Bob Dylan, "Modern Times": First impressions

Bob Dylan's new album, Modern Times, is incredibly relaxed. Most of the songs are mid-tempo shuffles, with the arrangements focusing on texture (a guitar riff here, a drum fill there, a bit of violin) rather than on power. There are only a couple real rockers, and even they are not played for rock-and-roll drive.

My first listen was last night after supper, with three kids running round (well, okay, Sara was not running around, since she can't walk yet, but it's a metaphor). The sound of the CD made the whole living room calm; the kids' energy did not seem hectic with these gentle but pulsing rhythms surrounding them. Despite being very worn out, I just sat there on the couch and enjoyed the music and the kids.

I've been catching bits of lyrics here and there, but nothing that makes me want to cite anything yet. Lots of nice turns of phrase, as always, and a healthy dose of lines that are actually clichés, but that sound beautiful in a song. Also, the lyrics are not included with the disc, and I have not yet been able to find them on line.

In fact, the phrases that keep coming to me tend to be from songs from Dylan's last, Love and Theft, which just indicates that this CD sounds a lot like that one—and why shouldn't it? One feature of both Love and Theft and Modern Times is just how wonderfully recorded they are.

The titles that have struck me the most on Modern Times are the first two, "Thunder on the Mountain" (not a rocker; the thunder is in the distance, as it were) and "Spirit on the Water" (with some exquisite rhythym riffing from the guitars), as well as two ballads, "When the Deal Goes Down" (with its title that sounds familiar to any Deadhead) and "Nettie Moore." The last of these is the most singular tune on the CD musically: the groove is much less pronounced, and the sparseness of the arrangement (though not the details) recalls the exquisite "Sugar Baby" from Love and Theft. The arrangement of the drums deserves special mention: using mostly just a straight-four bass drum, with some percussion details added on the choruses (or perhaps they are bridges?), George Recile has produced a masterpiece of minimalism in his playing here.

David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer

David Foster Wallace, author of the novel Infinite Jest and other books that have gotten a lot of attention over the past few years, has just published an essay about Roger Federer in The New York Times. I recommend it; along with being a good description of Federer himself, it is an excellent analysis of the current situation in men's tennis.

(If you can't get to the article, sign up for free access to the NYT. If the article is more than a week old and hence in the archive, then you can access the archive if you subscribe to the NYT or to the International Herald Tribune. If you cannot get to the article otherwise, I did download it, so you can ask me to send it to you.)

Verse novels V: Rosellen Brown, "Cora Fry's Pillow Book"

This book is another one that I picked up in March, but I only just now got around to reading it. It pushes the envelope of what can be called a "verse novel," but there is enough story to it to make it clearly more than "just" a "sequence." Rosellen Brown writes in the first person here, but the speaker is Cora Fry, a woman who lives most of her life in Oxford, New Hampshire, where as an adult she is first a housewife and then a mail carrier. The narrative is basically the narrative of a life: children are raised, tensions between husband and wife are dealt with, and eventually Cora and her husband move to another town after he has gone through a period of unemployment. This story of a life makes the book more a novel than a sequence.

At the same time, the individual poems can mostly be read on their own, as well (which, it could be argued, makes it more a sequence than a novel). There are many vivid moments, as in a poem about Cora's children that contains this frightening thought for all parents:

And if I died
would they
remember me
shouting?

This is followed a bit later by a a crisp poem acting out how the light from a new streetlamp would upset someone nearby who is not used to light shining in the window at night. Another memorable poem describes how a muskrat chewed off its leg to escape a trap, leaving behind only a leg for Cora's husband and son to find there. A third is about gardening and the gardener's uncertainty about the vegetables she plants:

Each year I doubt, each year they prosper.

The gardener's doubt, that is, does not influence the success or failure of the garden. (I have the same doubt when I tie-dye shirts: each time I doubt, each time they come out.)

There is a memory of her son on a merry-go-round, thinking that the "red and white horse" would "canter off across / the town green." At the same time, there is a much later poem about talking to adult children, remembering things, and noticing:

They have forgotten the childhoods we had
together, they remember only their own.

The book is actually two books: Cora Fry was apparently published much earlier; the 1994 edition that I have includes all of Cora Fry and then continues with the actual Cora Fry's Pillow Book. The two books cover different time periods (the former the housewife years, so to speak, and the latter the mail-carrier years) and are written in different forms (shorter lines in the former, much longer lines in the latter).

One of the more startling moments comes near the end of the second part, when Cora reflects on the lives of those who have lived in or near Oxford all their lives:

... I feel like a pilot
flying over the tiny, separate plots of our lives,
I see how the shapes we've worked so hard at carving out and cultivating
to look like no one else's begin to resemble each other. At fifteen thousand feet,
they blend, their borders run together, vague, finally invisible.

All in all, Cora Fry's Pillow Book is another fine addition to my list of verse novels.

Verse Novels IV: John Bricuth

John Bricuth has written two books that he calls "narrative poems"; they both seem to me to qualify as "verse novels" (although perhaps he might try to downplay the "novelistic" elements). I picked them up in the U.S. in March and read them on the plane home. Yes, both of them, all the way through.

The first, Just Let Me Say This About That, was published in 1998. A brief prose introduction sets the stage; it begins:

"The following poem takes the form of a press conference. The three questioners are named Bird, Fox and Fish. The person being questioned, addressed only as 'Sir,' either God, the president of the United States, everybody's father, or a combination of the three."

This structure becomes the springboard for a wide-ranging story told through questions and answers; at times highly philosophical, at others it is uproariously comical. Still other passages become entirely tragic.

As "Sir" says once, though, "boys, let's not go crazy chasing details." Further, Fox complains about "the coldness of examples." Instead, here are some quotable passages:

You come away convinced the sense of self

And its survival had its start in childhood
Memories of being held within a
Parent's gaze, that look that first conveyed

The notion they were someone separate, special,
Safe from harm as long as daddy watched,
Until as they grew up that gaze was swallowed

Whole, and came back as the soul.

*

We'd had the better of the bargain: merely
To have been, and been aware, within
A universe mostly made of vacant

Space, freezing cold, drifting dust,
Represents so rare a gift that if you
Reckon in life's ordinary share of

Joys, then add the world's surprises, you've got
A big mix justifies any amount
Of suffering, at least that's what I think.

*

I know you'll laugh at this, my thoughts began
To clear. I had a kind of revelation, Fish,
That burst of level lightning one associates

With several types of Eastern wisdom—
The seven ways, the twelve steps, the four
Tops, the three pigs—I don't know ...

I know it had a number in it, Fox.

*

Bricuth's second "narrative poem" appeared in 2005. As Long As It's Big takes the same discursive situation, adds a few characters, and makes it more concrete: the setting is not a parody of a press conference but a divorce trial in which Fox and Bird have become lawyers for Fish and his wife. Like its predecessor, the book runs through a wide range of emotions and registers. Some readers might prefer the somewhat tighter intensity of Just Let Me Say This About That (which might partly explain why I did not note any particular passages of ALAIB), but others (the majority, I suspect) will prefer the clearer narrative of As Long As It's Big. I enjoyed both books immensely and recommend them highly as two more extraordinarily successful and utterly unique examples of the peculiar category of the "verse novel."

Simon Armitage, "Homer's Odyssey"

In a book that is as yet only available in England, Simon Armitage recasts the Odyssey as a radio play and hence entirely in dialogue. Even though the book was a BBC commission, it is vivid and riveting from start to finish. Odysseus's telling of his story to the Phaeacians is handled beautifully, with the dialogues switching back and forth between those in the stories Odysseus tells and those between Odysseus and his listeners. But the book's best sections are the dialogues between Athena and an entirely memorable Zeus: the king of the gods comes across as a wonderful ironist:

When we send eagles
to signal our thoughts in the sky,
what do they do -- stand and point and stare,
like ... birdwatchers!

Or:

At least they don't live forever, like us. My memory --
it's like a museum. Infinite rooms, covered in dust.

Or:

I find it doesn't do to look down too much like that.
Gives one a bad neck.

As I looked back through the book to find some good passages to cite, I discovered that after about halfway through the book, I stopped underlining things. That could be a bad sign (fewer quotable passages later in the book?), but it usually means that I got so caught up in the story and its telling that I stopped thinking about finding quotable quotes! And this is, of course, a fabulous story, which Armitage tells in a fresh and exciting way.

Kick Me

So last night Miles and Luisa were watching Swallows and Amazons. Miles was lolling about on the floor, and Luisa was sitting on one of their two small white chairs (which they usually sit on to watch their movies, right next to each other, soooo cute). Luisa was pestering Miles with her feet.

Andrew: Luisa, don't kick Miles. Kick me if you want to kick somebody!
Miles (standing up): I want to have somebody to kick, too!

31 for 14

Miles and I were playing cribbage, and we had the following run of points in play:

Miles played a 10.
I played a 5: Fifteen for two.
Miles played a 4: 19.
I played a 4: 23 for two.
Miles played a 4: 27 for six.
I played a 4: 31 for fourteen!

Evening Snack

After they have put their pyjamas on, Miles and Luisa often have an evening snack of fruit while watching a bit of one of the movies they like (lately, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Swallows and Amazons have been their favorites). This evening, they watched the scene in which Mary Poppins arrives, the "Step in Time" sequence, and the finale, "Let's Go Fly a Kite" (what a cool song that one is), and they each ate quite a few pieces of apple and banana as a snack.

When movie-watching time ended, I asked Miles to go brush his teeth. He insisted that he was still hungry and wanted to eat some more, which I did not believe (sometimes he asks for more just to further delay going to bed, and it was already quite late). So I decided to tease him and offer him something more to eat that would be as small as possible: "Okay, you can have one piece of rice or a piece of cold macaroni."

"Okay," he said, "I want a piece of cold macaroni!"

At which Luisa said, "Auch cold macaroni!" (If she had not said it bilingually, she would have said something like "me-too cold macaroni!")

Don't Drink and Talk

Mel Gibson's recent experiences are nicely summarized here.

Verse novels III: Fred D'Aguiar

I have been meaning to make more comments about verse novels since March, when I bought quite a few new ones while traveling in the US.

One was Fred D'Aguiar's Bloodlines. As I commented in Verse novels part two, I was not that impressed by his Bill of Rights, but Bloodlines makes me want to reread that one anyway. Bloodlines tells the story of a doomed interracial love affair around the time of the American Civil War. Its tour de force is a chapter called "War," and its most memorable effect is that it treats the topic without the slightest sentimentality: no happy end here.

My only problem with the book as a whole might have been a result of how I read it: I had to take a break in the middle of it to reread another verse novel (Glyn Maxwell's The Sugar Mile, which I taught in late June), and as a result, the book seemed somewhat disjointed to me.

But it is full of wonderful moments, such as this one:

.... Their attitude
to everything is, if it is so urgent
it will happen without their attention.

They are right and they are wrong. The world
carries on as it must, but it is diminished
without their involvement.

Verse novels part two
Verse novels

Joke

Miles came up with the following joke today:

A man is sitting on the floor playing chess. The cook comes in and asks him what he is doing. "I'm playing chess on the floor because it looks like a chessboard," says the man. "That's a rather large board," says the cook. "But it's okay, the crib is on the icebox," says the man.

Riddle

I taught Miles how to play cribbage. When it's his deal, he says, "HGG." When it's my deal, he says, "GHD." What do these abbreviations stand for?

Headlines; Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet"

The big headline in the International Herald Tribune today:

"Rice to return to Mideast with plan"

I don't know which is worse: the idea that she had no clue what to do on her previous trip(s) to the Mideast, or the idea that she is bringing a plan from Bush along, whose previous plans for the Mideast have not been particularly successful.

It makes me want to stop reading the newspaper. I get the same reaction when I read The New Yorker sometimes: there's yet another article about how badly things are going in Iraq, and all it makes me want to read is Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner was a GI in Iraq, and his collection is uncannily powerful. Poetry is indeed "news that stays news," as Ezra Pound said. Three poems from the book are on-line from when they were published in The Georgia Review.

The "Wayback"

I read an article by Daniel Gilbert in the International Herald Tribune (taken from the New York Times) that led me to send him the following note:

Dear Prof. Gilbert,

I enjoyed your informative and insightful article in the International Herald Tribune the other day. Along with the information on research that it contained, I especially enjoyed the image of you and your family's trips in the station wagon when you were a child. The part of that, then, that especially struck me was the expression "wayback." That's what we called that section, too, when I was growing up in the seventies. It was always fun to sit there on long car trips, in the days before child-safety seats (which I, as a father of three kids, can hardly imagine anymore). And it's nice to know that our family was not the only one to use this expression.

*

He wrote the following back:

I've now heard from about a half dozen people who used this term. We all thought we were the only ones!

*

I think we thought we were the only ones, too.

Cool acoustic blues downloads

A link at my cousin Katy and her husband Bruce's site sent me to this download page for country blues from North Carolina and environs. I've downloaded some of it and have enjoyed it all quite a bit. Highly recommended.

Vinyl story

I left my records in storage in Philadelphia in 1991 when I went to Europe to spend a year in Berlin. When I handed in my dissertation in Philly in March 95, I picked up the stuff I had stored there and took it to my Dad's house in Toledo. When he moved from Toledo to Seattle (in 99, I think), he shipped the stuff (records and books) to my sister Sara's house in Massachusetts And then a couple summers ago, I took all the books to a used bookstore there and traded them in for four very old books (all about birds, but up to 100 years old), and I took all the records to a used record store and traded them in for CDs.

The only vinyl I kept was the old Beatles and Doors LPs that my Dad bought in the 60s. The copies of the first two Doors LPs were actually bought by my Dad in 1967, the year of their release.

Zidane's head butt as video game

If Marco Materazzi has insulted your mother and sister, you, too, can give him a head butt. More than one, actually: earn your well-deserved red card in this Zidane video game!

Morality Tale

A few years ago, my New Year's Resolution was to floss every day. And I did; I was very proud of myself. After a few weeks, I already did it more or less automatically.

I always did it very quickly, though, and I wondered if I was being too cursory. So when I went to get my teeth cleaned again in the early summer, I was eager to hear what the dental hygienist said. If she had given me the "you-need-to-floss" speech again, then I would have quit flossing in frustration! But she didn't, she praised me and said it made a world of difference, upon which I admitted that I felt like I was doing a cursory job, but I was glad that that was better than nothing.

The moral of the story: A cursory effort is better than no effort at all!

Syd; Wish You Were Here

So Syd Barrett died, the mastermind behind the early Pink Floyd. My Mom thought I might be sad about this (which I guess I am, a little bit), but it wasn't Syd that meant PF to me (although this idea surely scandalizes Syd fans). It was Roger Waters and his songs, and David Gilmour and his guitar playing.

But as the news items point out, at least two later PF songs were explicitly about Syd. One of them, "Wish You Were Here," is one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar:

Wish You Were Here

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you trade
your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
year after year,
running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears,
wish you were here.

I am always especially moved, when playing the song, to sing the powerful last lines of the first verse: "Did you exchange / a walk on part in the war / for a lead role in a cage?" This is not only a fine piece of songwriting, the music is fabulous to play on the guitar. In fact, many beginning guitarists that I knew in the eighties began with this song (or "Stairway to Heaven"). It's easy to play, but it also feels like you are really playing music already.

Maybe I'll play it to myself someday soon, and think of Syd and how sad it was that he had to be institutionalized, but later he got out, changed his name to Roger, and became a painter.

Fragment

I actually understand those who say that "Fragment," the winner of my Daily Poem Project, is a boring poem. Its initial effect is one that is often not very productive: one reads it and nods. Okay, next poem.

What drew me back to it, then? Two things, one about the poet, one about the poem: first, even if I had not become friends with A.E. Stallings, I would still be a fan of her work (in fact, we became friends because I invited her to read in Basel, hence because I am a fan), and it has been my experience, over and over again, that her work deserves multiple readings, even or especially when it does not seem to deserve them at first glance.

Secondly, the poem itself drew me in with its patterning. As is often the case with Stallings's work, the surface is delightful and full of suggestive phrasing.

That said (to use that phrase again), I had to keep returning to the poem before it really opened up for me, because, I think, its surface is so glossy (or glassy?) that it actually resists interpretation (one way of putting this is: it's boring). Only when I began to notice how distinct the various moments that cause the glass to be dropped are did I began to get at what the poem says to me: how it is not the material that objects are made of that causes them to break but the fact that we use them. To put it boldly: matter is not in itself mortal; it is the use of matter that makes it transient.

Last Days of the Surreal

Just when I fear that my tastes in poetry are becoming so "straight" as to be almost boring (I don't really fear that, but it's a nice opening move for a blog entry), I come across something like Elton Glaser's "Last Days of the Surreal," which reassures me that "bent" poetry can still strike me, if it's this good. Wit does not preclude darkness and mystery.

My biography, 1988-present

Someone asked me to explain how I got to Basel, and I did, so here it is for the whole world to read.

In the fall of 1988, I went to Penn to do a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature. I was ABD in the spring of 1991, when I went to Berlin for a year to work on my dissertation (on Christa Wolf, Doris Lessing, and Marguerite Duras).

That year turned into more: I was in Berlin for about twenty months in all, and then I got a job teaching English-language courses in the English Department at the University of the Saarland in Saarbrücken.

I taught there for two-and-a-half years, during which time I completed my dissertation and tried, unsuccessfully, to get a tenure-track job in a North American English or German department. Then I got my job here in Basel, starting in October 1995—more or less the same job I had in Saarbrücken.

I came here planning to stay for two years, and that has turned into a lifetime. When I began to be more interested in literary translation than literary criticism and to concentrate more on my own poetry, I stopped trying to get back to North America to be a professor. The decision was made easier since Andrea did not really want to move to North America.

So here I am still, happy to be living in a wonderful European city teaching English to support my literary habits and raising my three kids to be Swiss. :-)

David Bottoms on Poetry and Philosophy

I found this passage from an interview with David Bottoms quite compelling (although I am not sure I agree with it one-hundred percent). I'd be interested in any comments people may have on it:

"[Young poets] want to write ideas and not poetry, and I'm of the old 'show me, don't tell me' school. Students sometimes have trouble with that. Someone asked me once in a class, 'Hey, but can't the poem be an idea?' I said no, absolutely not, and I stick by that. On the other hand, it can express an idea, and it usually will if it's any good. Karl Shapiro puts this well in an essay called 'What is Not Poetry.' He says, 'If poetry has an opposite, it is philosophy. Poetry is a materialization of experience; philosophy is the abstraction of it.' I love that, and it's a point I try to get across to all my students. Okay, think about this. Here's a story I like to tell. It's another simplification, sure, but it makes the point well enough for students. A poet and a philosopher are walking across Woodruff Park [in Atlanta], going over to Fairlie-Poplar for some Thai food. When they reach Peachtree Street they see a yellow flash go by, then hear a gigantic crash under the traffic light at Five Points. A yellow MG has tried to beat the light and smashed into the side of a furniture truck. It's a mess. Well, the poet and the philosopher rush over and try to help. A crowd gathers, somebody's on a cell phone calling an ambulance. The driver of the MG has been thrown into the street. The sports car's a tangle of crushed metal. Gasoline, blood, and glass are everywhere. So, the philosopher takes it all in and immediately abstracts. He thinks 'Accident, Chaos, Fate.' The poet, on the other hand, whips out her notebook and writes down everything that happened. The yellow flash on Peachtree Street, the smell of the smoking brakes, the spilled gasoline, the sound of the impact, the blood in the street. She goes back to her apartment and fleshes it all out on a legal pad as vividly as she can, then she types it up into a poem, and sends it to Five Points. You get your copy a few months later and turn to a poem called 'Smash Up.' You read the poem. You ponder it for a few seconds. You think 'Accident, Chaos, Fate.' The point is this. The poet and the philosopher are both traveling to the same city. The poet is simply taking the scenic route. The poet is trying to make the world material on the page, so that the reader can abstract, so that the reader can take what clues the world offers and decipher meaning from them. The poet wants the reader to participate, to experience the event in a vivid way."

Daily Poem Project, final vote(s)

The final vote for the Daily Poem Project took place this morning, Tuesday, July 4. The twelve finalists had been narrowed down a little bit for purposes of discussion: all the students and I had written shortlists of two to six or seven poems (with each student making his or her own choices about how to pick which poems were on his or her shortlist). My tally of the shortlists led to an initial list of four poems for discussion: A. E. Stallings, "Fragment," Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs, John Balaban, "If Only," and Bill Zavatsky, "Monologue" (with Stallings having been named on 16 shortlists of the 22 submitted to me, including my own).

Before discussing the poems, though, I asked two questions: first, how many of the students had already made up their minds about what to vote for? If only one or two had not decided yet (along with me), then I would have had the vote then and there, and the discussion would have occurred after the vote. However, as seven or eight people were still undecided, I put off the vote until after the discussions. (Still, it is worth noting that that means the clear majority had already decided before the discussion.)

I then asked if there were any poems that any student wanted to ask to have added to the discussion. This led to two further poems being added to the list for discussion: Terrance Hayes, "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)" and C. K. Williams, "Thighs."

This left us with about ten minutes to discuss each poem, which is, of course, not much, but it was also enough to sketch out what the issues raised by each poem were. The selection from Sutzkever's Epitaphs, for example, raised the issue of how we would read the poem if we did not know it was about the Holocaust. The poem does contain some information that points toward the Holocaust for contemporary readers (a young woman is being taken against her will from Paris to Poland by train, and she throws her most precious possession, a pearl necklace on a red silk thread, out the "grate" of the train—not the window). But many readers, even today (and definitely in the future), might well read the poem without its historical context; we agreed, though, that they would still have a sense of the poem's power. That power might be more mysterious then, even eerie, but it would remain.

The issue of information is raised by C. K. Williams's "Thighs." The poem contains a great deal more information and contextualiztion than Sutzkever's does, and to someone aware of the what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is nothing mysterious about the poem. (Its strengths lie elsewhere.) However, it struck us that quite a bit of what we can infer from the poem depends, as with Sutzkever's, on our knowledge of things that the poem does not mention explicitly (for example, it never mentions the United States!). In rereading the poem before class, I had also noticed that its depiction of the powerlessness of the newspaper reader when confronted by information that he cannot do anything about is repeated not only for the speaker of the poem but also for its reader: we read the poem and remain as powerless and frustrated as the speaker does. In this light, the poem also ends up highlighting how the sheer quantity of information in newspapers does not empower the newspaper reader; on the contrary, "Thighs" suggests, all the reader can do is make his ironic comparisons (perhaps by writing a poem about them).

The discussions of both Balaban's "If Only" and Zavatsky's "Monologue" focused on how the poems' conclusions change the rest of the poem. Balaban's final line ("This is how it should have been"), some suggested, provides a twist that strengthens a poem that otherwise takes the risk of being too "sentimental" (as one student put it, one who did not think the twist was effective). For me, the most interesting point was about typography: the italicization of the line, it was argued, made the conclusion too heavy-handed, precluding a neutral, even resigned reading of the line.

Zavatsky's poem also ends with a striking image, when the speaker of the monologue compares the old friend he has been breaking off with to a "pesky insect that flies around, / buzzing in one's ear its tiny / message about mortality." My sense of this startling image was that it overwhelmed the rest of the poem with its vividness. This led one student (who had had the poem on his shortlist) to agree with me in these terms: the change in tone in the final lines does not work (whether you prefer the tone of what comes before, as he did, or the concluding image, as I do).

Before the final vote, I asked whether anybody had changed their minds because of the discussion. Nobody had! :-)

The results were quite clear:

1. A. E. Stallings, "Fragment": 10 votes
2. Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs: 4 votes
3. Ingeborg Bachmann, "I Step Outside Myself": 3 votes
3. Rachel Hadas, "The Nosebleed": 3 votes
3. Dick Allen, "On Tenterhooks": 3 votes
6. Terrance Hayes, "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)": 2 votes
7. John Balaban, "If Only": 1 vote
7. Bill Zavatsky, "Monologue": 1 vote

I had also polled "outside" voters, just to spice things up a bit. I received (only) 10 votes (after emailing over 100 people, but it was at short notice, so I understand why many people might not have wanted to participate). Here, the results were much more spread out: A. E. Stallings, "Fragment," and William Wenthe, "Groucho and Tom," each received 2 votes, while six poems received one vote each:

Hayden Carruth, "Springtime, 1998"
Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs
Ingeborg Bachmann, "I Step Outside Myself"
Rachel Hadas, "The Nosebleed"
Dick Allen, "On Tenterhooks"
John Balaban, "If Only"

After we determined the final winner, I wondered whether the class all felt comfortable with the result (as was the case with last year's winner, "The Shout," by Simon Armitage). That group was smaller, so it was not hard to achieve consensus acceptance of the winner; in this, larger group, several students mentioned that they had not liked the poem at all. One of them made an interesting characterization of the group: most of them were students of philosophy. One could ponder why that might be so, but it is true that the poem begins with a reference to philosophy: "The glass does not break because it is glass, / Said the philosopher."

If you have read this far, thanks. Feel free to comment!

Finalist list
Week 12
Week 11
Weeks 9 and 10
Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

For Bill Frisell fans: Vic Chesnutt, "Ghetto Bells"

I just picked up Vic Chesnutt's 2005 CD "Ghetto Bells" the other day, for two reasons: I really like the album I already have by him ("About to Choke"), and Bill Frisell plays guitar on it. Probably all Vic C. fans already have the album, but maybe there are some Frisell fans reading this note who need to be told: get this album. If only for the astonishingly beautiful ballad "Forthright," in which BF's floating guitar sound achieves perfection.

Daily Poem Project finalists

These are the 12 finalists in the Daily Poem Project:

1. A. E. Stallings, "Fragment"
2. Hayden Carruth, "Springtime, 1998"
3. Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs
4. Terrance Hayes, "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)"
5. C. K. Williams, "Thighs"
6. Ioanna Carlsen, "Forgiveness"
7. Ingeborg Bachmann, "I Step Outside Myself"
8. Rachel Hadas, "The Nosebleed"
9. Dick Allen, "On Tenterhooks"
10. John Balaban, "If Only"
11. William Wenthe, "Groucho and Tom"
12. Bill Zavatsky, "Monologue"

The in-class vote will take place on Tuesday, July 4, 2006. If you are not in the class but want to vote on which of these 12 poems is your favorite, I am also running a vote for people who are not in the class. Email me or send me your vote as a comment by Monday, July 3, 2006, and we will see if the members of the class agree with those who are not in the class!

Week 12
Week 11
Weeks 9 and 10
Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Daily Poem Project, Week 12

The vote for the 12th and final week of the Daily Poem Project (poems on Poetry Daily from June 20, 2006, to June 26, 2006) took place on Tuesday morning, June 27.

The clear winner was Bill Zavatsky's "Monologue" with seven votes. In second place was the selection from Brian Henry's book "Quarantine" with four votes. The rest of the votes were scattered among the other poems from the week.

I was disappointed that Bob Hicok's "The Evolving Landscape," which I voted for, did not receive more votes (it received only two). Hicok is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and his poem "Solstice: voyeur" came in second to Simon Armitage's "The Shout" in last year's project. But it is interesting to note that René, the only student who was also in last year's course, was the other person to vote for Hicok. Perhaps Hicok's work takes some getting used to (I know it did for me, though I have now long since been hooked), or perhaps the students were just put off by the length of the poem, as is often the case when one is reading poems on computer screens.

Week 11
Weeks 9 and 10
Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Daily Poem Project, Week 11

The vote for week 11 of the Daily Poem Project took place in class on Tuesday, June 20. The poems were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, June 13, to Monday, June 19.

There was a clear winner: "Groucho and Tom," by William Wenthe, received seven votes (including mine), with Christopher Buckley's "Travel" in second place with four. Buckley's sly poem has a nice, self-mocking tone, but Wenthe's imagined version of an apparently real encounter between Groucho Marx and Tom (T. S.) Eliot lives up to the humor of its conceit.

My comment is brief this time because I had no trouble choosing Wenthe's poem over the others, about which I wrote notes like "too long, no form," "too vague," and "funny but not deep." In fact, only Buckley's poem came close to Wenthe's for me this week.

Weeks 9 and 10
Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Softblow

Some poems of mine have just been published by the online journal Softblow.

Gilbert Sorrentino

I only just heard about the death of Gilbert Sorrentino (on May 18). I had limited contact with him during my Stanford days, but the contact was very important to me: he was the second reader of my honors thesis on Milan Kundera. I only talked with him a few times about Kundera and my thesis, and I do not remember any details of the conversations, but I do remember his warmth and his appreciation of my first truly serious efforts in literary criticism. And of course I appreciated his comments on the thesis when it was finished: the memorable element was that he wrote that he had never taken Kundera seriously before, but that I had made him do so.

Daily Poem Project, Weeks 9 and 10

The vote for week 9 of the Daily Poem Project (Tuesday, May 30, to Monday, June 5) was quite complicated. The first part of the voting took place on Tuesday, June 6, as planned. However, the vote resulted in a three-way tie for first place, with each of the first-place poems receiving only three votes each. As eight students were absent that day and had not emailed me their votes before class, I decided to allow them to cast late absentee ballots (without, of course, telling them what the result of the first vote was, only that it was a three-way tie between poems I did not identify).

Then, after the absentee ballots came in (four arrived by my deadline of Wednesday evening, June 7), two poems were still tied with four votes each: "On Tenterhooks," by Dick Allen, and "Feast of the Ascension. Planting Hibiscus," by Jay Hopler. So we had to break the tie with a run-off vote between these two poems, which took place on Tuesday, June 13, before the week 10 vote (see below).

At least the run-off vote was decisive, as Dick Allen's poem received thirteen out of twenty votes.

I had originally voted for Seamus Heaney's "The Nod," from his new book District and Circle. While some might consider the poem as an example of how Heaney's poem can be "reduced to a paraphrase," I found the poem quite powerful. It did not generate a "wow" at the end, but it generated another effect worth taking note of: I kept thinking of it out of the blue. (It was also an interesting coincidence that the poem was on PD on the very day that we discussed two Heaney poems in class—to be precise, two of Felix Christen's translations of Heaney.)

In the run-off, I found it easy to decide: Allen's short, brisk play with the expression "on tenterhooks" easily beat Hopler's overly abstract and unnecessarily fragmented "Feast of the Ascension."

The week 10 vote (poems from June 6 to June 12) was much more straightforward: John Balaban's "If Only" won easily, receiving seven votes while no other poem received more than three. One of the seven votes for it was mine; it was the only poem I considered during the week. And even Balaban's poem seemed a bit flat to me on a first reading—until I got to the final line. It did not generate a "wow," but it did turn the whole poem on its head. Check it out!

Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Three things Luisa said yesterday

1

She was napping in the afternoon. It was getting late, so I went to open her door, so that she could begin waking up. Apparently, she was already awake; she stood up in her crib and smiled at me. "Did you have a nice nap, Luisa?" I said.

"Grrreat," she said with a huge grin. (There were at least three Rs in the word. Americans would have thought she was doing a baby imitation of Tony the Tiger—someone she has never seen!)

2

Then I offered her a snack. She wanted some of the delicious grapes we have been eating for the past few days.

I had been folding laundry while watching England and Paraguay in the World Cup. It was halftime when I went to check on her, and it was still halftime when she began eating her grapes. During halftime, I was watching the French Open women's final. At four o'clock, things were getting exciting near the end of the first set, but I still zapped back to the football to see if it had started yet, then zapped back to set point.

Having seen that bit of soccer, Luisa turned to me and asked, "Is Basel?"

(She must associate soccer with Miles's question when there is a bit of "footie" on TV: "Is that Basel?")

3

A little while water, I was holding baby Sara, and Luisa clambered up on the couch and wanted to hold Sara herself. After a minute or so of holding the baby and stroking her head, Luisa gently pushed Sara toward me and said, "All done Sara."

(Which is what she says when she is done eating anything.)

Marc Ribot, "The Dying Cowboy"

When the guitarist Marc Ribot played a solo concert in Basel a couple years ago, the most surprising part of the show (given that he is mostly associated with jazz, despite his affiliations with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, among others) was the folk music that he played. With his unique singing and his equally unique way of accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, he seemed to me to be ready to play folk songs at folk-music festivals, where he might well overwhelm audiences with the power of his performance.

He still has not released an album of folk songs, but you can check out "The Dying Cowboy" from an in-studio performance at KEXP (the University of Washington) to get an idea of what makes his folk music so special.

Two grammar poems

I saw a link to this poem by Clive James, "Windows is Shutting Down."

It reminded me of "Rummy's Player," my little ditty about GWB, another "grammar poem."

"Rules" of Poetry

My friend Angie (the philosopher with the "special conversational backwardness" I mentioned earlier) wrote the following:

"I think I've told you my brother has been working on poetry in his creative writing class, although he doesn't like the idea of conforming to rules to make a poem, which I learned about a very long time ago but can't for the life of me remember. So he tells me very brief half-descriptions about the kinds of poetry his professor 'ran through,' on the day of class, but because he is uninterested and because they don't spend a lot of time learning about the specific rules and meter for kinds of poems, he can't tell me much about it."

This provoked the "special conversational backwardness" of the poet, or perhaps especially of the formal poet:

"You had not told me about your brother's class. I would encourage him to consider the 'rules' of poems not as rules but as patterns that people have found effective in the past. That is, the sonnet is the way it is not because of some arbitrarily established 'rules' but because poets and readers have found that shape to be particularly powerful. The sonnet is not a set of rules but a powerful tool for the production of the aesthetic effects that one wants to achive with lyric poetry."

And here I would add that the same, of course, can be said for other forms, and for rhyme and meter: these "rules" existed for so long not because they were rules but because they were effective tools for generating the kinds of effects people wanted to generate in or experience with poetry.

Miles and "they"

Miles's observation about "they" lead to a link being made to my post by one Mr. Jumbo (who was inspired to start blogging by my blog, and who posts lots of very cool pictures on his blog).

I also posted a comment in response to Mr. Jumbo's reference to Miles.

Daily Poem Project, Weeks 7 and 8

Since class did not take place on Tuesday, May 23 (as I was on paternity leave after Sara's birth), the votes for week 7 (Tuesday, May 16, to Monday, May 22) and week 8 (Tuesday, May 23, and Monday, May 29) both took place in class on Tuesday morning, May 30.

The vote for week 7 had a clear winner: Ingeborg Bachmann's poem "I Step Outside Myself," as translated by Peter Filkins, received six votes. Three poems received three votes each: Robert Creeley's "Talking," Luciano Erba's "Without a Compass (as translated by Ann Snodgrass), and Davis McCombs's "The Elgin Marbles." As for me, I voted (along with only one other person) for Henry Taylor's "A Crosstown Breeze," the only poem which made me go "wow" when I finished reading it. I enjoyed Taylor's smooth transitions between present experience and past memory (and, as usual this term, the poem's rhyming).

Creeley's poem was very memorable, too, so I did consider it carefully before deciding to vote for the Taylor. I even exchanged some email with my friend Angie Harris about it: Creeley's sharp observations about how conversation sometimes works came back to me when Angie made a comment about her own "special conversational backwardness," that of the philosophy student who often sees everyday discussions as examples of philosophical debates (something that I love to experience).

The vote for week 8 was closer: 6-5 for the first two poems. The winner was "The Nosebleed," by Rachel Hadas, with Robert Pinsky's "Pliers" in second place. Hadas's beautiful description and interpretation of an everyday scene is impressive and memorable: the speaker observes a woman and her daughter on the street, having thought (correctly) that the daughter was having a nosebleed. She concludes:

love as rocking cradle that two can rest in,
bodies nested, cupped in one curve of shelter;
question, answer; need met as it arises.
Trouble breeds comfort.

I wonder if it was the well-earned power of that final line that caught people's attention.

For the first time ever, the poem I voted for received no other votes: J. Allyn Rosser's "Gym Dance with the Doors Wide Open." Again, I surely fell for the poem's lovely rhyming, but I was probably also inclined to vote for Rosser because she is an acquaintance of mine from days in Philadelphia, one whose work I have been enjoying for several years now. Hadas's poem came close for me, but I decided to vote for Rosser instead.

Of special mention here is Yves Bonnefoy's spectacular "Let This World Endure," as translated by Hoyt Rogers. This long poem reads like a beautiful prayer, and Rogers's translation is wholly convincing.

Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Two things Miles said today

1

"Why do you say 'they' in England when you mean only one person?"

He might not have been accurate about the England part, but he was very accurate here in identifying how everybody says "they" when they refer to singular subjects (as in this sentence!).

2

"Little miracles are happening everywhere right now, because it's so beautiful and nice."

Said as we left his swimming lesson and walked out into the late afternoon sunshine, temperature in the low twenties (C; ca. 70 F).

Sara Emily Marie Delpho

Sara Emily Marie Delpho was born May 20, 2006, at 4:34 a.m. in Basel at the Frauenklinik of the University Hospital. She was 48 cm long and weighed 3100 grams.

Daily Poem Project, Week 6

This week's vote for the Daily Poem Project took place this morning (Tuesday, May 16). The poems in question were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, May 9, to Monday, May 15.

In another close vote, the winner was Ioanna Carlsen's "Forgiveness," with five votes. Janet Sylvester's "Barometric" received four votes, while three poems received three votes each: Victoria Chang's "Proof," Kathryn Starbuck's "Thinking of John Clare," and Stephen Yenser's "Tidepools: La Jolla."

This week, then, the two most "prestigious" poets of the week received the least votes: Carl Phillips with two for his "Riding Westward" and Frank Bidart with no votes at all for his "Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake." This contradicted an effect that I had noticed in last year's Daily Poem Project, in which poets with good reputations tended to get votes (only a poem by Gerald Stern got shut out among poems by poets whose reputations I thought relatively "substantial" in my own subjective way).

Still, I was quite surprised by the winner, as I found Carlsen's poem dry and abstract; even though I read it twice, I did not consider it a serious contender at all. It has some humor, but that's all I found in it. Here's part III of the poem:

THE TRICK

You would
if you could,
but what if you can't —

the trick is to believe
your own story,

accident is needed for some kinds of change.

I like that "[y]ou would / if you could, / but what if you can't," but surely there is more to do with this dissection of a cliché than Carlsen does here.

The second-place poem, Sylvester's "Barometric," was on my short list of two poems, but I gave my vote to Yenser's "Tidepools: La Jolla"—perhaps I am just a sucker for rhymed poems about daughters, especially one that contains a lovely rhyme on the name of my favorite 19th-century American poet:

Quick, mystic — this is the world's profoundest mirror.
The girl in any of us leans a little nearer.

You lean to it this evening, Helen Emily,
Holding my hand, to glimpse us both, though dreamily ...

Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Greg Brown at JR's Warehouse, Traverse City, MI, May 28, 1991

Warning: What follows will not mean much to people who are not already Greg Brown fans. If you are not yet a Greg Brown fan, that means one of two things:

a) You have never heard him (or perhaps even never heard of him). Please rectify this problem by buying at least one of his CDs. My recommendation for a starter: "Dream Café" from 1992. But "Down in There," "The Poet Game," "Further In," and "Slant 6 Mind" are all brilliant, too, just to name a few.

b) You have listened to Greg but somehow not recognized just how utterly brilliant he is. This makes me sad, because you have missed something! :-)

Anyway, this is a review of a 2-CD recording of a concert of his in 1991. For insiders, but of course outsiders are allowed to read it, too.

Greg at JR's

"You Drive Me Crazy" is the opener; as with several other tunes from "Dream Café" here, it must have been quite new at the time (the "unit" had not yet been released). These tunes all sound pretty close to the album versions here, as well as to the versions on "The Live One." (The other DC tunes are "I Don't Know That Guy," "No Place Away," and "Spring Wind.")

"Good Morning Coffee" has the "Earl Grey kind of guy" story with the "expensive, greasy little buggers." It's a very quick and energetic version.

"I Don't Know That Guy" is lovely and haunting (but then I love this song); Greg introduces it as being about an "evil twin."

The introduction to "If I Had Known" is about how much Greg likes albums; I like the point about how albums would change over time in a way that CDs do not. Remember how one would get to know one's own copy of an often-played record? (Still, I don't understand why he insists that you can't call CDs "albums"; after all, a CD is still an "album" in the sense of a "collection," as in a "photo album.")

"If I Had Known" is more poignant and plaintive than some more recent versions, which often get bluesier than this version. I wonder if he knew when he wrote this one just how good it is (and how "better and better than it's already been" it would keep getting).

"No Place Away" is a haunting song even one is familiar with it, but imagine hearing it here when the CD had not been released.

"Fishing Blues" closes the first set and is real groovy, with lots of Greg's lovely, driving finger-picking and the British-trout rap: "Oh, I hardly think so" (Greg's version of "I would prefer not to"?).

Still on the first CD, the second set opens with "In the Dark with You," slower than the studio version. It is as if the song were both more subtle and more explicit at the same time: the music is more relaxed, but the sensual side of the song comes through a lot more clearly.

"Dream On" follows, also a bit quieter and subtler than on "One Night," the picking of the chords less pronounced, the guitar playing more drumlike, as it were. "Heavy-lidded eyes."

I always like "Speed Trap Boogie" without the studio effects and with the wonderful rapping. "Earl? Come in, Earl. Wake up, Earl. ... How many'd you get?"

"Twenty or So" is an eye-opener, one I had never really noticed on "44 & 66." Such a beautiful song, actually!

"Spring Wind" is very close to the studio version (again, before it was released). "The wine bottle's half-empty, the money is all spent." (My sister Sara's favorite Greg Brown song.)

The Blake set that follows is preceded by the FIRST REASON TO GET THIS CONCERT. In his intro to the songs, Greg talks about poets, including e.e. cummings. In the discussion of cummings, he recites the beginning of the Prologue to Canterbury Tales in the voice of cummings. He also recites Dylan Thomas in a fake Welsh accent.

So "The Little Vagabond" and "The Chimney Sweeper" follow, the former with its usual energetic triple meter, the latter strummed in a more floating, almost ethereal way, with occasional accents for effect and an evocative solo: humming. :-)

Disc two begins with the SECOND REASON TO GET THIS CONCERT: the Angel Poop Lullaby. It is part of the introduction to "Daughters." Sung only once, apparently, like the songs children make up: "They're just sung once; they're like jazz." A must have for any Greg fan. "This life we have on earth, the beauty and the poop are like that."

"Daughters" is full of drifting rubato, as it always is, and beautiful, as it always is. "Dad, the moon is coming home with us."

Dave Moore joins Greg for the last four songs: a rowdy version of "Help Me Make It Through This Funky Day" ("Mr. Mellow, they call me"); "Who Woulda Thunk It" as always funny and swinging; a version of the "Chicken Polka" ("Everybody dance!" cries Greg); and "Downtown." Greg's version, of course, not Patsy Cline's (or Neil Young's?). "Downtown" even includes a sax player identified only as Tom.

The Poem of Winnie the Pooh, by Miles D.

THE POEM OF WINNIE THE POOH

Winnie the Pooh
and Piglet, too;
Tigger and Kanga and Rabbit and Roo.
Owl says Who-who;
Eeyore doesn't say Moo;
Christopher Robin says, "Me, too!"

— Miles, 22 April 2006

Discussion Group, Sept. 13: Tim Parks, "The Rapids"

Wednesday, September 13, 7 - 8:30 pm

Book Discussion Group on
The Rapids
by Tim Parks

The discussion will be led by Andrew Shields. Set in the dramatic landscape of the Italian Alps, this is the story of a group of English canoeists who arrive for an 'introduction to white water.' The dangerous river manages to bring out the group's qualities and failings in the most urgent fashion, provoking sudden conflicts and unexpected shifts of alliance.

Bergli Books
and Bergli Bookshop
Rümelinsplatz 19
CH-4001 Basel

The announcement says: "Anyone is welcome to attend the meetings of the Book Discussion Group but it is recommended that you have read the book in advance." Makes sense, doesn't it? :-)

See my earlier comments on "The Rapids."

Daily Poem Project, Week 5

This week's vote for the Daily Poem Project took place this morning (Tuesday, May 9). The poems in question were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, May 2, to Monday, May 8.

This was another close vote, but with only two poems in contention: "Thighs," by C. K. Williams, was in first place with seven votes, while "Swimming in the Woods," by Robin Robertson, came in a close second with six votes. They thus garnered the majority of the votes between them; the other five poems received a total of nine votes in all. "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings, from week 1, remains the only poem to have won an absolute majority of the votes for its week. (This week, I also especially enjoyed Christian Wiman's "The Secret" and Timothy Steele's "Starr Farm Beach"; the latter's reference to swifts is a joy to this swift-watcher.)

The poems by Williams and Robertson are astonishingly different. Robertson's title captures quite a bit of its paradoxical, almost surreal power; in fact, it is short enough to quote the whole poem here:

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood
was a swimmer moving through a pool:
fractal, finned by leaf and light;
the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus
wobbling coins of sunlight.
When she stopped, the water stopped,
and the sun re-made her as a tree,
banded and freckled and foxed.

Besieged by symmetries, condemned
to these patterns of love and loss,
I stare at the wet shape on the tiles
till it fades; when she came and sat next to me
after her swim and walked away
back to the trees, she left a dark butterfly.

The poem moves from a rather concrete image described through metaphor (the light flickering through the leaves onto the woman's body makes her appear to be moving through water) to several other relationships between woman, woods, and water in such a short space that it is dizzying. I found myself gasping with the vertiginous speed with which the wood goes from literal to figurative and the water goes from figurative to literal, with at least one allusion to classical metamorphosis dropped in for good measure. It was that gasp that convinced me to vote for this poem.

I also gave "Thighs" serious consideration, though: Williams eloquently and vividly (even painfully) juxtaposes two thigh injuries: one to an unidentified NBA player with "a 'Charley-horse,' we called it when I played, it did hurt,"; the other to "a taxi driver in Afghanistan, a small man, five-two, arrested by mistake, hung by his wrists, and . . . / tortured" (yes, Williams's lines are that long). The taxi driver died as a result of being tortured (I found some information about this death on the web); the NBA star returned to the next game and was at "eighty percent."

Williams handles this challenging and provocative material skillfully; the long lines work very well, and he balances the poem's five stanzas by beginning and ending with ones about the basketball player, with three poems about the taxi driver in between. If I did not vote for it, it was because of that gasp at the end of Robertson's; in a sense, "Thighs" is an exceptionally strong poem, but it also seemed a bit predictable, and hence less successful. As I wrote in my notes before the vote: as a document, it is excellent; as a poem, it is very, very good.

Still, as with Abraham Sutzkever's poem in week three, I was not surprised that this poem won the vote: Williams has some incredibly powerful material here, and he has handled it with tact and precision. As I wrote about Sutzkever: "It's hard to beat a poem that takes on such issues in such a grounded, memorable way."

Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Phosphenes

Reading Richard Wilbur's "Walking to Sleep" for class tomorrow, I was struck by this image:

Now with your knuckles rub your eyelids, seeing
The phosphenes caper like St. Elmo's Fire

A friend of mine once said something to me about wanting to watch what was going on behind his eyelids. Perhaps we were enjoying alternative approaches to perception at the time. :-)

I wish I had then known the word "phosphenes":

"A sensation of light caused by excitation of the retina by mechanical or electrical means rather than by light, as when the eyeballs are pressed through closed lids."

If I had known the word, I could have said, "Okay, I'll shut up and we can enjoy our phosphenes." Perhaps only "mechanical or electrical means" generate "phosphenes," or the definer failed to consider "alternative approaches" to the production of such "sensations of light."

Two sentences for today

My sentence for today (May 8, 2006):

"The toilet is kind of like a diaper, so when you're on the toilet, you don't need a diaper."

(Luisa was on the toilet, practicing ... well, being on the toilet. I call it practicing, because only once has she ever actually done anything on the toilet besides sit there.)

Miles just had a good one, too:

"We live in the middle of the world, but the middle of the world is everywhere."

(I'm not sure what brought this one on, but we had just been discussing what the word "native" means, in the context of Swallows and Amazons.)

Daily Poem Project, Week 4

This week's vote for the Daily Poem Project took place on Tuesday, May 2. (I have only found the time to type it up just now, on Friday night.) The poems in question were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, April 25, to Monday, May 1.

The vote was again exceptionally close. The winner, "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)," by Terrance Hayes (from his new book Wind in a Box), received five votes, while three other poems received four votes each: Seamus Heaney's translation of the anonymous ninth-century Irish poem "Pangur Bán," Martha Silano's wonderfully titled "Getting Kicked by a Fetus," and John Hodgen's equally wonderfully titled "When Dylan Left Hibbing, Minnesota, August 1959." Come to think of it, Hayes's poem has a wonderful title, too.

In fact, the four poems receiving the most votes were the four that I had on my (quite long) short list. I ended up voting for Hayes's poem because of its witty, memorable, and intellectually convincing dissection of the expression "African-American":

I think of a string of people connected one to another
and including the two of us there in the basement
linked by a hyphen filled with blood;
linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.

That's the poem's conclusion; it also includes a wonderful story about a pickup line:

..........I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October
because I have always been a sucker for deep blue denim
and Afros and because she spoke so slowly
when she asked the time. I wrote my phone number
in the back of the book of poems I had and said
something like "You can return it when I see you again"
which has to be one of my top two or three best
pickup lines ever. ...

Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Sendak, Seeger, and the poets

The April 17, 2006, issue of The New Yorker contains a wonderful coincidence in its profiles of Maurice Sendak and Pete Seeger: how both of them had encounters with poets (women, no less), the kind of encounters one tells stories about, as Seeger does in this story from when he was in high school, where he edited the newspaper:

The playwright and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay visited the school to see a production of one of her plays. "They told me that, with my newspaper, I should interview her," Seeger said. "I had never interviewed anyone famous. I didn't know what to ask. Finally I blurted out, 'What do you think of Shakespeare?' I don't remember anything else of the interview."

(Alec Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer: Pete Seeger and American Folk Music," in The New Yorker, April 17, 2006)

Sendak's encounter with a poet came later in life:

He also owns a Charlie Chaplin figure, given to him by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a neighbor of his on West Ninth Street; in the nineteen-seventies, Sendak would visit Moore and read aloud to her.

(Cynthia Zarin, "Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the Perils of Childhood," in The New Yorker, April 17, 2006)

I find these juxtapositions particularly amusing since Sendak and Seeger were childhood heroes of mine.

(Unfortunately, neither profile is available on-line, so I could not provide links.)

Addendum to Cliché about Formal Verse

Here's a comment on the same New York Times article ("Poetry Chronicle") that I commented on earlier.

Essay on Jazz

ESSAY ON JAZZ

Dave Holland Quintet, Theater Basel, April 27, 2006
Robin Eubanks—trombone
Dave Holland—bass
Steve Nelson—vibes, marimba
Chris Potter—soprano and tenor saxophones
Nate Smith—drums

I go to hear live jazz to clear my head.
But it is not the soloists alone
whose riffs turn down the noise that fills my brain.
When I can hear the players interact,
the chords and phrases moving round the band
from instrument to instrument, a riff
on sax that turns into a tom-tom beat
and reappears, rephrased, a gift returned
from the bassist to the tenor man—
and when this band, of drums and bass and vibes,
trombone and sax, begin to play together
like nobody I've ever heard before—
then through my eyes and ears they take my mind
and give it back to me again, refined.

Chris Potter wrote a tune to play with Holland,
his solo first a duo with the leader,
their lines like double lightning bolts across
a mesa, moving faster than my eyes
can follow, but my ears can pick them up
and grow accustomed to how bass and tenor,
returning to each other, turn away
again, again, until the click of sticks
opens my eyes, and I discover drums.
The driven sax then tells me what to call
this song without a title: "Rise and Rise."

But then they prove it's not how loud you are:
the quiet climax of a Holland solo
in the bass's upper register
with cymbals lightly ringing in and out,
and then the horns come in, an orchestra
of sound and volume giving meaning to
the concept of dynamic range—then stop.
This tune entitled "Ebb and Flow" has ended.

Steve Nelson starts his "Amateur Silenti"
as quietly as possible. He touches
his vibes with double mallets in each hand,
a ballad of how silent love can be.
Bowed bass and stately horns, the drums
a gentle swirl of brushes. Tremolos
begin to stir the surface like a breeze
that hints the sky will not be blue for long;
the tremolos crescendo into words
rising through the forces up to gales
until a hurricane of walking bass
and swing provides a center for the storm.
And when bowed bass and stately horns return,
the drums, now sticks providing stops and starts,
keep shifting till the tune has blown over.

"Lucky Seven" is indeed in seven:
another classic Potter tenor solo,
then Smith supporting Holland's dancing bass:
a giant instrument, the lightest touch,
surprising shifts of rhythm and of key
in passages fulfilling the ideal
of spontaneity as composition.
They first exchange a glance and then their roles,
with Holland's ostinato under Smith,
carefully constructing his crescendo
until the horns and vibes begin to play
legato deconstructed Dixieland
over Holland's still-repeating line.

Applause, applause. The encore is a lesson:
how Eubanks on his brand-new tune invites
just Potter to begin a dialogue
in brass, the black trombonist talking to
the white guy on the tenor, chattering
and passing phrases back and forth, a game
of tag as played by children innocent
of race, if anyone can ever be.
The stage becomes a place for acting out
a better world, for weeping joyously
despite and with the bitter certainty
that this is only play. And yet it's play,
this listening to jazz with Aristotle
and all the other seekers of catharsis
going out into the night with clearer heads.

Daily Poem Project, week 3

This week's vote for the Daily Poem Project took place yesterday. The poems in question were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, April 18, to Monday, April 24.

This time, six of the seven poems received votes, and all poems receiving votes received at least two. The winner was clear: a selection from "Epitaphs," by Abraham Sutzkever, translated from the Yiddish by Jacqueline Osherow, received seven votes, while Elsa Cross's "The Lovers of Tlatelalco," translated from the Spanish by Sheena Sood, came in second with four votes.

It was a dark week: four of the seven poems (by Sutzkever, Cross, Forrest Hamer, and Major Jackson) were about war, violence, or genocide. I voted for Jackson's "Hoops," the title poem of his new book, which I gave the nod over Sutzkever's stunning poem (it received three votes in all). I was won over by Jackson's variably rhymed and invariably subtle quatrains: remembering Radar, a friend who played hoops well enough to get a scholarship but ended up getting shot in a drive-by shooting.

For the first time, a poem did not receive a vote, but it was the third poem I was considering voting for, "Breakfast with Bonnard," by Margaret Holley. This elegant depiction of how a poster in one's home becomes an intimate part of one's life probably did not stand a chance against several poems that addressed not a scene from everyday life but an Ausnahmezustand, and did so so well. Sutzkever's "pearls / threaded on a blood-red string of silk" figure so powerfully how the extraordinary and horrifying are touched by the everyday. It's hard to beat a poem that takes on such issues in such a grounded, memorable way.

Light Quarterly No. 50; Richard Wakefield, "On Dogshead"

Light Quarterly no. 50, Autumn 2005, does conclude with a poem of mine, "Habit," but that's not what I want to share here. First of all, I just want to recommend this magazine, which I have been subscribing to for several years now, and which I always enjoy. On the whole, the number of poems that stick with me from this journal is as high as (or in many case much higher than) the number that stick with me from more "serious" journals. And the ones that don't stay with me are at least funny!

Secondly, I want to share this sonnet by the featured poet in this issue, Richard Wakefield:

ON DOGSHEAD

The rock formation there we're standing on
was known as Dogshead, jutting from the side
of Mount St. Helens. Now, of course, it's gone,
along with half the mountain, in a slide
that took out trees for twenty miles downstream.
This was taken in seventy-four, six years
before the mountain blew, and don't we seem
secure up there, triumphant mountaineers?
It's strange to think we stood a thousand feet
above the present summit. A single blast,
a sudden welling up of buried heat,
and all this mountain fell so far, so fast.
I look back on that climb we're resting from—
our innocence, not knowing what would come.

A Cliché about Formal Verse

In his brief New York Times review (April 23, 2006) of Hapax, by A. E. Stallings, Eric McHenry writes:

"Strict fidelity to traditional forms is brave — not only because these forms are unfashionable but because they're unforgiving. Readers know what rhymed pentameter sounds like, and what language sounds like, and when one has been sacrificed for the sake of the other. Stallings deserves high marks not only for the performances in 'Hapax' but for their degree of difficulty. She may wobble from time to time, but she always stays on the beam and usually sticks her dismounts."

As McHenry suggests, traditional forms are challenging, but his own approach to discussing a "formal" poet is not very brave: he goes right for the cliché that formal verse leads poets to constantly distort what they are saying in order to fit the form. There is, of course, a corresponding cliché for non-formal verse: the reviewer calls the poet's language "slack." But every review of "formal" poetry seems to harp on supposedly problematic passages where the form has distorted the writing, and it is rare that anyone reviewing "free" verse says that a poet might have done better to use form.

There's a paradox in McHenry's comments, too: on the one hand, traditional forms are unfashionable; on the other hand, readers of poetry still manage to be sophisticated enough to hear when language has been sacrificed to "rhymed pentameter" or any other form. Considering how often one reads that students in MFA programs are supposedly unable to identify pentameter (and in some cases, even teachers apparently fail to do so), either McHenry is wrong about the sophistication of readers of poetry today, or traditional forms are actually more popular than he thinks. I'll go for the latter.

I should stress that McHenry agrees with me that Hapax is a wonderful book. I agree: it is full of memorable poems, and "The Village in the Lake" (the poem McHenry criticizes for its "noisy end-rhymes") is one of them.

Tennis Numerology, or Comfort for Federer fans

This week, Roger Federer has exactly as many entry-system points as Rafael Nadal and David Nalbandian combined:

Federer, Roger (SUI) 7160
Nadal, Rafael (ESP) 4335
Nalbandian, David (ARG) 2825

So he's as good as the two of them put together. Some comfort for the fact that Nadal has now beaten him three times in a row, and Nalbandian was the last player to beat him besides Nadal.

Greg Brown concert review from recent Philadelphia show

Here's a long review (with gorgeous photos) of a recent Greg Brown show in Philadelphia.

My sentence for today (well, yesterday)

At some point in my education, I came across the idea (hypothesis? suggestion?) that every person, every day, utters at least one sentence that has never been uttered before.

Mine for yesterday: "I had kind of a mayonnaise problem when you ran into the refrigerator door."

I guess this is kind of like a caption contest in reverse: now, cartoonists should draw the cartoon with this caption! :-)

You ful I

What did Miles mean when he wrote this with our magnetic-poetry kit last December?

:-)

Daily Poem Project, week 2

The vote for the Poetry Daily poems from Tuesday, April 11, to Monday, April 17, took place this morning. Once again, all seven poems received votes, but this time the votes were distributed more evenly, with no poem receiving more than four, and there was no first-round winner: "Dowsing for Joy," by Floyd Skloot and "Springtime, 1998," by Hayden Carruth tied for first with four votes. A runoff vote was necessary, and the winner was Carruth's poem, nine to eight.

In both the main vote and the runoff, I voted for Skloot's poem, in which a dowser discusses how dowsing works:

He says there are signs everywhere,
obvious things that most of us simply miss
like the scent of blooming lilies carried on air,
or hidden fields of force that call us home
when we can no longer bear to be alone.
What is music but waves plucked from the sky [...]?

For me, John Koethe's "Hamlet" (which received three votes) was quite striking, as Koethe's biography is uncannily like mine: off to college to study physics, he finds the courses disappointing:

................................instead of paradox and mystery
And heroic flights of speculation that came true,
You had to start with classical mechanics and a lab ...

So he ends up studying philosophy and writing poetry. The poem is also interesting because it reveals the existence of a DVD of Richard Burton playing Hamlet in a stage production!

Easy bunny

I hopped into the room with my hands up by my ears, index and middle fingers pointing up. Since rabbits cannot talk, I made gestures to Miles, Andrea, and Luisa, who were still at the dinner table, that they should close their eyes. Miles and Andrea did so, although Luisa did not, of course, as she is not yet two. I pulled little chocolate Easter bunnies out of my pocket, put one at each table setting, and hopped back out of the room. Then I walked back in as if nothing had happened, and I asked Andrea what had happened. "The Easter bunny was here," she said, "and brought us chocolate bunnies."

I did the same thing again the next day. On the third day, something different happened, although I am not sure exactly how it came up. In any case, somebody (Miles?) said we should close our eyes for some reason, so Luisa put her hands up by her ears and said, "Easy bunny!"

Since then, we all call the Easter bunny the Easy bunny.

Daily Poem Project, week 1

This semester, I am teaching a course called "13 Ways of Looking at a Poem." As part of this course, I am repeating the "Daily Poem Project" that was part of the course on "Quality" that I taught last summer with my colleague Lucia Michalcak.

The Daily Poem Project involves reading the poem on Poetry Daily every day for a week. Then the students in the course vote, as I do, for the best poem of the week. As the course is on Tuesday mornings, our week runs from Tuesday to Monday. After we have done this for twelve weeks, we will have a final vote in the last week of the term on the best of the winners. Last summer, the winning poem in the end was "The Shout," by Simon Armitage. Poems by Bob Hicok and Ted Kooser came in second and third.

The first vote for this semester took place this morning. The poems were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, April 4, to Monday, April 10, including a selection from Czeslaw Milosz's brilliant "A Treatise on Poetry" (which is included in a new and selected edition that has just been published) and "Elena Ceauçescu's Bed," by W. D. Snodgrass, a poet I have recently come to admire.

But the winner was a much younger poet, as well as a poem that I recommended yesterday in my last blog entry: "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings. Not only did it win, it won hands down: it received 11 votes, and all the other poems received one each. I was quite surprised that AES's poem won so easily against such strong competition (in addition to Milosz and Snodgrass, Tomaz Salamun; for the complete list, see PD's archive). Alicia beats the old guys!

Two poems by A. E. Stallings

Two poems by my friend A. E. Stallings were on Poetry Daily on Monday, April 11. They are from her wondrous new collection, Hapax.

Joachim Sartorius, "Ice Memory"

The latest book to which I have contributed translations is Ice Memory, by Joachim Sartorius, which has just been published by Carcanet in the United Kingdom. The book features translations by many renowned translators, including Michael Hamburger, Michael Hulse, and Christopher Middleton. (What an honor to have my translations included in this book!)

A poem is for nobody.
I send it to my friends,
the freedom to understand it
or not to understand.
— Joachim Sartorius, "Poetics," tr. Andrew Shields

Tim Parks, "The Rapids"

Another book I read on my trip (of many -- those were LONG airplane flights) was "The Rapids," by Tim Parks. It is a novel about kayaking on whitewater in northern Italy (in South Tirol, to be precise). A group of English kayakers is there for a long weekend of advanced kayaking lessons. As a theme, kayaking offers Parks the chance to say things about kayaking that also become metaphors:

There was always the tenth time when you didn't come up and didn't know why.

That particular sentence struck me because it captures one of the mysterious and fascinating things about sports: one does the same thing over and over again until it always works, and then suddenly it doesn't, and one has no clue why. Ski jumping is a sport that seems that way to an extreme degree: one jumper suddenly can fly ten meters further than before for a few months or a year, and then suddenly he can't anymore, and he can't explain why he got better or why he suddenly got worse again. Or a tennis player goes to hit an easy volley, and suddenly misses it, after having done it right dozens of times. No explanation possible.

In this novel, kayaking is about taking risks in order to push your envelope and have the exhilirating experience of success, but Clive, the main instructor in the book, sees what the limits of such risk-taking are:

... after the high of getting away with it on the river, nothing has really changed.

Parks himself takes risks in his narrative: such a story has an obvious ending that is hard to avoid: somebody has to die, or at least come close to dying, in a nasty accident. As is usually the case in his novels, Parks manages to get around this problem while also paying tribute to it, as it were. The way he does so is quite startling and powerful, so I won't reveal it here; suffice to say that he does sidestep the predictable ending in surprising and harrowing fashion.

Of course, after the high of getting away with it in the narrative, nothing has really changed. But that's all that art can do, it seems, or sport: provide a space in which one can get away with things, in which one can be out of character: "It was satisfying to do something out of character, something destructive." The destruction that one experiences in art, as in sport, is imaginary, and hence not really destructive. One goes beyond one's limits in a safe, controlled way.

Of course, sport is more dangerous than fiction (usually): you can die kayaking, which you usually can't do while reading a novel. Still, Michela (Clive's girlfriend) concludes that "these sports are something you do instead of life." Is fiction "something you do instead of life"? Perhaps, but I would always argue that fiction is part of life, and the "life" that Michela appeals to is also a fiction -- or a sport?

Geoffrey Hill, "Without Title"

I got Geoffrey Hill's "Without Title" from the Poetry Book Society right before I went to the United States ten days ago, and finished it on my trip.

Hill's work runs completely counter to the direction my tastes have been developing in the past few years (as I become more and more critical of unnecessarily convoluted stuff where poets are trying to be deep or "difficult" but are just being boring), but he offers so much even before I begin to "understand" what he is getting at:

Thou canst grasp nothing except through appetite.

That's the conclusion of "Improvisations for Hart Crane" (varying the line from Crane that Hill starts with: "Thou canst read nothing except through appetite"). With Hill, there's always the sound of his words and of his mind at work to stimulate my appetite so that I become interested in first reading and then potentially even grasping his poems.

"Without Title" also contains "Improvisations for Jimi Hendrix" (proving that Hill's tastes are not only poetic) and a series of 21 "Pindarics" that respond to passages from Cesare Pavese's diaries. The last concludes:

Patterns of lines, mostly, raw in appearance.
I see I have just defined a poem. Something I'd say
held over, deep in reserve, so that it may strike.

Even within Hill's dense work, there is always his reserve, ready to strike at any moment.