Reading: Power and Wealth, Orville Schell SS "rugs" (Lydia Davis) and American poetry Edmunson (Harpers) WS Merwin
People keep asking me what I am reading. Difficult question. Power and Wealth by Orville Schell, when I get a chance... highly intelligent, but requires rapt attention, and I have not gotten beyond the first two chapters which I heard before listening to him talking about the book and its inception, at WAFC, SF. I am reading articles on Korean Buddhism, for my lecture course, namely those on the "Pensive Buddah".
I read a short story in Harpers magazine, which I really liked: by Lydia Davis, who won the 2012 Man Booker International Prize. I do not know her work, but Farrar Straus and Giroux is publishing "Can' and Won't" which sounds intriguing in 2014 The title is "The Two Davises and the Rug". I just love its illogical logic, and how it shows the mind in activity in interactive with identity and relationship. As I have a "rug culture" period, especially in Istanbul, and on my Fulbright in Central Asia, and Azerbaijan with the Soros Foundation in Georgia(rep of), I also love the "rug" as trope, or object...though it sounds SW Indian, which is fine, as I spent considerable time with these...and my museum copy handmade in the hills near Taos is in the Fine Arts Museum in Tblisi, my gift to the curator upon departure...it says something that I brought it with me!
I read with special attention, "Poetry Slam" an essay by Mark Edmondson who is at UVA, about the "decline of American verse". He is very fixed on Robert Lowell as the barometer for meaning in this century. He has to say, about Seamus Heaney who just ranked a front page NYT obituary and passed away, creating sadness in the heart of those who ever heard him read. I heard him in an intimate reading, perhaps, the Academy of Poetry, at the NY Public Library in the Rare book room, where he read poems from a new edition, of poems, which had evolved from him looking about his library and fixing on objects, and spinning a poem about, or because of musing on them. Highly readable he is one of the most read poets, likened to WB Yeats, though I don't know if I would carry the comparison that far. He further proved himself by translating Beowulf, again! Edmunson says, which he may regret: "Seamus Heaney (American, as it were, by mutual adoption) sounds only like Seamus Heaney: (me: isn't that why we love poets; they are distinctly themselves and not someone else) He then quotes: I can feel the tug.of the halter at the nape/of her neck, the wind/on her naked front./It blows her nipples/to amber beads,/it shakes the frail rigging/of her ribs.?. Why does he choose those particular lines out of all of Heaney's oeuvre; they are not really representative, but could be to be moreso indicative of Robert Haas who seems obsessed with young women's bodies . Edmundson continues: "The lines have an Anglo Saxon earthiness, they're rugged and raw: his every word, a friend of mine once remarked, sounds like a verb. You could not listen to more than four lines of Ashbery or Heaney or Anne Carson or Jorie Graham (about whom more later) and not sense who was knocking at the door. But poetry is about more than voice. " I do not feeling like being discursive about this right now...but as any writer who writes; we not only learn more about that about which they write, but about the writer.
Edmundson really does a disservice to WS Merwin, with whom he starts his objective of mapping the "decline" of poetry after Robert Lowell. He cites "mainstream poetry" and then quotes Merwin, which is way off the mark. "some time I thought there was time/ and that there would always be time/for what I had a mind to do/and what I could imagine/going back to and finding it/as I had found it the first time/but by this time I do not know/what I thought what I thought/back then..." Edmundson continues, "That's what W.S. Merwin from the December 12, 2011 issue of "the New Yorker". At the close the poet hears a thrush at dawn "singing the new song." A freshness in nature registers as an ironic reproach to the poet's fruitless ruminations. "The New Song" is about the unlived life: chances neglected, deed undone. It also seems to be a poem about how hard it is to write a poem (Going back to "what I had a mind to do" suggests not only deeds undone but poems unwritten.) the lines are melodious, the voice warm and sympathetic -- but there's too little at stake. We're sitting in on a small-time game". He continues: "Most of our poets now speak a deeply internal language not unlike Merwin's. They tend to be oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning. They not only talk to themselves in their poems; they frequently talk to themselves about talking to themselves, as Merwin does here("But by this time I do not know/what I thought when I thought back then.") He provides a counterexample by Lowell, and then again comments on Merwin. "at a time when collective issues - communal issues, political issues -- are pressing, our poets have become ever more private, idiosyncratic, and withdrawn. Their poetry is not heard but overheard, and sometimes is too hermetic even to overhear with anything like comprenehsion."
Edmundson really misses the point, and being an academic, he should at least cite the title of the poem he is extracting lines, from, to prove his own bias. He neglects that the poem from Merwin is about memory. Susan Sontag has written a whole essay on this topic as well as has interpreted French thinkers on memory, which is an inexhaustible well. He is saying the proverbial, "we can not step in the same stream twice ; it has flowed on...but he is also talking about the natural wish to want things as we remember them, and that returning, we may find them different or ourselves to have changed in the way we feel in that moment...so he is saying something more psychologically truthful and profound for which Edmundson does not credit him. He is also talking about the loss of memory, and not knowing now how one felt in another time, as one cannot recall that feeling; in that way he is evoking Proust's whole oeuvre on how a fragrance, a taste, or sentient experience recalls another moment in time...but it has now changed, been transformed by time. It has to do with what circumstances require, how conditions determine events, how so many factors outside ourselves decide events. How the proverbial "timing is all" and "readiness is all" plays into the formula of outcomes. It is also the poets and writers imagination: how to end it. Why do we have alternative endings to stories? It is tedious to argue this further with Edmundson. He is not a poet. W.S. Merwin is a great poet; he could not be other than a poet. His saving of a tree, .. as Emily Dickinson's putting a robin back on the nest, again,-- saving the world for an individual, and perhaps that is all we can do....
I read a short story in Harpers magazine, which I really liked: by Lydia Davis, who won the 2012 Man Booker International Prize. I do not know her work, but Farrar Straus and Giroux is publishing "Can' and Won't" which sounds intriguing in 2014 The title is "The Two Davises and the Rug". I just love its illogical logic, and how it shows the mind in activity in interactive with identity and relationship. As I have a "rug culture" period, especially in Istanbul, and on my Fulbright in Central Asia, and Azerbaijan with the Soros Foundation in Georgia(rep of), I also love the "rug" as trope, or object...though it sounds SW Indian, which is fine, as I spent considerable time with these...and my museum copy handmade in the hills near Taos is in the Fine Arts Museum in Tblisi, my gift to the curator upon departure...it says something that I brought it with me!
I read with special attention, "Poetry Slam" an essay by Mark Edmondson who is at UVA, about the "decline of American verse". He is very fixed on Robert Lowell as the barometer for meaning in this century. He has to say, about Seamus Heaney who just ranked a front page NYT obituary and passed away, creating sadness in the heart of those who ever heard him read. I heard him in an intimate reading, perhaps, the Academy of Poetry, at the NY Public Library in the Rare book room, where he read poems from a new edition, of poems, which had evolved from him looking about his library and fixing on objects, and spinning a poem about, or because of musing on them. Highly readable he is one of the most read poets, likened to WB Yeats, though I don't know if I would carry the comparison that far. He further proved himself by translating Beowulf, again! Edmunson says, which he may regret: "Seamus Heaney (American, as it were, by mutual adoption) sounds only like Seamus Heaney: (me: isn't that why we love poets; they are distinctly themselves and not someone else) He then quotes: I can feel the tug.of the halter at the nape/of her neck, the wind/on her naked front./It blows her nipples/to amber beads,/it shakes the frail rigging/of her ribs.?. Why does he choose those particular lines out of all of Heaney's oeuvre; they are not really representative, but could be to be moreso indicative of Robert Haas who seems obsessed with young women's bodies . Edmundson continues: "The lines have an Anglo Saxon earthiness, they're rugged and raw: his every word, a friend of mine once remarked, sounds like a verb. You could not listen to more than four lines of Ashbery or Heaney or Anne Carson or Jorie Graham (about whom more later) and not sense who was knocking at the door. But poetry is about more than voice. " I do not feeling like being discursive about this right now...but as any writer who writes; we not only learn more about that about which they write, but about the writer.
Edmundson really does a disservice to WS Merwin, with whom he starts his objective of mapping the "decline" of poetry after Robert Lowell. He cites "mainstream poetry" and then quotes Merwin, which is way off the mark. "some time I thought there was time/ and that there would always be time/for what I had a mind to do/and what I could imagine/going back to and finding it/as I had found it the first time/but by this time I do not know/what I thought what I thought/back then..." Edmundson continues, "That's what W.S. Merwin from the December 12, 2011 issue of "the New Yorker". At the close the poet hears a thrush at dawn "singing the new song." A freshness in nature registers as an ironic reproach to the poet's fruitless ruminations. "The New Song" is about the unlived life: chances neglected, deed undone. It also seems to be a poem about how hard it is to write a poem (Going back to "what I had a mind to do" suggests not only deeds undone but poems unwritten.) the lines are melodious, the voice warm and sympathetic -- but there's too little at stake. We're sitting in on a small-time game". He continues: "Most of our poets now speak a deeply internal language not unlike Merwin's. They tend to be oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning. They not only talk to themselves in their poems; they frequently talk to themselves about talking to themselves, as Merwin does here("But by this time I do not know/what I thought when I thought back then.") He provides a counterexample by Lowell, and then again comments on Merwin. "at a time when collective issues - communal issues, political issues -- are pressing, our poets have become ever more private, idiosyncratic, and withdrawn. Their poetry is not heard but overheard, and sometimes is too hermetic even to overhear with anything like comprenehsion."
Edmundson really misses the point, and being an academic, he should at least cite the title of the poem he is extracting lines, from, to prove his own bias. He neglects that the poem from Merwin is about memory. Susan Sontag has written a whole essay on this topic as well as has interpreted French thinkers on memory, which is an inexhaustible well. He is saying the proverbial, "we can not step in the same stream twice ; it has flowed on...but he is also talking about the natural wish to want things as we remember them, and that returning, we may find them different or ourselves to have changed in the way we feel in that moment...so he is saying something more psychologically truthful and profound for which Edmundson does not credit him. He is also talking about the loss of memory, and not knowing now how one felt in another time, as one cannot recall that feeling; in that way he is evoking Proust's whole oeuvre on how a fragrance, a taste, or sentient experience recalls another moment in time...but it has now changed, been transformed by time. It has to do with what circumstances require, how conditions determine events, how so many factors outside ourselves decide events. How the proverbial "timing is all" and "readiness is all" plays into the formula of outcomes. It is also the poets and writers imagination: how to end it. Why do we have alternative endings to stories? It is tedious to argue this further with Edmundson. He is not a poet. W.S. Merwin is a great poet; he could not be other than a poet. His saving of a tree, .. as Emily Dickinson's putting a robin back on the nest, again,-- saving the world for an individual, and perhaps that is all we can do....
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