April 2010

Auditory openings

April 24, 2010 - 10:48pm

A windy late-April evening, perhaps prelude to late-night storms.  The thick hissing of the Lake Michigan waves, when winds from north and east raise them up–as they have been doing all day and and are doing now in the dark as well– carries some distance because, I think, it floats over the lower-frequency ambient noise of trucks and cars.  It arrives in subtle waves of sound.

When I walked along the lake this morning I heard the usual air-floating gulls, meowing in the air; red-winged blackbirds squawking about their precious territory in this breeding season; and a song sparrow doing the same thing but more sweetly.

(Today I happened to read this about why song sparrows change their tunes in urban environments with lots of low-frequency noise: “Suitable breeding habitat is not simply comprised of space and good, but also an auditory opening.”  So the sparrows emphasize the high pitches of their lovely little song–two or three seconds long.)

The steady heavy blowing of the wave-sounds, along with the sound of wind in the trees and around buildings, is ominous but at the same time makes one feel one is within nature.

Last night I was at a very absorbing reading downtown by Nathaniel Mackey and an equally absorbing lecture by Michael Palmer–both of them participating in a conference on the poetry of Robert Duncan.  (They both knew Duncan well; I only met him several times when I was a grad student, and heard him read; I read him then, and I still do, with pleasure, puzzlement, and at times awe.)

In the afternoon of the day before, I was working with Ilya Kutik in a coffeehouse, revising our translations of four poems by Ivan Zhdanov; we did them so long ago, in this ongoing project, that now it’s time to revise them again in light of what in the meantime I have learned how to do, and what Ilya has learned about what it is in the Russian that especially has to be carried over into the English, if the poetic thinking is going to be at all apparent.

In the coffeehouse, someone I had met once, a while ago, but whom I had unfortunately forgotten meeting, came up to me and said a friendly hello, and we fell into talking about our teaching, and then somehow moved to the subject of students smoking.  I said I thought that a few years ago, I was seeing many more young women smoking than young men, but that now young men were smoking again.  I thought that with the young women, it could be an accoutrement of calling attention to their model-slenderness, or alternatively a way of saying that they actively wish to be regarded as not fitting in, as pushing back against the university culture–even though it is saturated with alcohol and pot.  He said that where he teaches, he hasn’t noticed such a gender difference.

I wondered if that might be because more of his students, compared to mine, are in the first generation of their families to attend college.  (I myself was the first to finish, on my mother’s side; she had an older brother who went to The Rice Institute, as it was then called, in the 1920s; but he dropped out because even though Rice was at that time free of charge, he needed the money he could make playing the piano in the silent-movie houses of Houston.)  It could be that some of the smoking students, now that they are where their parents have never been (mine had never even been on a college campus, I think, until their own children enrolled here and there), feel the inner conflict between the impulse, or perhaps the inevitability, of becoming a different sort of person, a more educated person with better job prospects, and the desire, or fear, of remaining the same person their parents know.  And perhaps they smoke because, since among the college-educated smoking is less common, their cigarettes are a kind of affirmation of what is still, in their hearts, for now, their true identity.  A class marker held in public view.   When I was a student, still making those trips back to Houston at holidays and for the first two summers, I certainly felt that.  I didn’t want to be spurned by my old schoolmates because I was presumed by them to think of myself as better than they, since I was in an elite university on financial aid, and they were not.  I smoked when I was a freshman–partly because of feelings like that.  And kept at it, although not at all steadily, throughout my undergraduate years and then in grad school–but it became a different kind of marker for me: it had to do with marking solitary study, intellectual and artistic efforts and pretensions.  It might even have had to do with wanting to look, at least in theory, attractive in that particular way–it’s always breeding season among human beings.

Russian Ilya, for whom cigarettes do not mark class distinctions, any more than they did or do for Spaniards, perhaps, was outside the coffeehouse having a smoke as this conversation about cigarettes came to a close.  It took only a couple of minutes.   Ilya returned, the acquaintance said good-bye, and apophatic, inside-out, upside-down, invisible actions, images, metaphors, ideas and realms were once again trying to find their way, with out help, from Russian into English, on our unstable table.

An auditory opening: there has to be not only language in which a song is heard, but also a sonic, intellectual, artistic, and social space into which it can be placed.  An occasion for a reading aloud; a book for a translation; a classroom for a discussion; a receptiveness of mind for a remembering or for our necessarily solitary silent reading.

Palmer spoke of a kind of suffusion of infancy through Duncan’s poetic ideals and practice, regarding pleasures of language, myth both literary and personal, and the beckoning potentiality of being and of the future (my phrases–his were more considered.)

Mackey read from his poems of different years–which seem to me (like those of certain other poets) to belong to one great book of all his lifelong work.  (The Spanish poet Jorge Guillén passionately argued this; the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda maintained it, also; I mention these two only because I translated both of them years ago–but I was not able to come to my own conclusions about their claim.  Whitman; Dickinson, by default; many others.  The Chuvashian poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) says in his preface to a little book I just read yesterday (Winter Revels, translated from Russian by Peter France and just published by Rumor Books in San Francisco), “I can briefly express my attitude to my own poetic work in the following formula: “Life is a Book, one Life–one Book.”  Ilya and I have not had much success translating Aygi, so Ilya still has to find another one or two for us to try.  To judge from the few translators’ versions of his poems that I have read, whatever Aygi is singing is mostly a melody that we don’t or can’t hear in English–although Ilya and I, I believe, have found a new way to sing Russian in English, in general.)




Song sparrow




We have to provide “an auditory opening” in our own minds, our own ears, for poems.  There is a lot of other noise pouring into us, pounding us, including word-noise, and a huge amount of it might as well be the sound of traffic.  The sound of poem-winds is pitched higher–like a song sparrow’s or that of the waves–than the ambient noise.  It can always be heard if listened for.

(When I’m thinking in a way that carries me inside the life of poetry, I get from this to that, from that to this, and the way it works is what the poem tries to make it happen again, once the words are all there, and they’re in the right order–which is an English-language thing, not such a problem in Russian–and they are listening for each other, and finding each other–that’s a Russian-language thing, not something we’re used to thinking about, much less making happen, in English.)

Recordings, words, brains, texts, & cetera: a few favorite web sites

April 21, 2010 - 9:25pm



http://www.universeofpoetry.org/index.shtml

Universe–an international online gallery of poets and writers, with texts and brief biographies

*****

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do

An archive in the UK of recorded poetry.

*****

http://amediavoz.com/

A web archive in Spanish, with recordings.

*****

http://edl.byu.edu/

The Emily Dickinson Lexicon

*****

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/

The Frontal Cortex

and

http://www.mindhacks.com/

Neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what’s going on inside your brain.

*****

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mcgrath/mcgrath.htm

Modern American Poetry (This URL is the Thomas McGrath page, from which you can navigate elsewhere within the site)

*****

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

The Perseus Digital Library (texts in Greek and Latin, with hyperlinks to lexicons and translations, and other texts as well)

*****

http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer/

The Chicago Homer (Greek texts and interlinear translation, with Greek text hyperlinked for definitions and other functions)

*****

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/index.php

The Modernism Lab

*****

Again–oats, peas, beans and barley…

April 18, 2010 - 9:25am

… grow, but since I know nothing about agriculture (except for the boyhood experience of watching my father plow a home garden with a mule, and of my having to weed the rows with a hoe, or on hands and knees, as the corn, beans and tomatoes came up and grew in those wet, hot subtropical summers), I would not have realized, without seeing a passing reference to Neolithic “crop rotation involving emmer wheat, barley, and legumes” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe, that the traditional phrase in English might be more than the remnant of an ancient prayer for good crops.  What more?  Since one use of folk sayings, and of whole poems transmitted orally, was the necessity of remembering and passing on important information, included such information as the best order in which to rotate crops, then for that practice this old phrase provides the instructive sequence, and in fact a little further research shows me that grasses and legumes are indeed commonly alternated–but then we see that the poetic chiasmus (grass, legume, legume, grass) does not give the expected order; which suggests that the rhythmic, phonetic and structural pleasures of the phrase seem to have outweighed, over time, the practical efficacy of the right order of grass, legume, grass, legume.  Is that possible?  Or is there another explanation for the divergence of poetic “best practices,” so to speak, and agricultural ones?  (The agricultural ones have changed, except in some elemental way; the same might be said of the poetic ones.)  Perhaps someone reading this post will know.

* * *


And I can’t help wanting to annotate the pleasure of my wandering among words for a few minutes, on this topic.  I made use of the not very extensive index of The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe by following the entries for “legumes,” since there was no entry for “oats,” but this ploy did not turn up the word “oats” nearby the word “legumes” until the chapter on “Barbarian Europe”–i.e. peoples north of the Roman Empire from 300-700 CE (that’s how this chapter defines them).  So it seems that the presence of oats in the traditional phrase may be related to the existence of an English word whose origins aren’t nearly as ancient as those of “bean” or “pea.”  According to the etymologies in the American Heritage Dictionary, “oat” comes from Old English ate [there should be a long-vowel mark over the "a" but this program doesn't make it available]; standing furthest behind the Old English word for “pea,” pise, is ancient Greek pison; Old English bean [another long-vowel mark should lie across the top of that "e"] goes all the way back to a conjectural Indo-European root bha-bha-, the age of which, in itself, attests to the ancientness of this crop; “barley,” too, goes that far back–past Old English baerlic to the Indo-European root bhares- (and “barns” are where the barley is kept).  (No written trace of Indo-European exists, since it died out, or rather gave birth to other languages, long before writing had been invented; the conjectural Indo-European roots are constructed through comparative philology, which looks at several words that can be isolated from each other in different languages and then analyzes possible earlier words from which they derived in common and in slightly different ways.)

We scarcely ever think about how a word like “barley” is older than recorded history, or about how the barley in a bowl of soup made today has been grown in some variety or other for thousands of years.  A soup, a phrase, combine the very old with the very new–but unlike the soup, the phrase gives us elements we can put back into their divergent histories with the aid of a dictionary.

Reading and writing poetry (2)

April 13, 2010 - 4:39pm



Watercolor, Katherine Plymley, 1804, Death's-head hawk moth, caterpillar and adult



First we have to learn how to notice what poems do—by studying exemplary ones, naturally enough.  In the hyper-organized learning environment of a college or university course, with its schedule, deadlines, inevitable terminus, we have only the time and the appropriate institutional space for learning some of the craft.  Learning the art—in the sense of possibilities of spirit, of feeling, of voice, of one’s own individual purpose—is more solitary, as it must be.

So last week I spent far too little time on my favorite stanza, perhaps, in all of Keats.  It supremely exemplifies… not depth of feeling; and not only the intensity and sensuousness of his way of articulating perception and feeling at once; nor the ideas of Romanticism that he in particular so vividly deepened.  It exemplifies spectacularly developed craft that for his era—and like Schubert, nearly his exact contemporary, he went beyond what those before him could do in English, and for later readers he has remained in the position of the most artful.  The stanza exemplifies, in particular, the way Keats’s thinking moves by means of images and sounds.

The stanza is the first one of his “Ode on Melancholy,” written in May of 1819.  This poem of—and addressed to—a feeling is luxuriantly figurative, rhythmic, sonorous.  I have written briefly about its rhymes elsewhere, but I want to look at them, or rather listen to them again here, because I am feeling keenly how little of this I was able to get to in our class discussion on Friday, April 9:


No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine,

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine.

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth, be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl,

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

(I can’t make this annoying blog software preserve the indentation of lines 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10—visual markers that suggest certain relations among phrases and figures and that mark the rhyme scheme of ABABCDECDE.)

To rhyme “twist” with “kiss” suggests clearly enough, beyond what the first sentence actually says explicitly, that the metaphoric kiss of this mood or state of being is crooked, not straight, and is even perverse.  This kiss is a token of and an invitation to melancholy, sadness, gloominess, anger, annoyance, dejection, mournful reverie (even to the extent of being self-contradicting and pleasurable, like Shakespeare’s “sweet sorrow”).  It also suggests moods that shade into what was formerly called melancholia, which we call depression.  This kiss is not for the lips—which are a metonym for the sensual pleasure of the body as a whole—but for the forehead—a metonym for the mind, the spirit.  So one of the first movements of thought in the poem is fulfilled by this rhyme.  This is my emphasis: the rhyme itself does part of the thinking.

Keats’s second line prepares for the word “wine” with the second syllable of a startling plant name:  “Wolf’s bane… poisonous wine.” (The English language feasts on names.)

(And of course on plant names in general, and flower names, herb names, place names, names of hand tools, and much more.  In Coleridge’s notebooks a few pages in particular, from December 1800, have remained in my thought for decades–long lists of the names of wildflowers, in the hand of the woman he pined for, Sara Hutchinson—Wordsworth’s wife’s sister; Kathleen Coburn’s editorial notes of the notebooks say that these lists are “transcribed from the Index to [someone's copy of] the standard botanical reference book of the day: William Withering An Arrangement of British Plants (1796)” and that by March 1801 both Coleridge and Wordsworth had their own copies of this book.  English feasts on names, and poets feast on English.)

The OED quotes from 1656, W. Coles’s Art of Simpling—”The Oyntment that Witches use is reported to be made..of the Juices of Smallage, Woolfsbaine and Cinquefoyle.”  A friendly herb this is not.  Yet it leads by sound to “wine.”  An ancient poetic device—a phonetic similarity that expresses a semantic opposition, like “last but not least”—gives the opposition more force.  Let us neither have bane not (poisonous) wine.  Keats now turns not water into wine but wine into poison.  I should also mention the wonderfully emphatic effect created by Keats’s five speech stresses in succession, all fitted perfectly, of course, into his iambic pentameter lines: “twist / Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted…”

Then comes that twisted kiss, and the wolf’s-bane and implicit witches have led, also implicitly, to “nightshade,” yet another poison, and one that names a darkness that metaphorically is the state of melancholy itself.  And only then comes the grape—we arrive guided by Keats through sounds and images and ideas.  The mood is dark; but the poet surely exults in the pleasure of composing it.

In this poem, in fact, Keats seems at first to be our psychopomp—an ancient Greek word meaning the mythical figure who guides the souls of the dead to the underworld—for in this poem Keats begins with the worst, most corrosive proximity: of melancholy with death.  Yet the poem is a performance, not real death; and anyway, by the end of the poem there will be beautiful flowers and a beautiful mistress, and bees and joy, and melancholy of a dangerous intensity will turn simply to regret, to gorgeously conveyed sorrow, that the happiness of a moment, of youth, of life itself, cannot last.

And from the grape in line four the poem moves to Proserpine, the Roman version of Persephone.  (In either guise, she has appeared often in poetry.)  She rules the under-kingdom of the dead (the psychopomp leads the souls of those who have died to that realm) for the half-year when she is required by the logic of myth to remain with Hades—Pluto, to the Romans, having also been called Plouton by the  Greeks (who associated him not only with death but also with wealth).  In Greek mythology wine is associated with Dionysos, and bread (wheat) with Demeter (the mother of Persephone.)  Keats rearranges the association between wine and a god, moving it from Dionysos to Persephone—and this is evidently not a good thing, since the wine is now poisonous because instead of being a liquid of life it is by association a liquid of death (since it is made from the “grape” of nightshade rather than from the good grapes of the vineyard).




An ancient yew



More associations follow—Keats makes rich use of metonyms here rather than metaphors.  Here’s a rosary of yew berries in line 5.  But rather than a rosary of the usual sort, which might be used to pray for mercy and rescue and help and as a way of giving thanks and worshiping, this is a rosary of death.  In England, yew trees are associated with black magic; with the English longbow, used in warfare and made of yew—thus with death in battle; and with cemeteries.  Yew trees can live for more than a thousand years.  (Thomas Hardy’s poem “Transformations” begins, “Portion of this yew / Is a man my grandsire knew”; he imagines that the roots have drawn the buried dead back into the air as a branch, as a nearby rose bush may have done.  Hardy atypically makes the graveyard a scene of a modest, everyday, unwitting resurrection that has little to do with his pessimism—except that this good little resurrection is all there is.)

And the rhyme word, “berries” points in two directions—back toward the nightshade, whose fruit is not at all “grapes” but berries—that is, the right word appears after it has been absent where we expected it to be, and so it completes the thought that “grape” had started by its not having been the right word.

It takes so long to draw out the movement of thought the way I am doing, discursively, yet the poem achieves it rapidly by metaphor and metonym, by rhythm and phonetic repetitions…  One returns to read the passage again and the poem makes everything happens at once again, more richly for having been studied.

So—praying for or even to death… and now we move by association to the beetle.  A creature of the ground, although some of them, like some strange spirit from under the earth, are able to extend wings from under their carapace and fly.  And the death-moth.  One of my students on Friday had to point out to me—since I was moving so fast I had not even done all my own homework, and I am forgetful on top of that—that there is a species called the death’s-head hawk moth which has on its back a figure uncannily resembling a human skull.  And moths are creatures of (here, metaphoric) darkness, not day.  So Psyche, the soul (led from its dying human being down to the underworld by a psychopomp, a psyche-guide) is mournful here, whereas in Greek mythology she is the sun-loving butterly.

And now the poem leads us to the owl.  (Either this word was pronounced “ole,” or alternatively “soul” in line 10 was pronounced “sowl” by Keats and fellow cockneys, for this rhyme to be heard fully.  I don’t happen to know which it was, but somebody probably does.) The progress of images is beetle (flying? not?); moth; and its implicit opposite—the butterly; and finally a bird.  But… a fierce night bird with uncanny voice and silent flight.   And what does it eat?  The mouse.  (I won’t stop again when I get there, but we can hear the rhyme for the absent word “mouse” in the word “drowsily” which will come at the end of line 9; and the vowel sound is also repeated as downy shifts its consonants and becomes drowsy, as the repeated sounds lead the thinking onward, one word and idea flowering into another; and then “drowsy” transforms itself into “drown“!)

The end-rhyme pair “owl” and “soul” have now shown us that the soul of the melancholy person is a night bird that avoids daylight and the sensuous pleasure of daytime sight—especially color.  And those little berries—nightshade, yew—end up rhyming with “mysteries”; the physical (and metaphorical or metonymic) rhyming with the abstract and metaphysical.  One can only sigh.  Here phonemic similarity leaps us from one category of thing (concrete) to another (abstract), and produces in itself yet another movement of thought.

Well, the poem doesn’t end by attaining happiness.  (Please take a look at the whole poem!)  It approaches happiness in stanzas two and three, but only to lament  that they are absent, and in any case, transient.  Beauty dies.  Pleasure (here, implicitly, metaphorically, the nectar sipped by bees) turns to poison (yet another!).  The baneful kiss of stanza one becomes a kiss of farewell in stanza three; and in that stanza another lovely train of association leads—very straightforwardly but with such pleasurable deftness—from lips to mouth to tongue to palate and the sense of taste.

The poem is about an ugly mood; the poem is beautiful.  A “meta” antithesis.

I have not “unpacked” everything, as people often say of close reading.  (As if the poem were a suitcase with contents.  No, the poem is suitcase and contents as one marvelously intricate thing.  It contains itself, and it is both right-side in and inside out at the same time, showing everything about itself to the eye that can see it.  Not as a spatial entity but as something unfolding in time, as it creates sequences of sounds, rhythms, component shapes of its structure, ideas, feelings, mental images….)

The profusion of Keats’s imagination has exhausted me!

And what does the poem say?—nothing very complicated, nothing new, something perhaps painful to acknowledge but not difficult to grasp.  What is complicated in this poem, and new, and graspable if one gives one’s attention to how poetry works (or at least to some of the many ways in which poetry works—”works” is a wholly inadequate word, here), and what is begging for due acknowledgment and even honor, is the way Keats moves the thinking of the poem from beginning to end.  One can learn how to see all this; and learn how to imitate it to some extent; and complicate and extend one’s ability to think-with-words-used-poetically.  The process of such learning does not end, even in the long lives of poets who have been, or are, physically luckier than Keats.

Reading and writing poetry (1)

April 10, 2010 - 1:20pm

The spring quarter enters its third week, and my section of our introductory focus on poetry has to move fast.  How much can an instructor bring into ten weeks of study in a class that meets three times a week for only 50 minutes each time?  A lot, but with not nearly enough time.   Each class leaves me (and at least some of the students) wishing we had a few more minutes, even if it were only ten, each day.  But we don’t.  Instruction must obey the clock, even though learning proceeds on its own schedule within us.

The kinds of things that must be the focus of such a course are the line; the sentence (syntax) and the line in relation to each other; the sounds of words; the rhythms of words in sequence; the image; a sense of how writing (or reading) poems is embedded in history; the poem as argument and idea(s); as encounter with and acknowledgment of others and of the world; as elegy or lament or curse or praise or celebration; the functions of language in general, which poetry uses more extensively than does most prose; and how we think with metaphor and metonymy.

Those who are reading this post on my own site, reginaldgibbons.northwestern.edu, will find the syllabus posted under Resources/Courses; those reading this post on the CWA site may want go to my own site for that syllabus.

I will provide a number of posts, over the rest of the quarter, on teaching and learning how to write poems.  However introductory, such a course always raises questions and touches on practices that are the everyday stuff o my own work, so it is as interesting for me as I hope it is for the students who take it.

Bard school

April 10, 2010 - 9:13am




Cycladic singer of poems, with harp. Metropolitan Museum



As I did not mention in my last post, we also know that “inspiration” was not the simple matter that Plato makes it seem in his dialogue Ion.  If the Greek gods were merely an illusion of the ancient mind–or, I should say, an ancient way of thinking–then of course as external realities they could not have inspired anyone.  Yet as a way of thinking they clearly did inspire, if by that word we mean those moments of creativity that seem to come from elsewhere, not from our own (conscious) efforts, which we always know are not entirely adequate.  (The “elsewhere” has been explained in modern times in different ways, but perhaps all such explanations rely on our now understanding that the mind is continuously at work beyond our conscious awareness–responding to our perceptions of everything beyond our bodies, and within them; remembering; imagining; making connections; regulating our progress; and so on.  While the ancient Greek idea of the divine is nothing like the Jewish, Christian, and other religious beliefs of the divine, still in many varieties of belief it’s the divine that has inspired the writing of holy texts–and still inspires words and actions.)

So the idea of “inspiration” in ancient times is already a metaphor–even, it seems, a knowing one in some poets.   And that is how I see it.  As I implied above, I take inspiration, at any time and in any place, to mean the remarkable, intricate, evanescent, unconscious processes of thinking which–whether empathetic or aggressive; with cartoon light bulb switching on, or not; artistic or practical–seems to deliver such surprising words and impulses that at times we can scarcely believe they could have come from within ourselves.  The least spiritual person in the world may have such an experience, and does not need to think of it as assistance from the divine.  Even to Plato, I think, it must have been clear that ancient poets knew that even if there were Muses, these alone were not sufficient for composing a poem; but Plato makes Socrates conceal this thought from Ion.

Poets and rhapsodes undoubtedly studied and practiced to acquire the skills they needed.  Plato gives Socrates the view that poets and rhapsodes know nothing–they don’t need to know anything if the words that they compose or perform are inspired and arrive when they are in a trance.  But as I implied before, Plato very strikingly removes from consideration the knowledge of how to compose a poem, or even the less difficult knowledge of how to perform it.

Here are quotations and quotations within them from Watkins (pp. 76-77); the long quotation is so remarkable that I have been tempted to consider it an invention of Watkins himself–a delightfully constructed fancy that accounts not only for Irish poets but even, in the description of performance, of Athenian tragedians.  Please note that nothing in this post after this very sentence is mine–it is all Watkins, Watkins quoting Bergin, and Bergin quoting “one Thomas O’Sullevane”):


In Ireland right down to the collapse of the Gaelic world in the 17th century (and in Scotland in the 18th) the

Gaelic poet, in [Osborne] Bergin’s apt phrase, had to be both born and made.  In his justly famous 1912 lecture on Bardic Poetry, Bergin ([Irish Bardic Poetry]1970: 3ff.) gives this description:

For we must remember that the Irish file or bard was not necessarily an inspired poet.  That he could not help.  He was, in fact, a professor of literature and a man of letters, highly trained in the use of a polished literary medium, belonging to a hereditary caste in an aristocratic society, holding an official position therein by virtue of his training, his learning, his knowledge of the history and traditions of his country and his clan…  At an earlier period he had been regarded as a dealer in magic, a weaver of spells and incantations, who could blast his enemies by the venom of his verse, and … a well-turned malediction.  He might be a poet, too, if in addition to his training he was gifted with the indefinable power, the true magic, of poetry.  But whether he was a poet in this higher sense or not, he always composed in verse.

These sentences could be applied virtually without alternation to the Vedic kavi and to the mostly nameless composers, over hundreds of years, of the more than a thousand collected and preserved hymns, some good and some indifferent, which make up the Rigveda.

As illustration Bergin quotes from the description of a Bardic Society by one who attended it early in the 17th century, in the Memoirs of the Marquuis of Clanricarde (apparently the work of one Thomas O’Sullevane, see R. Flower, British Museum Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts 3.16 [editors' note] which I excerpt:

The poetical Seminary or School… was open only to such as were descended of Poets and reputed within their Tribes…

The Structure was a snug low Hut, and beds in it at convenient Distances, each with a small Apartment without much Furniture of any kind, save only a Table, some Seats, and a Conveniency for Cloaths to hang upon.  No Windows to let in the Day, nor any Light at all us’d but that of Candles, and these brought in at a proper Season only…

The Professors (one or more as there was occasion) gave a Subject suitable to the Capacity of each Class, determining the number of Rhymes, and clearing what was to be chiefly observed therein as to Syllables, Quartans, Concord, Correspondence, Termination and Union,  each of which were restrained by peculiar Rules.  The said Subject (either one or more as aforesaid) having been given over Night, they worked it apart each by himself upon his own Bed, the whole next Day in the Dark, till at a certain Hour in the night, Lights being brought in, they committed it to writing.  Being afterwards dress’d and come together in a large Room, where the Masters awaited, each Scholar gave in his Performance, which being corrected or approved of (according as it requir’d) either the same or fresh subjects were given against the nexy Day…

Every Saturday and on the Eves of Festival Days they broke up and dispers’d themselves among the Gentlemen and rich Farmers of the Country, buy whom they were very well entertain’d and much made of… Not was the People satisfied with affording this Hospitality alone; they sent in by turns every Week from far and near Liquors and all manner of Provision toward the Subsistence of the Academy… Yet the course was long and tedious, as we find, and it was six or seven years before a Mastery or the last Degree was conferred…

As every Professor, or chief Poet, depended on some Prince or great Lord, that had endowed his Tribe, he was under strict ties to him and Family, as to record in good Metre his Marriage, Births, Deaths, Acquisitions made in war and Peace, Exploits, and other remarkable things relating to the Same…

The last Part to be done, which was the Action and Pronunciation of the Poem in the Presence of the Maecenas, or the principal Person it related to, was performed with a great deal of Ceremony in a Consort of Vocal and Instrumental Musick.  The Poet himself said nothing, but directed and took care that everybody else did his Part right.  The Bard having first had the composition from him, got it well by Heart, and now pronounced it orderly, keeping even pace with a Harp, touch’d upon that Occasion; no other musical Instrument being allowed for the said purpose than this alone, as being Masculin, much sweeter and fuller than any other.

This remarkable document probably comes as close as we will ever get to an eyewitness account of the formation of an Indo-European poet.

 

[End of quotation]

Back to worms (in general)

April 3, 2010 - 9:44am

It comes to me that I have been thinking for a long time about words that (might) cure.  It certainly puts me in a kind of thought-position that would not be of interest to everyone.  The poetry of “rupture,” syntax broken apart, “hermeneutics of suspicion” regarding the capacity of language to communicate reliably, and so on, would be hostile to thinking about what I regard as the amazing efficacy of language in continuing, needful ways (and I include poetry as such a way).  At the opposite end of the current poetic spectrum, the poetry of more or less straightforward autobiographical accounts might be welcoming to my stance, but that party isn’t interested in what interests me.  (Not that autobiographical materials and gestures can’t be found in my own poems; there are lots of them, but the uses to which I have tried to put them are, I hope, akin to what Tom McGrath regarded as the uses of “representational moments” articulated in poems for the sake of how they align personal and social experience with thinking against the culture, rather than aligning psychological experience with conformity.  And I include in this category of conformity the gesture of offering the reader exotically wild experience, of serving as a supposedly tragic buffoon of low life, self-destruction, dramatic recovery, etc.)

If I try to list every kind of American poetry in terms of how “words  that (might) cure” would play in it, I will be writing about this for a year, and I won’t even do it well, so I’ll move ahead to what got me started in the first place.  It seems I’ve been thinking about all this since well before I ever tried to think it through.

The curing power that we wish were in words is actually in them, depending on who uses them and how.  As is the power to curse, to harm, to abuse.  It’s there for emotional, cultural, historical reasons, and simply by reason of how language works, and how we are worked by language.

A long time ago I wrote a poem called “At the Temple of Asklepios on Kos” (1981).  It goes like this:



Climbing toward the ancient source
while weighted down with injury--
one twisted ankle, some sunburn,
sulks, bad bowels, bruised
feelings--we felt pains
spark up our bones like
the flames that rise along a fuse.

No sign of snake or cock,
so we carried our thirst
uphill to the tall
stone tub where bees in the air
swung back and forth at the spout,
following the smooth spill
to the ground,

and one of our countrymen,
now knowing how the spirit led him,
heaved himself up over
the high lip with a laugh
and dunked
his dirty head, fouling
the water for others.

We sipped nevertheless, sweet
taste, and started
up the wide staircase to the top,
my tongue rolling a cool word
in my mouth till I made
the connection: my work is to make,
to make speech whole, to heal.


If I were writing such a poem now, I would probably not write those last two lines–because I don’t feel any longer that mood of confidence in a calm assertion of what poetry, and what I in particular as a poet, might achieve.  Nevertheless, I do think that even in the present day, poetry can still be, and often is, a kind of homage to the language itself, or at least to some aspects, elements, openings, moods of the language, and so it can make two healing gestures–one toward language, and another toward the reader or the listener or the addressee of a poem. (And I don’t mean to say that poetry can’t make other kinds of gestures, too–it makes many different kinds.)

In other words, while it seems very mistaken in our world and day to think, as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did, that poetry could “purify” the language, there’s no less pressure now on language than there was in the early 20th century to conform to the duplicities of the loudest voices, whether real or artificial, individual or corporate, self-deluding and self-serving or meant to rouse a mob.  So there is (or there should be) no less of an impulse to try to write against that pressure.

And it’s interesting to me to realize now that well before I had studied any of the evidence of ancient poetry, I seem to have had an idea that a shrine to Asklepios–the whole point of which was to mark a place of healing of the body, as healing was understood by ancient physicians–was also a place worth honoring for a different kind of healing.  Not of the body–although singing or chanting or reciting of poetry, prayers, spells, charms, in the days of Asklepios was certainly a bodily practice.  So–a healing not of the body only, but also of, shall we say, how we think with language and of how that kind of thinking, mixed with an unashamed love of language (not an idealizing reaction to language abuse), tries to push back at everyday language, even as it draws life from it.

All of which implies that a poet could certainly have been expected, in ancient times, to think of poetry as a participation in healing, at times, and even an effecting of healing.  Why, after all the hard work it took (and takes, still) to write well, shouldn’t words repay the one who uses them with the most deliberateness not only with pleasure but also with at least some power?  It’s the continuity of that sense of poetry even down to our own day that fascinates me.

Even in ancient Greece, long after the great tragedian poets, and even longer after the composition of the Homeric epics, poetry-hating Plato wouldn’t hear of it.  He makes easy fun of the rhapsode Ion by creating him as an earnest but dull-witted foil in a dialogue with Socrates.  I say “easy” because the contest is unequal not only in terms of Socrates’ intelligence, but also in terms of how Socrates, with apparently deliberateness, misshapes the question he professes to want to answer in his dialogue with Ion.  In a famous passage, Socrates says that “the epic poets, all the good ones, have their excellence not from art, but are inspired, possessed, and thus they utter all these admirable poems… So is it also with the good lyric poets; as the worshiping Corybantes are not in their senses when they dance, so the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems” (533e-534a; I quote from Lane Cooper’s translation).

I cannot defend Plato by assuming that he did not have much of an idea of how poetry is composed, and was only repeating a commonplace of his time.  I think he must have been very familiar with the performance of epic, and he must have known some poets.  He knew that the rhapsodes who memorized and performed episodes from Homer’s epics were not themselves poets in the sense of being creators of the work, so his conflation of the two categories is deliberate and sly and guarantees that he will win the contest of wits.  He knew that the work of memorizing– especially for someone gifted with a great memory–and even of improvising the assembling of an episode, as it was being recited, from alternative lines and passages could not be nearly as difficult as the work of creating those passages in the first place.  (Whether they were created by one poet called Homer, or by generations of rhapsodes who by small increments made the Homeric poems the astonishing works we know, which were written down as soon as the syllabic alphabet was brought to ancient Greece.)

I can’t defend his position at all, because he pushes the argument onto absurd grounds.  (Use has been made of Plato’s position as a kind of anticipation of the psychoanalytical sense of the unconscious, which is then adduced to support Plato, but I will argue against that at another moment.)  I can’t even defend him by saying that we now understand the complexity of the mind and of artistic composition better than he could have understood it.  Who could have understood better than Plato how complex thought is and how rare the ability to think deeply about complex questions?  And narrative is a mode of thinking, as well as a display of imagination and of linguistic and artistic skill.  On top of all that, I don’t feel any inclination to defend him, because he is wrong.

The reality of working with words in the ancient world (as it can be still today, although less so and less often) is that many different simultaneous demands (especially rhythmical, but also according to conventions of comparison, narration, reverence, the culture of heroes, etc.) are present in the composition of a poetic line, a group of lines, an episode made of lines.   When this was done in the mind, without writing, the art of improvising appropriate poems and chants and songs out of available materials and methods for the occasion of a chieftain’s marriage or death or the celebration of a religious festival or the secret incantation of a curse on an enemy–this was such a difficult art of memory, rhyme, song, and thought that the last surviving bard school of which there is a record required of its student bards a course of study lasting six or seven years.  (In one of my next posts I’ll transcribe a description.)

And when that much study has been put into even ordinary kinds of poetic materials, by even ordinary sorts of bards, including those with no great talent, it would have been inevitable to think and hope that such word work had powers well beyond everyday language.

So here I am thinking about words that (might still) heal.  How I got here is certainly a story that begins in my childhood.  The contours of my psyche–which may have longed for a cure or might have been convinced very early that there could never be any, or both–led me early to think for a moment about an Asklepios whose beneficence might extend to healing how one spoke and how one heard spoken words and how one felt when speaking and when listening or having to listen.  But that’s another story.

Instead, I want to get to that school for bards.