Monthly Archives: May 2010
Another Dream About The Old House
Just before waking this morning, I dreamed I had moved back into the old house and furnished my childhood room with the turret as a studio. My first creative writing teacher Tom Brush was there and suggested that I rent the place out when I wasn’t in residence — apparently I still had a teaching job and would only be in Santa Cruz part of the year. I was saying I’d want to be very exclusive and limit the rentals to people I knew and trusted. I could tell Tom was a little envious. This is another dream about repossessing my childhood, I think.
Summer Course: Modern American Poetry
I’m getting ready to teach an online course, Modern American Poetry. The course requires junior standing and at least one previous literature class, but it is open to all majors. That is, I think I can expect a certain amount of reading savvy and engagement with the material, but not a lot of background in poetry as such, especially modern poetry. The last time I taught the class, in the flesh, as it were, I used Cary Nelson’s fat and inclusive anthology, which I like — it also has a good web-based supplement that includes critical statements about the poets, which I use as a way of getting students to enter into a “conversation” or on-going argument about a particular writer or text. But I had fourteen weeks during the regular semester, with class seventy-five minute class meetings twice a week. With the summer course, I can go as long as ten weeks, but students usually prefer a more compressed schedule in the summer, so I’m going to schedule eight weeks, with a couple of weeks of non-required start-up time during which the site will be live and I’ll be posting some general thoughts; students can also of course use this time to get going on the reading, which will not be voluminous, but will require close attention. So I’m going to abandon the Nelson anthology for the two, much more conservative, anthologies edited by Joel Conarroe, Six American Poets and Eight American Poets. Rather than assign a text about poetry — I like Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem — I will link to online resources and create a few pdf files of commentary for students.
Conarroe’s six poets are Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Frost, and Hughes. I will put all six on the syllabus; his eight are Bishop, Merrill, Plath, Ginsberg, Roethke, Berryman, Sexton, and Lowell. Of these, I will drop Sexton, who wrote very few good poems, I think, and Merrill, to whom I’ve never warmed, whatever virtues he possesses. And then I’ll add Eliot’s “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” — he was born in St. Louis, after all. Along the way, I’ll try to link to less mainstream poets as a supplement. For instance, I’ll use Hughes to link to a bunch of good online material about the Harlem Renaissance. I’ll expect about as much reading and writing from students each week as I would expect in a week & a half (three class meetings) during the regular semester.
Week 1: What is Modernism & what do we mean by “modern”?
Week 2: Dickinson & Whitman as the inventors of American modernism.
Week 3: Stevens & Eliot
Week 4: Williams & Frost
Week 5: Hughes & the Harlem Ren
Week 6: Bishop & Lowell
Week 7: Plath & Berryman
Week 8: Some contemporary poems / the reaction against the personal
Girl, Interrupted
Notes on Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. I ignored this when it came out a few years ago, consigning it to the category of Chick Lit. That was a mistake. The memoir focuses on the year and a half during the late 1960s that Kayman spent as a patient at McLean Hospital. She was eighteen when she went in and twenty when she came out, “stabilized” but skeptical of conventional wisdom, a trait that makers her a good writer. There isn’t a wasted word in the 168 pages of text. The portraits of her fellow patients — other adolescent girls — are moving and funny, but not sentimental. Kaysen refers in passing to some of the famous people who have passed through McLean — James Taylor, Robert Lowell* — establishing the class affiliation of the patients. She points out that you don’t get to stay there unless someone keeps paying the bill each month.
When the teen-aged Kayson refuses to consider going to college despite her obvious intelligence and verbal gifts, I found myself reacting with incomprehension until I realized that this was the most radical form of rebellion a young person of her class could engage in, whereas, where I came from, going to college was very often considered a kind of betrayal of one’s family. Remember Huck’s father berating him for going to school? Something like that. Going to college, I aspired to transcend my class; Kaysen does the same thing by “attending” McLean Hospital.
Kaysen’s personal recollections are for the most part objective, with a minimum of interpretation, so that when she does reach for the larger meaning of her madness her observations are grounded in direct experience; furthermore, she rejects easy conceptualization at every turn, refusing to create meaning where she does not see it. This gives the book an unsettling quality that emerges from this rhetoric of negation and refusal. The effect on the reader is a sense of the author’s integrity. Girl, Interrupted presents a fragment of the 1960s. From her genteel madhouse, the young Kaysen looks out on the assassinations, riots, the hippies & the Yippies, the Vietnam War & Watergate. These details are sketched sparingly, like the distant city in a Renaissance landscape, but they serve to establish both the cultural and personal context for the story.
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*She might also have mentioned Alice James, sister of Henry & William — and perhaps William himself, the records are missing and there is only circumstantial evidence.
Series of Dreams
The soundtrack for this post is Dylan’s “Series of Dreams.” Dreams are out of fashion in psychiatry these days, but I’m still a Freudian at heart and I pay attention to my dreams when I remember them. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” writes Yeats, quoting “an old play,” a sentiment then echoed by Delmore Schwartz in what is probably his single most successful piece of writing, unless you figure that he “wrote” Saul Bellow’s Humbolt’s Gift. Talk about intertextuality!
First dream: I’m an adult in my childhood home, having returned to live there with C. We have our usual crew of scruffy, noisy dogs with us and we’ve settled in — been in residence maybe two or three days. The house is a big Victorian affair with a balcony and a turret & a sweeping sun porch, etc. C & I are standing on the porch when an older woman, elegantly dressed, with an upswept gray coif, approaches across the driveway. 
She’s a neighbor & is leading a little schnauzer — as elegant as she is — on a lead. As she comes up to us, our terriers start barking & leaping around. The woman begins to greet us, but is clearly bothered by our unkempt, delinquent dogs. She raises her eyebrows, throws her head back nose-in-the-air style, & says, “Completely lacking in class & breeding.” Up to this point I’ve just been interested in meeting this neighbor, but at this point in the dream I become enraged & begin shouting at her to “Get off my property, get off my god damned property! ”
Second Dream: I’m in Ho Chi Minh City, except that it is located where Ottawa ought to be; that is, close to where I actually live. I’m with some other people who have never been there before & I am explaining how to get around, where to go. It is the day before I have to leave for home & I am saying to one of the people I’m with, “It always breaks my heart to have to leave this place. I breaks my heart.” Then I’m by myself in a part of town I’m not familiar with and I stop at a food stall to order bun cha (grilled pork & noodles), but either because of my poor Vietnamese or the perversity of stall owner, along with the pork and noodles I receive a grilled songbird and a frog. I decide to eat the pork but not the two more exotic offerings.
I see both these dreams as taking control dreams. One of the main themes of my dream life over the years has been loss of control — lost in big cities, cars that won’t steer correctly or in which the brakes don’t work, elevators that go sideways, buildings that double back on themselves just when you think you’re getting to the exit, etc. In the first dream here, I return to the scene of my childhood anguish and helplessness, move in, and defend my turf against the sort of people my parents desperately wanted to be. I woke from that one feeling proud of myself. In the second dream, set in HCMC, not Hanoi, which is my “home town” in Vietnam, I’m getting along well despite some uncertainty. The business with the food suggests to me that I don’t have to accept every aspect of Vietnamese culture & that I can love the place without having to embrace everything about it. (I actually have been served whole grilled songbirds in HCMC, but never frogs.)
And speaking of dreams & Freud & all that, I love this response by Phillip Levine to his then teacher Robert Lowell, who had complained about Levine’s use of Freud, accusing him of lifting it from Auden. “Mr. Lowell,” Levine said, “I’m Jewish. I steal Freud directly from Freud; he was one of ours.” Well, I’m not Jewish, but I found Freud early and under the influence of my teacher Larry Frank made him my own. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and its Discontents — these have been maps to the world for me over the decades. Freud has been, in Lowell’s own words, one of my “Masters of Joy.”