Today Twitter (naturally) brought some very good news: one of my poems, "Words," which the brilliant poet and critic Dawn Lundy Martin selected for the Academy of American Poet's "poem-a-day," was featured today on the last day in February and thus Black History Month. Many, many thanks to Dawn for contacting me about new poems, and thanks also to Mary Gannon and Maya Phillips at the Academy of American Poets for their work in publishing it on the site!
Though I have been writing and publishing poems for over 25 years, and though I have several books of poetry (two in collaboration with wonderful artists), I have never had any of my poetry featured on any of the US's major poetry organization sites (beyond Cave Canem). Essays? Yes. Biographical notes? Yes. References to my fiction? Yes. But poetry? No such luck. So this is a first and again, many thanks to Dawn, Mary and Maya.
The Academy's site also includes an audio track of me reading the poem, and my brief statement about it:
“I initially conceived this poem while participating in the Vulnerable Rumble, an amazing reading-performance organized by Laura Goldstein, Jennifer Karmin, and Laura Mullen, as part of the Red Rover Series at OuterSpace Studios in Chicago in January 2014. In the midst of the excellent poetry everyone was reading, I thought carefully about where the United States was in 2014 and where we might be heading. I started to mull over how we have been struggling to communicate with and understand one another—even at the level of basic language and art-making. We have misvalued and disvalued the power of words and their social, political, and economic meanings and effects. From this kernel I drafted the poem and, learning quite a bit from an Italian translator’s attempts to wrangle it into that language, I have revised it over the last couple of years.”
It feels especially appropriate for where we are today. I should add that the Vulnerable Rumble ranks amongthe most singular and thrilling readings I have ever participated in, and I wrote it up on this blog shortly after participating. I highly recommend that post and will share this paragraph:
Indication by raising the hand or shaking one's head. Duets and choral readings. Self-halting and disabling. Strategies to encourage reader time. Failure. What principles, and I say that without irony. Oh, if only more poets would internalize many of these! What became clear as the evening proceeded was that many of us did, and rather quickly; there were some who read briefly, some who leapt in and then out, some who paired up more than once but never too long, some who added a theatrical or performative element to change the reading dynamics, and a few who seemed to step right back into the usual holding-of-the-floor at length, as if any other approach would not do. But, as Jennifer [Karmin] said and underlined, even failure at these "codes" was acceptable, so anything went.
In a field as deeply explored as textual studies of William Shakespeare's work, it might seem as there were little more to be said. But if you think that, you would be wrong, as independent scholar Dennis McCarthy demonstrated in conjunction with Professor Emerita June Schlueter of Lafayette College. In the forthcoming "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays (D.S. Brewer, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, with the British Library), out next week, they discuss how they used WCopyfind software,which English, composition and other faculty members sometimes employ to find out whether students have committed plagiarism, to discover that the source of at least 11 of Shakespeare's plays, including several of his most famous, such as King Lear, Richard III, Henry V, and one of my favorites, the verbal and dramatic masterpiece Macbeth, was the eponymous tome by the obscure writer George North.
According to Michael Blanding's New York Times report, McCarthy does not believe that Shakespeare actually plagiarized North's unpublished work, which he somehow acquired, but as was the case with other sources of his borrowings, North's text served as a crucial guide and source, down to words deployed in the exact same order, but repurposed in style and often, it seems, meaning. A self-taught Shakespearean and magazine journalist, McCarthy was inspired both by the idea of evolutionary development, which he had already written about, and practically by former ETH Zurich Professor Sir Brian Vickers' use of similar software in 2009 to establish that Shakespeare had co-written Edward III. McCarthy began sussing out the sources of Shakespeare's work, and followed that led him to George North's volume. Next, the Times notes
To make sure North and Shakespeare weren’t using common sources, Mr. McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online, which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are especially rare; “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before 1623.
In the past, some scholars have identified sources for Shakespeare from a few unique words. In 1977, for example, Kenneth Muir made the case that Shakespeare used a particular translation of a book of Latin stories for “The Merchant of Venice” based on the word “insculpt.” In recent years, however, it’s become rare to identify new sources for Shakespeare. “The field has been picked over so carefully,” [former University of Chicago Professor David] Bevington said.
I would add that back in 2013, I blogged about Saul Frampton's assertion that the Renaissance scholar and translation John Florio not only edited Shakespeare's works, but enriched them linguistically, adding to the Bard of Avon's already rich trove of innovative language. I found his argument quite convincing, and when I have taught the foundational course in literary studies, it is one of the essays I share and discuss with students.
Before Florio got to Shakespeare, though, Shakespeare was gleaning all kinds of gems from North, and polishing them up, McCarthy and Schlueter will suggest in their study. In the Times article, McCarthy points out how North's preface contains a unique series of terms, many familiar to us today--"proportion," "glass," "feature," "fair," etc.--to urge those who seem themselves as unattractive instead to create an inner beauty, against the stamp of nature; as it turns out, Shakespeare uses the exact set of words, in the same order, to make a different statement in the opening soliloquy of one of his unforgettable villains, the hunchbacked and unloved Richard III. What McCarthy and Schlueter divined was that this is not a one-off case; Shakespeare repeatedly not only borrowed exact terms from North, but also employed in similar series and scenes, as well as similar figures from history.
For example, in Macbeth, Shakespeare has his protagonist declaim,
"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs (Macbeth, III, 1)
In King Lear, Edgar says:
Tom will throw his head at them. Avaunt, you curs!
Be thy mouth or black or white,
Tooth that poisons if it bite;
Mastiff, grey-hound, mongrel grim, Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle-tail,
Tom will make them weep and wail:
For, with throwing thus my head, Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled. (King Lear, III, 6)
This list, McCarthy and Schlueter argue, is almost a mirror of North's text, with the ultra-rare "trundle-tail" a term appearing only in the source text, Shakespeare's play and one other early 17th century text. The playwright spins these borrowings out into something memorable in both plays. In another example, the reference to Merlin's speech in King Lear diverges from any previously known prophecy by the wizard, yet McCarthy and Schlueter found a version of Merlin's speech in North's text, and that it not only influenced what Shakespeare later wrote, but also the figure of the "Fool," who delivers it.
According to reports, including one in Atlas Obscura, scholars have praised McCarthy and Schlueter's work, and it suggests that digital humanities scholars and students looking at texts might do well to utilize all the software at hand, including a tool often used to catch potential miscreants, to learn even more about the roots of key works of the past. Mr. McCarthy, it appears, certain intends to do so. His book hits bookshelves this Friday, February 16.
A few months ago I received an unexpected but wonderful invitation to participate in the G37 Summit of Poetry (Summit della Poesia), "La Potenza della Conscenza." This poetry gathering aimed to bring together established writers from several of the G7 countries, including established and apprentice Italian poets, to share their work in venues near where the G7 participants were planning to convene in Taormina, Sicily in late May. Of course I said yes. The dates, May 25-27, fortunately fell after the last of my domestic readings and Commencement, and did not conflict with any other commitments, and having visited Caltagirone, Sicilyfor a poetry festival at the end of 2009, I figured the trip and the festival would be nothing short of remarkable. Having now returned to the States, I can say without hesitation that once again, the Sicilians did not disappoint! The hospitality, warmth, kindness, generosity, and attentiveness of our Sicilian hosts was superlative at every point during the trip, and though I have traveled a little bit around the world, never have I been treated as well as I have when in Sicily. To everyone who made the festival and our visit possible, milione grazie!
In the Labyrinth of Ariadne
(Gianfranco Molino near the entrance)
The brainchild of Sicilian native Antonio Presti, a major figure in contemporary Sicilian and Italian art, and the director of the Fondazione Antonio PrestiFiumara d'Arte, based in the exquisite little seaside town of Castel di Tusa, and managed expertly by Josephine Pace, a brilliant poet, businesswoman and Caltagirone native, the G37 Summit of Poetry represented both a complement and counter-force to the gathering of political power on display just down the road in Taormina. Alongside the demonstrable power embodied by the presence of the world's most powerful politicians, who included US President Donald Trump, the G37 organizers envisioned a festival that promoted and reinforced "The Power of Knowledge," which would include international voices and those from cities and towns across Sicily, Italy, and the globe.
The Tyrrhenian Sea at sunset
To quote some of the event literature (and I'm hewing here to the translated English in the original documents): "The Foundation Antonio Presti Fiumara d'Arte intends to activate...a big 'word's event' to reach people's hearts, touch their roots, reawaken their humanity that sometimes [asleep], graying because of the mediocrity" of our time. Rather than viewing the G37 Summit as a "snub" to the G7, the Foundation suggested that it wanted "to be a mantra, a subtle pervasive melody that direct[s] people differently looking upon this earth...of which Sicily, with its contradictions, is a perfect synthesis." The poetry summit was, therefore, intended to be a living poem, that would
affirm the superiority of the principle of Beauty than that of finance and economics. The real aim is promote a collective thinking: economic power is subject to the power of knowledge. To be free, men and women need to nourish by knowledge.
At the Birch Forest
reading, Mt. Etna
(photo by C)
Central to G37 Summit's theme was the dynamic assembly of the collective knowledge and wisdom, the artistic power, of poets, writers, and artists of all kinds, speaking to locals and visitors, and sharing words that might carry beyond Mt. Etna's slopes and the baroque churches where the readings took place. The idea of investing words with such power, or believing that they could possess such power once more, underscored not just a profound faith in literature and art, but also a recognition of Sicily's ancient past, and language's sacred, spiritual, metaphysical and psychological potency. Reading poems in the open air, amidst the spectacular Bosca di Betulle, or Birch Forest, one of the rare stands of birch so far south in Europe and uniquely from Mt. Etna's black, volcanic soil, as well as in the historic small-town churches, the poets and musicians, would underline what the Foundation saw as a clear message, "the value of being as opposed to the logic of having." Or, as I saw it, the power of language's presence, in and of itself, its capacity to bring reality into being and to shape it, as well as its resistance, however small, to the commodifying machinery of global neoliberalism.
The high-school age student participants wrote poems based on the theme of "knowledge." Their teachers then selected some of these poets to read during the two day-long sessions at the Birch Forest on Mt. Etna. The students would thus, to quote the Foundation, become "not only passive receptors of the poetic Word but, through a prior preparation of the school, first-person protagonists of the expressive modes." They would also be active members of the audience for the published poets, and one of the highlights for me was meeting some of the young poets and their classmates, particularly those who were studying English, as well as those who were immigrants and refugees. One, Ibrahim, who introduced himself to C and me, mentioned that he was living in one of the local towns, but was originally from Gambia, and thanked me for my poem in English. I spoke briefly with a few others before taking a few selfies (which may be floating around Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites, though I haven't seen them). A third component of their participation entailed collaboratively producing "ethical manifestos." These texts would provide "essential theoretical, moral and ontological support" for their poetry, their lives, and their futures.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Caltagirone
Before we headed to eastern Sicily, however, we had breakfast at a hotel along Palermo's sea coast, then headed through the center of Sicily, via the picturesque, elevated town of Enna, to Caltagirone, where we had the pleasure of spending a little time with our dear friends Josephine and Gaetano, their daughter Giulia, Josephine's sister Miriam, and her husband, Dino, her adorable new baby, their parents, and other members of her family and friends. Caltagirone looked exactly as it had last time, and those famous stairs were no less difficult to ascend, though we did it several times. We also got to tour Josephine's family factory, which was humming and a work of art in itself; she and her sister truly merge the worlds of business and art. I also participated in the first of several interviews, this one with a local bureau of RAI, the major Italian media company, and though I have not seen it, I think it went well. Josephine translated fluidly and swiftly, I thought, my pedestrian English into the approximate, melodious Italian. Trump's name and policies surfaced during this interview and others, and all throughout the trip. At one point, when I discussed his tenure without mentioning his name, an interviewer asked me specifically to say "Trump." They wanted me to put him on the record.
On TV, with Josephine, in Caltagirone
(Photo by C)
After our stay in Caltagirone, we headed the next day to Savoca, where the first of the readings took place that evening in the Mother Church Santa Maria of the Assumption into Heaven. This was my first opportunity to meet most of the other poets, which was another of the great pleasures of the trip, as were the stunning mountainous landscapes, which wound down to the rocky coasts, in Roccalumera and Castel di Tusa, skirting the Tyrrhenian Sea. As some of the photos make clear, these truly were mountains and not merely hills, and looming amidst all of them was the still active Mt. Etna. In fact on the way to one of the other cities, we could even smell the volcano's almost suffocating sulfur as we sped through a tunnel. The Sicilians' gift for navigating the hilly roads impressed me yet again. Thankfully, though they drive very fast, they were also skillful at navigating the flat(er) highways and tunnels.
In Enna
Before I say more about the events, let me list the participating poets, some of whom joined only one or two of the readings, though all of the poets from outside Italy read at every venue. The poet participants included: Antonella Anedda, Alessio Arena (a very pleasant young poet from Palermo, I believe I heard someone say), Maria Attanasio (one of Sicily's great living writers, whom I met when she passed through Chicago years ago, and who it was a joy to see again, along with her fun husband Gianni), Mariano Baino, Michaël Batalla (from France, and we got to meet his lovely wife, Virginie, a filmmaker), Alberto Bertoni, Elisa Biagini (who had received her doctorate in the US and translated American and Anglophone poets), Tiziano Broggiato, Sebastiano Burgaretta (whom we met during our previous visit in 2009), Tiziana Cera Rosco (a poet living in Milan, who with her boyfriend Ted, originally from Canada, became our traveling companions, especially towards the end of the visit), Giuseppe Condorelli, Giuseppe Conte, Gianni D'Elia, Antonio Di Maura, and Flavio Ermini.
Walking toward the Pyramid
Also reading were Giovanni Fontana, Biancamaria Frabotta, Gabriele Frasca, Mariangela Gualtieri, Biagio Guerrera (a friendly poet whose work drew from Sicily's rich linguistic traditions, who spoke excellent English, and who was my cue to approach the stage, as I often missed the detailed Italian instructions about reading order), Andrea Inglese (another talented younger poet who'd taught in Paris), Vivian Lamarque, Paolo Lisi, Rosaria Lo Russa (a Milanese poet we'd met in 2009), Roberto Mussapi (who we got to chat with towards the end of the trip), Luigi Nacci, Aldo Nove, Carmelo Panebianco, Antonio Riccardi, Margherita Rimi, Cia Rinne (a Swedish-German-Danish poet remarkably fluent in multiple languages, and the author of poems that ranged with playful swiftness between them), Evelina Schatz (a wonderful Russian-Italian poet who read in both languages), Marco Simonelli (another young Milanese poet), Ida Travi, Patrizia Valduga, and Sara Ventroni.
C in one of the rooms at the Museo Hotel
Atelier sul Mare, Castel di Tusa, La Stanza
della Luce, designed by Pepi Morgia
Moreover, others who played important roles, in addition to the poets, Antonio Presti, and Josephine Pace, were the kind, indefatigable Gianfranco Molino, of the Foundation; other members of the foundation (including Giovanni--a painter, with whom I spoke about his work in my very broken Italian), Adriana La Porta, Josephine's thoughtful colleague; Alessandra Caccioppo; Elisabetta Raffa; Carmelo Damico; Antonio Musumeci; Lorenzo Di Silvestro; the Polyphonic Choruses of Castiglione and Linguaglossa; Alfio Priolo; the students of the ITS Steve Jobs in Caltagirone; the various curates of the churches where we read; the caribinieri and rangers in the Birch Forest on Mt. Etna; all of the others who ran the video equipment, answered questions, kept us on schedule, drove us around, and just provided a continuous welcome; and whoever translated my poems, which occurred with great speed and for which I offer my deep gratitude! I know I am leaving out other important people, so my apologies, and to all of you, thanks so very much for everything!
Savoca
Returning to the events, on May 26 and 27, we read with the students from the morning through the late afternoon in the Birch Forest, in Piedimonte Etneo (literally the foot of Mt. Etna). In honor of the birches, we were urged to wear white, which gave me an opportunity to 1) sport a pair of white jeans I hadn't worn since last year but thankfully could still fit and 2) buy a white pullover in Caltagirone. Each of the two Mt. Etna readings opened with a ritual procession, led by Carmine Elisa Moschella, pictured in the video below, singing and descending into the valley where the main event occurred, followed by performers who would go on to wrap the birches very slowly, rhythmically really, as the speeches unfolded. At every event Antonio Presti would provide an overview of the festival and share his thoughts on the importance of what we were doing.
In addition to Carmine's songs, musician Michele LaPaglia improvisationally and impressionistically accompanied the poetry readings--unless poets asked him not to--using a series of percussion and wind instruments. He concluded both of the Birch Forest events in conjunction with audience members who were equipped with brightly colored plastic tubes that doubled as whistles, issuing ethereal tones in response to Michele's. Between the ritual opening and the closing music, established and student poets, whom Antonio Presti introduced and often posed questions to, read for roughly 3 minutes each. Nearly all the poets adhered to these guidelines. Michele performed with the poets at the church readings too, and I am still amazed at how he often found an appropriate accompaniment to the work each of us read. (I did ask him to produce a darker tone for my poem "Words," which is a litany about mis-understanding as reality.)
Salvatore Comodo, one of two
Italian politicians we met
In addition to LaPaglia and Moschella, May 26's Mt. Etna reading featured also featured Daniela Motta, with students from Guttuso Art Institute, the Mazzei-Sabin Agrarian Institute of Giarre (a nearby town), and the Steve Jobs Institute of Caltagirone. The May 27 Mt. Etna reading included LaPaglia, Moschella and Motta, the students from the Guttuso Art Institute and the Steve Jobs Institute of Caltagirone, and students from the Classical Grammar School of Giarre, the Linguaglossa Amari Linguistic and Linguistic Grammar School, and the Amaryllus Lyceum of Riposto. On the first day on Mt. Etna, in Linguaglossa, the Etruscan Piedimonte, after the reading concluded, C and I hiked with a number of poets and their partners and friends to the Rifugio Soggiorno, or food campsite, and I want to thank Dr. Wayne Winnick yet again for helping get my knees into shape to do this. (I could not imagine what this would have been like had they not be able to take the long, twisting, ascending march over the volcanic soil.) It was a workout but an enjoyable one.
Black cats, poolside, in Palermo
At the refugio the lunch was simple but delicious, but then I can state unequivocally that I did not have a bad meal the entire time I was in Sicily. At both the lunches and the dinners, things unfolded as multiple courses, so there were sandwiches, then salad, then meats (if you ate them), all accompanied by what we initially thought was grape juice given the plastic jugs that contained the dark violet liquid, but which turned out to be delicious locally produced red wine. I had the delightful opportunity that day to meet a number of college students from Palermo, and we worked on collaborative poems and discussed poetry, which was a lot of fun. (And took selfies!) The second day we joined Josephine, Gaetano, Evelina, and Rosaria at a nearby local restaurant, where the food was, unsurprisingly, perfect. (I had pasta with a sauce that combined fennel, pine nuts, and anchovies, and the chef pulled it off.) My favorite meal was a Sicilian specialty, the summery pasta with lemon, which was, I learned more a little lemon-lime (verdetto). I'll have to learn how to make this over here.
Poet Cia Rinne, reading
her work
On the evenings of both days that we visited Mt. Etna, we read in churches, as on Thursday evening. On May 26, we read in the municipality of Castiglione di Sicilia, at the Basilica Madonna of the Chain. The Polyphonic Choir Mater Catenae of Castiglione, the New Book Club of Palermo, and musician Antonella Furian all took part. There was also a video installation by Daniela Motta at this event and the subsequent evening one. The following night we read in the municipality of Linguaglossa, in the Mother Church Santa Maria of Grace near the downtown square. This event involved a tribute to the beloved Sicilian poet Santo Cali, read by an amazing performer, Agostino Zumbo, whom I could not understand but whose passion certainly transcended linguistic barriers. Also participating were the Choir and Orchestra of Linguaglossa, and the Linguistic Lyceum. The student musicians, like the professional ones, played with skill and verve.
The church where we read
in Linguaglossa
We had dinners, in the Italian style, i.e. beginning at 8:30-9 pm, involving multiple courses, and running until 11 or later, at various spots. In Savoca, we ate at a (former?) monastery (I think), and each of the poets, I included, inscribed poems in concrete blocks which will eventually be placed at a new project that the Foundation is developing. The second, quite chilly evening, we dined at a winery--cantina--where we met a local politician, Salvatore Comodo--though he didn't exactly introduce himself as such--who had, he shared with us, just sat earlier that day in the ancient Greek theater in Taormina right behind none other than Trump and the First Lady. (At the multicourse, outdoor meal at this venue, I did encounter a meat whose origins I could not identify--and as a mostly-vegetarian (pescatarian?), I sampled only a tiny bit of it, but it was quite tasty.) For the readings I chose to read no more than two poems, one usually very short and the other no longer than a page, at each reading. I also chose poems that I felt were appropriate to the occasion, and public in spirit and tone. All of these events brought out healthy crowds--and everyone who drove up those vertiginous, serpentine roads to reach the readings on Mt. Etna deserve a medal--and some members of the audience were conversant enough in English to offer comments and thoughts on my English poems and, I imagine, the poems they heard in French and German.
The student poets before one of the
readings in Piedimonte Etneo
After we left Linguaglossa, Antonio Zinga drove us to Castel di Tusa, Messina, where we stayed in the extraordinary--and that is putting it mildly--Museum Hotel (a/k/a Atelier sul Mare Museo Albergo) Castel di Tusa--which is literally, not just figuratively, a hotel that not only holds numerous works of art, but also is also a work of art itself. And I mean its rooms are art installations, some so fully so that they were truly conceptual in design and function. I include photos below and on the next page. In Castel di Tusa, we were right on the sea, but we took a walking tour of the town, which rose ladderlike via steeply ramped streets. During our outing we spotted bodyguards and glimpsed a person we figured must be a famous person having lunch not far from us, and after a bit of Googling we realized after he had left that it was the President of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta. We thought about asking him for a photo, but decided we probably shouldn't bother him. The next day, at a completely different restaurant, while having a leisurely early lunch (before a second lunch at the hotel!), we ran into this same gentleman, and this time we asked for and took a photo with him, which is below.
C, the President of Sicily, and yours truly
That day we also visited a number of the giant sculptures that the Foundation had erected near Castel di Tusa, including the almost indescribable giant Pyramid/38° Parallel, which sits high atop a mountain and which will, in a few weeks, be the site of a solstice festival. To reach the Pyramid, whose latitude is exactly that of the line dividing North and South Korea, and which you can spot from many vantages far below, you must drive up a dizzyingly circuitous road--though there is also a cow--or goat?--path that you can climb to reach it--then park, and walk up towards the triangular structure, which you then enter via a pitch-black tunnel, proceeding slowly until you come upon stone stairs that take you up into the mostly dark giant structure itself, which has a stone labyrinth inside it, and which only a thin opening illuminates. We visited it with Antonio Presti, Gianfranco, Tiziana, Ted, and a young journalist whose name escapes me, and I have to admit that at one point, as we stood near the edge of the cliff, I could feel vertigo slowly creeping inside me, though the sublime sunset over the sea helped to subdue my anxiety about the cliffs. In addition to the Pyramid, we also walked the Labyrinth of Ariadne (Labirinto di Ariana), which provided another unexpected but exhilarating workout. At its center was a tree: the Tree of Life.
The mountainside towns
near Mt. Etna
We said goodbye to Castel di Tusa and Sicily one week after we arrived, riding back to Palermo early in the morning courtesy of Gianfranco, who gave us a verbal tour as we headed northwest via Sicily's beautiful--and that hour, mostly empty--highways. The return via Palermo Airport involved far less hassle than I usually encounter in US airports, and though it felt great to land at JFK, I immediately felt a pang of wistfulness because we had such an incredible time in Sicily. I also would return in a heartbeat. To repeat my thanks from my first paragraph, the hospitality, warmth, kindness, generosity, and attentiveness of our Sicilian hosts was superlative at every point during the trip, and once again, though I have little bit around the world, never have I been treated as well as I have when in Sicily. To everyone who made our visit possible, MILIONE GRAZIE A TUTTI!
"Poetry makes nothing happen," or so writes W. H. Auden in his famous elegy, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," though he went on to qualify this oft-quoted fragment with a much cannier and profounder understanding of poetry, noting that
it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
That is to say, by its very existence and presence, by our engagement with it, poetry creates a reality--or many, aesthetic, discursive, imaginative, material, social, historical, ontological--that is significant, that does make something "happen," though we usually don't credit it beyond its immediate effects on us as listeners and readers. Poetry is a "way of happening," a "mouth"--processual, sensuous, truth-telling, connected to the root sources of our understanding of the world--that we would do well to listen to. It is a means of knowledge, sensuous and real even as it foregrounds its artifice. It cannot offer the only truth or means to reality, but it provides one of them. Thus Plato feared it, and Aristotle lauded it. About it "men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there," the speaker in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower" astutely notes; the "new," the real "news" lies in those "despised poems": the deeper truths, a deeper awareness not just of language, but of the world, the self, ourselves.
But all of this sounds like a poetry advocate trying to make the case for why we ought to read poems. Like lemons for the kidneys, or cucumbers for the skin, or whole oats for digestion, or apples for combatting colds and staying thin, this verges on a prescription, which doesn't make poetry so palatable. Especially because it often seems like it should be simple, but, as the quote from Auden above makes clear, it often isn't. Especially when it is doing the many things poetry can do all at once. What I am saying about poetry, also applies to fiction and other literary forms. For poetry it is language, its use and arrangement, for prose fictional forms it is language and the various tools and techniques of narrative, but in both cases, as well as for related and analogous genres (drama, creative nonfiction, narrative cinema and video, long-form narrative TV, etc.), more goes on that mere entertainment. They are "good" for us, not just in the cathartic sense, as Aristotle suggested, but they have specific effects on the mind that we still have not fully reckoned with.
According to Julie Henry, an education reporter for the Telegraph, Liverpool University literary scholars and cognitive scientists working together have found that poetry and dramatic texts by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and others has "beneficial" effects on the mind, in part because of the complexity of the texts' linguistic organization arrests and holds the reader's attention, even if briefly, provoking self-reflection as a result. As with many of the other studies, the brain researchers used scanning devices to monitor brain activity while conducting a series of tests, and they found that when they presented the test subjects with the poetic and dramatic texts versus more straightforward prose versions, the poetic texts triggered more electrical activity in the brain, particularly when the test subjects encountered "unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure."
Yet this temporary electrical activity did persist beyond the initial flicker, leading the subjects to continue reading the texts. Poetry in particular increases activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, Henry states, "an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory,'" suggesting that poems aid readers in thinking about and understanding their own lives in relation to what they have read. One of the researchers, English professor Philip Davis, will reportedly tell a conference this week that "Serious literature acts like a rocket booster to the brain," reorganizing it in vital ways. "[Poetry] is a matter of deep versions of experience that add the emotional and biographical to the cognitive." (This appears to be true of fiction as well.) Yet Henry adds that the researchers claim this means that classic literary texts were more valuable than self-help books, though this appears to be a bit of scientism running amok, and she doesn't give evidence for this. Davis's assertion appears to be borne out by many of the studies I point to in the links above, and in overviews by writers like Geary, George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, and others. But what about a self-help book written using the techniques of poetry or fiction, or written as poetry or fiction (cf. Thomas Traherne's deeply meditative work, or John Ashbery's semi-parodic, playful version in Three Poems)? Perhaps the researchers' claims go a bit too far, or are simply not precise enough.
Nevertheless, Henry's article underpins the reality that we ought to read Auden's fragment not just more carfully, but ironically at the very least, for he, like every poet of worth, certainly has been aware, at least at some point regard her or his own poetry, as well as regarding the poetry they admire, that poetry, and literary language and texts more broadly do make things happen, even if not in the immediate sense that some poets--and writers in general--might like. Or that tyrants and philosophers might not. You might even point to one of the world's most poetic books, The Holy Bible, especially the King James version, which, for anyone who has (had to) read it, has decided cognitive effects, sometimes hypnotic, and these cannot all be chalked up merely to social, cultural and sometimes political and economic traditions and contexts. Reading certain sections of the Bible can be entrancing; I would imagine they spark the same sorts of electrical activity, and effects that Davis describes above.
This got me thinking about a poem fragment that Geoffrey Jacques sent in a recent email, which brought back almost immediately thought not with complete clarity the following poem, which I hope some enterprising brain scientist studies in relation to the topic above. If you have never read it, you are in for a treat. Many of the poems I've posted on here would also be worthy of study in this regard, but I am posting this one since Geoffrey cited it and it is does promote a decent amount of mind work. Read it aloud and see if you can do so without stumbling, listening to the words as you do so, before you begin analyzing it, if you can. I can assure you that it's doing something (good) to and for your brain, even if just making you more attentive to words, sounds, and language's power. But of course it's doing far, far more than that. Eliminating the need for self-help texts, analysis and therapy or more, I can't say. But a boost--or several kinds--is occurring.
The poem, a sonnet, by Marianne Moore (1887-1972, and native of Kirkwood, Missouri), "No Swan So Fine":
NO SWAN SO FINE
"No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.
Today's poem is by a poet I've never featured before, but this poem, and this poet's work, have intrigued me, not least because of one rhetorical device (of the many) she uses so well: repetition. In several of the poems by Martha Collins (1940-) that I've read, repetition serves as the means for what might in music be called motivic variation, at least if I'm grasping the concept right.
She will introduce a word, a phrase, an idea, and then repeat it with variations in its placement, context, meaning, function. In one of her better known poems, "Lines," she spins from that word's many meanings a complex little poem about composition, connections, relationships, the algebra of love. In many poems she plays with the mechanics of syntax, semantics and spatiality, allowing her to make quite complex works with the seemingly simplest of tools--think Williams Carlos Williams's machine made of words, but with hidden, powerful gears. It should hardly be surprising, then, that she has written books titled Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), and The Arrangement of Space (G. Smith Publisher, 1991).
The poem below operates a little differently, but as you read it you start to see how she can take an idea and draw all sorts of interesting things out of it, using, among her tools, repetition. This is not to say, however, that her focus is only on language; in her 2006 book-length poem, Blue Front (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press), she took on history directly, writing about a lynching that occurred in her father's hometown of Cairo, Illinois, bringing to bear her poetic skills to render unforgettable one of many too-forgotten, horrible moments in American history.
Martha Collins is a native of Omaha, Nebraska, and established the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She currently is the Pauline Delaney Professor in Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She has published five books of poetry, and one chapbook, and has edited a book of critical essays on poet Louise Bogan, and translated two books of poetry from Vietnamese, The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1997), edited with Ba Chung Nguyen; and Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da (2005). Among her awards are the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Blue Front, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
SEVERAL THINGS
Several things could happen in this poem.
Plums could appear, on a pewter plate.
A dead red hare, hung by one foot.
A vase of flowers. Three shallots.
A man could sing, in a burgundy robe
with a gold belt tied in a square knot.
Someone could unite the knot.
A woman could toss a gold coin.
A stranger could say the next line,
I have been waiting for this,"
and offer a basket piled with apples
picked this morning, before the rain.
It could rain in this poem,
but if it rained, the man would continue
to sing as the burgundy silk fell
to the polished parquet floor.
It could snow in this poem:
remember how the hunter stamped his feet
before he leaned his gun in the corner
and hung his cap on the brass hook?
Perhaps the woman should open the ebony bench
and find the song her mother used to sing.
Listen: the woman is playing the song.
The man is singing the words.
Meanwhile the hunter is taking a warm bath
in the clean white tub with clawed legs.
Or has the hunter left? Are his boots
making tracks in the fallen snow?
When does the woman straighten the flowers?
Is that before the hunter observes
the tiny pattern on the vase?
Before the man begins to peel the shallots?
Now is the time for the woman
to slice the apples into a blue bowl.
A child could be watching the unbroken peel
spiral below the knife.
Last but not least, you could appear.
You could be the red-cheeked child,
the hunter, or the stranger.
You could stay for a late meal.
A Provencal recipe.
A bright red hare, shot at dawn.
Shallots. Brandy. Pepper, salt.
An apple in the pan.
I described this quarter's movement thus far--it's been only one week and had I followed the suggested teaching schedule I would have taught 7 class sessions, instead of 4--to a colleague at another university as akin to being on, and simultaneously racing, a maglev train, and I won't get off it or be able to lower my pace until late March. So my posting may be very intermittent until then. Last year at this time, and just days into the new quarter I was heading to Los Angeles to undertake my responsibilities on a hiring committee that was interviewing people at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. I spent most of my few days there in a single large room, asking tough questions of very smart and interesting people, and my evenings recuperating, and that's all I'll say about that, other than great hires emerged from the experience. One highlight of the trip, however, was having the opportunity finally to meet and hang out with poet-genius Will Alexander, which was a delight (and when I returned to Los Angeles last spring, I spent an afternoon not far from the UCLA campus with him and Chris Stackhouse), and also with several old friends, among them my former Dark Room Collectivist, writer and scholar Bethany White, and my former co-worker, the multiplatform artist Ella Turenne. I don't think I had time to attend a single MLA panel or reading, though I did run across many anxious colleagues who appeared to be presenting at or excited about one or the other.
This year, no MLA. I had no reason to go beyond wanting to see, once and for all, the city of Seattle, which I've never set foot in. (Nor have I ever visited Portland, which I want to visit even more after a mini-marathon of the Carrie Brownstein-Fred Armisen zaniness known as Portlandia. The show is so bizarre and hilarious that it probably has planted an irrevocably skewed vision of the city in my head and any time spent there will be a let-down, but nevertheless, I'd love to go there.) Nevertheless, I did see that, according to Stacey Patton in The Chronicle of Higher Education, at this year's conference the major focus will be a justification of why teaching literature--and by extension, the humanities and cultural studies--matters. As many a major scholar (Judith Halberstam, Rita Felski, etc.) has articulated far better than I, literary studies faculty have for decades now not made a compelling or convincing case, particularly to those outside academe, for studying literature or for the importance of various critical and methodological approaches, which have become caricatures in portrayals by people on the right and even among journalists and non-academics. This is not to deny that a good many scholars and literary critics have engaged people outside academe and some, like bell hooks or Stephen Greenblatt, to name two, regularly reach audiences outside university and college walls. But I do sometimes think that important conversations occurring within academe often don't filter out, and that the many valuable aspects of these conversations are not self-evident without some explanation, some guidance, some justification, however rendered, to people outside academe.
We live in an age and in a society in which "expert" knowledge is viewed with perhaps more skepticism than an any other time over the last 200 years (and I certainly do acknowledge that this is perhaps a bit hyperbolic and that, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out half a decade ago, the US in particular has always possessed a strong anti-intellectual strain, even as it has produced some of the major thinkers, scholars, and creative people to have emerged over the last two centuries). Just saying that scholarly and critical work, especially literary scholarship and criticism, and the teaching of literature, are important, or that it's necessary for professors to pore over a given work, and to teach students how to do so, to do so with them, to guide them in doing so, holds less weight with many outside academe than it once did. Yet, as I have pointed out more than once to my students and to friends and colleagues, our contemporary political sphere undoubtedly draws a great deal--too much--of its water from the well of a not-very-good work of prose fiction, a novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I would venture that far more people animated by Rand's thought and ideology have read this work or her other creative texts, like the better written but still stilted The Fountainhead than have puzzled through her more overtly economic or philosophical treatises. In fact, these books are among the most effective vessels of and for her ideas; what someone teaching literature can do is explain, perhaps in ways that someone who doesn't do so, is why and how.
One area where this intra-academic knowledge in some ways appears to to have filtered out and yet at others has not is with what is now falls under the broader rubric of queer studies. In the current issue of the Chronicle, both Michael Warner, chair of Yale's English department and a major scholar and critic, and William Germano, dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union, muse on the end of Duke University's Series Q, an imprint of influential books in queer studies--and lesbian and gay studies before that--and on the current state of the field, which, it has struck me as I have begun teaching what I think is the first course in my current department in LGBTQ literature and theory ("American LGBTQ Literature Since Stonewall"), and here I echo both Warner and Germano, is as germane as ever. In some ways, the popular discourse about lgbtq issues is much further along than it was when I was an undergraduate in the late mid-to-late 1980s, or when I was in graduate school in the mid-to-late 1990s. But in as much as some of the key insights of many figures of that era have diffused throughout popular discourse, and we are further along politically and socially, I and anyone else who opens her or his eyes on a daily basis can see how certain things still carry over. It is no longer surprising to me how frequently people adhere to binary notions of sexuality; how frequently offensive terms like "tranny" are tossed about, and how transvestitism, transsexualism, and transgenderism pose a quandary for many; how confused many people still are about the differences between sex, sexual orientation, sexual object choice, and so forth; and how the unrepressed, the normative--heteronormativities and now, homonormativities--not only never left, but in some quarters are thriving. Outside of Logo and MTV, turn on the TV, and what do you see? I think the answer to this question is clear enough.
Lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies coming shortly thereafter, unpacked and examined a great deal of what lies at the core of these issues, and for some in the academy, I sometimes think it really may feel as if the matter, the issues, were long settled. (Or maybe that's just my perspective as I listen to people talk about lgbtq issues within academe vs. outside it.) But in fact, it's not even settled in academe itself. I can recall, as I told my class on Wednesday, how a colleague on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the late 1990s spoke enthusiastically of a "post-gay" moment, and many, perhaps most people present, agreed with him. In many senses, particularly in the wake of queer theory and queer studies, we were at a point where we could speak, at least in academic terms, of moving away from the sorts of identitarian-dentificatory-based (i.e., linked to individual psychologies, with communities arising from these identifications) ways of thinking about the world to approaches that examined larger structures, institutions, the fluidities and mobilities and intersectionalities of self-fashioning and presentation, of performance in the world, in varying contexts, and this was, certainly, exhilarating. But those older approaches were not without their value, because outside the walls of academe, they were and still are in contestation.
Think about the It Gets Better series of videos and the discourse around this, and how there's little discussion of how other issues, like race and ethnicity, class, gender variance and dissidence, and so forth, factor into how young people not only may be treated but whether or not they'll be able to deal with bullying, homophobic, and heterosexist violence and oppression. It may get "better" if you are young and white and male-identified and queer and upper-middle-class, and have support networks around you, but if not, then what? That is not to say things are hopeless, but rather that the insights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, and queer studies, especially as they have explored the state of the world with increasingly greater nuance, do offer ways of addressing some of the questions the standard responses in the It Gets Better videos have set forth.
I say all of this to suggest that teaching literature and the insights gained from doing so over the last century have have many purposes, offer many tools, in the world. One, as the Chronicle article says Stephen Greenblatt suggests, is bringing us towards an understanding of "aesthetic pleasure" and appreciation. Implicit in the idea of the "aesthetic," as not only Clyde Taylor, who wrote a superb critical book some years ago about the European idea of the aesthetic and its multiple, sometimes problematic valences, but going millennia back, Plato and Aristotle themselves would suggest, are questions of the political, the economic, the social and cultural. Literature can help us to better understand these aspects of the world; it never appears in a vacuum and some of the most important things that professors teaching literature do include (but are not limited to) introducing students to works they have not read before; guiding them through and teaching them new ways of reading those works--including ways that they may already be familiar with; helping them understand how those works function in relation to other works, to the times in which they were written, to other periods and times, and to the present moment; exploring the various registers of literary texts, for every work operates on a variety of frequencies, some quite obvious, some quite hidden; and inculcating the multiple potentialities and worths, which should include skepticism of those very values at times, of literature, art and the humanities as human enterprises, of reading and writing, of language and languages themselves, which constitute the primary ways we as human animals, all of us, not just some select few of us, communicate. Of course, as I said, scholars far more distinguished than I have already hashed this out with brio and panache, and are certainly doing so at the MLA right now (or have been doing so). But in case any J's Theater readers wonder what people do in literature classrooms, it's a lot more important and engaging than tossing around gobbledygook. It goes to the very heart of who we are as human beings and creatures in this large and vast world.
Last month, as my advanced undergraduate fiction students and I were reading ZZ Packer's stories, I drew a little box around a word she uses in the first paragraph of "Doris Is Coming," her beautiful evocation of a young woman's personal, public political protest against segregation in the early 1960s: "drupes." This word caught my attention because it both stood out--though I don't think any of the students mentioned it in particular--as yet another example of Packer's precise and brilliant gifts for detail and diction, and because it was and is such a simple and strikingly unusual term. What is a drupe? Do you know? Have you ever heard anyone use this word? If you read Packer's story, did you know this word as you finished the paragraph? Did you look it up? I remember saying I would look it up the first time I read the collection and did not, so this time I had to do so.
"Drupe" is another name for all stone fruits, which is to say, all fruits with a fleshy outer tissue surrounding the shelled seed or seeds, or pit, in the center. Among the many common and well-known drupes we encounter and eat daily are: olives, coffee, mangos, jujubes, most palms, and all members of the Prunus family, from peaches and apricots to cherries and plums. One of my favorite fruits, and one that abounds in the backyard garden--it is a wonderful pest--is the blackberry. Each blackberry fruit consists of scores of tiny drupe-lets, which is why it is such a good source of fiber. You can't not eat its pits, which you must avoid with most other drupes for fear of choking (and in some cases, poisoning)--as happened unfortunately to my great aunt, one of my late paternal grandmother's older sister, about whom my mother used to say that she was "too mean to die," but a plum pit did her in, in her 90s--and of course, that dark coloring and sweet, somewhat tart flavor mean blackberries brim with anti-oxidants.
I was curious to see where the word comes from, and according to Merriam-Webster's International Dictionary, 11th edition online, it appears to derive from the New Latin word drupa, from the older Latin term for an overripe olive, which derives from the Greek term dryppa, olive. It apparently entered the English language quite late, in 1753. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language online says that drupe derives from Latin drpa, druppa, overripe olive, from Greek drupp, olive, possibly alteration of drupeps, ripened on the tree, deriving from drs, dru-, tree, and suggests one review deru- in Indo-European roots + peptein, pep-, to ripen, while also looking at pekw- in Indo-European roots. In Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, he says the word derives from "L., Gr, olives ready to fall, Gr., a tree; to fall." One thing I immediately notice is the relation between the Indo-European root deru-, Greek dru-, drupp, and the English word tree.
The Online Etymological Dictionary gives a bit more information on tree's origins; though English is a Germanic langauge, the German word for tree is Baum, related to English's beam, as in a wooden beam, and in Dutch, a tree is a boom (pronounced "boam"). (The general Latin word for tree is arbor, though termes means tree branch, especially of the olive tree.) English's tree is linked to its northern Germanic cognates, it appears, and directly to other Indo-European words meaning tree, wood, and specifically, the oak:
O.E. treo, treow"tree" (also "wood"), from ProtoGermanic *trewan(cf. O.Fris. tre, O.S. trio, O.N. tre, Goth. triu), from PIE *deru- "oak" (cf. Skt. dru "tree, wood," daru"wood, log;" Gk. drys "oak," doru "spear;" O.C.S. drievo"tree, wood;" Serb. drvo "tree," drva "wood;" Rus. drevo"tree, wood;" Czech drva; Pol. drwa "wood;" Lith. derva"pine wood;" O.Ir. daur, Welsh derwen "oak," Albanian drusk
"oak"). Importance of the oak in mythology is reflected in the
recurring use of words for "oak" to mean "tree." In O.E. and M.E., also
"thing made of wood," especially the cross of the Crucifixion and a
gallows (cf. Tyburn tree, gallows mentioned
12c. at Tyburn, at junction of Oxford Street and Edgware Road, place of
public execution for Middlesex until 1783). Sense in family tree first attested 1706; verb meaning "to chase up a tree" is from 1700. Tree-hugger, contemptuous for "environmentalist" is attested by 1989.
The link of our word tree metonymically to the oak, an ancient hardwood tree, which has mythological resonances, obviously goes quite far back, and crosses cultures. (The English word oak has cognates in the other Germanic languages(cf. O.N. eik, O.Fris., M.Du. ek, Du. eik, O.H.G. eih, Ger. Eiche), from the Indo-European root *aiks, but without cognates outside this family. In Greek, there is an added element: one classical Greek word for tree, dendron, (from the root dendro-), which is even today in modern Greek the word for tree, is also the word for a fruit tree.
Comb. form meaning "tree," from Gk. dendro-, comb. form of dendron "tree," sometimes especially "fruit tree" (as opposed to hyle "timber"), from PIE *der-drew-, from base *deru- "to be firm, solid, steadfast," specifically used for "wood, tree" (see tree).
From this same root we get the Latin durus, meaning hard, strong, so endure, a word that entered English during the Norman period from French, around the early 14th century, meaning "to undergo or suffer" (especially without breaking). It later took on the meaning, later in the 14th century, of "to continue in existence." It comes from the Old French endurer, make hard, harden; bear, tolerate; keep up, maintain, from Latin indurare, make hard, in Late Latin to harden (the heart) against, from in- + durare "to harden," from durus "hard," from PIE *deru- "be firm, solid."So too perdure, duration, durable, obdurate, and so on.
To be firm, solid, steadfast; hard wood, an oak, a tree, fruit; so going quite far back in human history, those Packer drupes. The word also made me think too of English's verbs to droop (Middle English drupen, from Old Norse drūpa; akin to Old English dropa drop), and of course to drop (the verbal form of the noun drop, a Middle English term, from the Old English dropa, akin to Old High German tropfo drop). There is probably no directly link to drop, droop and drupe, but as ZZ Packer or anyone walking near fruit trees on a late summer or early autumn day can attest, those drupes on a drooping tree branch very well might drop, as they did for our forebears, and once cleaned and bitten into, we recall the childhood admonition: sate yourself, but do not eat the pit.
