Echoes

(275) Creeley. Echoes. New York: New Directions, 1993. 113 pp.

I thought that I had already done this book for this project, and it turned out it was the 1982 Creeley chapbook of the same title.

Many think Creeley's later work is mediocre, but this isn't so. When people think of his early work, they are only thinking about a few spectacular anthology pieces. Actually, Creeley's early work also had many unspectacular poems, just like his later books. I don't know if his batting average is any different. Late Creeley stratches the same itch for me as early Creeley, and has the advantage of being less known, less cliché.

Entire memory
hangs tree
in mind to see
a bird be-

but now puts stutter
to work, shutters
the windows, shudders,
sits and mutters-

because can't
go back, still
can't get
out. Still can't.

This poem is called "Echo," one of several with similar titles ("Echoes").

Two Kinds of Paradox

I think that there are two kinds of paradox in the proverb or aphorism. One seems to go against the doxa but really doesn't. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." It is paradoxical from a naive perspective, but it expresses the actual ideology of the community. Or LaRochefoucauld: "There are women who have never had a love affair, but very few who have had just one."

The other kind of paradox presents a belief that really is not socially acceptable. Here the aphorist is original and truly paradoxical. The aphorism does not command assent but puzzlement. To agree with the aphorism is to cross over to another kind of belief. (Oscar Wilde).

Life Is Good

I sat down at a coffee shop and mapped out my chapter on aphorisms. It's going to be quite original.

***

The guy i sent an article to wrote back with really detailed suggestions that are going to improve the article a lot.

***

I went to Love Garden and bought a Coleman Hawkins box set for 15 bucks. It's called "Coleman Hawkins: The Bebop Years." There was a really cool R&B track record playing, so I asked the girl behind the counter what it was. Mama's Gun by Erykah Badu. I would have guessed another spelling (Erika or Erica), but the voice and the groove are really great.

***

I had drinks with two friends.

***

Life is good. (Or can be.) I have problems like anyone but I am in the prime of life and more fortunate than most people on the planet.

***

I did a few consultations, giving advice on how to improve some articles. I helped two people out and earned a few bucks.

Modernity

I used to be only interested in older literature (before 1900) to the extent that it anticipated literary modernity. So I was interested only in older works that seemed surprisingly modern. There are a lot of these, so I never ran out of texts to read, but my papers tended to emphasize the forward-looking aspect of the past. Perhaps I was influenced by some of my professors in Spain, who would praise an older text by calling it "muy moderno." Modern meant interesting.

Now this strikes me as the wrong way to approach things, and most probably a symptom of my earlier immaturity as a reader and scholar. The dichotomy between older and newer texts no longer makes sense to me, and I view any text as potentially interesting whatever its epoch. I still like those forward-looking texts I always liked, but I no longer have to find the modernity angle in order to make something interesting to myself. Now that I am myself ancient, newness seems less crucial.

Wiki

I'm a little embarrassed that the only work of criticism in the wikipedia article on Lorca is my own book. I don't do wikipedia editing, so I cannot fix this myself, but this is pretty ridiculous. There are many excellent books of criticism on Lorca, and my book is not even a book about Lorca himself, but about his influence on American poetry. (Flaco favor me hacen.)

Borges, Sonnets

(274)

*Borges. The Sonnets. New York: Penguin, 2010. 301 pp.

Borges is a great practitioner of the sonnet form. This is a bilingual edition edited by Stephen Kessler. I tried to avoid the translations as much as I could. When I saw Alistair Reid translate "palabras" as "such words as these," or Kessler bury an allusion to Góngora by translating "polvo y nada" as "nothing but dust," I got rather disgusted.

In so many sonnets, you start to notice repeated rhymes. Borges was fond of the "verso" "universo" rhyme, for example.

Lezama

If I add a chapter on Lezama Lima and the chapter on aphorisms, then I will have 10 chapters. I can then skip the chapter on Lorca's Diván del Tamarit, for which I have no ideas anyway. That will give me the following chapters to complete this year:

Lorca
Zambrano
Claudio
Lezama
Aphorism

I probably won't finish the book in 2011, then. Realistically, I could finish Lorca and Zambrano, since I have substantial work done on those already, over the summer. I could finish three more over the next AY.

Saint Teresa of Avila

I had the joy of telling my student who Satin Teresa of Avila was today. I know at least one student thought that the reference was to Mother Theresa. Here's what Lorca wrote about Teresa in his lecture on the duende:

Recordad el caso de la flamenquísima y enduendada Santa Teresa, flamenca no por atar un toro furioso y darle tres pases magníficos, que lo hizo; no por presumir de guapa delante de fray Juan de la Miseria ni por darle una bofetada al Nuncio de Su Santidad, sino por ser una de las pocas criaturas cuyo duende (no cuyo ángel, porque el ángel no ataca nunca) la traspasa con un dardo, queriendo matarla por haberle quitado su último secreto, el puente sutil que une los cinco sentidos con ese centro en carne viva, en nube viva, en mar viva, del Amor libertado del Tiempo.

She is infused with the spirit of the duende, she is "flamenquísima." Not because of her bullfighting prowess (though she had that) and not because she slapped the emissary of the Pope (though she did that too, but because the dart of the duende pierced her and almost killed her because she had revealed its ultimate secret.

My students had a hard time with the idea that a woman who rebelled against the church and was persecuted by it would end up being a saint. Welcome to Spanish literature and its wonderful contradictions.

Juan Bernier

(273)

*Juan Bernier. Antología poética. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 1996. 109 pp.

Bernier is another poet of amazing linguistic talent. He has an amazing description of water mixed with oil in port of Málaga. I've discovered that Bernier and García Baena are a little more interesting that Álvarez Ortega.

Dios de un día

(272)

Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Dios de un día. Madrid: Palabra en el tiempo, 1962. 115 pp.

Here, again the poet creates a single mood by using a consistent rhetoric. The book is made up of two sections, Dios de un día and Tiempo en el sur, both written in the 1950s.

Los campos Elíseos

(271)

*Pablo García Baena. Los campos Elíseos. Madrid / Valence: Pretextos, 2006. 67 pp.

PGB has real poetic chops, with an amazing vocabulary and powers of sensorial evocation.

One poem that stood out in an excellent book begins like this:

He dejado las puertas entornadas
tras el suicidio. Sé que vienes, llegas
por la cal del pasillo con la luna
y es hermoso el verano que escogiste...

The funny thing is that in this poem, where I did not have to look up any words, I feel much more emotion than in all the rest of the book put together.

***

Here begins the fourth percent, or 90 books, of the 9,000 books of poetry project.

Código / Liturgia

(270) Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Código. Madrid: Devenir, 1993. 52 pp.

(269) Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Liturgia. Madrid: Devenir, 1990. 56 pp.

Two books by the Cordova poet MAO. Código is dense, surrealistic plotless narrative, in long dense prose poems. Liturgia consists of shorter prose poems, each divided into three very short paragraphs. I am not fond of how these books seem to be saying the same thing over and over again, caught in a particular rhetoric.

There concludes the third percent of the 9,000 books of poetry project. Only 97% to go.

Proverbios y cantares

As you know, I have been interested in aphorisms lately. As you also know, I am writing a book called What Lorca Knew: Late Modern Spanish Poetry and intellectual History. Yesterday, I realized that I needed a chapter of this book that deals with the tradition of the aphorism from Antonio Machado to Ángel Crespo and Vicente Nuñez. I am so happy I am a scholar of Spanish literature because these lightbulb flashes make me feel very good. I was working on the aphorism project simply as a side interest, without even realizing that it was going to be part of the book. Now I have the chapter in my head inchoately. I know the authors I'll need to consider. I know exactly why I need this chapter and the gaps that it will fill. What I don't know yet is whether it will take the place of the chapter on Lorca's Diván del Tamarit. This chapter is not well developed at all and was there as a kind of place holder and because I felt the book was lacking in poetic analysis: chapters where I just take books of poetry and do close readings of them.

I love feeling smart and competent.

Bueno es saber que los vasos
nos sirven para beber;
lo malo es que no sabemos
para qué sirve la sed.

Juan March

A friend told me about these lectures that can be downloaded for free from the Fundación Juan March in Madrid. I listened to some before I went to sleep last night, and so of course I had a dream that I was giving a lecture there on the group of poets from Córdoba associated with the journal Cántico. In my dream I was lecturing all night but could never quite come up with the name of Manuel Álvarez Ortega, one of the poets I was supposed to be talking about. Only when I woke up and had some coffee could I remember his name.