The Humanities

Jonathan Mayhew has a quick and biting analysis of what's wrong with the "humanities."

Dark Alley

I know very literate people who see poetry as a dark alley in a deserted neighborhood that they may have glanced into a few times. (Jonathan Mayhew)

Now I understand why some of the voracious readers of novels I know look at me funny when I try to get them to read some: they think I am trying to get them to go down a dark alley with me, where I might try to offer them something that involves needles that may have been places they don't want them to have gone ...

Info Dump

And here's another nice piece gleaned from my blog reading: Jonathan Mayhew on the "info dump" in scholarly writing.

The undergraduate version of the "info dump" in essays about narrative literature: a detailed plot summary of the short story, narrative poem, novel, or play in question, full of tidbits from the plot that might be interesting to know but are utterly irrelevant to what the paper is actually about.

Taste

Jonathan Mayhew has some sharp thoughts about "taste" here:

The mystery of taste is not why we don't like the same things, but why we ever correspond at all. If taste is subjective, then there's no reason two people would ever agree. So there has to be something in the object itself. It's not just that we like Mozart because we're told it's supposed to be great: the response is genuine.

This reminded me of some claims I made in an essay I think I have linked to before:

Taste is not an individual matter; the idea that "there's no arguing about taste" is backwards: there is only arguing about taste. In fact, tastes are the communal result of argument: our "individual" tastes only develop within a context of differing tastes in which each of us confronts others with our response to works.

Bruni

Last year, I read an article somewhere about an album by a European singer with lyrics taken from famous English-language poets. I was interested, but not enough to get the album.

In the meantime, the singer has become famous for marrying the President of France. Here's an article about Carla Bruni's use of poems for her album "No Promises."

(Jonathan Mayhew will wince at the idea that Dickinson's hymnal stanzas can be sung to the tune of "Gilligan's Island," but at least that's a change from the usual reference to "The Yellow Rose of Texas.")

Poetry and Symbols

Jonathan Mayhew often puts thing wonderfully succinctly. Here's a recent comment of his that I can wholeheartedly affirm, from a post on Lorca and "symbols":

"I don't see poetry as a process of encoding ideas in symbols that the reader then must decode. I understand why anyone who is taught that this is what poetry is might grow up to hate poetry."

As I quoted Lorca a few days ago: "I'll let you know what I see there. Just don't ask me to explain it."

Campfire watercolor

Today, Luisa wanted to do some watercolors with the coloring pages from the "Sendung mit der Maus."

I knew she would want me to paint with/for her, but she paints much better than I do, so I started my own painting, of a campfire, on the page I had written a few lines on last night.


I wrote the lines in my head first (following Jonathan Mayhew's "Complete Sentence Game," but adding in that each sentence was supposed to be iambic pentameter), but even then, I made some mistakes writing them down.

I wrote the last two sentences in my head last night and did not write them down. But I remembered them this morning.

I think my desire to paint on my draft was also influenced by the Best American Poetry cartoons here.

Imaginary Prosody

"It's like arguing about the prosody of poem that may or may not exist ..." is the beginning of a striking post by Jonathan Mayhew. It may sound like literary theory, but it turns out to be an allegory of ... theology.

Check it out, and feel free to tell me (and him) what you think.

Colloquial style II

Jonathan continues from what I linked to on my previous post with this title:

"There are two equal and opposite fallacies. One is that the colloquial direct style is and should be the ideal for all poetic writing. That you should never write anything that couldn't be said. The other fallacy is that poetic language needs to mark its distance, be its own separate language."

Highly recommended!

Colloquial style

Jonathan Mayhew makes a point I have long wanted to make, but with such precision that I will just tip my hat to him without further comment:

"We think of a colloquial, direct style as easy to achieve, but if that were true then anybody could write as well as Eileen Myles. But this is obviously not the case. Not even Eileen Myles can write like this--all the time and at will. The directness of WCW and some modernist prose writers too is an achievement. It isn't even that easy to imitate."

Voting on poems

Jonathan Mayhew and I exchanged an email or two about how we pick the poems for the Daily Poem Project. Here's my last note in the exchange:

My procedure is ... read the poems, read the poems, read the poems. :-)

More seriously, my procedure is to read each poem hoping to be blown away. If anything gets in the way of that, then I put the poem aside. Last year, this procedure usually led me to pick a poem quickly, or choose between two very quickly. This year, I'm trying to give them more time; in fact, I'm trying to see how the things that irritate me might actually be the things that are worth looking at more closely (à la the "I can see" motif in Christian Wiman's "The River" in week one).

So I'm shifting my focus a bit to how irritation can be a good thing, a reaction that tells you what to look at just as much as a "wow" does.

Snowclones

Jonathan Mayhew gives good blog, and he drew my attention to the concept of snowclones. Be sure to check out the list of snowclones. To snowclone, or not to snowclone?

(Might I take this opportunity to refer you to the concept of eggcorns, too?)

poets as intellectual reference points

I posted a comment on a post by Jonathan Mayhew that led to some discussion between him and me about the following quotation from my translation of Durs Grünbein's "The Poem and its Secret," which appeared in the January 07 issue of Poetry: "When an average intellectual today reflects on the last century's great artistic and intellectual achievements, he first thinks of such names as Freud and Picasso, Stravinsky and Heisenberg, Hitchcock and Wittgenstein. It is impossible to imagine that one of them could be a poet. Not a single poet from the ancestral gallery (whether Pessoa, Cavafy, or Rilke, whether Yeats, Mandelstam, Valéry, Frost, or Machado) will cross the mind of the historically-informed thinker, who dares to claim a monopoly on Modernism anyway."

You can read the post and the comments if you want all the gory details, but the conclusion is what I wanted to post here: what "artistic" references do intellectuals use to support their points in cultural and political discussions? For example, when Frank Rich writes his weekly column on the state of prevarication and obfuscation in contemporary American politics, what "artistic" works (in the broadest sense) does he refer to?