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Mike Snider's Formal Blog at the Sonnetarium
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Monday, December 31, 2007 |
There’s a new biography and a new Selected Poems for Edwin Arlington Robinson, and they’ve gotten good notice in a few relatively obscure publications—Charles Simic, our new poet laureate, writes in the December 6 New York Review of Books, and David Mason in the Autumn 2007 The Hudson Review (the article itself is not online)—but the wonderful Robert Mezey edited Modern Library edition is out of print (I have it); his long poetry, including best-selling, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Arthurian epics(!) are all but unknown: I don’t remember, from 6 years of graduate study in English poetry, his name being mentioned once.
But poets as different as Mezey, Simic, and Mason all consider Robinson to be a major poet, indeed a great poet. Robert Frost, whose introduction to Robinson’s last book, King Jasper, is included in Mezey’s edition as well as in the Library of America’s Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, writes there that in his first conversation about poetry with another poet—who happened to be Ezra Pound—
I remember the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over the fourth “thought” in
Miniver thought and thought and thought
And thought about it.
Three “thoughts” would have been “adequate” as the critical praise-word then was. There would have been nothing to complain of had it been left at three. The fourth made the intolerable touch of poetry … There is more to it than the number of the “thoughts.” There is the way the last one turns up by surprise around the corner, the way the shape of the stanza played with, the easy way the obstacle of verse is turned to advantage.
So Pound and Frost, too.
Mezey, Mason, and Simic all relate how Robinson was once rescued from destitution by a sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote a glowing review of Robinson’s till-then self-published poetry and secured him a job in the New York Custom house for which he was expected only to make poems. Now, our own Beloved Leader has appointed Dana Gioia chair of the NEA, nearly the only good thing he’s done (and a very good thing, indeed), and Teddy Roosevelt, told by Congress he could not have the money to “show the fleet” by sailing it round the world, sent it half way and told Congress to get it back from there. But when American troops under Roosevelt tortured Filipino resistance fighters, Roosevelt had a general court-martialed, and fired that general when the verdict was only “excessive zeal.“
Just one more New Year’s Eve after tonight with George Bush in office—the Senate Republicans and Lieberman can easily block conviction on any articles of impeachment the House might in a better world have the courage to send them—and then maybe we can put a fork in him and Cheney. They’re already done.
And Robinson’s Collected is back in print.
7:33:50 PM 
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Friday, December 28, 2007 |
And Fried almost certainly doesn’t know why it’s being offered.
Almost three weeks ago I was so pissed off by Daisy Fried’s contribution to a discussion on the “social functions” of poetry that I wrote a little invective poem at her. I don’t know her work well, but it since seemed to me that there was something of hers I’d admired, and today I’ve found it: her glowing review, in the October 2005 Poetry, of Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn. That review is in fact the reason I bought the book (after having grown tired of Paglia’s obsessions with her own perspicuity and with that medeivalist fantasizer Freud), and the book is every bit as good as Fried claims. Unfortunately the review’s not online—why oh why doesn’t Poetry offer an online subscription?
Last night open mic at Neptune’s, tonight off to Annapolis to a poetry open mic at Zü Coffee, and tomorrow to the ocean for the first time in a couple of years—and the first time ever for Krys. I’m excited to be there.
3:09:56 PM
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Thursday, December 27, 2007 |
I haven’t forgotten Poetry. The May issue was just so long ago, though there are things I like. Two poems by Ben Simons are each pretty engaging, but as a pair they’re not encouraging. Their respective first few lines: "Keyless, son of louts / and old coffinbangers, / I, melancholic without shoes," and "Son of an incubus, / born with a wobbling eye, / and the silver skin of blasphemy,"—it’s not fair, I know, but I smell a workshop sequence. A poet I should have known and will look for is Susan Stewart; her “The Fox” is slight but wonderful, and unfortunately too short to quote enough of it show its charm without typing out the whole thing—which I’ll feel guilty about unless I link to her new book of poems, Columbarium:
“The Fox”
Did we live lightly then?
Twice we’ve seen the fox,
the flash
of red that leaps
the weeds and brush, an af-
ter image gray,
then blank, then gone
delight cannot be sought
or pleasure thought
or joy re-caught
but twice we saw the fox, not once,
and knew his fear of us
Step in time, love, step in time,
live inside the morning
twice we saw the fox, not once
and knew his fear of us
I’m not fond of the hyphenated word-enjambment “af- / ter,” though I suppose it’s a kind of visual pun, but I love the way the poem shapechanges from free verse into near nursery rhyme and deepens as it does so. Krys says she can hear it spoken through the first stanza, then shifting to song. I think I’ll have to try to write something like that.
After the poetry, the comment. I'm confused by Michael Hoffman's certainty that one set of translations from a language he doesn’t know is better than another—clearly he can argue that one set is better poetry in English, or, more modestly, that he likes one set better, but it seems to me entirely possible that the goodness of a translation as translation (whether in the sense of faithfulness to the original language or to authorial intention or to the tradition in which the original lives or to whatever else one chooses) is separable from the goodness of a translation as a poem in the new language, and that the former can only be judged by someone with some degree of fluency in both languages and their respective poetic traditions.
Finally there’s a set-to, first in a promised series of poet/critic smackdowns, between Ange Mlinko and David Yezzi (disclosure: there exists photographic evidence that I’ve played music with David Yezzi) over new books by Charles Bernstein and Morri Creech. It’s entertaining but predictable, and, predictably, I think Yezzi is more … sensible than Mlinko, though I can’t say I’m as enthusuastic as he about the fragments of Creech that he presents.
I’m not at all certain I want to continue this exercise: I’ve re-etablished, I hope, a habit of working here and on new poems, and this going over old news seems increasingly like going over old news. Shout if you want it kept up. I’ll be posting one way or the other.
3:36:45 PM
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Monday, December 24, 2007 |
Robert Graves, more than any other poet, convinced me that I wanted to make poems. I’ve bought 3 copies of his 1975 Collected (the first two having been lent to former friends, later Collecteds having dropped too many good poems, and the Complete being either 3 expensive hardbacks, only the frst and last of which seem to be available, or a single expensive paperback which would fall apart in a month), and at least once a year I read through it with varying degrees of amazement and exasperation. He is a very uneven poet.
Probaby his best known poem is what I consider one of the bad ones: “To Juan at the Winter Solstice” is one of many he wrote directly out of his fascinating but cockeyed study of myth, The White Goddess (several variably priced editions here), and nearly the lot of them seem to me now to be windy pseudo-vatic nonsense.
But oh! he could write when his ambition didn’t ride him! I love “Flying Crooked,” “The Persian Version,” “Allie,” “Warning to Children,” “Beauty In Trouble,” and “The Thieves,”all available directly or indirectly from the site first linked above—which unfortunately also has a lot of dead links.
Here’s what I think is a better winter poem from Graves, another of my favorites, not available online as far as I can tell:
The Christmas Robin
The snows of February had buried Christmas
Deep in the woods, where grw self-seeded
The fir-trees of a Christmas yet unknown,
Without a candle or a strand of tinsel.
Nevertheless when, hand in hand, plodding
Between the frozen ruts, we lovers paused
And ”Christmas trees!” cried suddenly together,
Christmas was there again, as in December.
We velveted our love with fantasy
Down a long vista-row of Christmas trees,
Whose coloured candles slowly guttered down
As grandchildren came trooping round our knees.
But he knew better, did the Christmas robin—
The murderous robin with his breast aglow
And legs apart, in a spade-handle perched:
He prophesied more snow, and worse than snow.
4:32:45 PM
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Sunday, December 23, 2007 |
Spent all day Friday cooking or preparing to cook—and I started the spinach on Wednesday. But the real news is that a new Occasional Poem has been podcast.
9:55:55 PM
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007 |
More than two years ago I wrote
I started making poems, at least after I got past the advantages of being a sensitive guy, in order to participate in a very grand conversation … I thought—and I guess I still think—that blogs, and the web in general, have the potential to re-open the lines of communication between the isolated poetry worlds that have grown since the Second World War (members of the avant gardes, which once thought they were opening new territory for the rest of us, now try to maintain their separateness for its own sake), but what I’ve seen so far is also an ability to find enough people who think just like me to create the illusion of a grand conversation.
And now, via the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily (which also led me to Sunday’s Poetry Stand) I find “The Polarization of Extremes,” describing an experiment done in Colorado in 2005 (was something in the air?) which concluded “people held more-extreme positions after they spoke with like-minded others” and then goes on to note that
[t]he Internet makes it exceedingly easy for people to replicate the Colorado experiment online, whether or not that is what they are trying to do. Those who think that affirmative action is a good idea can, and often do, read reams of material that support their view; they can, and often do, exclude any and all material that argues the other way. Those who dislike carbon taxes can find plenty of arguments to that effect. Many liberals jump from one liberal blog to another, and many conservatives restrict their reading to points of view that they find congenial. In short, those who want to find support for what they already think, and to insulate themselves from disturbing topics and contrary points of view, can do that far more easily than they can if they skim through a decent newspaper or weekly newsmagazine.
A key consequence of this kind of self-sorting is what we might call enclave extremism. When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which the group's members were originally inclined. Enclave extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored by their members.
I also learned from the article that I was hardly the first to make such a suggestion. Nicholas Negroponte predicted the “The Daliy Me” in 1995.
You know, that whole month was pretty darned good. I don’t think I’m quite back to that level of blogging, but onward and upward …
3:40:35 PM
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Sunday, December 16, 2007 |
What really jumped out at me in last April’s translation issue of Poetry is that those translators who produced metrical and/or rhyming versions, whatever the form of the original, were more likely to to write in their comments about the formal qualities they had tried to address, while only those those produced “free” translations were likely to write about the poet and his or her circumstances, and only the latter group wrote of trying to be as literal as possible. I must admit I don’t understand the desire to produce a literal translation, except as a crib: it seems to me that a literal translation is only the first step.
I’ve not done much translation. I want, one day, to translate all of Cavafy, but I have no Greek. I have done a few, working with the Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard translation edited by George Savidis, and posted them here (scroll down to the 6th and 7th of the month). I do read Spanish, and about 2 years ago I did a translation for Liz Henry’s second Composite: Multiple Translations of the unrhymned endecasílabo “Fusión” by Juana de Ibarbourou. I had forgotten the rules for that Spanish meter include some variations on when and when not to count adjacent vowels as separate syllables, and so I initially thought it was free verse. I was lucky enough to choose pentameter anyway, since the two meters have something of the same status in their respective languages, and I chose to use terza rima because it seemed to fit the subject matter of this fairly creepy little poem:
Fusion
after Juana de Ibarbourou
My Soul Entwined With Yours Into a Tight, Dark Knot
This more-than-human cord, with every coil
Rooted fast and deep, is an embrace
Forever unfulfilled that death won’t foil.
Your shadow feeds me as my roots enlace
Themselves with yours; surely you must know
That hunger and that we’re one, that there’s no trace
Of you or me—that when you want to go,
To unravel that knot, your flesh will know my pain,
And from my wound your living blood will flow!
With your own hands you’ll knit it back again,
And cure the wound, and wipe away the stain!
10:31:18 PM
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Poetry Stand
I may be biased: the project’s similar to my own Verse for Hire, and I solicit suggestions for Occasional Poems. Still, Douglas Goetsch’s account of how he took four days to sell a bunch of bright teenagers on writing poems for strangers on subjects and in styles requested by those strangers on the streets of Princeton is one of the most exciting things I’ve read in years.
9:48:06 PM
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Thursday, December 13, 2007 |
For years I kept a copy of Louis MacNeice’s “Snow” on the wall above my desk, and I’ve generally been impressed by his work, enough to buy his Selected Poems (in an edition which doesn’t seem to be available right now) but not, from the condition of the book, to read much in it, and not enough to seek out individual volumes.
But the March Poetry has a review of the recent Collected (apparently only available now at Amazon UK) which sent me reading through that Selected tonight, where I found that a song I’ve loved for years, Sean Tyrell's rollicking jig with saxophone “No Go,” is a setting of MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music,” and the review and the read together set me to working on sapphics:
What I know is what I remember’s not fixed.
Tales that change in telling again are not lies;
They’re a way we have of discovering what truth
Lies in a shared tale.
Take the time we met. Was I drunk or sober?
Drinking wine or Irish at Bowens that night?
Did I say that you were a singer like
Marianne Faithfull?
Ani? And were you …
No clue whether that will ever go anywhere.
11:54:21 PM
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Monday, December 10, 2007 |
I’ve revised and podcast last night’s ovillejo. Y’all be good now.
10:54:12 PM
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Sunday, December 9, 2007 |
I absolutely love the cover of the February 2007 Poetry, and I’m damned fond of two of the poems: Albert Goldbarth’s ”To Be Read in 500 Years” and Billy Collins’ “Pornography.”
Two poems I like moderately well, but puzzle me in different ways. One is 18 lines (no meter), all but the first two of which are loose-rhymed couplets: lavender/someone, then blurs/ears, sweatshirt/preferred, laugh/carafe, and so on to hands/stand. There’s nothing syntactically or thematically different about the first two lines—it just looks lazy, as if the rhyme got started by accident, and the poet just couldn’t make the effort to go back and include the first two lines. The poem is in memory of Thom Gunn: does anyone know if he ever did something similar?
The second clearly begins as a non-metrical Petrarchan sonnet, but the sestet has grown an extra line so that it ends in a couplet and rhymes (consonant rhymes—the vowels are all over the place) cdeedcc. The puzzle here is whether there’s something I can use in this. I’m gonna try a few of them over the next little while.
Over at the Sonnetarium I've officially killed the Weekly Sonnet (it’s been moribund for months) and added a new feature: Occasional Verse. I’d be pleased to hear from you about it.
10:50:29 PM
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Friday, December 7, 2007 |
The January 2007 Poetry contains an exchange entitled ”Does Poetry Have a Social Function?” in which Daisy Fried makes these statements:
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[Poetry’s] utility is to shake us out of our standard American buy-stuff-and-watch TV half life.
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For the record, I never feel guilty getting paid. Never.
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Good 9/11 poems sustain the possibility that America was both victim and guilty.
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Solace poetry is to serious poetry as pornogaphy is to serious art.
She pissed me off.
For the record, Ms. Fried, are you glad?
Glad that it’s poems enrich you—
Poems that teach how our mad
Pursuit of stuff for which you
Have only disdain explains
How murder in Heaven’s name
Is partly right? Is that right?
For the record, Ms. Fried, were those planes
And towers America? Do you blame
Those dead for their lives? Is that right?
For the record, Ms. Fried, what’s the use
Of verse for those not Americans?
Are their Truth-filled TVs no excuse?
This poem’s a curse on your arrogance.
12:27:23 AM
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Monday, December 3, 2007 |
But it’s been out for more than a year. Look at this, the first section of the first (and title) poem of Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes:
“Beijing”
| I could still hear the musicians | | |
A |
| cajoling those thousands of clay | | |
b |
| horses and horsemen through the squeeze | | |
c |
| when I woke beside Carlotta. | | |
D |
| Life-size, also. Also terra cotta. | | |
D |
| The sky was still a terra cotta-frieze | | |
c |
| over which her grandfather still held sway | | |
b |
| with the set square, fretsaw, stencil, | | |
E |
| plumb line, and carpenter’s pencil | | |
E |
| his grandfather brought from Roma. | | |
F |
| Proud-fleshed Carlotta. Hypersarcoma. | | |
F |
| For now our highest ambition | | |
A |
| was simply to bear the light of day | | |
b |
| we had once been planning to seize. | | |
c |
There are nineteen of these, each titled with a battle beginning with “B” (“Baghdad” is missing), each featuring the speaker, Carlotta, and Carlotta’s grandfather, and each using the same complicated rhyme-scheme (the capital letters above indicate feminine rhyme). Various reviewers (including Brian Phillips in the December Poetry) have called them sonnets, but they seem to me more akin to the Pushkin stanza—not just the mixed and fixed masculine and feminine rhyme, but the way the rhyme’s groupings allow the individual poems to turn in response to narrative, tone, argument, or what-have-you in a more flexible way than is possible in a sonnet. This is genuine and productive formal invention, and a hell of a lot of macabre fun.
The individual poems of “The Old Country“ are unambiguously a linked (last line to succeeding first line) Petrachan sonnet sequence and they acknowledge/defy/capsize/ and make new form by goosing—over and over again—every cliché of “Old Country” Irish life. The sequence ends
But every boy was still “one of the boys”
and every girl “ye girl ye”
for whom every dance was a last dance
and every chance was a last chance
and every letdown a terrible letdown
from the days when every list was a laundry list
in that old country where, we reminisced,
every town was a tidy town.
There are other formal tours de force and a few formal curiosities—well, “90 Text Messages to Tom Moore,” all axa rhyming haiku, is perhaps more than a few—but the book’s last poem, “Sillyhow Stride,” an elegy for Warren Zevon and for Muldoon’s sister, is by itself worth the price of admission.
11:00:40 PM
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Saturday, December 1, 2007 |
As I did last night and which I otherwise would today, being an old fart and having a gig tonight at my company’s Christmas Party—Baker’s Boys won’t be playing holiday music—I want to provide a link to something from Brian Phillips, who reviewed Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes in the December 06 Poetry. As far as I can tell he doesn’t publish poetry himself, and his reviews and criticism appear mostly in Poetry. There’s a generous selection of work from most of Poetry’ reviewers here, including the review by Phillips of Muldoon’s The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures which accompanied his review of Horse Latitudes.
And then there’s his September 2007 “Poetry and the Problem of Taste,” which seems to be generating the same kind of heat in the letters as did John Barr's September 2006 “American Poetry in the New Century.” I almost reread the latter because the December 2006 letters are dominated by reactions to it—but I am resolute. If I do not go forward, I'll never get to next year by next year.
11:54:05 AM
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I sold another custom poem last month. Yes, I am a poet for sale, and I’ll write a poem just for you—anything from a party invitation or birthday greeting to a declaration of love or a regretful goodbye—though I can’t offer poems for the big public holidays such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day. My rates are very reasonable, starting at $2/line and going slowly up for technical difficulty or, shall we say, necessary delicacy. The poems will never be published by me without your permission. Visit this page or send an email.
12:06:12 AM
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© Copyright 2008 Michael Snider.
Last update: 6/26/08; 9:37:48 PM.
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