James Tate's "The List of Famous Hats" (Commonplace Book)

Very much along the lines of Ron Padgett, James Tate is a very funny poet. I thought I would try out the new technology and make this commonplace book entry a reading of his "List of Famous Hats," a prose poem of one paragraph. If you want more James Tate, I highly recommend his "Selected Poems" where you will find this poem, and many more like it.

Ron Padgett's Mortal Combat (Commonplace Book)

You can't tell yourself not to think
of the English muffin because that's what
you just did, and now the idea
of the English muffin has moved
to your salivary glands and caused
a ruckus. But I am more powerful
than you, salivary glands, stronger
than you, idea, and able to leap
over you, thoughts that keep coming
like an invading army trying to pull
me away from who I am. I am
a squinty old fool stooped over
his keyboard having an anxiety attack
over an English muffin! And
that's the way I like it.

The Poetry of Ron Padgett

When I started this blog I intended to discuss poetry more, but the poetry posts are few and far between, in part because other kinds of posts are, for obvious reasons, more popular. Nevertheless, a few words about Ron Padgett.

Ron Padgett represents a small but I think important shift in taste for me. He is a poet I was introduced to back when my undergraduate interest was shifting from philosophy to literature. I was entertained by him in part because my roommates, very much into a silly kind of surrealism, liked him so much. Here is his poem "Haiku" and "Nothing in that Drawer," which I put up on the blog a year and a half ago. Here is his poem "You Never Know":

1) What might happen.
2) How people will behave.
3) Oh anything.

Three rules that live
in the house next door.

Along comes the big bad philosopher,
and at their door
he hurls the mighty bolts
of lightning
from his brain.

The door is unimpressed.
Behind it the rules
are chuckling.

I witness this scene
through the kitchen curtains
as I rinse the dishes.

As I went deeper into literature my taste "matured" to more "serious" things like Beckett and Joyce, and when I began to focus on poetry it was the canon of great poets. Ashbery became one of my favorites in part because he had the silliness of Padgett on occasion, but was also authorized by Bloom as the inheritor of Stevens et al. Done with grad school, and having written a book on poetry, I have returned to Padgett in the last few months -- specifically his books Tulsa Kid, Great Balls of Fire, The Big Something, You Never Know, and his new one, and my favorite one, How to be Perfect.

Even the titles of these books sort of sing. Padgett is the master of a kind of charming, goofy-direct, freshness. He is surreal, but never "difficult" the way Ashbery, Carson, or even Mark Strand can be. Ashbery is a great poet, but Ashbery is also a great poet to write an essay on. I would feel faintly silly writing a serious academic essay on Padgett, maybe. But now that I am no longer required to write such self-serious essays, I find Padgett is a poet I really enjoy in a pure non-academic way. It is for this reason I say -- if you do not really read poetry, go get How to Be Perfect. Not because it is a major work of American Literature (though I suppose it might be) but because it is FUN TO READ.

I will put up the first poem in the book tomorrow, as the commonplace book entry.

Russell Edson’s “The Parental Decision”

One of Blake’s best poems is “The Mental Traveller.” A close reading of the thing here is beyond our scope, but essentially it is a terrifying, hallucinogenic vision of the cycle of history in the fallen natural world – a cycle we must escape if we are truly to be free. It only has a few archetypical characters that morph in a cycle. Here are some representative lines.


And if the babe is born a Boy
He’s given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock
Catches his Shrieks in Cups of gold


She binds iron thorns around his head
She pierces both his hands & feet
She cuts his heart out at his side
To make him feel both cold & heat

Her fingers number every Nerve
Just as a Miser counts his gold
She lives upon his shrieks & cries
And She grows young as he grows old


Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright…

[In the end, the poem cycles back to the beginning –]

Till he becomes a wayward Babe
And she a weeping Woman Old
She nails him down upon the Rock
And all is done as I have told

Russell Edson’s weird little poem “The Parental Decision” takes Blake’s visionary allegory of world history and wrecks it by translating it into the mundane day-to-day world of household decisions. Here is the whole poem.

A man splits into two who are an old woman and an old man.
They must be his parents. But where is the man? Perhaps he gave his life for them …
I ask the old couple if they’ve seen their son.
The old woman says, we’ve decided not to have any children.

If modern poems seem weird and impossible to understand, it is often the case that you are just missing another text that the poem you are reading is thinking of.

The Overflow of Powerful Feelings

Years ago I read an essay on poetry by Penelope Laurans called "'Old Correspondences': Prosodic Transformations." It contains this passage "Indeed, it seems to me that [Elizabeth] Bishop exercises her technical proficiency to cut her poetry off from that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling' so immediately central to the Romantic imagination. Frequently it is this quality of restraint that keeps the poetry from sentimental excess and gives it its elegantly muted modernest quality." She has made a kind of dreadful mistake here in using that quotation. I freaked out about it in class, but have not though about it for years.

This week I was reading Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty Three of the World's Best Poems (You, or at least I, have to admire how she got her name in the subtitle). Now Camille Paglia, for the most part, is a critic I really like, someone who, like Bloom, writes about poetry in such a way as to actually make people feel it is important and exciting, as it should be. But she makes that same damn mistake when she writes "Wordsworth called poetry 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. The new Romantic values were immediacy and emotional truth, replacing the cooler, more formal standards of Neoclassicism, such as symmetry, perfection, and control."

The mistake in both cases is that they have truncated the Wordsworth quote to make it say something very close to the opposite of what it says in context. What Wordsworth actually wrote was this: "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." That last phrase is kinda important, since both Laurans and Paglia use the truncated quotation to demonstrate an opposition between Romantic poetry (sentimental excess, immediacy and emotional truth) and something else (technical proficiency, restraint, cool, symmetrical, perfect and in control) -- when it is clear from the full quote that Wordsworth thinks Romantic poetry contains that something else. If anyone ever wondered (though I am sure no one did) why Bloom says that Modernism and Post-Modernism are just Late-Romanticism, this is at least one reason why.

Wallace Stevens Reading "The Snow Man" (Commonplace Book)

[I found this on Stephen Frug's blog, but I wanted to post it myself and make a brief comment.]

Here is one of my indispensable poets reading one of his indispensable poems -- on youtube no less. The video is at best pointless and at worst distracting and painfully literal, so look away from the screen, or close your eyes, and just listen. It is an interesting experience, but not as good as reading the poem yourself, I think.

There is an assumption that there is something valuable in hearing poets read their own work. I disagree, at least as far as most of the poets I have heard read. I think, generally, poets are terrible readers of their own poems. (Ashbery is an exception here -- T.S. Eliot is not). This is not as surprising as it sounds, as we would not, for example, expect a screenwriter who was not also an actor to do a very good job reading parts of his own script. I recommend we treat poetry the same way. Let's find actors to read these things aloud -- college actors for instance -- and let the poets get back to doing what they do best: writing poetry.

[How embarrassing is it that I now embed youtube clips because I am excited to have "cracked the technology" of embedding? I am such a Luddite.]

From a Letter of John Keats's [negative capability] (Commonplace Book)

Henry Jenkins wrote one of those essays that make me nuts.* Pirates 3 is just no fun. No theoretical machinery is going to begin to justify even a single one of its egregious mistakes, such as the one pointed out by Fraction in the comments to yesterday's post, that Chow Yun Fat fails to kick any ass as a pirate.

In the essay Jenkins writes "The secondary characters [in Pirates 3] rely heavily on what my former student Geoffrey Long likes to describe as negative capability -- they are well enough defined that we can imagine who they are, what they want, and why they are doing what they are doing, but much remains for the audience to flesh out from their own imaginations."

Does he really think I should be satisfied with my imagining Chow Yun Fat kicking ass as a pirate? To quote the fellow audience member who responds to Lisa Simpson's gushing "you have to listen to the notes she's not playing" -- "I can do that at home." And for free I might add.

I am unclear from that quote if Jenkins knows his former student is cribbing from the poet John Keats. But we know he is, so lets take a look at the best prose thing Keats's wrote, in a letter of 1817:

"At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason -- Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium [innermost and most secret part of a temple] of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."

If you, as they guy in charge of Pirates 3, fail to provide the pure spectacle of Chow Yun Fat kicking pirate ass -- Beauty in its purist form -- then you do not get to claim, or have someone claim for you, John-fucking-Keats as a patron of your film's junky stupid badness.

[Apparently when I said in yesterday's comments that I was going to let the whole Pirates 3 thing go, I was not telling the truth. But NOW I am letting it go.]

*[thanks for the link Mikey: you inspired today's post].

From Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled (Commonplace Book)

The way poetry was taught in school reminded W.H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A.E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:

Teacher 1:
Oh, cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice

Teacher 2:
State the alternative preferred
With reasons for you choice.

From William Butler Yeats's Vacillation (Commonplace Book)

These lines capture a feeling I get occasionally, and I am sure everyone gets. Next time you are in this mood you can remember these lines; I like particularly the way he is in a good mood for no reason, just sitting down somewhere, and he specifies the short time the mood lasts for (the word "blessed" should be pronounced with two syllables):

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

From W.H. Auden's "The Cave of Making" (Commonplace Book)

I wanted to quote today from a poem that exemplifies what I like most and least about Auden. Here is Auden with a wonderful statement about poetry:

After all, it's rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background-noise for study
or hung as status-trophy by rising executives,
cannot be "done" like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored.

That is lovely, and true, and makes me proud to be a person who cares about poetry. But for Auden, pride is always a sin, and so the poem ends like this:

God may reduce you

on Judgement Day

to tears of shame,

reciting by heart

the poems you would

have written, had

your life been good.

(The computer is making it hard to format this correctly but you get the idea). It is beautifully put, but the idea that poetry would be better if poets were better human beings seems to me to be not such a good observation. Ego-maniacs write great poems -- and comic books and television -- and I do not think their poetry would be better if they spent more time loving their neighbor and loving God, which Auden says are the only important things in life, unlike poetry, which he calls frivolous.

From John Ashbery's "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (Commonplace Book)

Just a quick commonplace entry today, from John Ashbery's "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror". I wanted to quote it this week since we have been talking about aesthetics and I have been defending my enjoyment of the more superficial aspects of Grant Morrison's New X-Men, such as the clothes. Here are a few lines from one of the most important poems by one of the most important poets of the century:

But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
...

There are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core...

From W.H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand (Commonplace Book)

In my post on New X-Men 121 I wrote "Everyone looks like fashion models again, and the aims of the manifesto come rushing back. The Beak and Angel are not around to mess with the aesthetic integrity of this issue. " That is not a very nice thing to say. The fact that I side with the uber-cool, uber-sexy and against the "freaks" like Beak and Angel does not make me look like a good guy. Even worse: this is an X-Men book, in which the "freaks" are a long-established metaphor for the nerds and high-school outcasts. As it stands, I end up looking like I am rooting for a world in which football players and cheerleaders are the only high school students visible and everyone who reads or has acne is shoved in a dark corner and forgotten about. Even worse, I myself was an outcast bookworm as a teenager, so I come of as self-loathing. And all I wanted to do was appreciate good comics.

To make a clear statement where I stand on this I have selected W.H. Auden for a commonplace book quote today, from the Dyer's Hand. Replace "poem" with "X-Men comic book" as you read:

A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the mentally and physically unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave caste kept out of sight in cellars.

Long story short: a good comic book is not a model of a good society. My comments on this blog are about good comics, not good social principles. I am interested in aesthetics first, which is why I blog on Grant Morrison and John Ashbery and not president Bush; philosophy, theory, politics, psychology, and the rest, come second.

From Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner (Commonplace Book)

What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock 'n' roll. But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.

From Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (Commonplace Book)

Who knows how many suffering, crippled, fragmentary forms of life there are, such as the artificially created life of chests and tables quickly nailed together, crucified timbers, silent martyrs to cruel human inventiveness. The terrible transplantation of incompatible and hostile races of wood, their merging into one misbegotten personality. How much ancient suffering is there in the varnished grain, in the veins and knots of our old familiar wardrobes? Who would recognize in them the old features, smiles, and glances, almost polished out of recognition.

From James Merrill's "Oranges" (Commonplace Book)

Segment by segment, nonetheless a mind
Made up of taste and sunlight. May the blind
Gods who drink its juice be satisfied,
Disposing gently of the empty rind.

What I like about those lines is the way the first sentence is so sweet, then in the same line it goes suddenly dark. They admit a very dark evil, but also just hope evil will unintentionally nice, since perhaps we are too small to care about. I also like how "blind Gods" is split across two lines; the appearance of the word "Gods" is more surprising, and, because it is at the beginning of the line, it is capitalized, making whether these are "gods" or "Gods" ambiguous.

From John Ashbery's "Soonest Mended" (Commonplace Book)

Don't worry about the meaning of this passage at first. Just read it out loud a few times and listen for the rhythms, and the vowels, and the subtle shifts in tone. It seems quite goofy (brushing teeth?), and then the last four lines punch through your defenses making you feel sentimental and hopeful and sad without having any idea what was just said.

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing
Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made -- well, in a sense, "good citizens" of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept
The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

John Ashbery Titles (Commonplace Book)

John Ashbery can title a poem like no man's business. I thought I would list a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

When I Saw the Invidious Flare
Novelty Love Trot
Flow Chart
Girls on the Run
As One Put Drunk into the Packet Boat
The One thing That Can Save America
Finnish Rhapsody
Unreleased Movie
Letters I Did or Did Not Get
And Some Were Playing Cards, and Some were Playing Dice
But What is the Reader to Make of This?
Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran
Purists Will Object
37 Haiku
Proust's Questionarie
Whatever it is, Wherever You Are
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
The Variorum Edition
Theme Park Days
View of Delft
As Umbrellas Follow Rain
Oh Evenings
Get me Rewrite
Redeemed Area
They Don't Just Go Away, Either
Amnesia Goes to the Ball
Poem on Several Occasions
Your Name Here

From Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (Commonplace Book)

Only Felix Deutsch accompanied Freud, and he did not stay through the operation; it was as though by treating the matter as a bagatelle he could wish away Freud's cancer. But something went terribly wrong on the operating table; Freud bled heavily both during and after the procedure and was made to lie down on a cot "in a tiny room in a ward of the hospital since no other room was available." His only company was another patient, whom Anna Freud later described as a "nice, friendly" retarded dwarf.

The dwarf, in fact, may well have saved Freud's life. Martha and Anna Freud had been asked to bring some necessities to the hospital, since Freud might have to spend the night. At lunchtime, no visitors were allowed in the ward, and they were sent home with the assurance that his condition was satisfactory. But when they came back in the early afternoon they discovered that in their absence he had suffered at attack of copious bleeding. He had wrung for help, but the bell was out of order, so Freud, who was unable to make himself heard, was helpless. Fortunately, the dwarf rushed out to get the nurse, and with some difficulty the bleeding was brought under control.

[What knocks me out about this true story is the combination of how much it sounds like a David Lynch episode and how much of Lynch Freud unlocks: for example, Freud would immediately understand the famously unnerving Blue Velvet scene where Kyle MacLachlan hides in the closet and watches Denis Hopper breath Nitrous Oxide from a canister while saying angrily "Don't look at me" and stuffing Isabella Rossillini's mouth with velvet -- it is a child's limited attempt to grasp what he has seen after he walks in on his parents having sex ("why was daddy breathing like that? why was he saying those things? why was mommy's voice muffled?"). I am sure Lynch's famous dwarfs do not come from this story, but it is an interesting idea nevertheless.]

Nietzsche on Hamlet (Commonplace Book)

The Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get round to action. Not reflection, no -- true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action.

3 random things

A Kurt Vonnegut quote:

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe."


Etymology

“Basket-case” was an expression used by World War One nurses to refer to those patients who had their legs and arms blown off by shells – they were the patients who had to be carried in baskets around the hospital. Today we use the expression to mean someone who cannot handle themselves emotionally, but it originally derives from a person who could not handle themselves physically. Even though it developed in this century virtually no one knows that the word’s history is quite gruesome. I have not used it since looking it up in the Oxford English Dictionary.


Spell Check Lit Crit

Years ago I was writing a paper on Moby Dick and the computer’s spell check did not recognize the name of the main character, Ishmael. The computer’s only suggestion was “Fishmeal,” which is ironic since Ishmael is one of the only characters in the book who does NOT end up as fishmeal.