A free brochure arrived in the mail today, so I hacked out a portion of its cover; then I added a line drawing at the right which my sweetheart crayon'd. And since the space where I removed some of the brochure's words was just plain white, I filled it in with a pattern labeled "grass leaves" from a computer art program.
(By the way, these stupid images that always accompany my text are made only with the intention of filling up a rectangle of space.)
Dear diary,
I’d like to try living in a pure democracy. I think that the phrase “mob rule” was devised by the slave-owning class to convince the rest of the populace that it would be a bad idea to self-govern. The gamers of the system have the cash-power to broadcast their P.R. (public relations = propaganda); but they lack the numbers, on their own, to win any vote. So they must subdue THE PEOPLE which is legion: lull it to sleep; hypnotize the beast (their words, not mine); make the lion desire what is only in the interest of its tamer.
Now I apologize to myself: I promised I’d stop investing my energy in political sorties. Or rather that I’d join a grassroots flock and become an (in)activist, but avoid henceforward allowing my leftist murmurings to seep into this ship log. Because it’s boring. When these problems are finally solved, then reading about them will be torment. Nobody wants to know how people were once badly treated – we’d all much rather concentrate on how to shake down the end of the rainbow for its treasure.
But if our age’s political dystopia proves endless, then any writings about it will increase in attraction over time. Would it be accurate to say that Karl Marx remains of interest only because capital-cronyism cheat-beat communism?
I suggest that a similar problem haunts the dental profession: I’m always suspicious of it; for dentists would erase our need of them, if all teeth acquired everlasting immaculateness. Imagine the day when all infants are born with stainless steel chompers, jagged and hinged like a bear trap.
And if people were to heed the teachings of Nietzsche, we’d no longer need his books. (What value might Antichrist possess in a post-Christian utopia?) Future minds might even pity the vanquished Church Fathers, the way that a modern reader of Homer’s Iliad feels compassion for Hektor, at least once Achilleus begins to maltreat his corpse (Book 22, Lattimore translation):
[ . . . here I skip past Achilleus’ “winged words” to the Achaians . . . ]
We modern Christians have improved in civility, compared to these barbaric Achaians. Our U.S. troops in the Near East, for instance, would never use spears and horses for this type of thing: we now have automatic firearms, tanks and trucks. Motorized vehicles with far superior horsepower.
So let me avoid speaking of politics in this entry today; it only leads us down an ugly path. I want to say a few words instead on the topic of yesterday’s entry. Since we live in this Age of Transition to Instant Omnipresent Super-communication, and everyone is represented by anonymous accounts or pseudonyms, people tend to act negatively and voice contempt and scorn. I’d like to do my part, add my two cents, on the side of positive appraisal: I’d like to list what I love.
I mentioned a favorite poet of mine, A.R. Ammons – I quoted a letter that he wrote, from back in the days before the Internet had hatched. Here I’ll give another excerpt from it, to provoke myself; because what he asserts I find interesting but only partly agree with:
The new Norton anthology of Modern Poetry is I’m afraid no good. You shuffle two decks of cards together and then nobody knows how to play. That’s what happens when you put English and American (and Irish!) poetry together.
I love the idea of poetry as being a game, which implies that it has intelligible rules; but, perhaps since I grew up on such hodgepodge anthologies, I’ve always been attracted to modern poetry precisely because I can’t figure out how it’s “played”. And I prefer breaking rules, and the absence of rules; especially in a realm like art, where rule-breaking hurts exactly no one. In “real” life—that is, in clock-time—I love rules and order: I’d rather eat the same meals at the same time daily, so as to devote as much vim as possible to the imagination. In other words, I like mental chaos alongside physical stability. But chaos has unpleasant connotations, so maybe I should simply say: I favor freethinking. In conclusion, if Ammons is correct about this, and the future of literature is something nobody knows how to play, then I declare myself the winner.
But I ask you, Ammons: Do you really believe that if you were to craft a poetry anthology of exclusively American moderns, the thing would gel? Well I hope you’re right. For then we have something to veer from. If I see a pattern in a continuum, my urge is to contribute some variation; whereas, if I sense mayhem, I want to coax the undisciplined demons into a sequence. Like, once upon a time, my former neighbors lost their cat in my garage, because the beast had wandered away from them, because they were probably bad owners (what owners have ever been good?), and it snuck through a crevice in my old service door – so my neighbors (the whole family: mother, daughter, father) were all gathered in my courtyard yelling the cat’s name repeatedly and patting the sides of their pants and whistling and snapping their fingers and clicking their tongues: all in hopes of enticing the creature to return to its “loving” and “rightful” owners; then I came out of my house to see what all the racket was about, and they explained the situation to me, so I crouched down a few paces away from the service door, and I silently and sinuously continued curving the fingers of one hand, like a magician luring a neckerchief out of a Klein bottle, and after just a few seconds the beast crept forth, and it emerged from the darkness and slunk near and rubbed its ears on my leg. Then, cradling their wild cat in my arms, I turned to the family and said: such is the kingdom of heaven.
NOTE. A living body is like an electro-mechanical device in which a plunger propels thrillions of billiard balls down a slanting surface among pins and targets, which are fears and desires.
So, in his now-famous letter, Ammons mentions Irish poetry, and he drops a disparaging remark about W.B. Yeats, which surprises me because I idolize Yeats – I’ve read with pleasant perplexity everything of his that I can get my hands on – Ammons’ insult is so harsh, I cannot even print it here (he calls him a “mush-mouth”); but one needn’t agree with one’s idols about absolutely everything. If we can swap that word “poetry” with “writing in general,” then my most loved moderns are Irish: to list just one, Samuel Beckett. Now let me tell you about David:
I met David at a local book group where we were discussing Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and I was taken with his admiration for Pynchon (at that point, I’d never met anyone who even knew the name, let alone had read, moreover admired, Pynchon’s books – this was before I had drowned in the ocean of the Internet); so, after the group adjourned, I approached David and questioned him avidly about his literary likings; and since my favorite novel at the time was Watt by Beckett, I asked if he’d read it, and, instead of simply nodding yes, he explained: “I read all of Beckett’s works while I was living in Dublin.” This impressed me deeply: for I hadn’t then, and haven’t yet, worked thru ALL of Beckett – my way is to read one composition, fall in love with it, and then read it over and over; so I get transfixed by certain works (Malone Dies… The Unnamable… Endgame… Murphy… How It Is… Krapp’s Last Tape… also Waiting for Godot… and of course Watt) while remaining ignorant of others.
An off-the-topic admission that I must jot here because it just struck me but which was spawned in no way by any of the above (unless the thought of judgment itself led me to it): This whole contemporary discussion about gender and sexual orientation confuses me. I wish that we could leap forward millennia, into a patch of time where all is fair and opportune in the economy as well as among all groups and individuals. Is it true that a male will write poems differently than a female? I don’t know the answer to this, and I don’t dare guess; for I’m reluctant to discover that there are yet more conflicts waiting to burst out and distract us from the bliss of word-shuffling. My bias is for what is beyond gender, beyond sex. Instead of man or woman or any variation thereof, therefrom, therein, thereout, I want their ur. —What is common to all? Let’s say it’s the soul. I don’t even believe in the soul, but I’m happy to adopt it as a universal placeholder. OK: all humans of any gender are souls, and so are animals. (If you say that animals lack souls, you are wrong.) And in place of fornication I elevate literature. I know the word is a bore but it’s funner than fuck. The prolific and the devourer, to use Blake’s terms. Artist and critic. Writer and reader. Masculine Feminine (1966), directed by Jean-Luc Godard: “This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”
Sorry—like I said, I don’t know what prompted that. Just gimme a chance to renounce it before you imprison me.
And, later in that unsent letter (the intended recipient of which, it’s worth recalling, is Harold Bloom, eventual author of The Western Canon), Ammons ventures an impromptu list of his own:
If you do an anthology, I hope you will give definition and exactly the right amount of space to what counts. Some Emerson, much Whitman, a little less Dickinson, much Stevens and pay very little attention to anybody else.
I like this, because I enjoy knowing anyone’s taste. But I would add a little more Emerson, a little less Whitman, ALL of Dickinson, and the same amount of Stevens that Ammons included. And I’d pay a great deal of attention to various others, which I must leave unlisted for the time being, because the day breaketh…
(Remind me to continue the above train-of-thot in the future, and to give the rest of my excerpts from Horace’s odes, and to react to his satires, and to praise Eric G. Turner’s translation of Menander’s The Girl from Samos, which we read last night. So much to blog about, so little time.)
Yet, before leaving, I want to mention something that is obvious to you but that gives me an excuse to quote another portion of Ammons’ non-letter. When he and I refer to Stevens, we mean the poet whose forename was Wallace. Ammons writes as follows:
I hope I have never said anything nasty about Stevens – he holds back under such pressure until just the right moment to deliver casually the crushingly beautiful. That both suffices and defeats the mind. After mastery has cut a design, what is one to say or do.
Ah, heck. I might as well let this entry get capsized at the finish line by Ammons quotations, because, just now, as I was intending to press the “Publish” button (you don’t any longer have to smear ink on the cumbersome printing-press contraption and then crank a lever to produce a copy of your pamphlet, instead you simply open your portable computing device and press the “Publish” button – it’s neater and cleaner, arguably less waste is produced, plus nobody cares), I noticed another paragraph that is as FREEING as the one that I shared yesterday was DESPAIRING, so I’ll end with this:
. . . how tedious and laughable it is – the picture of my old self trying to teach writing, being forced in spite of all protestation to adopt that pose! I have read what must be millions of comments and pieces of sizable literary criticism only to find myself able to say to poets, “Well, you know, poems just happen, they are acts of the mind.”
6 comments:
I have never read Ammons. Actually never heard of him till your mention of him, but I will do some investigating. I am in agreement with you, however, that there's nothing wrong with putting Irish, American and British poetry together. What could possibly be wrong with that? I don't get it. Also don't see how he could disparage W.B. Yeats, whom I also greatly admire. So, that's two strikes against Ammons before I've even read him. But it's okay. Hemingway was talking about Pound and Stein and said Stein is always right. Pound, on the other hand, is right only half the time. I agree with that. I've read a lot of Pound's essays, and found much to disagree with. But I still love his poetry. Even his Cantos, which, though they can drag in many places, taught me more about the nook and crannies and gopherholes of poetry writing than any other 20th century text.
I have never read Beckett, can you believe it? I've heard so many good things about him, but have yet to look at one line. Same goes for Wallace Stevens. Man, this post is making me feel deprived. I like that though. Thank you!
(1/2) Ah, re Ammons, as usual I’m just casually listing a favorite poet because I enjoy when others do the same—I think poetry is such a wide realm that it’s sort of a mug’s game to try to coerce others into embracing my own tastes… I repeat this incessantly, but I think it’s still true: Listing a poet as favorite reveals more about the reader than it does about the poet who is listed. And yeah, those “two strikes” that you note against Ammons are the same in my mind, despite my having fallen in love with his work—yes, you’re right about his words that I copied above: and, just to be extra fair to Ammons, I’m purposely quoting statements that are slightly controversial, from a personal letter which he chose not to send, because I presumed that they would spark a reaction in myself and thus make the blog more interesting (I feel a little guilty about this underhanded scheme of mine, which is why I’m admitting it now and blushing)…
And regarding A’s idea “You shuffle two decks of cards together and then nobody knows how to play.”----ever since I posted the entry, I’ve been wondering about this more; and although I still don’t feel that I’m entirely in agreement with him, I think I am a little closer to understanding his point—right now I make sense of it like so: it’s as if you were to play an old country & western song, and then play a scene from a 70’s masterpiece film, and then recite a sonnet by Shakespeare, and then show a clip of a joke being told by a stand-up comedian, and then quote a novel like Bleak House, and then quote another novel like… ah, I was gonna list one of those postmodern antinovels, but I don’t know which ones you’d be familiar with (my own knowledge of them is hit-or-miss, so I’m following the golden rule here in leaving off)—anyway, the idea is that although each of these individual excerpts from different art forms might be excellent on its own, it probably shines brighter when compared to examples from its own genre or medium than when placed next to such disparate fragments.
The tension between this view and my own first instinct comes from the fact that I myself love the chaos and confusion that result from such outlandish juxtapositions—I am thrilled by this ground-shift; but I’m not insensitive to the idea that it’s maybe wiser to concentrate on one format at a time; and, when I look at the way that I spend my time with art, I realize that I tend to follow A’s idea instinctively: I’ll read a novel, and then I’ll talk about similar novels and compare and contrast; and when I listen to rap music, I tend not to stop and read a Kafka parable between tracks: instead I finish the album, and maybe move on to another rap album until my rap craving is satisfied… then I’ll watch a movie, and some other audiovisual artwork etc. So I believe that I can see the dilemma from both sides, now. (Tho admittedly I am almost ALWAYS wrong!!) ...My problem is that I’m just as thrilled by the construction of a new tower of Babel as I am with the confusion that results when the old tower topples. I assume that James Joyce, for one, would side with Ammons, because Joyce has a LOT invested in his audience’s understanding the grand tradition of literature. I put forward that last thought, because I suspect that my own stance might be immature; and I’m really MOST interested in what’s best for the improvement of humanity. (I hope this makes some bit of sense—I’m writing fast, and throwing ideas out casually, the way I’d do if we were just shooting the breeze to pass the time.)
(2/2) And I wanna underline that my opinion matches your own, with regard to W.B. Yeats: Ammons is plain wrong. Yeats is a god. But it doesn’t bother me that one favorite poet misjudges another favorite poet—I’ve noticed that this happens more often than not, amid the members of my own pantheon. I always remember how strangely Samuel Johnson misjudged Milton’s “Lycidas”—it’s comforting, in a way, to realize that nobody possesses perfect perception absolutely incessantly. There’s that saying: even Homer nods. …I’m only now feeling a little bad for tainting your view of Ammons before you got a chance to encounter him fairly: so again I stress that these ugly remarks I cited are from a letter that he never mailed, perhaps because he read his words over and disagreed with them as much as we do now! --and the most important thing is the strength of his poetry itself. The words, the composition, the work should be able to stand alone. My idol Whitman blundered out ridiculous, embarrassing remarks here & there in his older age—yet none of this changes the FACT of the mental accomplishment of “Song of Myself”. …I’ll try to quote some actual POETRY from Ammons in future entries, to redress my crime! Let me just state for the record that I love the thin volume simply titled Selected Longer Poems, especially the one called “Essay on Poetics”. (Whew, just listing that name makes me feel a lot better… the burden dropped from off my back…)
When you mention what Hemingway said about “Pound and Stein”—I’m assuming you mean Gertrude Stein: her Tender Buttons is one of my holy scriptures: I’m in awe of that work… I haven’t read extremely deeply in the rest of her writings, but I’ve tackled an experimental novel over here and a hard-to-label writing over there, and I adore her when the work “works”, and I shrug & wave it off when her work doesn’t “work”… but I’m as clueless about Pound as you say that you are about Beckett/Stevens—I’ve read nothing more than a couple translations that Pound made of other poets’ poems; I remain clueless about his poetry and his essays! To be honest, I used to own a copy of his Cantos (I don’t know what happened to it; now I can’t find it) and I browsed around in them lightly, but not enough to call my skimming READING: I really need to sit down with his work seriously if I’m going to claim to have given it a chance.
Yet those works of Beckett’s that I listed in the main post above – I bow to them. I agree with one critic (pardon the following paraphrase from memory) who said that the very best modern English writing was Beckett’s translations of his own work from his own original French (in case you don’t know, he composed a number of the aforesaid texts in French, presumably to escape the influence of Joyce the Master, and then rendered them into English himself—but this fact alone would only be shallowly amusing and of interest to none but craftsmen, if the imaginative quality and aesthetic dignity of his texts were not so clearly GENIUS as they are)…
And Wallace Stevens – I’m a believer: I feel that I need to stop myself even before starting, lest I go on forever in praise of him. The name of my favorite short poem of all is also the title of the most excellent selection of his poetry: The Palm at the End of the Mind. Again I triple-stress that I’m not trying to sell you on any of these makers: I only list a favorite or two when you claim the name is new, in case you end up checking them out—I just want save you from diving into a bad part of their oeuvre.
There’s so much FINE writing out there, I don’t see how anyone could catch up let alone keep up with it all. I have so many holes of ignorance in my very porous knowledge that it’s more sensible to speak of holes of knowledge in my nearly rock-solid ignorance.
…So I’m overjoyed that our respective oceans are transparently displaying the contents of their life aquatic!
You have convinced me not to jump to any unwarranted conclusions about Ammons. I will keep him, along with Stevens, Beckett, Ashbery & all your other fine suggestions at the top of my to-reead list.
I am familiar with that 'Even Homer nods' saying. Horace said that, if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't surprise me that S. Johnson said that about Milton. For all his wisdom, he also nodded quite a bit. Here's what he said about Tristram Shandy: "Nothing odd will do for long. Tristram Shandy did not last."
The Cantos by Pound is a VERY dense and laborious read, but there is a payoff to it, like I said. Lots of brilliant little fragments strewn about it. And I love Tender Buttons too. That's yet ANOTHER book I need to get my hands on again.
I’m so awkward with these online exchanges—I never know when to let the thread naturally dangle; and I get a sense that your last reply would be the perfect ending point, but I have just a couple things that (for some reason) I’m BURNING to say; so, since I always choose the last option in Blake’s proverb “Enough! or Too much” I’ll allow myself to look in my heart and write:
Re: “I will keep [Ammons], along with Stevens, Beckett, Ashbery… at the top of my to-read list” – I just want to stress that I believe BECKETT is the most rewarding name here, especially if you start with his early novel Murphy, or one of his brief plays (Endgame; Krapp’s Last Tape; Waiting for Godot) – and now I repeat my standard disclaimer: I only mention these names specifically because we’re alas mortal and the name of the game is “Save Time for the Best.”
As for “Even Homer nods” being a quote of Horace—you’re absolutely right, and I was stunned about this (not about the fact of your being correct, but about the way I found out): I happen just to have finished the second book of his epistles, and the only work left in the volume that I’m reading is his Ars Poetica (“Epistle to the Pisos” or “The Art of Poetry”), and when I saw your comment here, I flipped casually through the pages of that work, not expecting anything, but my eyes instantly alighted on the line in question—so although the odds were in favor of me striking gold, it still felt like magic that I found it almost instantly, like some kind of miraculous sign:
. . . et idem
indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus,
verum operi longo fas est obrepere somnum.
Strictly out of curiosity, I typed the above into an online auto-translator and got this:
. . . and the same thing I resent that sometimes even the good Homer nods, but over a long work it is allowable, to sleep.
Also, just for the record, the book that I’m holding in my living hand at this moment, which features the original Latin on every left page facing a literal translation on the right, offers this translation:
And yet I also feel aggrieved, whenever good Homer "nods," but when a work is long, a drowsy mood may well creep over it.
Yes and to me Samuel Johnson is a hero, a towering giant; and it’s only the rarest exception that his judgment feels erroneous, especially when I consider his writings on Shakespeare, which are beyond helpful. And even his puzzling opinions on Milton’s “Lycidas” are, in a way, enlightening, because they point out the poem’s idiosyncratic treasures, albeit in inverse (“I found some trash over here,” Johnson announces, and we see that it is a gem)… But it’s remarkable that you and I, in our very first attempt, highlighted his two most notorious noddings (for, if there are others of this caliber, they are slipping my mind right now)!
I'm glad you recommend Beckett because he's the one I was thinking of first. Thank you! re: Ars Poetica. I can't say enough about it. Just your mentioning it makes me wanna read it again. However, same could be said for his Satires, Odes and Epistles. I never tire of Horace. And btw, I'm really digging Juvenal. About halfway done now.
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