“Carl Sandburg wrote me from Chicago, ‘It’s hell when poets can’t afford to buy each other’s books.’” 

- Ezra Pound in “A Retrospect” 

Toward the end of a late night at Lightbulb Club, a ramshackle collection of folks started playing desert island games. What would we take? Whose songs, what gadget, an everlasting bottle of which liquor? Given enough time, we eventually got around to picking out a single poem to bring with us. Memorization was not an option. For me, this was a snap: “The Cleaving” by Li-Young Lee.      

The City In Which I Love You was the first book of contemporary poetry I laid hands on, which was a striking experience of itself as I was an aspiring medievalist. But the sixth stanza of “The Cleaving” staggered me on first reading, and continues to catch my breath. It’s a long stanza in a longer poem, but I’m unjustifiably self-indulgent. Consequently, I can only hurl myself at your mercy for spurring the following quote through the chop-shop: 

In a world of shapes 
of my desires, each one here 
is a shape of one of my desires, and each 
is known to me and dear by virtue 
of each one’s unique corruption 
of those texts, the face, the body: [...]
each pleases, verging 
on utter grotesquery [...]
inimitable, and, hence, memorable.  

The poem insists in this section that what are sometimes thought of as flaws are also identifying marks, that these are the essence of the inimitable and memorable self. Gorgeous. Possibly not meant to be universalized beyond the particular group he’s addressing in this section, but I think I’m on sound theoretical ground when I open the poem, which I’ll avoid getting into right now. (I think we can handle that in the comments. Maybe? Yes?) 
 
Regardless, when I first read this poem, it had a religious air and–for me–it still does. Its forgiveness was and is astonishing, especially because I’ve always secretly let this sentiment move beyond the body, where it’s rooted in the poem, to include all aspects of the self that could be seen as flawed, all insecurities. Instead, all particular, idiosyncratic flaws sometimes form an essential part of who one is, what makes one inimitable and memorable. 
 
This is the kind of revelation that defined poetry for me–that made poetry actual, necessary–and it’s a poem I would never want to be without, a poem that actually changed how I understood the world around me and continues to do so. It’s become more than a poetic touchstone for me: more personal, emotional. 
 
I’ve internalized these lines now, hoping that any real or imagined character flaw of my own might also be an exact and defining grotesquery that makes me recognizably and singularly myself in the eyes the people who care for me. Even faults can be endearing. 
 
Hopefully. I’m banking on it.

When Johnathon said, and I quote, “Ashley, I take back everything I’ve ever said about your space being messy”, the sentiment didn’t quite seem heartfelt, but–moreover–he was not joking around. My workspace is always an enormous pile of disarray. Proof:

Since the picture cannot possibly do justice to the filth in which I write, I have attempted to draw this eyesore into some semblance of order with arrows and labels. Useful? I hope so. 

To begin: The “desk” is actually two end tables pushed together, which requires the low chair. I like to be hunched over my poems as I’m working. The reasoning behind this is unclear. 

The empty packs of cigarettes are a sure sign that things are going well. Although I’ve recently begun rolling my own cigarettes in an attempt to hurry my death by nicotine, the overflowing ashtray continues to be a signal of significant progress.  I like to think it means that I’ve been too busy writing to empty the ashtray or clean up.

On the other hand, I might just be lazy. It is impossible to tell. Assuming it is the latter, I’ll justify myself with Virginia Woolf: “It is in our idleness…that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” That’s it.

The excuse regarding the empty Coke can, many of which typically litter the desk I treat with such derision, falls into a similar line of thought. I am pleased to say, however, that my Coke addiction is fading fast: I’m on to sweet tea now. 

Perhaps surprisingly, I can’t write anything even remotely worthwhile when I’m drunk, which isn’t to say I can do so sober, but I think I edge a little closer without the whiskey. As my alcoholism becomes more fully developed, I’m hoping the liquor will become a regular part of my writing process, since writing drunk seems like a positive thing in theory. 

Books are stacked helter-skelter and set askew around the general vicinity. When I’m stuck, it occasionally helps to pick up someone else, to do a quick imitation. Also: this sometimes leads to a poem worth following up on, or reveals a structure that might be useful to my current pet project. Hardy is of great use when it comes to this, which is why he’s right next to the laptop. 

Also: Because I’m stuck more often than not, I’ll have up multiple versions of the same poem while I’m working. For me, a line from a previous failure can generate new ideas in the current take–even if it’s just a rhyme or a juxtaposition of words. 

I’ll leave the rest to you to justify, as I seem to be at a loss. While I would like my workspace to be clean and shiny, chaos is absolutely  necessary to my writing, in which I typically seek order–especially given my control issues. It seems I am a bundle of contradictions, right down to the lipstick prints on my rolled cigarettes. 

Where the Magic Happens: Karen Rigby

Where the Magic Happens: Deborah Ager

Where the Magic Happens: Sandra Beasley

“’One wants to feel in control,’ Hecht said of his work in an interview with the New York Times last year. ‘If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? A number of my contemporaries wrote in free verse, but it became random jottings from their minds. Some enjoyed a period of celebrity. I don’t think they are going to be read very long. It’s as if someone says, ‘I thought of a butterfly,’ and it becomes a poem because it’s sanctioned by their own brilliance.’”

–From “Anthony Hecht, 81; Confronted Brutality Through Visual Verse” in the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23, 2004

Philip Hoy: “Maybe I can quote from an earlier passage in Kafka’s diaries than the one I was alluding to just now, only I’d like to hear your reaction to what he says there:

‘Have never understood how it is possible for almost everyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of undergoing them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness, in all likelihood with my head still smarting from unhappiness, sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with as many flourishes as I have the talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal, or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain; it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of surplus is it?’”

Anthony Hecht: “I fear that I have never been granted Kafka’s bountiful surplus of energy that he was able to call up during crises or depressions. I can think of few things more enviable. I have no reserves of imaginative energy to draw on in periods of darkness. Ransom, who proposed what might be thought of as a doctrine of ‘aesthetic distance’, which I found easy to adopt, used to say that the poet who wanted to write a love poem would be well advised not to do so in the first fine frenzy of his passion. He would be too close to his experience, too giddy with its pleasing chaos and turbulence to be able even to understand himself, let alone to put his feelings and thoughts into some disciplined order. The writer, Ransom would maintain, who can best create powerful feelings in his reader is precisely the one who has mastered these feelings before trying to set them down on paper. And Eliot would add to this that the writer can also describe and evoke experiences he’s never actually had – a matter that the stunning variety of Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s and Browning’s characters ought unarguably to demonstrate, though the tendency in our era is to regard lyric poems as purely the seismography of the life of the individual soul. Flaubert wrote to his mother in December, 1850, expressing much the same requirement of absolute personal detachment that Ransom recommends, though in Flaubert’s case, far more severely, and by way of explaining that he was determined never to marry, feeling that his vocation as a writer forbade it. He wrote, ‘You can depict wine, love, and women on the condition that you are not a drunkard, a lover, or a husband.’”

–From Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, 

According to popular superstition, writers are an unruly, and often belligerently drunk, herd of cats. This may be why assignments go over so well in most poetry workshops, typically triggering a frenzied cacophony of embittered grumbles and back-stabbing squawks, the ferocity of which could rival that of this cat, and most of which imply that the particulars of the assignment are clearly informed by the workshop leader’s distinct variety of sexual incompetence. 

For example, I repeatedly smothered, with varying degrees of success, the urge to tuck myself away in the parking garage so that I could pelt a particular workshop leader with frozen peas as she walked toward her car. This impulse was particularly challenging to stifle after she declared—and these were real specifications—that our poems for the following week should include a staircase, a bowl of fruit, a piece of furniture with sentimental value and a past argument recalled in a new light. 

Even so, every so often–despite the initial desire to slingshot spoonfuls of live hornets into her bathroom while she showered or the wild compulsion to teach her small child how to play the SafeAuto advertising jingle on a tin whistle—I did wind up enjoying the play of working with or against the demands of her assignments. 

Like working within a fixed or nonce form, the constraints of abstract or conceptual assignments often provoke me to slip from my own micromanaged garden into an overgrown yard littered with hubcaps, Bud Light bottles and several uniquely disfigured Barbie dolls, the latter seemingly maimed  during the almost phenomenological event that occurred when my neighbor actually mowed his lawn, which happened only once, in April, back before he independently determined his yard was the unlikely home of an endangered black spine-neck swamp turtle—a turtle that is, one notes, most usually found only in Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay–and consequently retired the lawnmower for the rest of the summer.

Put more eloquently, I think what Richard Wilbur said of forms in his 1972 interview with the New York Quarterly can also be said of good assignments: “They are  not simply a straightjacket, they can also liberate you from whatever narrow track your own mind is running on, and prompt it to be loose and inventive, to entertain possibilities it hadn’t foreseen.” 

This sounds a lot like the claim Bret Anthony Johnston makes in the November/December 2008 print issue of Poets & Writers, which is, admittedly, a magazine Donald Hall singles out for belittlement in an essay titled “Poetry and Ambition” as “not so much a trade journal as a hobbyist’s bulletin, unrelievedly cheerful, relentlessly trivial”. Hall is probably cooking with gas, but  Johnston could still have a decent point when he praises writing exercises for providing “loose, empowering structures … [that] bring fingers to keyboards, pens to paper, without bias or expectation.” 

For example, to warm up before writing, Johnston recommends “spending five minutes with nothing but words that start with the letter j.” Another: Open the dictionary blind and point to random entries; once a noun crops up–dishwasher, for example–spend ten minutes writing, trying to showcase that dishwasher. 

The result may not turn out to be stunning evidence of your irrevocable genius, but you will have ten minutes worth of poetry about a dishwasher. Close enough?

When you search on Google for Bad Love Poetry these are the book results:

I find this unreasonably amusing.

Given my penchant for quoting poets—an unfortunate, but mostly harmless, effect of passion, insecurity or both—I was pleased to hear about Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry by Dennis O’Driscoll, a working civil servant since the age of 16 whose poetry belt* is, evidently, magical. I see no other option. The structural integrity of an average poetry belt would be debilitated by the unreasonable number of notches his seems to have. Or maybe my poetry belt is just the cheap kind? 

Some excerpts: 

“I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.”

—Michael Donaghy, Verse 

 

“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.”

—Franz Wright 

 

“We are all interested in our own poems, just as we are interested in the smell of our own armpits, because they are uniquely redolent of ourselves.”

—Editorial in The Spectator

There are moments of poetic pageantry, I’m sure, but from the handful of one-liners I’ve seen, it seems like it could be worthwhile to wade through the apotheoses?

Then again, those might not be too much trouble for me. I’m a pushover for silver-tongued truthiness, especially idiosyncratic dicta–and I’ve had just enough learning to misquote, which sometimes passes, if I’m lucky, for wit. Yes?

*Arbitrary note: There are, apparently, poetry belts. 

I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been reading Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Maybe I’m a little ashamed. Regardless, I will now regale you with Richard Wilbur quotes. Please don’t despise me too terribly much.

 ”The drug experience is shadow-boxing, and the business of the poet is to be confronting, with his imagination, these solid objects here.”

“[I]n the poetry of this school [the New York School] generally you find a hidden sentimentalism–they all think childhood was the best of times; there’s no sadder sound in nature than the sound of a running-down nursery music box.”

“I don’t care much for confessional poetry when it is just the sort of whining you get at a bar from drunks.”

And, of course, an obligatory quote on form, the length of which probably reveals something about my character:

“If I say hook-book to you, it’s not the same as if I said brush-stadium. There’s some kind of implicit, magical demand made on you by the fact that hook and book sound a bit alike, and your mind starts trying to pull them together in some way or the other…. There are certain kinds of control that you can’t have [in free verse]…. There’s an example–I hope I can quote it properly–a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, one of his terrible sonnets. It begins, ‘No worse, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief;/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./ Comforter, where, where is your comforting./ Mary, mother of us, where is thy relief?’ Notice the relationship between that ‘wilder wring’ in the second line and that ‘comforting’ in the third. The ‘wring’ is a very hard rhyme, and ‘comforting’ breaks off, and it tells you where to break your voice. It almost lets your voice crack at the end of the third line. There’s the kind of accurate music that a fine user of rhyme can force.”

Granted, I had to go through a lot of interviews to find those three gems of snark, but — oh! — wasn’t it all worth it?

As a break from poetry and its accoutrement–letters, biographies, journals–I’ve been reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. It is, essentially, a collection of case studies of patients with various neurological diseases. It’s charming, light and hopeful for the most part, and as a consequence, it’s been a great relief.

However, while I was reading Chapter Nine, “The President’s Speech”, poetry couldn’t help but elbow in. The chapter seemed to suggest a new way to conceive of what makes a good poem, new questions to raise in the process of revision.

In “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes how his patients reacted while watching a technically unnamed president ( “the old Charmer, the Actor” ) give a speech: some patients “looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive”. However, the far majority of the “patients were convulsed with laughter.”

This particular collection of patients consisted of two groups: one group with aphasia and the other with tonal agnosia, which is also known as aprosodia. Aphasia is, according to Wikipedia, “a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language” and Sacks describes tonal agnosia as a state when “the expressive qualities of voices disappear – their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character–while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood.”

Sacks says that while patients with aphasia cannot understand speech on the word level, “something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that–at least with emotionally-laden utterance–the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed.”

As a consequence, he feels that it is impossible to lie to the aphasiac: “to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one–this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs–they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give–or remove–verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice. In this, then, lies their power of understanding–understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic.”

Patients with tonal agnosia, on the other hand, have to rely solely on the literal world of language, but can also get along with the aid of observing body language. However, in “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes “Emily D.”,  a patient with tonal agnosia who is also losing her sight. As a result, Emily had to give “extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same.” He goes on to explain,

“She could less and less follow loose speech or slang–speech of an allusive or emotional kind–and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose–‘proper words in proper places’. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree, for lack of perceived tone or feeling.

In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of ‘expressive’ speech–in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words–despite being more and more lost with ‘evocative’ speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).”

In an essay titled “Writing” included in The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claims that every poet has an inner censor to whom he or she submits work for approval and criticism. He goes on to recommend that “to keep his [the poet's] errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”

After reading “The President’s Speech”, I should like to nominate two new personae for participation in this censoring process: the blind tonal agnosiac and the blind aphasiac, each of whom could simultaneously critique the poem that has been–or is being–written, and both of whom the poet should aim to please.

This would mean that the poem should, on the one hand, be completely emotionally authentic in “every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations”; there should be no emotional misstep.

However,  as Ezra Pound writes in “A Retrospect”, “if a man use ’symbols’ he must use them so that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.” A poem has to work on this most literal of levels as well, not relying only on the authenticity of emotion, but remaining clear to the tonal agnosiac who can grasp only the literal meaning of the poem through “the apt choice and reference of words”.

The poem should be understandable both as an inarticulate emotional whole and on the literal level of the “verbal contraption”.

After all, as Sacks writes, “We normals–aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”

Although this may be old news to some, New Yorkers seem to be taking the poetry reading to a whole new level, one which includes fishnets, corsets and absinthe: 

“The ‘Madame’ presents a rotating cast of this city’s finest poets (both men and women) engaged in a night of surreal happenings, literary debauchery and private poetry readings. Here’s how it works: The poets play ‘whores,’ visitors play ‘johns’ (and are also encouraged to attend incognito!) but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry by giving private, one-on-one readings in curtained-off areas. All of the resident ‘whores’ are available for private readings at any time during the event (for a small fee).”

–From the main page of The Poetry Brothel 

If only I’d known about this during the last AWP.

Given that Fayetteville’s annual Bikes, Blues and Barbecue festival draws over 325,000 bikers to Northwest Arkansas for a cacophonous weekend of terror, I’m shocked to learn that I’ve never heard of biker poetry, which includes a variation on the haiku dubbed “baiku”.

The only formal explanation of baiku that I could find was on a personal blog, which described the poem as a six-line poem written in tercets with a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-5-7-5 and a rhyme scheme of abcabc. 

The author of the blog goes on to give examples of baiku, including a section titled, “Tales From Shakespeare, Retold In Baiku”. My favorite? “Romeo And Juliet”.

However, not every biker poem has to be formal. A light-hearted poem entitled “Bugs On My Face” proves the point:

I got bugs on my face
There’re June bugs and May flies 
On summer’s wind ride 
God knows when they‘re born
Now I know when they died

While plenty of biker poetry is available online, an anthology edited by Jose Gouveia, “Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology”, is already available on Amazon.  

Maybe next year the rally should host an open mic?

I’m at a loss, so I’m just going to lay it on you. Evidently, according to a report from William Keckler,  John Ashbery died on July 21 of  ’63. After this point, a carny was hired to give readings and a computer was programed to produce poems:

“They were all authored by a computer. 

That’s right. 

And not even a supercomputer.

They tried a supercomputer in the nineties, but it got bored writing the poems and commited suicide. 

That was the first recorded instance of machine suicide. But it’s still classified information.

No, it’s NOT a supercomputer that wrote Rivers and Mountains and Flow Chart (wink wink, nudge nudge…get it??) or Hotel Lautreamontor…well the list goes on like Banquo’s line, doesn’t it? 

It’s this really clunky thing with vaccum tubes and little dice with letters on them and sometimes it starts smoking and the administrators have to turn it off for a few hours to let it cool down.”

–From joebrainardspyjamas.blogspot.com

I could use one of those computers. Also: a carny. 

Than again, it is quite possible that I am unjustifiably entertained. This occurs on a terrifyingly frequent basis as my sense of humor is unfortunate. Still, while I take the above post as good fun, Ashbery’s poetry does, evidently, evoke some volatile reactions.

On Daniel E. Pritchard’s blog, a frenzy of commenters are attempting to hash out Ashbery’s aesthetic, namely whether or not, as Daniel claims, “[h]is is a poetry of ‘just words’, strung together, evocative at times but intentionally un-meaningful.” Even if this the case, some might see it as harmless. Daniel feels there is a real danger in this way of writing: 

“Words actually are the end of the experience, words that purposefully lack their referential meaning, that undermine by extension the idea of all possible meanings. [...] He may not intentionally be pursuing the deterioration of meaning, intellect, and humanism, but his work demands just that by denying so much of it. It is destruction without replacement – it is a gag without any substance, all laughing at the funny sound of names.”

Needless to say, some staunch Ashbery supporters were in the crowd. It began, and got a little dirty at times despite the mod’s best efforts. One commenter wrote: 

“Likening Ashbery to “language poetry” is madness. No, I take that back–it’s “cute.” Someone trying use them big poetry expressions and all. To reduce Ashbery to a collage poet (whether the poet used this term or not) based on a few recent poems (he’s been around a while and written a lot, if you didn’t know that) is equally cute.”

For the most part, though, the defense of Ashbery is very thoughtful and clear. It’s worth cruising through the post and the comments. Also, as always, it’s nice to see people who are so passionate about poems.

I’m not exactly ashamed to admit a long-lived obsession with the villanelle, but this has consistently proven itself an unfortunate affair: the passion seems to be very much unrequited. 

I’ve written innumerable first, second and tenth drafts that are, at best, horrifying—the latest failure included the word “tin” as an end-rhyme of a repeating line, which I’ll admit to despite Johnathon’s tactful and somewhat anonymous earlier reference—and I’ve always claimed that if I wrote one good villanelle, I would quit poetry altogether. While I certainly realize the benefit this would have for the poetry world at large, I assure you that there is no need to pop those corks quite yet.

However, from a recently attained copy of Patterns of Poetry by Miller Williams, I believe I may have developed a wandering eye. The latest infatuation: the terzanelle.

In his introduction to the form, Williams writes that this form is “French in origin, originally syllabic with lines of equal length. A nineteen-line poem, of five triplets and one quatrain, akin to both terza rima and the villanelle. Lines 1 and 3 are repeated as lines 17 and 19 or 18 and 19, depending on the resolution chosen by the poet. The middle line of each triplet reappears as the final line of the following triplet, except in the case of the final triplet (the penultimate stanza), after which its middle line appears as the third or first line of the final quatrain, depending on the form of the resolution.”

In short: it’s slightly ridiculous.

If you’re like me and need to see this spelled out A¹  B  A^2,, Wikipedia has—of course—the entire scheme mapped out. If you would just like to read a lovely example, Williams cites “Thunderweather” by Lewis Turco. As a warning, this link does seem to lead to a personal blog, but it’s the best copy of the poem I could find online.

Regardless, I seem to have found a new way to fail miserably, which is always exciting.  

A first-edition copy of W. B. Yeat’s “Easter 1916″ sold for 7,100 euros ($9,600 dollars) according to an article published by the BBC. Yeats handed out 25 copies of the poem originally, but 22 are hiding out somewhere mysterious. Check your attic?

A Wikipedia Fun Fact about the poem: “The date of the Easter Rising can be seen in the structure of the poem: there are 16 lines (for 1916) in the first and third stanzas, 24 lines (for April 24) in the second and fourth stanzas, and four stanzas in total.” I think Yeats may have been more neurotic about numbers than I am. That’s saying something.

My obsession with Yeats leads me to be thoroughly entertained by the following quote, which is probably to be expected. I’ll keep you posted with more prose on Yeats as I read further.  

“In Irish Theosophist, a magazine whose very title is enough to raise the ghosts of the ninties, carried an interview with Mr. W.B. Yeats in its issue for 15 October 1893. It had been conducted by the editor, one D.N. Dunlop, who set the scene in his opening paragraphs: 

“‘A few evenings ago I called on my friend, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and found him alone, seated in his armchair, smoking his cigarette, with a volume of Homer before him. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists; everywhere books and papers in apparently endless confusion.

“‘In his usual genial way he invited me to have a cup of tea with him. During this pleasant ceremony little was said, but sufficient to impress me more than ever with the fact that my host was supremely an artist, much in love with his art.’

“Yeats was then twenty-eight, and could deploy that elaborate style he had learned from Pater with as much indolent calculation on a sofa as in a sentence. If he had not yet formulated his theory of the mask, he had an instinctive grasp on the potency of his image; and if he does not altogether ruffle here in a manly pose, there is neverless a bit of peacock display going on. The Homer volume was a nice touch, and so was the cigarette and the ‘ceremony’ of the tea. 

“The young man whose concern for appearances had led him, a few years earlier, to ink his heels in order to disguise the holes in his socks has obviously mastered more complex and sure-footed strategies for holding the line between himself and the world. He had not, to be sure, acquired the peremptory authority which Frank O’Connor was to see in action decades later, when the poet could silence an argument or butress a proposition with a remark such as ‘Ah, but that was before the peacock screamed ….’”

– “Yeats as an Example?” in Preoccupations by Seamus Heaney.

The English faculty of the University of Cambridge recently survived the execution of a marathon reading of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton. The reading occurred in a small studio described as a “large black cube in the basement [...] with an absolute minimum of visual stimulus, allowing listeners to remember Milton’s own blindness and to relate it to the kinds of darkness—moral and visible—which he imagines in the poem.”

Moreover, those who had seats in that dark cube seem to have been trapped for at least a full book: “A video feed of the reading was relayed to a lecture room in the Faculty building to enable people to listen to less than a full book, or to follow the reading no matter when they arrive or need to leave.”

The joy of all joys here is that the University of Cambridge is planning to release the recorded reading as a podcast, which will eventually be posted on their site. This might be useful to those of you teaching the text: just refer your students to the iTunes music store, and they can turn it up to eleven, rocking out to “Paradise Lost” as they roll down the main drag on Saturday nights.

Just make sure they don’t get the poem confused with the self-proclaimed ‘Gothic metal pioneers’ that also go by the name Paradise Lost. On second thought, that might be one way to make grading essays more interesting?

“HV [Helen Vendler]: In your new book [Mirabell: Books of Number], you say there will be one more volume in this vein; after that you will be permitted to return to your “chronicles of love and loss.” These three books have all been based on Ouija-board material. Is there anything else that unites them, in general, and that separates them from your earlier poetry?

JM [James Merrill]: Chiefly, I think, the—to me—unprecedented way in which the material came. Not through flashes of insight, wordplay, trains of thought. More like what a friend, or stranger, might say over a telephone. DJ and I never knew until it had been spelled out letter by letter. What I felt about the material became a natural part of the poem, corresponding to those earlier poems written “all by myself.” [...]

HV: How did the poem get transcribed and composed? The work of transcription alone must have been enormous.

JM: The board goes along at a smart clip, perhaps 600 words an hour. Sometimes it was hard to reconstruct our words—”What was the question?” as Miss Stein put it. Then what to cut? What to paraphrase? What to add? Plus the danger of flatness when putting into verse a passage already coherent in prose. I could have left it in prose, but it would have been too sensational—like Castaneda, or Gwendolyn’s diary [in The Importance of Being Earnest].

HV: Couldn’t you have written without the help of the Ouija board, since it all comes out of your “word bank”? If not, why do you suppose the Ouija board is indispensable, in terms of the workings of your imagination?

JM: (a) It would seem not. (b) You could think of the board as a delaying mechanism. It spaces out, into time and language, what might have come to a saint or a lunatic in one blinding ZAP. Considering the amount of detail and my own limitations, it must have been the most workable method. And, as I have said, it’s made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.”

–From “James Merrill’s Myth: An Interview” by James Merrill and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 26, Number 7. May 3, 1979.

This interview is billed as an exploration of the psychological backing for a couple abstract associations, namely those listed in the title, “Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty”. It gets into that, but also detours into the process of unconscious problem solving:

“[T]here is no doubt that unconscious processes may be most active during sleep but they can also be active while people consciously focus on something—just not the problem you hope to resolve. In our study, we manipulated unconscious thought by distracting participants from the task at hand and focusing them on a different, very cognitive demanding task. Thus, to harness the benefits of unconscious thought, one does not need to lose conscious focus. The key is to focus on an unrelated task while still keeping the goal of resolving the original problem. Second, it partially depends on the complexity of the problem. As it turns out in our research and other work by Dijksterhuis, consciously focusing on a problem is more effective than distraction when the problem does not involve remote connections. The advantages of unconscious thought are most prominent when resolving difficult problems that involve weak associations.”

–From “Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty”, an interview with social psychologist Chen-Bo Zhong conducted by Jonah Lehrer, an editor for Scientific American

Does this mean I should refrain from counting the blinks of the cursor, then? How will I spend my Saturday nights?

“Politics are liable to fuse into aesthetics in Walcott’s conversation. His literary theory could be boiled down to a single principle: that the artist must make maximum use of the resources of tradition. ‘If you asked a young Caribbean painter, ‘Why are you painting like Turner? He was an Englishman,’ he would tell you fuck off. As writers we’re not as belligerent about this as we should be. What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it’s better than anybody else’s because it’s yours. It’s extremely provincial, and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be: ‘Don’t read Shakespeare because he was white.”

“His own experience in universities allowed him to witness ‘the terrible devastation to young minds caused by people who are poets themselves, who believe there are all sorts of horrible things about technique’. As a teacher, Walcott insisted on ‘the importance of the shape that you make out of a poem. That makes me a dinosaur, an old fogey. And why should I care? I always cite something that Pasternak said: ‘Great poets have no time to be original.” Imitation, he believes, ‘is not only a form of flattery, but is in a way creation. No two things are going to be alike. Whatever you bring to the craft is going to be individualistic.’ Bruce King suggests that, because of his education, Walcott was raised “in the Arnoldian world, not the Third World”. Walcott agrees, though it is Matthew Arnold ‘with a percussive beat’.”

–From an interview with Derek Walcott by James Campbell, “You promised me poems”, care of The Guardian, Oct. 04. 2008

“Gangel: You mentioned before you get inspiration from conversations overheard in the streets. Where else?

Ashbery: I’m very much of a magpie as far as reading goes. I read anything which comes to my hand. National Enquirer, Dear Abby, a magazine at the dentist, a Victorian novel. I don’t have a program in anything, as a matter of fact.

Someone remarked about an obscene passage in a poem. I replied that this shocked him not because it was there, but because there were not more of them.

There is an American feeling that if you do one thing, you’ve got to do that and nothing else. It goes against my grain.

Poetry includes anything and everything.

Gangel: Do you find it easy to relate to people?

Ashbery: Yes I do. I am a very gregarious person. This often surprises people, because my poetry does have a reputation for being aloof and antihuman. But I’m quite the reverse. I enjoy talking with just about anybody. My students, for instance. We get along very well socially. I don’t believe in closing myself off from anybody or anything.

My best writing gets done when I’m being distracted by people who are calling me or errands that I have to do. Those things seem to help the creative process, in my case.”

–From Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery” (originally printed in the San Francisco Review of Books [November 1977], rep. in Joe David Bellamy, Ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets On Their Work (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1984), 14.

“I am interested very much in debased and demotic forms of expression…. They often seem so much more moving than something that is beautifully phrased and composed. The crudeness of a Hollywood sound adventure picture on the one hand and a sort of high-flown translation from the Greek on the other were both elements that attracted me and not entirely just to make fun of them either, but to sort of purify the language of the tribe.”

–John Ashbery, on the film Where the North Begins, and its influence on his plays The Philosopher and The Compromise. (American Poetry Review, May-June 1984) courtesy of the Ashbery Resource Center.