7 posts tagged “poetry”

to sign up for this presentation on Heidegger and poetry, because I sit down and read the first line of the essay that refers to Hölderlin's "Brod und Wein" and immediately put down the Heidegger and run to the shelf to read "Brod und Wein" again, and half of it makes me delirious, and then I page through the bilingual edition of Hamburger translations to "Häefte [sic] des Lebens" ("The Middle of Life"):

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kallt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.

With yellow pears the land,
And full of wild roses,
Hangs down into the lake,
O graceful swans,
And drunk with kisses,
You dip your heads
Into the hallowed-sober water.

Alas, where shall I find when
Winter comes, flowers, and where
Sunshine,
And the shadows of earth?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold, in the wind
Weathercocks clatter. (tr. Michael Hamburger, pp. 158-59)

Now these are, I think, pyrotechnics not always on display in Hölderlin: his work is not all jaw-dropping.  But this astounded me when I read it seven or eight years ago, as now, and on both occasions I wanted immediately to share it with everyone.  I think it is pure genius, and I don't know what else to say.  Perhaps that isn't good pedagogy.  Probably not, and therein lies the problem: presentations in graduate seminars are basically cakewalks, stage fright notwithstanding, but I somehow have to work outwards from this core of my engagement with poetry to explicating Heidegger.  In Spanish, did I mention that?  In Spanish.  Maybe I'll just bring in "En la noche escura" and read that and be done with it.  Maybe I'll talk about secularization in Europe.  Maybe, as I did Wednesday, I will just bewilder most of the class; I could talk for 5 minutes and leave 25 for Q & A.

I have never sat down and really, seriously, read Wallace Stevens.  The ratio of poems read personally (quietly, intently, repeatedly) by me to poems encountered through quotation by others has got to be around 1:20.

I have, in fact, read "Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird."  But I have probably spent more time than that looking at blackbirds.

Amsel

I'm sure this is not the first time this has been said, but still.  (Bear with me: the block-quote formatting isn't working.)

<<To generalize broadly (at the risk, of course, of flattening out the significant differences between various theorists and poets), the striking consonance between approaches to language in late twentieth-century theoretical writing and avant-garde poetry would seem to place each in a special, even privileged relation with respect to illuminating and extending the scope of the other, setting the stage for a productive cross-fertilization. [...]  Yet this presumably ideal situation for the literary critic reading late twentieth-century avant-garde poetry... leads to what can only be described as a certain redundancy or obviousness when the two discourses are placed in dialogue with each other now.  In other words, the paradoxical combination of the two factors characterizing the relation between late twentieth-century language theory and language-centered poetry (philosophical attunement and historical alignment) ensures that for the critic today, most attempts to articulate a poetics based on foregrounding connections between the literary text and poststructuralist theory will end up seeming, well, predictable or descriptive...  Interestingly, the problem here is not one of a gap, dissonance, or contradiction (the negative terrain on which avant-garde theorists and poets have traditionally found themselves most comfortable working) but rather one of a fit that seems too close.  I could say: "In its privileging of the letter and constant deferral of stabilized meanings, Lyn Hejinian's Writing Is an Aid to Memory produces a heterogeneous flow of matter and signs in order to break down normative frameworks of reference and sense-making."  And you might well respond: "Tell me something I don't already know!">> (Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Harvard UP (2005), pp. 308-09)

That's exactly right.  I nearly jumped up and down.  These bad, overly-close fits happen all the time, though, not only to avant-garde poetry.  I've started referring to this whole class of critical writing as "explaining the punchline."  I mean— good times if you don't like to laugh.

I know this is lazy commentary, but I'm distracted.  No, sorry, I'm hungry.  That's the name of that feeling.  It likes to go incognito for long stretches, especially when there's no immediate chance of meals and every reason to just keep reading or typing.

To Paul this dedicated is:

XLII
[...]
In due time an account to you
in detail about everything I'll give.

XLIII
But not now.  Though with all my heart
I love my hero;
though I'll return to him, of course;
but now I cannot be concerned with him.
The years to austere prose incline,
the years chase rhyme, the romp, away,
and I—with a sigh I confess—
more indolently dangle after her.
My pen has not its ancient disposition
to scrawl fugitive leaves;
other, chill, dreams,
other, stern, cares,
both in the social hum and in the hush
disturb my soul's sleep.

XLIV
I have learned the voice of other desires,
I've come to know new sadness;
I have no expectations for the first,
and the old sadness I regret.
Dreams, dreams! Where is your dulcitude?
Where is (its stock rhyme) juventude?
Can it be really true that finally
its garland's withered, withered?
Can it be true that really and indeed,
without elegiac devices,
the springtime of my days is fled
(as I in jest kept saying hitherto),
and can it be that it has no return?
Can it be true that I'll be thirty soon?

— from Chapter Six, pp. 246-7

So, I mentioned this book of modern Urdu poetry — Modern Urdu Poems from Pakistan, translated and edited by Anis Nagi, Lahore: The Allied Press, 1974, to be precise — and you rolled your eyes, right?  Urdu poetry, schmurdu poetry, don't complain when all your papers are late this term — right?  Wrong.  This book is awesome.

Its awesomeness largely rests on the translator's eccentric, imprecise command of English, which turns what I'm sure are good Urdu poems into, rather than slightly dull, hand-wavy English poems about being and melancholy and desire and so forth (see most anthologies of World Poetry), works of pure scintillant wonder.  Snippets follow:

From the arch of each black bow [sic— I think he means "bough"]
All the darts that have landed in the soul,
Pulling them out,
We have forged an adze.

...

This nook of the garden is the dream of mendicant's desires
And a lake ahead, sleepy entranced lake,
With a tree on the bank
Each bow ponders : the boat shall return
But the boat returns not ;
Away on the other shore it appears
Here swans swim and their quills glitter.
Drops trickle on their quills
And slide on a nearby lotus flower
And a voice quivering like an arrow passesby
And its resonance is repeatedly audible.

...

All these caravans of seasons and all these travellers of
Fleeting moments,
In vain with the wind shall visit and return
This tautology of traffic is nothing but a solace
As the time, like an unattainable pathway, is eternal.

Many a remembrances quiver in the tale of wind
Countless are genres of wind.

...

[and my favorite:]
The whole night long
It quietly snowed, it had snowed.

But you probably have to have the book in your hands to get the gestalt of it— I was hoping it would work in quotation, and it doesn't quite.  Here as in many places the artifact is part of the charm: this unprepossessing library book, hiding out in the "Shelving Area," written and bound in another country in another era, expecting what readers?  Surely not me.  It has a lovely blue-and-white braided bookmark.  I know nothing.

Do I say, It's great, or do I say, I like it...?  Or do I simply say: it it it it it

That recurring line from The Adventures of Augie March: We all have bitterness in our chosen thing.  Said of Christ, initially, I think.  If you've chosen to live, you know, it's trivial.  But how do I write in a desiccated trance like this one about poetry?  This is my job, and my current level of incompetency.  I could, over time, peel every layer off until I've gotten to the core of it, and who would vouch for my speeches then?  For my scripts?  My divinations?  My lousy trilingual alingual grammar?  Pfft.

Everything before Poeta en Nueva York is performance — much after that as well — but in those poems he begs for an interlocutor.  Yo lo digo.  There is prophecy, mad laughter, long shuddering intakes of breath.  It's fucking exhausting to read: after those 50 pages I am spent, I tell you, os lo digo yo.  You hit a point of crisis at home and go abroad, with a post at a foreign university, and two months after you arrive the stock market crashes. 1929.  Who among you would not flip out?  So there's an explanation for this madness — not a method, however, wrong Aristotelian cause.  The form the poems take, their denseness, is almost certainly the result of information overload, resulting not in ennui but mania.  (So Simmel may be obliquely right, and I may have disproved my own theory: I can still say it's not Baudelairean, however.  Or can I?  Plenty of spleen... phantasmagoria... et ideal...  but no odes to Walt Whitman in Les Fleurs du Mal, certainly.)

All right.  Up-to-7-page precis due tomorrow, FYI.  If it's an up-till-7-a.m. precis, I am not responsible for the consequences.

I located Jena on a map.  It was in northern Wisconsin.  "Hegel spent his life teaching in f-ing northern Wisconsin?" I exclaimed in awe.  I looked more closely and the borders shifted—it was an extremely large map—so that Jena now appeared to be in Canada.  Paul looked over my shoulder at it.  "I don't think that's the same Jena," he said gently.  I became irrationally furious: of course he was right, of course Jena was actually in Germany, oh the humiliation.

I don't know what this dream means, of course, but it might have been tracking my experience of reading Hölderlin's "Brot und Wein" last night, after exasperation at (Friedrich) Schlegel's "Gespräch über die Poesie" led me to toss it down and start flipping through Paul de Man instead.  If I have to read one more account of the development of Western literature from ancient times along these lines—in English, for your reading pleasure:

A pure fountainhead of new heroic poetry flowed across Europe with the appearance of the Teutons.  And when the wild energy of Gothic poetry merged through the influence of the Arabs with the echoes of the charming fairy tales of the Orient, there flourished on the southern coast of the Mediterranean a merry trade of inventors of lovely songs and unusual stories which also spread, now in this form, now in that, along with the Latin saints' legends, worldly romances, praising love and arms.

—I will start reciting Dada verse in class.  But "Brot und Wein:" flashes of beauty and clarity so familiar that I felt I had been squinting at them in the dark my whole life, interleaved with total strangeness.  Strange names, strange rhythms, some signs pointing towards your heart and others pointing to a vacant sky.  Heimlich und unheimlich.

Vater Aether! so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge
  Tausendfach, es ertrug keiner das Leben allein;
Ausgeteilet erfreut solch Gut und getauschet, mit Fremden,
  Wirds ein Jubel, es wächst schlafend des Wortes Gewalt:
Vater! heiter! und hallt, so weit es gehet, das uralt
  Zeichen, von Eltern geerbt, treffend und schaffend hinab.

For sound alone, those last three lines are worth everything I've read this semester and then some.  But the conceptual play of vacancy and fullness—it troubles me...