May 2010

M. NourbeSe Philip audio file of her reading

May 27, 2010 - 3:07pm

M. NourbeSe Philip gave a reading on May 12 as a guest of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop (of the Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute at Northwestern) and of the Center for the Writing Arts.  (See http://www.nourbese.com)

TriQuarterly Online

May 27, 2010 - 11:08am

The other day someone asked me if I could still get hold of two copies of From South Africa, a special issue of TriQuarterly that was published in 1987), and I said I probably could, from the back stock of the old issues of the magazine.  But then I learned that there appear to be none left.  Fortunately, this issue, and others, will eventually be available on line.


Here is the text of the latest university press release from Northwestern about TriQuarterly Online (by Wendy Leopold):


(May 2, 2010)


EVANSTON, Ill. — TriQuarterly, the magazine that the New York Times once called “perhaps the preeminent literary journal,” has adopted a new name — TriQuarterly Online — and has made its “soft launch” on the Web with essays, author interviews and other writing at http://triquarterly.org/


The soft launch, which introduces readers to the site and leads the launch of the magazine’s first full issue by two months, includes work by Rosellen Brown and Lee Gutkind, an interview with poet Sterling Plumpp and other features.


The first full issue, TriQuarterly Online 138, will include new writing by eminent American fiction writer William Gass; admired contemporary American short story writer Antonya Nelson; PEN/Hemingway award-winning novelist and Oprah Book Club author Jane Hamilton; Cuban-American writer and translator Achy Obejas and others. It will come out in early July.


TriQuarterly Online (TQO) is at once the same publication and a very different one from the national literary magazine founded at Northwestern University in 1964, according to Reginald Gibbons. Gibbons, professor of English in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, served from 1981 to 1997 as TriQuarterly’s editor.


One of the big differences is the access the online format provides for an enormous potential readership around the world. “If back when I was editor I had thought we could have easily attracted readers in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and other parts of the globe, I’d have been thrilled at what the magazine could accomplish,” said Gibbons, who co-directs Northwestern’s MA/MFA in creative writing program in the School of Continuing Studies.


The online magazine now even boasts a mobile site — located at http://triquarterly.org/blog/triquarterly-online-mobile — that’s “slimmed down and buttoned up” to look good on a smartphone. Readers of TQO can forward a story or article via e-mail or Facebook to those with whom they want to share it.


Less than a year ago, Northwestern announced that TriQuarterly would move from a print to an online format. Now, as TriQuarterly Online, the magazine will publish issues of new fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama twice a year (in July and January) and will post monthly reviews, interviews, essays about writers and writing and art.


“Print literary journals have been under huge pressure because of production costs, the difficulties of distribution, the nationwide loss of independent book stores and other calamities of present-day publishing,” said Gibbons. “We’ve given TriQuarterly a platform for the future.”


Although Issue 138 of the magazine will not appear until early July, Web visitors already can find, among the contents of the soft launch, an excerpt from Gutkind’s latest book, a review of a new collection of short fiction by Alyson Hagy, the continuously updated TQO blog and other features.


A new and recurring TQO feature called “Firsts” also is part of the soft launch. Reintroducing the work of writers who between 1964 and 2009 made their publishing debuts in TriQuarterly, “Firsts” provides readers with the exact image of the debut work as it originally appeared in the print magazine.


“Firsts” often will include an essay or an interview with the author about what it meant to receive that very first acceptance letter. For example, Rosellen Brown discusses the acceptance of her story, “What Does the Falcon Owe?” which was published in 40 years ago in TriQuarterly 18.


Today the author of 10 books, Brown recalls in TQO: “I was in the hospital, having just delivered my second baby in 1970, when my husband showed up…with the galleys of my first story to be published…In the hospital, [I] corrected the galleys, and thought, this must be an augury of the fact that, yes, I will be able to go on writing.”


Along with the transcribed interview and the story itself is an audio file of the interview with Brown.


Referring to Brown and the contents of TQO in general, Gibbons said “works by the best writers will continue to add to the distinction that TriQuarterly has won since its beginnings.” TQO 138, for example, will include a cover created by writer and visual artist Audrey Niffenegger.


Using hyperlinks, a blog, Facebook, e-mail and more, TriQuarterly Online will have the capacity to build a broader dialogue around its contents, and broaden the context of new writing in ways that a print-only magazine cannot.


“You might read, for example, a recent interview with an author, then go to an excerpt from that author’s forthcoming book and move on to a blog post discussing his or her works,” said Chris Wallace, who led the TQO Web development team.


There’s a multi-layering of information that digital formats allow, added Wallace, a digital media specialist in Northwestern’s Department of Academic & Research Technologies (A&RT).  A&RT is developing an archival system to ensure TriQuarterly Online’s longevity in the face of changing technology.


Yet another TQO project, already underway at Northwestern University Library, will digitize all 137 print issues of the literary magazine. That initiative will make entire issues easily available to readers affiliated with Northwestern, and will allow TQO to provide readers around the world with a continuing selection of the best from TriQuarterly’s whole history.


TQO — which now boasts an easy-to-use online manuscript submissions system — is edited by graduate students in Northwestern’s MA/MFA in creative writing program. They are supervised by faculty who are experienced editors and who teach the journal editing course in the MA/MFA program.


To date, journal editing course faculty have been novelist and editor Gina Frangello and Susan Harris, editor of Words Without Borders, a literary Website devoted to translation. Poet and nonfiction author Kathleen Rooney will teach the course in the 2010 fall quarter. Rooney is founding editor of Rose Metal Press.



Wendy Leopold is the education editor.

Interview with Sterling Plumpp

May 20, 2010 - 7:54am

My 2003 interview with the poet Sterling Plumpp–a portion of which was published in 2005 by the Arkansas Review–is now available for the first time in its full version at triquarterly.org

Sterling Plumpp’s poems and his poetics are an extraordinary accomplishment.  Over a long career, he has found ways of representing (what an imperfect word!) both individual experience and the lived history of African Americans (OK, that’s about the focus of his poetry) along a vector—if I can put it so imperfectly—that combines the music of speech and an analytical yet musical (!) disassembly of language (and that’s about the poetics).  The speed of association between sounds and ideas is dazzling.  He makes so many things happen at once in his lines that it is hard to describe how rich the work is.   In Plumpp’s poems, the human figure that unites both a personal and a social history with the exploits of imagination and virtuosity is the blues singer or the jazz musician.  A significant portion of Plumpp’s work still in progress is his epic historical account of a genealogical narrative reaching across centuries and continents, from Africa to Mississippi.  Of his published works, I especially recommend Ornate with Smoke (Third World Press, 1998), Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth (Third World Press, 2003), and Blues Narratives (Tic Chucha Press, 1999).

In 2009 Valley Voices: A Literary Review (ISSN: 1553-7668), published a special issue on Plumpp’s work (vol 9.1), edited by Hermine Pinson and Duriel Harris.  It can be ordered for $12 from the journal, which is at 14000 Highway 82 East, #7242, Itta Bena MS 38941-1400.

In the interview, Plumpp evokes not only the stages of his own life and work, but also an American experience that belongs at the heart of what we think of as our own.

Reading and writing poetry (4)

May 13, 2010 - 10:03am

Scansion (one version)


Learning to hear the rhythms of the English language would not seem hard to do—we speak it without needing to be aware of them.  The rhythms of sequences of words, and the stress with which we emphasize them in our speech, are linguistic tools we don’t ever have to think much about, yet with which we articulate the meaning of what we say.  And we’re not just communicating information, just what we are “representing” with words; we are also doing things with them (the “speech act” theory of language), as we interact with other people and the world (and things are done to us with words–we are regulated by words, linked to others, pleased by sounds, typed and stereotyped, etc.).  The novelist Elizabeth Bowen commented that dialogue in fiction is what the characters do to each other with words.  So what’s should be so hard about writing poems in the language we already speak?

Many wonder, but few persist in finding out.

Poems aren’t speech–casual or formal; they are a use of speaking for additional purposes.

We also hum tunes and sing in the choir or at parties or in the shower without being aware of how the melodies and phrases and emphases might be far more deliberately and—we hope—artfully sung.

So here the students in English 206, Reading and Writing Poetry, and I are in the midst of a kind of very compressed course in the history of the rhythms, sounds, and the image-y qualities of the English language in the ways that poems make it possible to explore and exploit.  “I’m trying to change your thinking about language, and about poetry,” I say.

We have talked about iambic rhythms vs free ones (which to some extent have to be deliberately constructed in a poem, or else English will push the rhythms back into iambic pulses); and iambic meter verses the natural speech stresses used in English, and how in the best metrical verse the speech stresses play against the metrical scheme–within certain bounds; about the kinds of words that work with and against rhythmic emphasis–words with etymologies leading back to Old English, for example, versus those derived from Latin and Romance languages; about metaphor and metonymy; about the repetitions of sounds as a way of marking language as poetic; and more.

But in the last classes before we have some workshop sessions at the end of the quarter, I have moved on to some larger elements of poetry.  Out of many, I chose–for our purposes–argument, history, encounter, and elegy.  Argument we found most obvious in some Renaissance sonnets, naturally–but they allowed us to think a little about how all poems unfold (by what “logic”?).   History allowed me to introduce the idea of every poem’s context, its being embedded in the historical moment of its composition, and mostly in ways that the poet can’t entirely see.  We read poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Kenneth Fearing, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alan Ginsberg, Mahmoud Darwish, Miroslav Holub, and Paul Celan (the whole syllabus can be seen at reginaldgibbons.northwestern.edu).  How I wish we could have spent an entire hour on each poem.  But instead, as always, we must race through some passages in our very limited class time.

We discuss elegy.  In the other two classes this week, I focused on what I called “encounter,” since what I am after is easier to grasp when we read a poem in which the poet encounters, acknowledges, portrays, describes, another person.  (Alan Grossman said many years ago in Against Our Vanishing that he had “always been attracted to those accounts of the function of poetry which specify the keeping of the image of the person in the world as its principal outcome.”  He proposed this as “account” of poetry that can be seen vividly from Homer to the present day.)

I think of this function of poetry a little more broadly, in that I see the encounter with another person, who is then remembered in and by the poem, as a particular case, and perhaps the most important case, of a larger thing we do.  We are bound, we bind ourselves–by love or hatred, by joy or sorrow, by self-reassurance or self-questioning, and so on–to many kinds of “objects” (as the word is used in object relations psychoanalysis).  So after the students and I read some poems about encountering people (including the case of encountering oneself as an other), I asked everyone to stand farther back and think about the “objects” we had been seeing in all the poems we read.  There were persons, there, of course, and all sorts of small objects, places, ideas.


John Keats


But we started with Homer–whose poems we did not read together, but to which some of the students had been introduced in high school–and we made a short list of such things as warriors and desire for fame as a warrior, courage, the sea, home, wandering…  In the Renaissance poems we had read, we thought about romantic love, verbal art, Christian belief, and the mysteries of the destructive passage of time.  Among Romantics, we saw Blake’s focus on divinity versus religion, on children, on the corruption of human life by social and political structures (his “false systems”); in Wordsworth we saw the reverence for nature; in Keats the sorrowful acquiescence to time (again) and the heightened attentiveness to the moment, perhaps to everything, of one who knows he is dying young.  And so on.

Before we had this discussion on Wednesday, I had asked everyone to write on a sheet of paper–for themselves only–three objects about which they felt strongly, positively or negatively, in one corner; likewise, three places, in another; likewise three ideas or beliefs, in another… and so on.  Auden offers “father’s chair” as an example of what he calls “sacred objects” that are not, in fact, related to the sacred in a religious sense.  An object.

This too is about learning how to write.

The song culture of birds

May 5, 2010 - 9:22am



Song sparrow




Song sparrow songs occupy a prominent spot in the city’s spring soundscape, adding bright icing to a thick cake of background noise. “Suitable breeding habitat is not simply comprised of space and food, but also an auditory opening,” says Stephen Yezerinac, an ornithologist at Bishop’s University in Quebec. — “Urban Jungle: The changing natural world at our doorsteps,” Patterson Clark, Washington Post, April 2o, 2010.

I have used this quotation elsewhere, too.

I wanted to post it again because I just discovered a website that is in its way completely wonderful.  If you like this kind of thing.

http://birdsongradio.com/

(However, I believe that the song sparrow is a North American species, not one found in the British Isles.)


Reading and writing poetry (4)

May 2, 2010 - 7:59pm

Here’s a brief glossary—now slightly revised—that I put on my syllabus for the beginning course in reading and writing poetry, this quarter.  I don’t pretend that my definitions are the last word.  Far from it—these are matters that for a few thousand of years, and especially the last fifty or a hundred, have been looked at in sometimes different and even combative ways.  And since to some extent they are really about cognition through language, and cognition that becomes language, they can be more complex in daily life and in poetry than we can say.

I don’t like voluminous glossaries of terms that beginning students don’t yet need to know.  So I like to focus on the things that seem to me most important in getting a better sense of what poetry does with language, thought, feeling, and form.  (Yes, long ago I read Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form [1953], which was one of the most useful books about art that I ever did read, and especially helped me think about poetry from the inside.)


C O R E   G L O S S A R Y  for “Reading and Writing Poetry”

(You can find on-line dictionaries of poetic terms; this is a list of particular ones used in this course.  The occasional quotations are from the poets on our reading list.)

Breaking the idiom: changing a word, or the syntax, the focus, or any other element of a set phrase, even a cliché, so that the idiom is both present and reconfigured, so that you create a fresh “turn” of language.  (Sterling Plumpp pushes two idioms together to create simultaneous awareness of them and sudden shifts in their meaning.)

Defamiliarization: the poetic device of making what is familiar seem strange and thus more vividly apprehended–people, places, things, events, language itself—by describing or presenting it from a different angle (perceptual, linguistic, perceptual, emotional…).

Etymology: the origins of a word in earlier words, and the historical changes in its meaning. (Used poetically in Robert Duncan, “At the Loom.”)

Foregrounding: emphasizing some linguistic, poetic and other textual elements rather than others. (“Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie / Open unto the fields and the sky”—Wordsworth, foregrounding his variation of the speed of the iambic pentameter line, from slow to fast.  Ezra Pound alludes to and foregrounds an archaic pattern of verse rhythm and phonetic figures (in this case, alliteration) in the first portion of Canto I, as well as archaic word order [syntactic figures]. Williams foregrounds simple, concrete descriptive language to emphasize perception itself as a poetic goal. In “Women,” Louise Bogan foregrounds—among other things—complexity and elusiveness of metaphor.)

Free verse: Lines in which the iambic rhythms of English are consistently disrupted, and in which line endings may either follow syntactic units or break them gently or abruptly.

Grammatical figure: the use of the same word-root in two different words in close proximity. (“Or on my frailties why are frailer spies”—Shakespeare.)

Hyponym: a word that is more specific, more particular, more limited in meaning, and (in English) often visually more vivid, than another word that may be a synonym of a more general nature. Thus, “tulip” is a hyponym of “flower,” “marble” is a hyponym of “stone,” “dinghy” is a hyponym of “boat.”  Etymologically, “hypo” = “under,” so we can visualize a pyramid of synonyms in which the most general and abstract are at the top, and the most specific and particular are below.

Iambic rhythm: the intrinsic rhythm of English–a pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables.  (“Let us | have faith | that right | makes might,| and in | that faith, | let us, |to the end, dare | to do | our du- | ty as | we un- |derstand it” –Lincoln, Cooper Union Speech.  To scan this—which is completely artificial of me, but I think it is instructive: the first foot and the seventh are reversed in accent, which is a breaking of the iambic pattern that metrical poets have found pleasing in certain positions in the line; and what I have marked as the eighth foot, a double foot, is also a pattern found within the ordinary iambic rhythms of English—two unaccented syllables followed by two accented ones.)  See “speech stress,” below.  Iambic rhythm is used in a steadily patterned way in metrical verse, of course, with fine artistic deliberateness when it is done well.  Rhythmic figures that originated in metrical verse can also be used in free verse.

Indo-European: the language family to which English belongs—a family that includes languages both dead and alive across a geographical range from western Ireland to northern India. Proto-Indo-European is the lost language from which all the languages in this family have descended over thousands of years.

Metaphor: a trope that joins together two dissimilar things.  Thus it is about seeing one thing as another thing, or expressing a meaning by means of an image, or both. In the latter case, the meaning is often called the “tenor” and the image is called the “vehicle” (which is appropriate, since the etymology of “metaphor” is from an ancient Greek word meaning “to carry”). Sometimes the tenor is completely implicit and the metaphor appears at first to be only an image. (“Who so list to hunt I know where is an hind”—Thomas Wyatt; the pieces of the green bottle in “Between Walls” by Williams; “They are the Lords and owners of their faces”—Shakespeare.)  Metaphor is used with tremendous frequency in daily speech and everyday language in print, most often in the form of a “dead metaphor”—that is, one which we don’t visualize at all when we use it, so the “vehicle” is not even recognized as such; therefore the meaning can wander, over time, very far from what would seem to be the literal meaning.  For example, “broadcast” once meant to sow grain by hand with a sweeping throwing motion as the sower walked in a methodical pattern across a newly ploughed field; “blew me away” presumably originally meant something about an explosion or high winds; the “world wide web” is neither for fishing nor for catching flies; and a metaphor is not a living being, so it cannot really be “dead,” nor can a “dead language”; yet a dead metaphor may still has meaning, often a very useful one.  It lacks vividness, however, and leads to unintentionally silly statements.  Simile is a form of metaphor in which the word “like,” or “as,” or “the way…” may be used. 

Metonym: a trope that substitutes one thing for another to which it is related. (“It was very 1960s,” “the White House says…,” “Detroit is busted now,” “you’ve got nice shades,” “she has a great name now,” “the White Sox did their talking with their bats,” (The nature of metaphor and of metonym is not easy to pin down [metaphor]; they can be multi-layered [metaphor] or overlap [metaphor] so that we can’t be certain what we are hearing [metonym], much less how to map it [metaphor? Metonym?].) (“Skin of poor life”– Genevieve Taggard.)

Object: anything in which we have invested feeling—a person, a thing, a place, an event, a sound, an anniversary date, a building, a pond, a car, a pair of earrings…

Pentameter: a poetic line in five metrical feet (almost always iambic ones, with certain substitutions for the sake of the pleasure of artistically accomplished rhythmic variety).

Phonetic figure: the repetition of a sound (a phoneme)—the two phonemes have to be close enough together for the repetition to be noticed.  The sound may be a vowel or consonant, or more than one; it may occur anywhere in a word, or be formed by the end of one word and the beginning of another; or show up in variations including partial but noticeable correspondence, and even the reversal or rearrangement of certain phonemes, so long as these changes can be perceived.   Thus the repeated sound consists of several phonemes, they need not correspond exactly (“my sisters…mysterious,” “heard… auburn-haired,” “blue… blow,” “twice… pride,” “makes snakes hiss,” etc., and “steps… slept… pest, etc).  They may be in different rhythmic positions (“portico… sport,” “grass… Parnassus”).  (Robert Hayden’s famous “Those Winter Sundays” is packed with phonetic figures.)

Rhythmical figure: a small-scale rhythmical configuration, usually based on a repetition of speech stresses, that is noticeable as an artistic choice, whether in metrical or free verse.

Speech stress: the natural stress with which an emphasized syllable is pronounced—as in the preceding phrase, in which the most noticeable speech stresses are on “nat-,” “stress,” “em-,” “syl-,” and “-nounced.”  There are weaker stresses, too, though, on “which,” “-sized” and “-ble.”   While meter has only two degrees of accent, it is helpful to think of English as having 4 degrees of stress—most stressed; somewhat stressed; nearly unstressed; unstressed. The unstressed syllables in the phrase above are “the,” the second syllable of “natural,” “with,” “an,” the second syllable of “emphasized,” the second syllable of “syllable,” and “is.”   The nearly unstressed syllables might be the last syllable of “natural,” and “pro-.”  Assessing the relative degrees of stress is not a science, nor does it need to be; it’s approximate, and it helps enormously in understanding how meter works, because it allows us to see how speech stress plays against metrical pattern, the way notes in a musical score, or improvised performance in a jazz set, play against the rhythmic pattern that governs a piece.  Hearing speech stresses and learning to scan meter is simply a matter of ear training—like learning to recognize intervals and rhythms in music.

Syntactical figure: either a (comprehensible) disruption of expected syntax or a repetition of a syntactical element (these are two rather different things) that foregrounds the intensity of expression or the specificity of the words; at the same time, a syntactical figure is a mark of artistic choice and a way of making language more perceptible as language. (Repetitions of words in Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103º”; repeated structure of lines in Kenneth Fearing, “Green Light”.)

Trope: a poetic device (such as metaphor or metonymy) that “turns” the language toward more compressed meaning or that foregrounds an aspect of language to make it more perceptible (thus defamiliarizing it) or meaningful or both.