Haven’t been paying much attention to things online because there has been a lot going on offline. Carole left for Pictoplasma in Berlin today and will be gone a week. I’m only a month away from leaving for Vietnam and I’ll be gone six weeks. And the weather has been (slowly) improving, so there have been more dog walks and even a bit of time out on the deck, which faces south, enjoying the spring sun, though the air is still pretty cold and there are no leaves on the trees. Still a few patches of snow in the hollows, but the last of the ice has melted off the river. I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, as well as some things about Modernism, so I think I’ll have some notes to post here and at The Plumbline before long.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Travel Plans
Got my visa for Vietnam yesterday — A big gaudy sticker that takes up a whole page in my passport. The embassy very efficiently turned my application around in three days, so here’s three cheers for the socialist bureaucracy! I’m not leaving for a month yet, but wanted to get this bit of paperwork out of the way — it’s the last little detail I needed to take care of before traveling and also is symbolic, marking the fact that, after eight years, I’m really going back to Hanoi, my favorite city in the world. It’s not a “great capital” like London or Paris (I’ve been to both), but it is an intensely human city, a city in which one can walk (and walk safely) just about anywhere. And yet the customs and structures of reality in Vietnam are sufficiently strange for an American that they induce various forms of heightened consciousness, ranging from the sublime to the intensely irritating.
I’ve only been studying my Vietnamese language in a desultory fashion, alas. I think I’ll be in pretty good shape when I actually get there. My Vietnamese was rough but serviceable when I lived in VN before and I have a better sense of the grammar now than I did then. I’m really hoping this trip will jump start my language learning, that I’ll continue over the next year, and then be able to return the following year. Knowing even a little of the language makes a big difference to how one is received, not that the Vietnamese are anything but hospitable. Anyway, I have a few more weeks with my Rosetta Stone and audio tapes.
John Banville on Writing
“Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence.” [The rest of Banville's short statement is here.] While I don’t subscribe to the young Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language, in which every proposition is a picture of reality, as a writer, I have the strong sense that every sentence is a line thrown out into the world in order to retreive something of the real. Sometimes you catch something, sometimes you don’t. But that metaphor doesn’t quite catch it either; the sentence — as opposed to the fragment, which is always self-referenmtial — the sentence tries and fails. It is the pattern of those trials and errors that give us what access we have to the real.
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Note: Cross-posted to The Plumbline School.
Teaching the Political Poem
I’m going to be teaching a workshop on the political poem at the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program this summer. As I prepare, I’ve become aware of a presumption in my own thinking that a radical poetics equals a radical politics, but this is clearly not the case. Teasing out the relationship between poetics and politics is not nearly so simple as one might wish. To be honest, I’ve often thought of the New Formalists as a group of conservative poets, with the word conservative covering both their poetics and their politics, but that’s not a fair assessment of the range of political positions espoused by members of the group. Conversely, I’ve pretty often thought of the Language poets and their progeny as leftists and I think most of them are, but there is no necessary connection between the poetics of this group and their liberal or radical politics.
Twenty Books: How’s that for Hybrid?
Ron Silliman has been doing top-twenty lists, like this one from Javier Huerta of “top twenty books that made you fall in love with poetry.” Here is my list. I’ve intentionally limited myself to books from the first twenty years or so of my writing life. Maybe I’ll do the latter-day books in a subsequent post. I’d love to see others’ lists, either in comments or via a link.
- The Waste Land and other Poems — T.S. Eliot. [Especially the ironies of "Prufrock."]
- Highway 61 Revisited — Bob Dylan [Not a book of poems, but "Desolation Row" remains one of the great poems of Late Modernism.]
- From Confucius to Cummings — Ezra Pound, editor
- The Mentor book of Major American Poets — Oscar Williams
- 50 Poems — e.e. cummings
- The Stranger — Albert Camus [Not a book of poems, obviously, but very important to me in high school when I was breaking away from my parents' religion.]
- Ariel — Sylvia Plath
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman [More as symbol than as substance until I was in my 30s. I carried around an edition bound in cheap and crumbling red leather that I bought in high school, until I finally read the thing fifteen years later.]
- Selected Poems – W.H. Auden [This was an early Faber volume I no longer have.]
- A Coney Island of the Mind — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- How Does a Poem Mean? — John Ciardi [I first found a few of the Child Ballads in this book. I also got my basic understanding of poetic devices here.]
- Words for the Wind — Theodore Roethke
- Howl — Allen Ginsberg
- The Fall of America — Allen Ginsberg [Recommended by Ronald Johnson when he was briefly my teacher at the UW.]
- Selected Poems – William Carlos Williams [Especially "To Daphne and Virginia" and "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower," and "Burning the Christmas Greens."]
- Life Studies — Robert Lowell
- 77 Dream Songs — John Berryman
- Astral Weeks — Van Morrison
- Two Citizens — James Wright [From what I've heard, Wright's least favorite of his books.]
- Selected Poems (Ecco 1980) — Czeslaw Milosz [Maybe just one poem, "Ars Poetica.] ABC of Reading — Ezra Pound