, you who are young'.
Most compelling are the aspects of Powell's poem that continue the dialogue with Virgil, with not only the themes but the images as well, though never in direct rebuttal or affirmation. As Virgil writes, 'With plough up-tilted, and the shadows grow / To twice their length with the departing sun, / Yet me love burns, for who can limit love?' Powell responds with, 'a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters;' the elder, 'he was so dark, and you so fair,' and in response, the latter, 'how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs.' The entire third stanza of Powell's poem is a playful version of not only the idyllic scene, but also the line of desire from animal through lover, 'The grim-eyed lioness pursues the wolf, / The wolf the she-goat, the she-goat herself / In wanton sport the flowering cytisus, / And Corydon Alexis.'
Virgil's poem is one of homosexual desire, which is usually Powell's bread and butter — and so he is more than usually restrained, implicit instead of explicit: drawing from Elizabethan puns, he writes, 'as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue' (so bringing in as well Plato, of the Platonic love and the symposium); and he then engages a pun with, 'to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches / yearning for that vernal beau'. Again, there is the sense of uncertain irony. But Powell is not satirizing — the third stanza is full of real, emotionally resonant, imaginative description; the 'silly poet, silly man' is close to being just ironic, but the intellectual poignancy of his mastering nature like a 'misguided preacher' as an analogy for stipping himself of his desire is completely honest, and resonates too fully with the public problems of being a homosexual today that seemed not to exist in Virgil's idyll.
I have not yet even begun to discuss the sounds and formal strategy of Powell's work. His Whitman-esq long lines, his enjambments, his idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization (or lack there of), are all the formal aspects of the lyric voice. It allows him to capture the rambling off-the-cuff sounds of phrases like 'guess I figured to be done with desire' but not letting the language become stale; he pairs theses platitudes against his smart, evocative, often surprising images:
'what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue'
There is an enjambment of types of language here, made more jarring by the use of the end-line as a comma, or semi-comma. There is also a slight, slight echo as well between 'sideburns and charming smile' and 'sip of hemlock, I'd expire'. It's really a well-crafted set of lines, or stanza in this case — though not unusual for such an excellent poet.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
DEP at CPR and Burt at PF
I have an article at the Contemporary Poetry Review, 'Cats & Bulldogs', covering the recent Poetry Roundtable at Harvard with Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, and Maureen McLane. I wasn't enthusiastic about it, in large part because I think Kirsch and Burt (I'm unfamiliar with McLane) have so many insightful and discussion-worthy things to say about poetry today. In further consideration, the three critics all brought in a poem (or three) to share aloud and discuss — I wish they'd all talked about the same poem though. The common ground might have led to more insight, more real work being done, fewer vagaries and platitudes.
On a related note, Stephen Burt has an explication at the Poetry Foundation of 'To a Poor Old Woman', by William Carlos Williams. Burt writes, 'Unlike Whitman’s works, a Williams poem is usually short-lined, irregular in cadence, and dependent on frequent enjambments, where line breaks at phrase ends are the exception rather than the rule. Williams did not do it all himself — as early as the late 1910s, fellow poets were publishing similar verse in the same magazines — but among all those allies, he had the best ear and most often found the best uses for the defiantly un-English, un-Biblical, demotic patterns he heard.'
He goes a bit further, detailing the way that Williams' enjambments work to emphasize the shifting implications of his phrase 'They taste good to her', and pointing out the half-rhymes in later stanzas (and in the repetitive stanza as well, by its very nature) but not doing much in the way of describing their effect. What also strikes me in this poem is the fluidity of meaning that the irregular punctuation lends, giving more than usual weight to the line breaks that sometimes do or do not work as end-stops. Burt does a fine job of explaining the intellectual shifts and movements of the poem, but not of pointing out places where it is most or least successful, and explaining why — I was reading a Paul de Man essay on Shelly this morning, a deconstructive reading, which worked in a similar fashion.
I, for one, find this poem by Williams uneven, especially for how short it is. Stanza two, the repetition of the aforementioned phrase, is intellectually interesting, but sounds forced, showy — an unnatural movement for the sake of perspective that doesn't quite come off. The best moment is the break between stanzas three and four:
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
Because the reader has seen line breaks as both enjambment and end-stop, there is a formal tension that triggers a stronger, harsher emotional response on what could be a condescending, melodramatic word: 'comforted'. The image of the gored plum in her hand is actually somewhat grotesque, and it engages delightfully with the first two lines of the last stanza, which posit a 'solace of ripe plums'. But her solace, in that case, is 'sucked out in her hand', devoured, and she left with neither solace nor plums, only her poverty. I'm not sure that Williams is giving us the sort of feel-good democracy poem that Burt's reading suggests, or at least not as easily as is suggested.
On a related note, Stephen Burt has an explication at the Poetry Foundation of 'To a Poor Old Woman', by William Carlos Williams. Burt writes, 'Unlike Whitman’s works, a Williams poem is usually short-lined, irregular in cadence, and dependent on frequent enjambments, where line breaks at phrase ends are the exception rather than the rule. Williams did not do it all himself — as early as the late 1910s, fellow poets were publishing similar verse in the same magazines — but among all those allies, he had the best ear and most often found the best uses for the defiantly un-English, un-Biblical, demotic patterns he heard.'
He goes a bit further, detailing the way that Williams' enjambments work to emphasize the shifting implications of his phrase 'They taste good to her', and pointing out the half-rhymes in later stanzas (and in the repetitive stanza as well, by its very nature) but not doing much in the way of describing their effect. What also strikes me in this poem is the fluidity of meaning that the irregular punctuation lends, giving more than usual weight to the line breaks that sometimes do or do not work as end-stops. Burt does a fine job of explaining the intellectual shifts and movements of the poem, but not of pointing out places where it is most or least successful, and explaining why — I was reading a Paul de Man essay on Shelly this morning, a deconstructive reading, which worked in a similar fashion.
I, for one, find this poem by Williams uneven, especially for how short it is. Stanza two, the repetition of the aforementioned phrase, is intellectually interesting, but sounds forced, showy — an unnatural movement for the sake of perspective that doesn't quite come off. The best moment is the break between stanzas three and four:
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
Because the reader has seen line breaks as both enjambment and end-stop, there is a formal tension that triggers a stronger, harsher emotional response on what could be a condescending, melodramatic word: 'comforted'. The image of the gored plum in her hand is actually somewhat grotesque, and it engages delightfully with the first two lines of the last stanza, which posit a 'solace of ripe plums'. But her solace, in that case, is 'sucked out in her hand', devoured, and she left with neither solace nor plums, only her poverty. I'm not sure that Williams is giving us the sort of feel-good democracy poem that Burt's reading suggests, or at least not as easily as is suggested.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Tuesday: When Does the Ride Stop?
This has been the busiest stretch of my life since the last month of college. Between the family loss, visits with TBG's parents (including the big family meet this weekend; it went well), the upcoming BU Symposium Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the African American Studies Program, other academic conferences, lectures, readings, the Bookbuilders show tonight, my day job (oh right, that thing), and trying to launch The Critical Flame, I'm about ready to drop.
* From the NY Times, on two books regarding MFA programs: 'That you learn to write by writing, by seeing what works and what doesn’t, is the consensus here, and much of the advice offered is along the lines of the swing tips offered by golf pros — little thoughts that work for a while and then have to be replaced by other thoughts. One contributor points out, for example, that "show, don’t tell" is a good principle to keep in mind, except when it works better to "tell, don’t show".'
I can't convince myself to go the MFA route for exactly this reason: what can anyone teach me about writing that I won't learn from actually reading and writing? I've learned more from reading great poets and criticism than from any teacher, although that doesn't reflect on the quality of those teachers. It reflects on the nature of writing as uniquely individual. Add to that my mistrust of other people's judgments. And that MFA programs are expensive as all hell; there are too many of them, with too many terrible writers in them. That they don't help you in life at all, as far as recouping cost. The is most attractive element is the idea that my whole job for a year, or two years, would be to write. Not worry about my debts and bills, keeping myself afloat — but this kind of leisure, a middle-class mimicry of wealth, is hardly necessary and might not even be productive. If my life places obstacles in the way of my writing, I believe that the writing will be stronger and more vital for its existence despite them.
* The FSG blog has a review with Poetry Daily co-founder Don Selby. Selby recalls, 'There have been some wonderful moments. I always think first about an unexpected onslaught of angry notes when we features Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer" (from his book with Godine, New & Selected Poems) — a sonnet that repeats the title for 14 lines; offensively, it seems, to a great many devotee's of the form.' Ha!
* At Slate, Robert Pinsky compares Gerard Manley Hopkins' masterful 'Carrion Comfort' and Edwards Thomas' poem 'The Owl', and discusses brielfy the way 'one poem might generate its emotion with eloquent plainness, the force of directness. Another poem might work by turbulent or ecstatic or violent elaboration, the force of eruption.' But the question is: does each poem generate the same emotion, or generate any emotion with equal effect? I'd say not. The floor is open here though.
* From the NY Times, on two books regarding MFA programs: 'That you learn to write by writing, by seeing what works and what doesn’t, is the consensus here, and much of the advice offered is along the lines of the swing tips offered by golf pros — little thoughts that work for a while and then have to be replaced by other thoughts. One contributor points out, for example, that "show, don’t tell" is a good principle to keep in mind, except when it works better to "tell, don’t show".'
I can't convince myself to go the MFA route for exactly this reason: what can anyone teach me about writing that I won't learn from actually reading and writing? I've learned more from reading great poets and criticism than from any teacher, although that doesn't reflect on the quality of those teachers. It reflects on the nature of writing as uniquely individual. Add to that my mistrust of other people's judgments. And that MFA programs are expensive as all hell; there are too many of them, with too many terrible writers in them. That they don't help you in life at all, as far as recouping cost. The is most attractive element is the idea that my whole job for a year, or two years, would be to write. Not worry about my debts and bills, keeping myself afloat — but this kind of leisure, a middle-class mimicry of wealth, is hardly necessary and might not even be productive. If my life places obstacles in the way of my writing, I believe that the writing will be stronger and more vital for its existence despite them.
* The FSG blog has a review with Poetry Daily co-founder Don Selby. Selby recalls, 'There have been some wonderful moments. I always think first about an unexpected onslaught of angry notes when we features Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer" (from his book with Godine, New & Selected Poems) — a sonnet that repeats the title for 14 lines; offensively, it seems, to a great many devotee's of the form.' Ha!
* At Slate, Robert Pinsky compares Gerard Manley Hopkins' masterful 'Carrion Comfort' and Edwards Thomas' poem 'The Owl', and discusses brielfy the way 'one poem might generate its emotion with eloquent plainness, the force of directness. Another poem might work by turbulent or ecstatic or violent elaboration, the force of eruption.' But the question is: does each poem generate the same emotion, or generate any emotion with equal effect? I'd say not. The floor is open here though.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Hill Wins 2009 Capote Award
I'm pleased to announce that Geoffrey Hill has been awarded the 2009 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, for his recently-released Collected Critical Writings:
'Gerald Dawe wrote in the Irish Times that the essay collection "takes the reader on a soaring trip through the greats of classical and modern English literature . . . the moral dignity and scholarly authority Hill brings to his subjects is quite simply breath-taking."
John Casey wrote in the The Tablet, "One has a sense of a powerful intellectual and spiritual centre, an inner coherence, a philosophy that grows out of a continuously intelligent engagement with the culture."
Hill is the author of a dozen books of poetry and is considered one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. From 1988 to 2006 he taught literature and religion at Boston University, where he was a co-director of the Editorial Institute, and he is also an honorary fellow of Keble College at Oxford, Emmanuel College at Cambridge and the Royal Society of Literature. In the United States he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A. N. Wilson has called him "probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose."'
I agree completely. An honor earned and well-deserved.
'Gerald Dawe wrote in the Irish Times that the essay collection "takes the reader on a soaring trip through the greats of classical and modern English literature . . . the moral dignity and scholarly authority Hill brings to his subjects is quite simply breath-taking."
John Casey wrote in the The Tablet, "One has a sense of a powerful intellectual and spiritual centre, an inner coherence, a philosophy that grows out of a continuously intelligent engagement with the culture."
Hill is the author of a dozen books of poetry and is considered one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. From 1988 to 2006 he taught literature and religion at Boston University, where he was a co-director of the Editorial Institute, and he is also an honorary fellow of Keble College at Oxford, Emmanuel College at Cambridge and the Royal Society of Literature. In the United States he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A. N. Wilson has called him "probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose."'
I agree completely. An honor earned and well-deserved.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Books & Bookstores
A quick note to loyal readers: Godine is hosting a special offer for poetry month, giving select customers 50% off Linda Bamber's debut, Metropolitan Tang; a too-little-known major American author with The Poems of Charles Reznikoff; and the contemporary anthology Poets of the New Century. Just place your order through these Special Offer pages, as usual. Hope you'll go over and take advantage of the sale, with my compliments.
Speaking of books and sales, Publisher's Weekly reports, 'For the first two months of 2009, bookstore sales were down 3.2%, to $3.32 billion. Sales for all of retail tumbled 9.9%.' Those in the industry are focusing on the loss of sales — rightly so, as we all try to tread water — but it is encouraging for the future to see that bookstores are out-pacing the rest of the retail market by nearly 6%. And with bookstores on the brain today, I give you:
Dan's Top-Five Boston Bookstores
Symposium Books, Kenmore Square: Symposium is a small Providence-based chain that specializes in high-end and academic remainders. Their new location in the renovated space of the old Commonwealth Books is convenient for all comers, and I never leave without a book in my hand that I didn't plan on buying. Yesterday I got The Savage Detectives in hardcover for $10 from the outside racks; previous purchases include Walter Banjamin and Theodore Adorno. It is simply the most intelligent selection of books at the best prices.
The Harvard Bookstore, Harvard Square: Erudite but all-encompassing, as you might imagine from its prestigious name, when all searching fails you can usually find what you need at the Harvard Bookstore, whether it's cultural criticism, best-selling literary fiction, a new children's book, or something from the bargain basement. Hardly a hidden gem, the bookstore is listed in guidebooks and frequented by locals, students, and tourists alike.
The Brattle Bookshop, 9 West Street, Downtown Crossing: More discerning than other used shops, the Brattle was founded in 1825 and is a true Boston landmark. It's outdoor racks are full of fantastic 1, 3, and 5 dollar bargains, the shelved books indoors are very reasonably priced, and they have an excellent collection of special editions, illustrated, and finely-printed books (including some heavy-hitters that, sadly, remain behind the glass cases). The perfect place for habitual browsers, such as myself. You can even stay up-to-date with their sales and specials on Twitter.
Grolier Poetry Bookshop, 6 Plympton St., Harvard Square: In all the chaos of our times, the cozy Grolier remains an anomaly — a bookshop that carries nothing but poetry. Founded in 1927, it remains a refuge for those tired of hearing 'I just don't get poetry.' Well, this is where you get poetry, from small press titles to the biggest names, to the selection of limited-edition chapbooks in the corner. The people are friendly and happy to show you what's new and what's selling, as well as neat little treasures. You might even run into a famed poet browsing their shelves. Ahem.
Diskovery, 569 Washington St., Brighton: This one, I'll admit, is an entirely personal preference. It's out of the way, it's hard to find. But ambiance and the hide-and-seek of browsing is more than half the fun of used bookstores, and with it's cramped space, stacks of books piled higher than your head, and ancient copies of the Paris Review, Partisan Review, etc., this is one of my favorites. (Despite the cats, to which I'm allergic.) The owner's penchant for rewarding good taste with further price reductions adds to the charm, as does her willingness to trade books. On a nice day, jump the 57 bus from Kenmore way out into Brighton, and dig in.
{ps: Boston.com just posted a photo gallery of bookstores; I did it first though.}
Speaking of books and sales, Publisher's Weekly reports, 'For the first two months of 2009, bookstore sales were down 3.2%, to $3.32 billion. Sales for all of retail tumbled 9.9%.' Those in the industry are focusing on the loss of sales — rightly so, as we all try to tread water — but it is encouraging for the future to see that bookstores are out-pacing the rest of the retail market by nearly 6%. And with bookstores on the brain today, I give you:
Dan's Top-Five Boston Bookstores
Symposium Books, Kenmore Square: Symposium is a small Providence-based chain that specializes in high-end and academic remainders. Their new location in the renovated space of the old Commonwealth Books is convenient for all comers, and I never leave without a book in my hand that I didn't plan on buying. Yesterday I got The Savage Detectives in hardcover for $10 from the outside racks; previous purchases include Walter Banjamin and Theodore Adorno. It is simply the most intelligent selection of books at the best prices.
The Harvard Bookstore, Harvard Square: Erudite but all-encompassing, as you might imagine from its prestigious name, when all searching fails you can usually find what you need at the Harvard Bookstore, whether it's cultural criticism, best-selling literary fiction, a new children's book, or something from the bargain basement. Hardly a hidden gem, the bookstore is listed in guidebooks and frequented by locals, students, and tourists alike.
The Brattle Bookshop, 9 West Street, Downtown Crossing: More discerning than other used shops, the Brattle was founded in 1825 and is a true Boston landmark. It's outdoor racks are full of fantastic 1, 3, and 5 dollar bargains, the shelved books indoors are very reasonably priced, and they have an excellent collection of special editions, illustrated, and finely-printed books (including some heavy-hitters that, sadly, remain behind the glass cases). The perfect place for habitual browsers, such as myself. You can even stay up-to-date with their sales and specials on Twitter.
Grolier Poetry Bookshop, 6 Plympton St., Harvard Square: In all the chaos of our times, the cozy Grolier remains an anomaly — a bookshop that carries nothing but poetry. Founded in 1927, it remains a refuge for those tired of hearing 'I just don't get poetry.' Well, this is where you get poetry, from small press titles to the biggest names, to the selection of limited-edition chapbooks in the corner. The people are friendly and happy to show you what's new and what's selling, as well as neat little treasures. You might even run into a famed poet browsing their shelves. Ahem.
Diskovery, 569 Washington St., Brighton: This one, I'll admit, is an entirely personal preference. It's out of the way, it's hard to find. But ambiance and the hide-and-seek of browsing is more than half the fun of used bookstores, and with it's cramped space, stacks of books piled higher than your head, and ancient copies of the Paris Review, Partisan Review, etc., this is one of my favorites. (Despite the cats, to which I'm allergic.) The owner's penchant for rewarding good taste with further price reductions adds to the charm, as does her willingness to trade books. On a nice day, jump the 57 bus from Kenmore way out into Brighton, and dig in.
{ps: Boston.com just posted a photo gallery of bookstores; I did it first though.}
Monday, April 13, 2009
A Few Things
* At the San Francisco Chronicle, Stephen Burt has a review of the new Thom Gunn: Selected Poems out from FSG. He writes, 'This relatively slender volume (Gunn's first Selected Poems since 1979) shows his spare technique and his powers of observation, his chiseled stanzas and his careful, even humble, attention to plain speech - virtues, above all, in "The Man With Night Sweats" (1992), perhaps the finest of the many poetic responses to HIV and AIDS, and the work for which Gunn, in the United States, remains best known.'
I've always appreciated certain elements of Gunn's poetry that I have read — his brilliant bending of form to modern diction and the ease with which the poem on page translates to the speech — but am also put off by the often willful lack of emotional and intellectial depth. He played with words craftily, an imaginative and masterful craftsman, but his mind seemed hardly to be any kind of powerful force. The poems I've read merit re-reading for their descriptions and use of language, but the lack of depth is a flaw for which the verse ought to be accounted as well. That being said, the simple fact of his observing a world previously hidden, and being unafraid to express the aspects of his life that most in the 'upstanding' world would like to ignore, makes him fascinating anthropologically.
* At the New York Review of Books, JM Coetzee reviews Samuel Beckett's letters. I'm unsure how I feel about Coetzee's essays; they strike me in an oddly repugnant way sometimes, although they're researched and all. He writes, 'Beckett's letters are packed with comments on artworks he has seen, music he has heard, books he has read. Among the earlier of these, some are just silly, the pronouncements of a cocky tyro — "Beethoven's Quartets are a waste of time," for example. Among the writers who have to endure the lash of his youthful scorn are Balzac ("The bathos of style & thought [in Cousine Bette] is so enormous that I wonder is he writing seriously or in parody") and Goethe (than whose drama Tasso "anything more disgusting would be hard to devise"). Apart from forays into the Dublin literary scene, his reading tends to be among the illustrious dead. Of English novelists, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen win his favor, Fielding for the freedom with which he interjects his authorial self into his stories (a practice Beckett himself takes over in Murphy). Ariosto, Sainte-Beuve, and Hölderlin also get approving nods.'
* In an episode of the Simpsons, Bart once taunted Brown graduate students, and Marge put him in his place: 'They've just made terrible life decisions.' But, in truth, higher degrees do mean better salaries. Or at least, they used to mean better salaries. Slate explores the situation further.
* In this Boston Globe article that is, creepily, about its own impending demise, the one thing that I take out of it is that the Taylor family originally sold the paper in order to stop it from being taken over by competing shareholders when their trusts dissolved. It turned out not to matter, but I wonder what would have happened had the old guard fought to keep the thing running themselves. It's an interesting article: "We had no illusions about the fact that when push came to shove that the flagship newspaper came first." A good reason for independent ownership of newspapers; or even for putting papers in trust — you can't compete with your own product and win both battles.
I've always appreciated certain elements of Gunn's poetry that I have read — his brilliant bending of form to modern diction and the ease with which the poem on page translates to the speech — but am also put off by the often willful lack of emotional and intellectial depth. He played with words craftily, an imaginative and masterful craftsman, but his mind seemed hardly to be any kind of powerful force. The poems I've read merit re-reading for their descriptions and use of language, but the lack of depth is a flaw for which the verse ought to be accounted as well. That being said, the simple fact of his observing a world previously hidden, and being unafraid to express the aspects of his life that most in the 'upstanding' world would like to ignore, makes him fascinating anthropologically.
* At the New York Review of Books, JM Coetzee reviews Samuel Beckett's letters. I'm unsure how I feel about Coetzee's essays; they strike me in an oddly repugnant way sometimes, although they're researched and all. He writes, 'Beckett's letters are packed with comments on artworks he has seen, music he has heard, books he has read. Among the earlier of these, some are just silly, the pronouncements of a cocky tyro — "Beethoven's Quartets are a waste of time," for example. Among the writers who have to endure the lash of his youthful scorn are Balzac ("The bathos of style & thought [in Cousine Bette] is so enormous that I wonder is he writing seriously or in parody") and Goethe (than whose drama Tasso "anything more disgusting would be hard to devise"). Apart from forays into the Dublin literary scene, his reading tends to be among the illustrious dead. Of English novelists, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen win his favor, Fielding for the freedom with which he interjects his authorial self into his stories (a practice Beckett himself takes over in Murphy). Ariosto, Sainte-Beuve, and Hölderlin also get approving nods.'
* In an episode of the Simpsons, Bart once taunted Brown graduate students, and Marge put him in his place: 'They've just made terrible life decisions.' But, in truth, higher degrees do mean better salaries. Or at least, they used to mean better salaries. Slate explores the situation further.
* In this Boston Globe article that is, creepily, about its own impending demise, the one thing that I take out of it is that the Taylor family originally sold the paper in order to stop it from being taken over by competing shareholders when their trusts dissolved. It turned out not to matter, but I wonder what would have happened had the old guard fought to keep the thing running themselves. It's an interesting article: "We had no illusions about the fact that when push came to shove that the flagship newspaper came first." A good reason for independent ownership of newspapers; or even for putting papers in trust — you can't compete with your own product and win both battles.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Poetry Month II: 'Rain Gauge' by John Kinsella
As I announced before, I'll be doing some close reader here in honor of Poetry Month. Today's poem is one that can be found, again, at the Poetry Foundation website: 'Rain Gauge' by John Kinsella.
What strikes one about this poem on first reading is the brimming, difficult first sentence, nearly thirteen lines long, which begins with the bird-like description 'Millpoint throaty guzzler' and ends with the dry legalese of 'taken into consideration'. These two phrases are the basic elements of both the sentence and the poem: what is being taken into consideration? something that could be described in such (markedly poetic) terms. What is that thing? Presumably, by the tip-off of the poem's title but also by the intervening descriptions, this thing is the rain gauge. Immediately we are alerted that this poem's aim is both judicial and imaginative.
Kinsella exhibits a powerful control of construction and phrase here: by bookending this first part of the poem the most essential details of both the sentence (as in, most essential to understanding its meaning) as well as the poem as a whole, and by placing the first end-stop after 'consideration', he has successfully, to my mind, allowed for both comprehension and disorientation — a most difficult balance. One gets the basic gist of the thing within a context; that this gauge, an ordinary meteorological instrument, has some sinister but slightly obfuscated element, obscure as the context of any practical object: the violence, disarray, and incompletion of the images that explode this sentence ensures the dark tone, though it doesn't make clear the meaning.
The rain gauge was used for centuries as a way to determine the value of land, mainly for the purposes of levying taxes; hence, 'to calibrate the empty out and add up' and the concern with 'the failure of soil / to wet.' The violence of the images in that first part — 'squalls with hooks . . . to ripen blood-eating earth, so sharp needles' — implies the violent outcomes of a law's enforcement, of the violence that underlies state law, and perhaps harkens to the connection of violence and value itself. These images also create a tension of underlying violence that carries though the rest of the poem, into the more reasoned, or at least more clearly explicated, consideration of the object itself and of the act of checking a rain gauge in modern times, 'when airseeders have percolated hectare / after hectare of earth, to balance the equation.' It is a poem that ponders the meaning of a practical judicial object in its historical context, aware of the implied state violence that gives such a passive device its purpose. Yet, Kinsella is never didactic. His is a true consideration, a modern lyric that stems from one mind's well-wrought point of view and veers away from screed.
I also enjoyed Kinsella's lines quite a bit, their sounds as much as their poignancy: 'Millpoint throaty guzzler, wishful' has a great trochaic intensity (reminding me of Macbeth's witches' chant) and contains, really, all the rest of the poem's thematic force; 'moebius comeback though sharp and sliced' skips melodically from trochees to iambs; in both cases the hexameter lightly recalls Latinate predecessors of such agrarian verse. The line, 'They can’t, and even moisture from the sea,' is excellent and un-forced pentameter, broken for rhetorical tension, that also implies the response of its softened rhyming match, 'and the miracle of rain we might not even see.' Here is a poem truly concerned with the audible sense, with auditory enjoyment, and aware of the ways that meter can create or ease tension.
What strikes one about this poem on first reading is the brimming, difficult first sentence, nearly thirteen lines long, which begins with the bird-like description 'Millpoint throaty guzzler' and ends with the dry legalese of 'taken into consideration'. These two phrases are the basic elements of both the sentence and the poem: what is being taken into consideration? something that could be described in such (markedly poetic) terms. What is that thing? Presumably, by the tip-off of the poem's title but also by the intervening descriptions, this thing is the rain gauge. Immediately we are alerted that this poem's aim is both judicial and imaginative.
Kinsella exhibits a powerful control of construction and phrase here: by bookending this first part of the poem the most essential details of both the sentence (as in, most essential to understanding its meaning) as well as the poem as a whole, and by placing the first end-stop after 'consideration', he has successfully, to my mind, allowed for both comprehension and disorientation — a most difficult balance. One gets the basic gist of the thing within a context; that this gauge, an ordinary meteorological instrument, has some sinister but slightly obfuscated element, obscure as the context of any practical object: the violence, disarray, and incompletion of the images that explode this sentence ensures the dark tone, though it doesn't make clear the meaning.
The rain gauge was used for centuries as a way to determine the value of land, mainly for the purposes of levying taxes; hence, 'to calibrate the empty out and add up' and the concern with 'the failure of soil / to wet.' The violence of the images in that first part — 'squalls with hooks . . . to ripen blood-eating earth, so sharp needles' — implies the violent outcomes of a law's enforcement, of the violence that underlies state law, and perhaps harkens to the connection of violence and value itself. These images also create a tension of underlying violence that carries though the rest of the poem, into the more reasoned, or at least more clearly explicated, consideration of the object itself and of the act of checking a rain gauge in modern times, 'when airseeders have percolated hectare / after hectare of earth, to balance the equation.' It is a poem that ponders the meaning of a practical judicial object in its historical context, aware of the implied state violence that gives such a passive device its purpose. Yet, Kinsella is never didactic. His is a true consideration, a modern lyric that stems from one mind's well-wrought point of view and veers away from screed.
I also enjoyed Kinsella's lines quite a bit, their sounds as much as their poignancy: 'Millpoint throaty guzzler, wishful' has a great trochaic intensity (reminding me of Macbeth's witches' chant) and contains, really, all the rest of the poem's thematic force; 'moebius comeback though sharp and sliced' skips melodically from trochees to iambs; in both cases the hexameter lightly recalls Latinate predecessors of such agrarian verse. The line, 'They can’t, and even moisture from the sea,' is excellent and un-forced pentameter, broken for rhetorical tension, that also implies the response of its softened rhyming match, 'and the miracle of rain we might not even see.' Here is a poem truly concerned with the audible sense, with auditory enjoyment, and aware of the ways that meter can create or ease tension.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Grind
Back in the office today; back to being a cog in the great grind after an exhausting, depressing long weekend. Struggling to get my head around it all, to clear my mind enough that I become a useful citizen again — many, many thanks to everyone who sent their kind wishes. It's been a tough stretch.
* At The New Republic, as has been widely noted, Ruth Franklin has issues with Jonathan Littel's The Kindly Ones: 'If Littell's novel were content merely to draw an exhaustive, moderately familiar, sometimes factually incorrect, but occasionally illuminating picture of the Nazi apparatus, it would be inconsequential. But in its attempt to impose its version of an ancient Greek framework on this modern system of destruction, it crosses the line from amorality to something worse.' It's an interesting turn in terms of being a review; one of the first truly moralistic reviews I've seen since Adam Kirsch ravaged the abominable Human Smoke.
I agree with Franklin that 'It is erroneous . . . to compare the crimes of Oedipus with the crimes of the Nazis.' But it's not because they teach different lessons, as she argues: Oedipus is an invented tale, nothing more than a story indicative of the time; the Nazi crimes happened, actually happened, humans actually died and murdered, with a significance beyond any allegory of personal choice. To place an invented story and real events on the equal footing, in terms of their moral significance, is to deeply misunderstand the difference between narratives and assertions, at whose heart is arbitrary self-expression, and the concrete historical fact of the holocaust.
*At the New York Times — and one hopes this is not all the poetry they deign to discuss in April — Jim Holt makes the case for memorizing poetry. It is a skill, a talent, an ability, at which I have never been adept. Memorization is toilsome, but, I agree, worthwhile. Despite my mind's penchant for getting at the heart of a poem without remembering the particulars, I know the openings of both Paradise Lost and The Odyssey (in Greek, no less), as well as few lines of Shakespeare, Auden, Hill, and Keats. Holt writes, 'The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within.'
* More backlash against postmodernism, this time a misguided attack from City Journal on postmodern capitalism [for more & better on this subject see: Jameson, Fredric]. The return to evidence and a model closer to the scientific method is poorly articulated here, although an accurate remedy to some of the more incidious side-effects of PoMo; in France I think they call this type of circumlocution "style."
* At The New Republic, as has been widely noted, Ruth Franklin has issues with Jonathan Littel's The Kindly Ones: 'If Littell's novel were content merely to draw an exhaustive, moderately familiar, sometimes factually incorrect, but occasionally illuminating picture of the Nazi apparatus, it would be inconsequential. But in its attempt to impose its version of an ancient Greek framework on this modern system of destruction, it crosses the line from amorality to something worse.' It's an interesting turn in terms of being a review; one of the first truly moralistic reviews I've seen since Adam Kirsch ravaged the abominable Human Smoke.
I agree with Franklin that 'It is erroneous . . . to compare the crimes of Oedipus with the crimes of the Nazis.' But it's not because they teach different lessons, as she argues: Oedipus is an invented tale, nothing more than a story indicative of the time; the Nazi crimes happened, actually happened, humans actually died and murdered, with a significance beyond any allegory of personal choice. To place an invented story and real events on the equal footing, in terms of their moral significance, is to deeply misunderstand the difference between narratives and assertions, at whose heart is arbitrary self-expression, and the concrete historical fact of the holocaust.
*At the New York Times — and one hopes this is not all the poetry they deign to discuss in April — Jim Holt makes the case for memorizing poetry. It is a skill, a talent, an ability, at which I have never been adept. Memorization is toilsome, but, I agree, worthwhile. Despite my mind's penchant for getting at the heart of a poem without remembering the particulars, I know the openings of both Paradise Lost and The Odyssey (in Greek, no less), as well as few lines of Shakespeare, Auden, Hill, and Keats. Holt writes, 'The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within.'
* More backlash against postmodernism, this time a misguided attack from City Journal on postmodern capitalism [for more & better on this subject see: Jameson, Fredric]. The return to evidence and a model closer to the scientific method is poorly articulated here, although an accurate remedy to some of the more incidious side-effects of PoMo; in France I think they call this type of circumlocution "style."
Friday, April 3, 2009
John W. Pritchard, Jr. 1926—2009
My grandfather passed away today, at the age of 82, after a long battle with cancer. Jack, as he was known, joined the US Marine Corps in 1943 and served in the Sixth Marine Division. He fought at the battle of Okinawa, and was stationed in China following the end of World War II. He met Marie, my grandmother, while on leave, outside a roller-rink in their hometown of Quincy. Jack remained a career enlisted man, and saw active duty in Korea, finally retiring with the rank of Master Gunnery Sargent. After the Corps, he worked a foreman at the Quincy Fore River shipyards, where he oversaw the construction, in part, of the country's first series of nuclear submarines.This photograph was taken of me and Pa in the hospital where I was born. Since it was otherwise just my mother and I, growing up, Pa took on a lot of the duties of a father: he taught me to shave, taught me to work with my hands, taught me to take pride in my work, and imparted his passion for history and books, along with so many other traits by lesson or example that I can't begin to enumerate them. So many of my best qualities are his; we are all going to miss him every day.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
A Spoonfull of Poetry Month
In the name of National Poetry Month (I wish we didn't need one, but oh well), I'll be spending the bulk of my time here writing about poetry. Since I'm a big fan of close reading, I think I will approach a given poem of my choosing thusly. To do so, I'll pull from new and old at random or at my whim, unless some readers have suggestions.
In this installment, I'll be reading "Uptick," by John Ashbery, which appeared in the March 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine (and so is accessible to all you lovely readers).
"Uptick" begins mise en scène [ed: actually, en medias res, with apologies to confused readers] with its theory of time given over a social setting, a fact indicated at the beginning of the second stanza when the speaker brings the poem (or the discussion at hand) "back for a few hours to / the present subject, a painting." It's a common device in Ashbery (Houseboat Days, I believe, employs the same device), and as a result of his wide influence, it is featured in a good amount of contemporary American poetry — in this case, though, it is only a slight game of bait-and-switch: there are logical reasons, within the context of the poem, to begin with his theory of time.
The painting at hand is described, "half turning around, slightly apprehensive, / but it has to pay attention / to what’s up ahead: a vision." The dynamics of the speaker's mid-scene theory on time is extended and applied to the imaginative space of the painting and its relation to real space, and to the imaginative space of the speaker's mind, and the description is both perhaps the content of the painted scene but also a relation of the viewer more than dovetailing with the art viewed, with yet another piece on the beyond of the art — "a vision," which might be a reference to the inspiration the painting gave to the speaker.
It was then also appropriate to begin where the poem does, since, according to this theory of time, "Waste is virtually eliminated." Once is constantly in the middle of the act of being in time: there is no in-between or outside of the passing moment. This creates a level of irony to the poem. Ashbery is playing a game of mirrors: just as one is never outside of time, it can be said that one is never outside of imaginative space — he is aware of his influence and the internal logic of this poem is a nod to those who find his work inspirational. Hence, "poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture and reads us / to us. / A faint notion. Too many words, / but precious."
As in so much of his late work especially, Ashbery's poem here is dense and ironic, with several layers of reference. The language, though, is almost entirely rhetorical. It is certainly a crafted piece of rhetoric: the first line of stanza two begins with and ends with "to," creating a rhetorical tension in lines 6-7 whether the preposition would hang on the end of the first line or begin the next — the former formulation leaving the clause on a line of its own, granting it more weight and a verbal stutter-step; the latter gives a clarity of reading and completeness of phrase and rhetoric. Both are only so effective for the device of the first line in that stanza.
The only description given in the poem is of the painting "half turning around, slightly apprehensive," and the ambiguous poetry solvent of "brilliant moisture," perhaps to lend weight to two pieces of the logic puzzle that seem apparently unconnected (except in their arrangement in the poem itself). Given that it is a short poem, a meta-textual poem, in which the poet uses the poem to refer to his own status, one is surprised at the sparse and prosaic choice of diction. It may be an appropriate mode for the social context of the poem's setting, but it remains ineffective for me as a poem. It is too rhetorical, too constructed like a long riddle. Once the puzzle of reference and meaning is solved, the poem gives little else for which a reader might return.
In this installment, I'll be reading "Uptick," by John Ashbery, which appeared in the March 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine (and so is accessible to all you lovely readers).
"Uptick" begins mise en scène [ed: actually, en medias res, with apologies to confused readers] with its theory of time given over a social setting, a fact indicated at the beginning of the second stanza when the speaker brings the poem (or the discussion at hand) "back for a few hours to / the present subject, a painting." It's a common device in Ashbery (Houseboat Days, I believe, employs the same device), and as a result of his wide influence, it is featured in a good amount of contemporary American poetry — in this case, though, it is only a slight game of bait-and-switch: there are logical reasons, within the context of the poem, to begin with his theory of time.
The painting at hand is described, "half turning around, slightly apprehensive, / but it has to pay attention / to what’s up ahead: a vision." The dynamics of the speaker's mid-scene theory on time is extended and applied to the imaginative space of the painting and its relation to real space, and to the imaginative space of the speaker's mind, and the description is both perhaps the content of the painted scene but also a relation of the viewer more than dovetailing with the art viewed, with yet another piece on the beyond of the art — "a vision," which might be a reference to the inspiration the painting gave to the speaker.
It was then also appropriate to begin where the poem does, since, according to this theory of time, "Waste is virtually eliminated." Once is constantly in the middle of the act of being in time: there is no in-between or outside of the passing moment. This creates a level of irony to the poem. Ashbery is playing a game of mirrors: just as one is never outside of time, it can be said that one is never outside of imaginative space — he is aware of his influence and the internal logic of this poem is a nod to those who find his work inspirational. Hence, "poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture and reads us / to us. / A faint notion. Too many words, / but precious."
As in so much of his late work especially, Ashbery's poem here is dense and ironic, with several layers of reference. The language, though, is almost entirely rhetorical. It is certainly a crafted piece of rhetoric: the first line of stanza two begins with and ends with "to," creating a rhetorical tension in lines 6-7 whether the preposition would hang on the end of the first line or begin the next — the former formulation leaving the clause on a line of its own, granting it more weight and a verbal stutter-step; the latter gives a clarity of reading and completeness of phrase and rhetoric. Both are only so effective for the device of the first line in that stanza.
The only description given in the poem is of the painting "half turning around, slightly apprehensive," and the ambiguous poetry solvent of "brilliant moisture," perhaps to lend weight to two pieces of the logic puzzle that seem apparently unconnected (except in their arrangement in the poem itself). Given that it is a short poem, a meta-textual poem, in which the poet uses the poem to refer to his own status, one is surprised at the sparse and prosaic choice of diction. It may be an appropriate mode for the social context of the poem's setting, but it remains ineffective for me as a poem. It is too rhetorical, too constructed like a long riddle. Once the puzzle of reference and meaning is solved, the poem gives little else for which a reader might return.
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