Viral poems; reading Zagajewski in Poland

I've been teaching at the Pomeranian University in Slupsk in Poland this week, my second week here after a week in March. One of the courses I have been asked to teach is on contemporary literature, so of course I made it into a course on contemporary Anglophone poetry. 

I gave the students a collection of 20 poems published in the last 20 years, from Seamus Heaney's "The Rain Stick" to Danez Smith's "Dinosaurs in the Hood." I chose two of the poems not just because I find them worth pondering but also because they are poems that went viral: Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke" and Maggie Smith's "Good Bones".

Today, we talked about "Good Bones" and what features it has that contribute to its having gone viral. It was a combination of its simplicity (a fairly clear message) and its complexity (the message highlights the difficulty of communicating something simply and honestly). In addition, the poem's repetitions and variations amount to looking at its issues from a variety of different angles, which adds to its effectiveness.

We also discussed another poem that has often been shared after traumatic events around the globe, Adam Zagejewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" (trans. Clare Cavanagh). I don't speak Polish, but we looked at the Polish original as well, and I considered how someone who knows only what the title means might be able to piece together something about the poem. 

In particular, I noticed the repetition of a line from the title through the rest of the poem:

Spróbuj opiewać okaleczony świat.
...
Musisz opiewać okaleczony świat.
...
Powinieneś opiewać okaleczony świat.
...
Opiewaj okaleczony świat

It's cheating a bit, of course, since I am familiar with the English translation, but I was struck by how much can be said about the Polish original just by paying attention to these lines. Each of the lines ends with the same three words, and the first line means "try to praise the mutilated world," so though I didn't remember which modals are used in the repetitions of the line, I was able to remember that the poem's variations are on the line are variations in modal verbs, and I concluded that the final repetition must (musisz?) be an indicative "I praise" or an imperative "praise". As with Smith's "Good Bones", Zagajewski's poem works as a theme with variations that provides multiple angles on a simple message. As a result, neither poem can be reduced to its message, and both can appeal to a wide range of readers, which offers a kind of explanation of what it is that makes a poem go viral.

A final note: the students in the course are studying to be translators, and they were all very impressed by Clare Cavanagh's translation.

Without a doubt

A student (a native speaker of German) used the expression "without doubts" to start a sentence. That sounds wrong to me; I would prefer "without a doubt". But instead of just marking it as wrong, I did a quick bit of research.

I searched the NOW Corpus at the Brigham Young University site with linguistic corpora. The NOW Corpus contains 3.3. billion words of data from web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present. And by the present, they mean the present: it's updated with 4-5 million new words every day.

There were 27 hits for "without doubts" and 7752 hits for "without a doubt." So I can correct the student's usage in good conscience.

And that is how a usage point can be resolved: check actual usage using a linguistic corpus like the NOW Corpus (or any of the other corpora at the BYU site).

Specificity and Generality

A friend posted a quotation from Diane Arbus on Facebook:

The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.

I really liked the idea because it connected with what I've been preaching to my students in a class on poetry and songwriting: be specific! But I also wanted the source, and especially the context, so I did some digging and found a passage from the introduction to a 1972 collection of Arbus's photographs published as "an Aperture monograph" and edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel:

I remember a long time ago when I first began to photograph I thought, there are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody’ll recognize it. It’ll be like what they used to call the common man or something. It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.

I was right to want the context, because now the grand generalization about specificity is so much more specific. The context acts out two things that are lost in the quotable quote at the end: first of all, how the generalization is built on a specific experience; secondly, how that experience is a matter of learning something.

"deemed as"? "based on" vs. "based off of"?

A Facebook friend who was grading papers wrote:

Fellow language/grammar enthusiasts: I need another verdict so I know if two more of my pet peeves are justified. My students write that something is "deemed as" rather than simply "deemed" the adjective that follows. They also write that things are "based off of" rather than "based on" other things. I hate both. May I correct them or are these now so common as to be legitimate?

I responded:

This is the kind of thing I love to go a little bit crazy with …

I looked up the phrases in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GLOWBE). These two corpora can be found at the BYU site for linguistic corpora.

For based on vs. based off of:

COCA
based on = 61860
based off of = 9

GLOWBE
based on = 335832 (US 76525)
based off of = 736 (US 392)

I think you can safely say that “based off of” is not yet Standard English.

Deemed (as): this pair is a bit harder to deal with, because it’s not two distinct phrases (i.e., all hits for “deemed” as are also counted for “deemed”, and many of the uses of “deemed” might be in contexts where “deemed as” would not be used). But here are the numbers:

COCA
deemed as = 56
deemed (including the above) = 5141

GLOWBE
deemed as = 1419 (US 136)
deemed (including the above) = 39523 (US 5512)

While these ratios lean quite strongly in favor of not using “as” with “deemed,” I think there’s enough uncertainty about the numbers to make “deemed as” worth accepting, as well as enough grounds for understanding where “deemed as” comes from (parallel to “regard as” and “consider as” — which latter form I don’t like, actually, but have to admit exists).

This is only about current usage (1990-2012 with COCA, 2012-2013 with Glowbe), so it doesn’t even address the history of “deemed as” and “based off of.” I bet the former has a long history, while the latter doesn’t. But linguists have a term to refer to people’s sense that a construction is new when it is not: “recency illusion”.

And the Google Books Corpus shows that I’m right: “base d off of” does not appear until the 1990s in American English (though it has risen sharply since). In contrast, “deemed as” has been in steady use for 200 years now.

So mark “based off of” as wrong (and discuss it?), but accept “deemed as” (and talk about the “recency illusion”?).

A pragmatic consideration of the intentional fallacy

The assignment: a four-to-six paragraph essay on The Fall of the House of Usher. A student asks if she can refer to Poe's life to help her discuss the representation of women in the story. At first, I thought I would just say "intentional fallacy" and give her some background on the issue, but then I started thinking about things in more pragmatic terms. So here's what I wrote to her:

One way to think about this is in terms of how you would present such an argument. In this case, you have about five paragraphs, with about three of them being body paragraphs. Suppose one of your body paragraphs is about the biographical point. Then you have two paragraphs to discuss the story. If the discussion of the story is convincing without the biographical paragraph, then you can toss out the biographical paragraph and have another paragraph about the story. If the discussion of the story is NOT convincing without the biographical paragraph, then you have a weak, two-paragraph discussion of the story ... (There are also less pragmatic, more theoretical reasons to be careful about the author's biography when doing a scholarly study of a work of literature. These theoretical issues are usually summed up in the expression "intentional fallacy.")

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear

Preparing Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" for class next week with a digital version of the poem, I was underlining words and making marginal comments about all kinds of things in the poem. So in a sense, I wasn't really reading the poem.

And yet when I got to the beginning of the third stanza, I gasped anyway:

Cold  dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

Perhaps that's a test of just how great a poem is: if it blows you away even when you're not reading it in search of being blown away.

A Cold Spring

On this autumn morning, I'll be discussing Elizabeth Bishop's "A Cold Spring" with the students in my course on Bishop's poetry. The epigraph to the poem is from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring," but the poem also recalls T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and that recollection allows the "General Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to shimmer through. I hope all this doesn't distract us too much from looking carefully at Bishop's poem.

Leonard Cohen, "Popular Problems"

    In "Slow," the opener of "Popular Problems," 80-year-old Leonard Cohen warns us how not to interpret the album: "It's not because I'm old / It's not what dying does / I always liked it slow." And these mostly slow tunes do belie reading the album as "a work of old age." Here, Cohen looks at love from many angles, climaxing in the speechlessness of a wondering lover: "My Oh My." But the songs also depict a perplexed individual trying to make sense of the contemporary world; with his lover gone to fight a war, he finds himself among the ruins, "standing on this corner / Where there used to be a street".

*

[I'm teaching a course on Writing Reviews. The first assignment was to write a 100-word review. I thought I'd take a stab at it. This is 111 words long. Two-word version of the review: "Get it!"]

Shaming and the Pop Culture Canon

A Facebook status update from a colleague here at the English Department of the University of Basel:

genuine shock and dismay that only 50% of my class has seen Star Wars!!!!

My comment (among the others that had already commented):

For years now (decades even), I have joked with students that it's okay to have never read "Hamlet" but it's not okay to have never seen "The Wizard of Oz." And until just now, I've always meant it as a joke.

But your status here made me realize that there's something more serious going on: in contemporary culture, there's no particular reason to have not "done" any particular traditionally canonical work, be it "Hamlet" or "The Odyssey" or "Pride and Prejudice." If you haven't, oh well, you haven't.

But if no excuse is necessary for not being up on the "high culture" canon ("high culture": for lack of a better term), there is still no excuse for not being up on the "pop culture" canon. Failure to have kept up with that canon is now the acceptable location of cultural shaming.

In short, the proper response to those 50% is not to joke with them about not seeing "Hamlet" or the like—the proper response is to shame them as an earlier generation of professors would have shamed those who exposed their ignorance about the classic canon of literature and art.

(I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is yet another joke. Who can tell, after all, when Shields starts talking like this, just how serious he is actually being?)

Susan Mitchell, Robert Duncan, J. M. Coetzee

The seventh chapter of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is called "Eros"; in it, Elizabeth reflects on two texts, one she just read and one she remembers having read long ago: Susan Mitchell's "Erotikon (A Commentary on 'Amor and Psyche')" and Robert Duncan's "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar." As part of my course on "Elizabeth Costello" and its sources, the students and I each chose a passage from Mitchell, Duncan, and Coetzee this morning and wrote a sentence about it. Here are the passages I chose, and the sentences I wrote.

Mitchell

To see the darkness lifting its skirts. To see the darkness
undressing to deeper and deeper shades, the hiddenness
pleated, folded over on itself, clavichorded and enrinded
into recesses retiring inward —

Here, darkness can both be exposed to the light (when it "lifts its skirts") and still be a source of "hiddenness" in the "pleats" and "folds" of those "skirts."

*

Duncan

In Goya's canvas Cupid and Psyche
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light
falling upon the brown boy's slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
up from blind innocence, ensnared
    by dimness
into the deprivations of desiring sight.

Here, light, as the end of "blind innocence", reveals "the brown boy's slight body," but it also creates the "snare" of "dimness", making light into a trap for those who would see by it.

*

Coetzee

Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?

In her discussion of Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth insists that we can "enter into other modes of being" — bats, literary characters, corpses — but here, she seems to have forgotten her insistence on (or lost her belief in) the power of literature to go where philosophy cannot go.

Quotation or statement

I may be a descriptivist when it comes to language use, but that does not mean there aren't features of how people use language that I find annoying—that is, I have my peeves, too. The difference between me and a prescriptivist is that I'll give up my peeves if I notice that people are actually using words in a way that seems odd to me (as in my pondering the contemporary use of "geek", where I don't say that people are using the word incorrectly, but just that I don't quite get how they are using it).

So one pet peeve of mine is how people use the word "quotation." For example, a student writing about Hitchcock's "Rear Window" just began a sentence by referring to "Jeff's quotation about how 'sometimes it's worse to stay than it is to run' ..." My peeve is that the student is quoting not "Jeff's quotation" but "Jeff's statement". That is, Jeff is not quoting anything when he says that; he's saying something in his own words.

Similarly, I see things like this, in a discussion of Einstein's comment about God not playing dice: "Einstein's quotation was meant to convey his belief that the universe was not randomly designed." Again, Einstein was not quoting anyone, so it seems odd to me to refer to his remark as his quotation.

So that's my pet peeve, but when I'm grading a student's paper that uses "quotation" where I would prefer "statement," "comment," or "remark," I don't correct it, because it's my impression that that is how the word "quotation" is being used these days.

Perhaps I'll get a comment or two now telling me I should mark it as a mistake, but I'm really just wondering if others have the same peeve about this use of "quotation" or not. The usage is surely common enough that it is completely innocuous to many people.

Three versions of a paragraph

In my Intensive Composition course this morning, I gave the students an exercise that I took from Thomas Basbøll: they had 27 minutes to write one paragraph of no more than 200 words on a passage of their choice from Simon Armitage's poem "The Shout" (video below):

We went out

into the school yard together, me and the boy

whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range

of the human voice:

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm

from across the divide to signal back

that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.

Out of bounds,

he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,

from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm —

I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead

with a gunshot hole

in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,

you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

The Universal Home Doctor, 2002

(The poem is also the title poem of Armitage's American selected poems from 2005)

I did the exercise myself, too. The first time I tried this exercise in November, we were working on Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," and I had enough time in the 27 minutes to do three versions (see below). This time I was able to do three versions as well.

One feature of the development of the versions is how they begin. The first begins with a descriptive introduction to the passage, but the second and the third take material from the end of the first and second versions, respectively, and use that material to introduce the passage more analytically than descriptively. I have not edited the versions beyond what I wrote in those 27 minutes.

Version 1
In the experiment described in "The Shout", two boys take advantage of the difference between the speed of sound and speed of light to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

If the signals (a shout and a gesture; one acoustic, the other visual) that the two boys pass to each other both reach their destination, then the two boys are still within "range / of the human voice" from each other. Since sound is significantly slower than light, the shout will take more time to reach the other boy than the gesture will. The sound "carries," but the arm signal "carries" even faster. The experiment depends on this distinction to work: if at some point the shouting boy cannot be heard anymore, then the two boys will still be in sight of each other. They expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they expect "the range / of the human voice" to be less than the range of human vision.

Version 2

In the experiment, two boys take advantage of the difference between the speeds of sound and light to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

There are two signals here: not only the shout but also the speaker's gesture in return. The former is acoustic, the latter visual. As long as these signals both reach their destination, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". As sound is slower than light, the shout takes more time to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they implicitly assume that "the range / of the human voice" is less than the range of human vision, while also assuming that the voice's range is best measured by shouting.

Version 3

The experiment the two boys devise depends on an implicit assumption: that the loudest voice possible is necessary to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

But there are two signals here, one loud and one silent: not only the shout (a matter of sound), but also the speaker's gesture in return (a matter of vision). As long as these signals both reach their recipients, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". Sound is slower than light, so the shout takes longer to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other. That is, they not only assume that shouting will measure the voice's range, but also expect that range to be less than the range of human vision.

*

In the course of the semester, I'll be doing this exercise with the students six more times, on poems by Adrienne Rich, Rob A. Mackenzie, Katy Evans-Bush, Andrea Cohen, Don Paterson, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Here's Armitage reading "The Shout":



*

And here are the three versions of the Dickinson paragraph (as I wrote them in November, without further editing):


Version 1
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker pass by as they ride along in Death's "Carriage":

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age (in this, it is reminiscent of the riddle of the Sphinx). The stages of life are bound together with the anaphora of "We passed" that begins the first, third, and fourth lines; the phrase is used transitively here, but its repetition opens up the possibility of reading it intransitively as a euphemism for death as well: "we passed" in the sense of "we died." This play of the transitive and intransitive is mirrored in the enjambment of the phrase containing the verb "strove" between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, the children's "striving" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of both play ("At Recess") and struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Thus, the two verbs in the stanza, "passed" and "strove," are both made ambiguous by the poem's form: "passed" refers to both death and the passage of life; "strove" refers to both work and play.

*
Version 2
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker see as they ride along in Death's "Carriage." The stanza contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated at the beginning of lines one, three, and four) and "strove," which is emphasized by its enjambed position at the end of line 1:

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age; the anaphora links those stages while also drawing attention to the isolated phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself. Thus, the anaphora connects the passage of human life and the passing of human life into one figure of "riding with Death." This formal construction of an ambiguity is repeated in the enjambment between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, "Children strove" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of play ("At Recess") as well as playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Just as "passed" refers to both death and the course of life, "strove" refers to both work and play—and both of these ambiguities are created by the poem's form.

*
Version 3
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated in lines one, three, and four) and "strove," in an enjambment at the end of line 1:

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" figures human life from childhood to adulthood to old age. The anaphora links those stages while also isolating the phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself; the passing of human life is thus contained in the passage of human life. The enjambment with "strove" repeats this formal construction of an ambiguity: read by itself at the end of the first line, "Children strove" refers to their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" becomes a matter of play ("At Recess") and of playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Again, one perspective is embedded in another, contradictory perspective; here, the striving of work is contained in the striving of childhood play.

Part of the Ritual

I remember a Stanford professor (Mark Mancall) asking a roomful of freshmen if we were nervous about the exam the next day. (The course was the wonderfully titled "Structured Liberal Education," SLE for short; the students in it all lived in the same dormitory, and we were all a little bit crazy.)

So he asked us if were nervous about the exam, our first in the course.

"Yes," we cried.

"Good," he said. "That's part of the ritual."

Writer and Author

I'm correcting a German-English translation for an exam, and the German word Schriftsteller appears in it. My sense is that this corresponds to "writer," and that there is a difference between "writer" and "author," even though the two terms can refer to the same person.

I would articulate this difference as follows: a writer is someone who writes books (as a profession?), but an author is someone who has written one particular book, or a set of books. So one would say "Jane Smith is a writer," but one would say "Jane Smith is the author of Title of Her Book," or "Jane Smith is the author of four books."

Comments welcome on this distinction, of course!

Poetry Festival in Britain or Ireland next May

I'm toying with the idea of teaching a poetry seminar in the spring of 2009. The seminar would be based on a poetry festival taking place in Britain or Ireland in May—if I can find one.

So does anyone know of a poetry festival taking place in Britain or Ireland from May 1-3, 2009, or from May 21-24?

Those are the dates I am looking for because May 1 is a holiday in Basel, and it happens to be on a Friday in 2009, while May 21 is also a holiday (Ascension), and the Friday after Ascension is a day off from classes at the University.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Writing Advice

This is a footnote, as it were, to my post "How would a fool do it?"

My two colleagues and I were giving the final English-language exam to students earlier this month. One student who had been having serious problems (she had failed the exam twice) had still been struggling in the exam preparation course with my colleague Joyce. Shortly before the exam, Joyce made a surprising suggestion: "Write what you think is a bad essay." So she did, and when we marked it, we thought it was fine!