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The Repair of Speech

I have updated the “monthly” poem on my website.

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I have been slowly working my way through The Great Modern Poets, edited by Michael Schmidt – note, these are poets writing in English. I rather object to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s inclusion at the cost of Hart Crane, but then those are choices all editors of anthologies invariably must make. The standard repertoire graces these pages, but there are some others that I have not read much of (Thomas Kinsella, Kamau Braithwate, W.S. Graham) or even heard of (I’m sure I’m not a big fan in many people’s books for not having heard of Edwin Morgan or James K. Baxter). Anyways, I read the Adrienne Rich section last night. I have not read her work actively since college when I had a rather visceral, negative reaction to her work. I cannot remember the details all that well. The poem selected to represent her work in this anthology is “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” I was not taken aback by the poem for the most part, and I do not want to comment too much on it, for that is not the purpose of this entry. However, there were three lines that struck me:

the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering

These lines struck me as as strong statement as to the value of poetry.

the fracture of order – Poems, at least the ones that I find important and interesting, often work against normal English syntax to create rhythm, break rhythm, or any other numerous effects.

the repair of speech – After breaking normal syntax, poets then provide an alternative, valid meaning that would normally be lost in nonstandard grammar. This is, perhaps, the heart of poetry. If people spoke or wrote normally as poems often work, then day-to-day activities would be much more difficult, hampered by constant imagery and various interpretations (I hear the order taker at a fast-food restaurant saying, “Just tell me want you want. I don’t know what ‘Sticks of Idaho-grown starch’ means!”). When we start reading a poem, we unconsciously begin to think in terms of poetry.

to overcome this suffering – This is the value proposition of poetry. The Buddha said that suffering is an inherent part of living. People, of course, have come to many different methods to counteract this truth. The Buddha offered one method. Other religions offer theirs. Politics offers one. I could go on and on, but one more for my purposes: Art is another. The skills of the poet help to create meaning out of the suffering, to provide insight, peace, what have you.

I hope you can see that I am purposely trying to be fairly open ended in how poetry works, what poetry can accomplish, etc. I do so for the exact reason I shout the following phrase at the radio every time I hear seemingly well-educated people suggest that the person of William Shakespeare had neither the experience or opportunity to write what he did and that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote some of the most enduring works of literature: Do not limit the possibilities of the imagination.

New Book: César Vallejo

While in Cincinnati today visiting friends, I made stop at the Barnes and Noble in Newport. I found a copy of The Complete Poems of César Vallejo. I have only read a few poems of his, which I liked, but I had not found much of his work beyond the posthumous poems, so I had been stalling for a more complete set. Voilá. I look forward to digging into this book.

The Varieties of Inspirations

A question I have often been asked and a question I have often heard others asked is “What inspires you?” The question, while understandable, can often be annoying to the writer – not so much in localized, small interactions but in the larger public readings arena. It is not that the question itself is annoying; rather, it is annoying because it is such a gigantic subject that is impossible to condense into a small answer. Why?

“Inspiration” is a loaded term in some regards, though it does get at the gist of the creative endeavor. It is loaded, because inspiration often is meant in the sense of a divine spark or some other sudden burst of creativity (inspiration literally means “breathed upon”). Not that this is not the case, just that this is a distorted view of the creative process. I think of inspiration in “burst of creativity” sense, but I also see it in the less glamorous “things” that compel a poet to write poems about something (image, theme, etc.). I’ve been inspired by reports on the radio (”Conversing with the Stars” and “Operation Origami”), things I have read (”Ruins Above the Sea”  and “The Death of Archimedes” both from paragraphs in Norman Davies’ Europe: A History), places I have been, places I want to go, a line that “came” into my head (”The City“’s first line prompted this exploration of what it meant, but this is also inspired by my visits to Venice), an image – whether real or imagined (of the latter, “Richard Feynman Orders Nigiri-Sushi” is a good example) – people (”Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair” one of several poems inspired by my wife), reading other poets (I know I can go to Seamus Heaney, Giorgos Seferis, and others to prompt some thoughts of my own…and it should be noted that it is not necessarily tied to my preferences), and on and on.

The varieties of inspiration of far flung and sometimes mundane and sometimes “inspired.” However, just having inspirations is not near enough to craft great art. Many inspirations from any of the cited sources for myself have fallen flat during the actual writing and revision, have failed to muster up the image conjured in my head when the first thoughts came into it, or simply proved untenable as ideas at this time. The great poems of W.B. Yeats were labored over many hours and many drafts. Great writing comes from great work.

Rothko, Seferis, and Gorecki: The Metaphysics of Out of Modernity

While I have always been interested in the work of Mark Rothko, over the past year I have become exceedingly more so. Rothko’s efforts to create paintings that cut through the clutter of modernity to the spirituality (without any necessary connotation on a religious spirituality, though you can attach that to it as well) of humanity, his efforts to create quiet places of contemplation and thought have struck me and succeeded more than previously. While I feel that any outright dismissal of modern life as brutish, callow, cluttered, and lacking are exaggerated, there is a point to be made that the requirements of living often leave little room for contemplation and just sitting and thinking. No pre-modern civilization exists that is without its brutish, cluttered, and dismal aspects, and modern civilization has very much to offer – but I don’t want to get into a critique of modernity here. Back to Rothko.

Artists, to my mind, tend to either embrace their times and locations or seek alternative methods/modes of communication. Rothko abandoned human forms and moved to color and color structures, believing that the human form was incompatible after World War II and the start of the Cold War. His work abandons traditional attempts to communicate via images and symbols; his paintings become symbolic and strive to touch more instinctive human emotions. You cannot really appreciate a classic Rothko without looking at it (I have a poster of one of his works (Green, Blue, Green on Blue) at my work office. It is nice decoration, but it fails to perform Rothko’s intent (1. It is not his painting, so all the intricacies of the brush, etc., are not there, and 2. it is decoration…something appalling to him – but I could not help myself). Rothko strove to paint the most difficult, grand, and ambitious task in painting, I think: the human psyche and how to clear that psyche of all the clutter of life to focus on itself. His work is wonderful and important.

So Giorgos Seferis and Henryk Gorecki? What I have noticed recently is that my interest in Rothko is paralleled by poetry and music that seems to attempt something similar in different arts. Seferis, often labeled a surrealist, seems to lunge for that metaphysical awareness via his work. I think that literary surrealism functions quite differently than Dali or Magritte surrealism. Obviously, two different art forms, but I mean something more profound. Dali surrealism (or Surrealism) seems to me to understand the world by taking trusted and known images and putting them into entirely different and sometimes frightening contexts. This Surrealism works, but its goals are different from Rothko’s or literary surrealism. Seferis takes common images and puts them in odd contexts, but it is via the medium of language, so the odd connections, the stunning imagery create a different effect in the reader than the dual-used word “surrealism” suggests. Perhaps I a way off base here, but this is connection I found between Rothko and Seferis (Eugenio Montale also gets to the same place as Seferis).

Henryk Gorecki is a “mystical minimalist” – a term that I think is awful. In this category are Arvo Part, Sir John Tavener, and others. Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (at one time the best selling classical album in the world) is an example of this style (and I do really like this work). Another work that more people have probably been exposed to is Sir John Tavener’s Fragments of a Prayer on the Children of Men soundtrack. This is a music that, to my ear, sounds rooted in Orthodox liturgy and Gregorian chants, though it is also very far from that and need not be specifically religious in content. Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana also points to this same thread, though his style is definitively not in the mystical minimalist style. Anyways, these composers create moods and emotions through their music (often through choruses or vocals that sometimes are not words but just voice as instrument) that forces contemplation, thinking, reflection.

That’s enough for now, I think. I will be revisiting this topic, I am sure.

Amazing Wife

Yes, I have the most amazing wife ever: http://ginakanouse.blogspot.com/.

The Gates of Paradise: Photos

So here are the images that Gina and I took of the replicas of The Gates of Paradise in Florence in 2001.

This is the Joseph panel.

This is the Isaac panel.

This is the Moses panel.

This is the Noah panel.

This image is of the doors themselves.

The Gates of Paradise

I am in Chicago for a few days (my wife is attending the Stitches Midwest 2007 conference in Rosemont). I spent the afternoon at one of my favorite places in Chicago: The Art Institute. While there is an enormous amout of fantastic items to see, I primarily wanted to see the exhibition The Gates of Paradise. At the Institute, they have three of the originial gilt-bronze relief sculptures Lorenzo Ghiberti designed for the Battistero di San Giovanni (Bapistery of St. John) in Florence. When Gina and I were there in 2001, we saw the replicas of the doors, but we did not see the originals, which are stored in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo – given the short time we had in Florence, we prioritized the Accademia and Uffizi museums.

The replicas are amazing, but I could not pass up the opportunity to see the originals, which have had extensive restoration work. The three panels in Chicago are “Adam and Eve,” “Isaac with Esau and Jacob,” and “David.” Each panel tells the essential story of the characters/events. For example, “Adam and Eve” has renderings of the the creation of Adam, the creation of Eve, the temptation, and the casting from Eden. Wikipedia has a great picture of the replica. I was very pleased about how close I could examine the originals. The crowd at the time was sparse, so I almost fogged up the protective glass in my examination of the pieces. Ghiberti spent 27 years working on these sculptures, and the efforts are certainly worth it. The details are astonishingly fine given the medium and methods. Ghiberti creates mutliple levels from the back plane. In the “Adam and Eve” one, for example, there are at least, to my eye, three levels: 1) The temptation, 2) creation of Eve, and 3) the creation of Adam and the expulsion from Eden. The trees in the temptation plane join in the landscape of Adam’s and Eve’s creations. The creation of Adam is balanced on the opposite corner by the expulsion. The realization of the relief frames wonderfully the narrative structure as well as using creatively the limited and defined space.

As soon as I figure out how to upload photos to my blog, I will show a few images of the replicas Gina and I took when we were in Florence.

Also at the Art Institute, there is an exhibition of Jeff Wall’s photographs. He is a Canadian artist and displays most of his work as transparencies (very large pieces). The work is sometimes inconsistent, but the good is very good.

The Beauty of Ugliness

Many years ago when I was still at Ball State University, I found myself in a debate, as only English students who roam and spend enormous amounts of time in the halls of the English department can, over the idea of beauty in poetry. I was the odd man out, arguing for the importance of beauty in poetry. In fact, I was rather adamant and stubborn about it. Traits which have not dissipated over time, I’m afraid.

Some may have already cringed at the very word “beauty.” I will not retreat from it. But I will not limit “beauty” either. The primary argument I recall from that class against the importance of beauty in poetry was that beauty cannot capture the very real ugliness of living that living often is. That by insisting on beauty in poetry, I was ignoring the reality of life. I did not frame my counter-argument well at that time (and I may not do so now), but it essentially was, “Beauty in the sense you are using it is narrow.” My argument was not to lift up a beauty that only described, imagined, or conjured the everyday beautiful that is so often associated with the word: beautiful flowers, beautiful sunset, etc. My use of “beauty” included that very concept, but it was more than that. Poetry, I suggested, was words, phrases, rhythm, and phonemes first and foremost, and THAT is what should be beautiful. The subject matter, the imagery, and so on need not be beautiful.

My primary example was Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” This is a poem of the utmost beauty in its language, in its rhythms, in its construction. It is a poem of awful horror and ugliness in its description and imagery. For those of you unfamiliar with this vital English poet, Owen joined the infantry in 1915. He suffered severe shell shock and was hospitalized for a time, meeting Siegfried Sassoon. After recuperating, Owen returned to France and the front. He was killed leading his platoon across the river a mere week prior to the armistice. Prior to the war, Owen was a minor poet writing in a decidely Georgian manner. The war changed him (as one would expect it too) and his poetry forever. Here is “Dulce et Decorum Est”:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Latin translates literally to “It is sweet and right/honorable, to die for your fatherland.”

I doubt anyone could make a successful case that this poem is beautiful based on its imagery or theme. What is beautiful, however, is the poem. The consonance, assonance, rhythm, and sounds are wonderful. The poem moves and strikes with its wordplay. Remove the “meaning” of the images, and just listen to the sounds, to the rhythm, and you will understand how this poem is beautiful.

My last point in that class, which today I am convinced I failed successfully to argue, was that because Owen wrote such an awful and ugly theme into a poem with beauty, he enhanced the horror and ugliness of the topic. In other words, he used beauty to shame horror beyond simply the normal horror one would feel at a gas attack. He took an ugly event and framed it in such beauty as to heighten and horrify further that awfulness. This is a master poem by a poet made a master through the terror and blood and mud of the Western Front.