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Crossroads

A poem after José Ortega y Gasset...

In his first book (Meditations on Quixote), José Ortega y Gasset writes as follows (as quoted in his essay "Preface for Germans"):

Woe to the race that does not halt at the crossroads before continuing on its way, that does not make a question of its own selfhood: that does not feel the heroic need to explain its destiny, to inundate its historic mission with light!

It strikes me that the same applies to individuals (yes, I tend to individualize everything). So just I transformed the idea into a short (though, I think, not very good) poem:

Crossroads

(after José Ortega y Gasset)

When you finally arrive at
   The crossroads of your life
Do not plunge blindly on through, but
   Stop: inquire deeply
Into yourself, come to know the
   Meaning of your ideal,
Shine great light on your potential,
   And only then move on.

Posted on 2007-03-24 at 20:59. File under literature.

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More Sapphics

Further poetical investigations...

As mentioned I've started to collect poems in sapphic meter. Among other things, it turns out that the two poems that I've written in sapphic meter are all wrong. As explained by Timothy Steele in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing and Miller Williams in Patterns of Poetry, the meter of a sapphic stanza in an accentual-syllabic language such as English scans as follows (where "/" is a strong beat, "x" is a weak beat, and "|" divides one foot from another):

/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x x | / x

Here is ann example from Swinburne's poem "Sapphics":

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

That scans quite nicely as follows (accented syllables in bold):

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

Contrast that with, say, the first stanza of my poem Ancient Fire:

Sing me, Muse, of your bright sister -- small and dark,
they say she was, though I shall never know her.
Her song is lost, yet even her merest shards
are a vibrant spark.

Ouch. And the other stanzas are no better. No wonder the poem doesn't sing the way a sapphic is supposed to. Sigh.

Despite the disappointment of learning that my own poems are merely pseudo-sapphic, I've collected a number of properly-scanning sapphics by Sappho herself, Thomas Campion, William Cowper, Horace, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Andrew Marvell, August von Platen, Philip Sidney, A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Algernon Swinburne, Lewis Turco, and Rachel Wetzsteon. And my sapphics-hunting continues, so expect more reports in the near future...

Posted on 2007-02-18 at 20:01. File under literature.

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Sapphics

Collecting poems...

Here's an intriguing idea for a book: a collection of poems in Sapphic meter. Sapphics are my favorite form (see Ancient Fire and Cobalt), and they've been wielded so deftly over the years -- by Sappho herself and her contemporary Alkaios in the original Greek, by Catullus and Horace in Latin, by the likes of Cowpers and Swinburne in English, by a number of German poets (Klopstock, Platen, Hamerling, Geibel, etc.), and by recent Anglo-American poets like John Hollander, Timothy Steele, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, James Merrill, Marilyn Hacker, and Rachel Wetzsteon. I feel like a poetic lepidopterist -- I think I'll start hunting sapphics today!

Posted on 2007-02-05 at 21:21. File under literature.

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Sapphics

Two republished translations.

Gary Hess, who maintains the Poem of Quotes website, writes in to tell me that he has posted two of my Sappho translations from Ancient Fire: Come Here to Me from Crete and Some Say. It's always a pleasure to share the beauties of Sappho.

Posted on 2006-11-26 at 21:27. File under literature.

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Randian Style Redux

An overlooked passage of pure description.

John Enright, in his usual observant way, draws attention to a descriptive passage from Ayn Rand's Anthem that I missed when I wrote my essay Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style:

The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.

It's a shame that so many commentators are fixated on Rand's ideas, because the purely literary aspects of her novels are fascinating in their own right.

Posted on 2006-11-03 at 22:03. File under literature.

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Randian Notes

More essays published and on the way.

Herewith an update about various further essays of mine on Ayn Rand:

It's been over three months since the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies published my essay Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style in Volume 7 Number 2, so I've posted it online under my usual public domain licensing.
My essay "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" is forthcoming in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, due out in 2007 from Ashgate Publishing.
Chris Sciabarra has informed me that my essay "Nietzsche, Rand, and the Ethics of the Great Task" has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies on Nietzsche and Rand (due out in 2007, I think).

Now I just need to write my projected essay on Aristotle and Rand, which I think will be my last rung on the ladder.

Posted on 2006-09-12 at 21:09. File under literature.

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The Abacus and the Rose

A poem on science and art.

I recently had occasion to re-read Jacob Bronowski's little book Science and Human Values, which contains a pleasant if somewhat dated dialogue entitled "The Abacus and the Rose". I've always rather enjoyed the sonnet with which Bronowski ends the dialogue:

I, having built a house, reject
The feud of eye and intellect,
And find in my experience proof,
One pleasure runs from root to roof,
One thrust along a streamline arches
The sudden star, the budding larches.

The force that makes the winter grow
Its feathered hexagons of snow,
And drives the bee to match at home,
Their calculated honeycomb,
Is abacus and rose combined.
An icy sweetness fills my mind,

A sense that under thing and wing,
Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring.

Posted on 2006-07-06 at 21:11. File under literature.

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On Randian Style

My latest published essay.

I forgot to mention recently that an essay of mine entitled "Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style" was published in the Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Expect me to post it online in three months or so.

Posted on 2006-06-26 at 20:55. File under literature.

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Old Walt

Celebrating Whitman.

Today is the birthday of Walt Whitman, who my friend Deb Ross reminds me was born on this day in 1819. I happen to think that old Walt is the greatest American poet, probably the greatest American writer, and maybe even one of the greatest Americans. I wrote about Walt in three journal entries from 2001 (1, 2, 3) and ever since have been meaning to re-read his poems as well as his powerful essay Democratic Vistas (which I quoted obliquely in my recent post on understanding America). Until I write about Whitman again, I leave you with the poem "Old Walt" from another of my favorite American poets, Langston Hughes:

Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking,
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking or the finding.

Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.

Posted on 2006-05-31 at 20:47. File under literature.

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Epitaph

Translating the translator, part four.

Epitaph

Alles starb in meinem Herzen
was nicht reines Feuer war:
in den Gluten meiner Qualen
bracht ich's Gott im Himmel dar.

Nur das flammenhafte Sehnen
das sich grad am Brande nährt
hat die Gluten überstanden
noch nachdem sie Gott verzehrt.

And my first draft at a translation (there's a lot in this one I'm unsure of, it may change quite radically):

Epitaph

All is dead inside my heart
that once was purest fire:
in the heat I offered up
my pain to heaven's God.

Only the ardent passion
that once nourished the flame
has yet outlived the fire
that God alone devoured.

Posted on 2006-03-16 at 21:23. File under literature.

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The Outbreak of War, 1939

Translating the translator, part three.

Kriegsausbruch, 1939

Wohl strahtle die Sonne über reifen Feldern
und Früchte hängen schwer von jedem Ast,
die letzten Rosen blühn, die Wälder duften,
   und niemals war die Welt so schön.

Doch keine Hände greifen nach den Früchten,
das Korn steht ungeschnitten und verdirbt,
und all die Blumen welken ungesehen,
   freudlos und ohne Liebe hin.

Und nur im Traume küss ich ihre Blüten
und nehm dir Früchte in die durstgen Hände
und frage auch wohl einmal ob ein Sommer
   wie dieser jemals wiederkommt.

And my first draft at a translation:

The Outbreak of War, 1939

The sun shines strong over ripened fields
and fruits hang heavy from every branch;
late roses bloom, the woods smell sweet,
   and never was the world so fine.

Yet no hands are picking the fruit,
the grain stands uncut and wasted,
and all the blossoms fade unseen,
   unhappy and unloved besides.

Only in dreams I kiss the blooms,
take the fruit in my thirsty hands,
and wonder if a summer as fine
   as this will ever come again.

Posted on 2006-03-12 at 20:23. File under literature.

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Yellowstone

Translating the translator, part two.

Yellowstone

Da wo das Wasser in Kaskaden
versprühend in die Tiefe rauscht
hab ich dem Strom so manche Stunde
versonnen and verträumt gelauscht.

Das Wasser grub sich ins Gestein
wo es in grauser Schlucht sich windet
aus der der Fels in tausen Türmen
den Weg zur Sonne aufwärts findet.

Im Traume folgte ich dem Strome
durch Wald und Wüste immer hin
und sah die Welt im Strom gelöst
jenseits von allem Ziel und Sinn.

And a possible translation into English:

Yellowstone

There where the surging water roars
in spraying rapids in the deep,
I've spent countless dreamy hours
listening pensive to the stream.

The water gouges through the rock,
winding its way through gray ravines
where a thousand towers of stone
reach their way upwards to the sky.

In dreams I've followed the river
ever on through wasteland and wood
and seen the world released, flowing
far beyond all meaning and goal.

I'm not fully satisfied with that rendering (especially the final stanza), but it will have to do for a first draft.

Posted on 2006-03-11 at 21:23. File under literature.

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Rain

Translating the translator, part one.

One of my favorite poets is Walter Kaufmann, who is best known for his magisterial translations of the works of Nietzsche, but whose poems I've read with pleasure over the years (many thanks to John Enright for turning me on to his poetry). In addition to many fine poems in English, Kaufmann wrote some poems in German in the period 1939-1942 (copyright 1962, 1971, 1975 by Walter Kaufmann), which to my knowledge have not been translated into English. Since few people know of Kaufmann as a poet and even fewer still are probably interested in rendering his German poems into English, I thought I would try my hand at the daunting task of "translating the translator". The first of Kaufmann's poems I've rendered into English is this:

Regen

Der Regen is ein müdes Kind
das heim zur Mutter Erde will:
er gleitet schlafend durch den Wind
und sinkt zur Erde und liegt still.

Here's my first pass at a translation:

Rain

The rain is an exhausted child
that's homesick for its mother earth:
it glides down sleeping through the wind
and sinks to earth and there lies still.

Update (2006-03-11): I've corrected the rendering of "gleitet".

Posted on 2006-03-10 at 22:09. File under literature.

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Inaugural Podcast

A poetry reading, with commentary.

This evening I recorded my first podcast: a reading of my poem Ancient Fire, with commentary. Give it a listen here.

Posted on 2006-02-08 at 22:31. File under literature.

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Sapphics

Poems old and new.

Over on the New-Poetry list we've been discussing Sappho in response to the news (previously wished for here) that the good folks at Oxford have deciphered a "new" poem by Sappho. In the ensuing thread I sent along not one but two of the poems I've written in Sapphic meter. "She is like a god to me..."

Posted on 2005-06-28 at 20:07. File under literature.

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Slow Time

Poetry and language.

The other day, Uche argued for the continued relevance -- indeed, the increased importance -- of poetry in today's fast-paced times, since the concentrated and often difficult nature of poetic language forces the reader to slow down. Yet (as Uche knows) it is more than just diction: it is also the meter (or, more broadly, the rhythm) that induces a kind of slow time when one reads a poem. Poetry is a temporal art in much the same way music is -- and in one respect, a poem enforces slow time even more viscerally than a piece of music does because usually you perform the poem (by reading it silently or aloud to yourself) rather than having it performed for you at a poetry reading or by means of a recording. The post-modernists would call this co-creating the work, and for once they would be right!

One likely theory about the emergence of the arts (advanced for example by Ellen Dissanayake) is that human life started to become more complex around 30,000 years ago -- population densities increased, human bands started to interact more often and in more challenging ways with other groups, long-distance trade began to emerge as a key human pursuit, technology (such as it was) improved faster, and so on (sound familiar?). In the face of that increased pace of change and before the emergence of writing, humans needed something to direct attention to important life lessons and improve coherence across larger groups of people. Dissanayake calls this "making special". Poetry, music, paintings (as in European caves), and other forms of patterned representation emerged as ways to structure information; some of the resulting art-forms also structured time in significant ways, slowing it down and making time, too, into something special. While there can be complexity in poetic language or musical formalism, I think the key to these art-forms is not that complexity per se but the fact that their linguistic or musical materials are different from what we normally experience -- and different in ways that set them apart from humdrum existence.

Does the slow time of poetic experience have special meaning today? As Uche observes and everyone knows first-hand, life is getting faster and faster. We live in a culture of immediate gratification, sounds bites, the latest news, instant messaging (because email just isn't fast enough -- mea culpa!), continuous partial attention, and what Stuart Brand calls fashion (not clothing styles, but the ever-churning monthly and weekly and daily and hourly changes in what's cool, hot, new, interesting, and different). In contrast to that culture, the slow time of poetic experience induces reflection and introspection -- slowing, pausing, stopping, puzzling, treading, absorbing, and eventually delighting in the meaning of difficult words, fresh metaphors, strange word orders, odd grammatical constructions, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, and all the other tricks of the poetic trade.

In that pursuit of slow time, I find nothing as valuable as new poetry. While I love to read old and even ancient poetry (my favorites being Horace and Sappho), poems by authors from the last hundred years (my favorites include Langston Hughes, Walter Kaufmann, and Timothy Steele) often speak to me more deeply because their language and concerns are more naturally my own. Unfortunately, too many poets of the last hundred years thought it was perfectly acceptable to write poems without much form or difficulty -- what Robert Frost called the equivalent of tennis without a net. Yet it is precisely form (meter) and that sense of something familiar yet different and special that induces poetic "slow time". Thankfully, more and more poets are rediscovering their craft and the roots of their art, with the result that they are again making something special.

Here's to new poetry!

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 21:53. File under literature.

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New Poetry

A discussion list.

Thanks to a fine entry in Uche Ogbuji's blog, I've just discovered and signed up for the New Poetry discussion list. It'll be fun to once again be on a mailing list devoted to something other than technology.

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 14:49. File under literature.

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13 Emily Dickinson Poems

Another baker's dozen.

It took me all weekend, but I finally culled my list of favorite Emily Dickinson poems down to thirteen. The results were too long for my blog, so I've posted them in the form of a journal entry. Thanks again to my friend John Enright for turning me on to Emily.

Posted on 2005-05-30 at 21:49. File under literature.

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Oxyrhynchus

A papyrologist's dream.

A bunch of folks have pinged me about the astonishing news that a treasure trove of ancient texts will soon be readable again thanks to infrared scanning technologies. Yes, these texts were found in the two-thousand-year-old garbage dump of an obscure Egyptian town and have been essentially unreadable until now. My old professor Dirk Obbink is leading the team that is converting these texts. Personally I'm hoping for the discovery of some of the lost poems of Sappho (much more likely to show up in a garbage dump than some of the lost writings of Aristotle, which would be number two on my wish list).

Posted on 2005-04-19 at 21:41. File under literature.

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Break, Blow, Burn

Paglia on poetry.

Because I love poems and language, this excerpt from the introduction to Camille Paglia's new book made me want to yell "Amen, sister!" Some choice observations:

What fascinated me about English was what I later recognised as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining and often funny, as it is to Shakespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry....

My secular but semi-mystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech....

Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object; it is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

The full title of Paglia's book is Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems; I'll review it here once I've read it.

Posted on 2005-03-15 at 21:49. File under literature.

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Girl With A Pearl Earring

A rare novel.

This evening I finished reading Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. It is a rare event for me to read a novel -- usually I read dry books of history or science, and once in a while some poetry. But this is a rare novel, which weaves a sensitive story of a girl's coming of age and the meaning of art around Vermeer's painting Girl With a Pearl Earring (uit Nederlands, "Meisje met de parel"). Highly recommended.

Posted on 2005-03-15 at 21:17. File under literature.

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Stephenson @ Reason

An interview of interest.

I'm not a huge fan of Neal Stephenson (mostly because I don't read many novels), but this interview with him in Reason Magazine is a good read.

Posted on 2005-02-10 at 14:04. File under literature.

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Urban Haiku

Some lost poems.

When experimenting with document publishing as I have been recently, the works I usually play with are my poems, specifically the collection entitled Ancient Fire. To my surprise, I discovered that back in 2003 I somehow accidentally deleted my "Urban Haiku", which I've just restored using the magic of the Wayback Machine. Enjoy!

Posted on 2005-02-08 at 07:39. File under literature.

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Aslan Shrugged

C.S. Lewis meets Ayn Rand.

For fans of both Atlas Shrugged and the Narnian Chronicles, Aslan Shrugged is way cool. As someone said in the comments:

"You got your Narnia in my Objectivism!"

"You got your Objectivism in my Narnia!"

Two great tastes that go great together! (Thanks to Ken MacLeod for the pointer; and let's not forget that classic comic book Elvis Shrugged!)

Posted on 2005-02-07 at 16:13. File under literature.

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Aesthetics

Two essays on the arts.

I'm close to finished with writing two essays on literature and the philosophy of the arts that I've been thinking about for a long time: Image and Integration in the Novels of Ayn Rand and The Conceptual Nature of Art. Ping me if you'd like to read either one before I submit them for publication, most likely to the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 20:58. File under literature.

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The Wave

Meter and rhythm in music and poetry.

The book Robert Frost on Writing contains a conversation on the craft of poetry between Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Kenney Withers. Here is an excerpt (pp. 155-156):

WARREN: Well, I'm sure you're right about the dramatic quality being the basic quality of good poetry. That would bring up the relation of meter and rhythm to the dramatic moment -- moment by moment -- in a poem, wouldn't it?

FROST: That's right.

WARREN: I'd like to hear you say it in your way, how meter enters into this picture -- the dramatic quality.

FROST: The meter seems to be the basis of -- the waves and the beat of the heart seems to be basic in all making of poetry in all languages -- some sort of meter.

WARREN: The strain of the rhythm against the meter. Is that itself just a dramatic fact that permeates a poem?

FROST: From those two things rises what we call this tune that's different from the tune of the other kind of music. It's a music of itself. And when people say that this will easily turn into -- be set to music, I think it's bad writing. It ought to fight being set to music if it's got expression in it.

WARREN: Yes, there's something resistant and unique in it; you can't turn it into something else. This is to overstate the matter, but I do want to get it clear, if I can for myself: would you say that even though the meter is based on the human pulse or some kind of basic rhythm in our natures, still for the poet it's something to be played against -- it's not something to be fought with, to be tussled with? It's not directly expressive -- ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA.

FROST: No, it's doggerel when you do that. You see, and how you save it from doggerel is having enough dramatic meaning in it for the other thing to break the doggerel. And it mustn't break with it. I said years ago that it reminds me of a donkey and a donkey cart; for some of the time the cart is on the tugs and some of the time on the hold-backs. You see it's that way all the time. The one's doing that and the other -- the one's holding the thing back and the other's pushing it forward -- and so on, back and forward. I puzzled over it for many years and tried to make people see what I meant. They use the word "rhythm" about a lot of free verse; and gee, what's the good of the rhythm unless it is on something that trips it -- that it ruffles? You know, it's got to ruffle the meter.

Now, I find this interesting because I think Warren and Frost are getting at something -- the interplay of meter and rhythm -- that holds true for music as well. The best expression I've found of it is in Victor Zuckerkandl's book Sound and Symbol (p. 172):

Such is the case in all metrical music. To put it metaphorically: the ground upon which the tones fall is itself in wave motion. The wave is the meter; rhythm arises from the different arrangements of the tones on the wave. The greatest possible latitude is accorded to the nature and manner of these arrangements. The tones may be distributed over the measure regularly or irregularly; may fill the measure in rapid succession or leave it empty for long stretches; at one place crowd close together, at another spread thin; may follow the pattern of the measure with their accents or run contrary to it. This freedom of distribution and arrangement makes it possible for the tones to give the constant basic form of the wave a changing, perpetually different profile. In accordance with the will of the tones, the wave will display contours now soft and rounded, now sharp and jagged; will beat softly and calmly or with ever-increasing impact; will heave, topple, break against resistances. This playing with the wave by the tones, this shaping of the substance of the wave; the conjunction and opposition of two components, their mutual tension and continuous adjustment to each other -- this, in music, we experience as rhythm.

In both poetry and music, the meter provides an underlying wave of forward motion -- iambic feet and duple time being the most familiar (interestingly, most poems in the English language put the accent on the second beat, whereas most metrical music puts the accent on the first beat). But if one relies too heavily on mere meter, the result is poetic doggerel (ta-DA ta-DA) or unsophisticated music (the OOM-pah OOM-pah of bad polkas). The dramatic possibilities of rhythm are realized when the words or tones ruffle the meter, resist it, play with it, push it forward and then hold it back, break with it without breaking it.

Posted on 2004-02-03 at 20:39. File under literature.

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Clarification

Art as a form of knowledge.

Robert Frost, in his essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" (Robert Frost on Writing, p. 126), writes that a poem (and by implication every work of art) "ends in a clarification of life -- not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion." His thought is quite in line with my views on art, and contrasts strongly with my old muse Ayn Rand, who claimed that all art has "metaphysical" import and consists in (or reflects) a great clarification. However, in one respect I incline more to Rand than to Frost: in my experience, a work of art can provide something more permanent than a "momentary stay against confusion", and indeed can provide even something approaching "the courage to face a lifetime" (The Fountainhead, Part IV, Chapter 1).

Posted on 2004-01-31 at 19:53. File under literature.

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Colloquiality

Frost on Emerson and the living language.

In a letter to Emerson scholar Regis Michaud of January 1918, Robert Frost writes as follows:

Some twenty-two lines in "Monadnoc" beginning "Now in sordid weeds they sleep" (I don't need to copy them out for such an Emersonian as you, Michaud) meant almost more to me than anything else on the art of writing when I was a youngster; and that not just on the art of writing colloquial verse but on the art of writing any kind of verse or prose. I suffer from the way people abuse the word colloquial. All writing, I don't care how exalted, how lyrical, or how seemingly far removed from the dramatic, must be as colloquial as this passage from "Monadnoc" comes to. I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art. It may shoot up as high as you please and flourish as widely abroad in the air, if only the roots are what and where they should be. One half of individuality is locality: and I was about venturing to say the other half was colloquiality. The beauty of Emerson's "Uriel" and "Give All to Love" is that it is well within the colloquial as I use the word....

The lines from Emerson's poem "Monadnoc" to which Frost refers are as follows:

Now in sordid weeds they sleep,
Their secret now in dulness keep;
Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
These the masters who can teach.
Fourscore or a hundred words
All their vocal muse affords;
These they turn in other fashion
Than the writer or the parson.
I can spare the college-bell,
And the learned lecture, well;
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For the hardy English root
Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground, and never soars,
While Jake retorts, and Reuben roars;
Tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
Goes like a bullet to its mark,
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear.

What is this "colloquiality"? It is the living language of conversation, the "hardy root" and grounding of any language in its day-to-day use by individuals speaking together.

Posted on 2004-01-23 at 19:49. File under literature.

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Poems

Fall cleaning.

I just cleaned up the poetry pages on this website. Much easier to navigate now. I'm still rather fond of these poems, which I wrote from 1994 through 2000. The last poem I wrote was Cobalt on December 20th, 2000, and the muses haven't been back to visit since. That's not as bad as my songwriting activities, though: the last song I wrote was, I think, either Topology or Pre-Emptive Strike in 1995! Maybe I'll clean up my music pages next...

Posted on 2003-09-26 at 21:09. File under literature.

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On the Lighter Side

Wherein I take a break from Nietzsche.

When I have a book in my hand, I can usually be found reading all that heavy stuff like Nietzsche (just wait until I decide to re-read all of Aristotle!). So yesterday I took a little break and devoured two of my favorite books for young adults: The Wonderful O by James Thurber and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Both are highly recommended for kids from ages 10 to 100.

Posted on 2002-12-16 at 19:29. File under literature.

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Poetic Justice

On posting some poems by John Enright.

The other day John Enright sent me some poems, so this evening I posted them at the website of my literary webzine. John was the first person to publish any of my poems back in the pages of the long-defunct magazine Nomos, and he's one of my very favorite poets, so it's only just that I publish his work. Perhaps someday (after I finish my Jabber book!) I'll print a book of John's poems. But that's for someday, not today or the near future....

Posted on 2002-07-29 at 21:51. File under literature.

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Flatland

A fable for one and all.

Yay, an illustrated version of E.A. Abbott's Flatland is available online. Thanks to Moira for the link. Plus it's Theodore Roethke week over at Moira's blog -- he's one of my favorite poets!

Posted on 2002-07-14 at 21:51. File under literature.

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Looking Ahead

Thoughts on speculative fiction.

While on vacation I read some older fiction (Willa Cather's O Pioneers!) and some more recent work by Ursula K. Le Guin. I like Le Guin's writings, although I find them a bit maddening (or, sin of sins, boring) at times. She also engages in some worthwhile reflections on science fiction or, as I like to call it, speculative fiction. Le Guin is right that SF does not merely extrapolate from current trends, but rather speculates about what the future might be like. Yet sometimes I wish that SF stories would extrapolate, in the sense of writing about near-future events rather than just far futures in which interstellar travel and communication are givens. How did humans get to the point where crossing the interstellar deeps was normal? What were the first steps in that direction -- L5 habitations, space arks, Mars colonization, what? How did such events relate to human history on Earth? Perhaps it's harder to write stories set in the near future precisely because it's necessary to speculate about the near future of Earth as well, and recent history has been so fast-paced and disruptive that it's difficult to know what aspects of human life will be like in even 50 years, let alone 100 or 200 or 500 years. I was thinking about this the other day while waiting outside Bonnie Brae Ice Cream -- this neighborhood and the stores in it didn't even exist 65 years ago, so it's hard for me to imagine what this area of Denver will be like in another 65 years. And that's just one little street corner. Multiply that by hundreds of countries, thousands of languages, millions of towns, and billions of people. Suddenly extrapolation looks awfully challenging.

Posted on 2002-07-14 at 13:31. File under literature.

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Zamyatin

My latest researches.

I'm finishing up my research into Yevgeny Zamyatin for a paper I've written exploring his (possible) influence on Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. I think that the influence is there and I provide evidence for thinking so in the paper, which is slated to be published next year in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Zamyatin is a fascinating writer (best-known for his novel We, which was the original dystopia -- move over 1984!), and I find his deep individualism quite congenial to my way of thinking.

One possible source for ideas expressed by Zamyatin in We and Rand in Anthem is the short story "The New Utopia" by Jerome K. Jerome (PDF), published in 1891 and widely read in Russia (in Jerome's tale, people have numbers rather than names, the family has been outlawed in favor of government-controlled breeding, etc.). Another possible influence is Dostoevsky. In separate essays published in Gary Kern's anthology Zamyatin's We: Essays, Richard Gregg argues that We owes much to both Notes From Underground and The Possessed, and Susan Layton argues that Zamyatin's "Synthetism" is a descendent of Dostoevsky's "Romantic Realism". Interestingly, Rand described her own literary aesthetics as "Romantic Realism", although she meant something different by the term (I think the most accurate term for her aesthetics is "Heroic Symbolism", though the art created by her followers even shades over into Objectivist Realism if you ask me). Much to chew on here. And I simply must read more Dostoevsky!

Posted on 2002-06-26 at 21:17. File under literature.

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Monadnock

My webzine turns five years old.

Wow, it was five years ago that I started publishing my literary webzine, the Monadnock Review. There's some good stuff in there, if I do say so myself. My interest in it waxes and wanes, but I'm feeling the need to solicit more contributions before too long (haven't updated it since January!).

Posted on 2002-05-28 at 10:08. File under literature.

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I'm too busy to blog right now, but I must note that today is the 200th anniversary of Victor Hugo's birth! A fine time to visit my Victor Hugo FanSpace.

Posted on 2002-02-26 at 16:12. File under literature.

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A Jabber acquaintance of mine in Istanbul let me know about the poet Nazim Hikmet, whom I'd never heard of before. Naturally I can't read his poetry in Turkish so I'm sure I'm missing a lot. Hikmet is probably best known for his poem "On Living", which begins like this:

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example --
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.

I also like the following (one of his "9-10 P.M. Poems"):

The most beautiful sea hasn't been crossed yet.
The most beautiful child hasn't grown up yet.
Our most beautiful days we haven't seen yet.
And the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you I haven't said yet...

The translations are by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. I'll try to find links for them and for Hikmet.

Posted on 2002-02-12 at 07:48. File under literature.

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More Randiana. I found it amusing that the cover of a catalog of books and tapes I recently received from The Objectivist Center featured pictures of the Atlas sculptures at Rockefeller Center. The reason I found it amusing is that Rand seems to have disliked those sculptures. The context is, again, her journals (which I'm slowly working through), specifically a discussion of architect Raymond Hood, whom she thought was a faux-modernist who was cashing in on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright in a second-hand manner. Supposedly Hood originally drew up some Gothic plans for Rockefeller Center (Rockefeller loved Gothic architecture). Rand writes as follows:

Hood was the guiding hand among the eight or ten architects of Rockefeller Center. (Any wonder he got in? Would Wright draw up Gothic plans and then "talk" Rockefeller out of it? Where is the great integrity and "modern" convictions of Mr. Hood? And Rockefeller Center is a mess, compared to what it could have been. As to its sculpture -- I wonder if Hood had a hand in the giving out of that commision?) [152]

Posted on 2002-02-02 at 20:09. File under literature.

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Today is Ayn Rand's birthday, so I figure I'll post some Rand-related information. Here's an interesting quote from "Hollywood: Our Strength, Our Weakness" by James F. Cooper in the Fall 2001 issue of American Arts Quarterly (a free journal on the arts and culture published by The Newington-Cropsey Foundation):

The men who once ran Hollywood understood the craft of making motion pictures better than the intellectuals who disparaged movies as "kitsch" and critics who usually praised the wrong films. Tough studio-boss Jack Warner tried in vain to convince Ayn Rand that writing a movie script for The Fountainhead (1949) was different from writing the novel. Rand had worked as a screenwriter for several years at MGM before writing the 1943 novel that made her famous, but she brushed aside all constructive suggestions from Warner, Oscar-winning director King Vidor, and the movie's star, Gary Cooper, whom she had personally selected to play architect Howard Roark. A brilliant advocate for intellectual and artistic freedom, she seemed oblivious to the formal connections between aesthetics and content. The movie version of the highly successful novel The Fountainhead was an artistic and commercial failure.

In her journals, Rand praised Frank Lloyd Wright for his intransigence -- for example, she noted approvingly that "he refused to participate in the [Chicago World] Fair, unless he could have complete say over it; Wright did it because he had an idea of what he wanted done with the Fair and he wished no interference with the idea; he had a truly beautiful and important thing to create" [151]. She seemed to think this was a grand approach to working on large projects, but she underestimated the extent to which a project like making a movie is a collaborative effort (unlike writing a novel). In fact she loathed collaboration and cooperation on philosophical grounds (there are some clear-cut passages on this in her journals), since she saw them as instances of abdicating responsibility and yielding to the judgment of others (i.e., what she called "altruism"). For a thinker who opposed false dichotomies such as mind vs. body and secular vs. sacred, she certainly seemed to have a blind spot on the individual vs. the collective. I'm as much of an individualist as anybody, but I recognize that working with others does not mean one has compromised one's individuality. I think I've noted before (probably in one of my journal entries) that all of Rand's heroes were able to work independently -- they were inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, and the like. No teamwork was ever required of them, and if it was (e.g., Howard Roark while working in the office of architect John Erik Snyte) the situation did not last long because a true Randian hero, like her idol Wright, is too much of a creative genius to collaborate and cooperate with others -- who, it is assumed, will stifle the hero's creativity and therefore individuality. (That brings up the issue of identifying individuality with creativity, but I'll open that can of worms some other night.) In any case, I think there are some seriously questionable assumptions behind Rand's views here, and I plan to critique them at greater length in a future essay.

Posted on 2002-02-02 at 17:32. File under literature.

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One more thought on new formalism: I'm not convinced of the value of traditional meters. I'm slowly reading through the journals of Ayn Rand, and one thing that she got from Frank Lloyd Wright is the concept of organic architecture (although she shies away from the language of organicism). The catchphrase here is "form follows function" (although not in the original sense espoused by Louis Sullivan): the form of a building must be appropriate for its site and its function. Certainly it's harder in poetry or music than in a practical art like architecture to assign exact meaning to the term "function". Yet I find myself much more open to nonce forms in poetry than most new formalists are, just as my love of jazz (can we even speak of jazz "forms"?) puts me at odds with the traditionalism of most classical musicians. And despite my love of Bach and Dvorak and such, I simply find jazz to be more organic and alive than compositions created in slavish pursuit of sonata form or whatever. That's not to say I don't like writing in traditional meters -- I most decidedly do. And poetry is "inter-textual" in ways that most arts are -- when I write a poem such as Ancient Fire or Cobalt that refers to Sappho, I like to write it in Sapphic meter because I'm making a connection not to objective reality but to poetic history. Yet by no means am I wedded to writing poems (or music) solely in established forms, as my friends the formalists seem to be. But perhaps that's just because I lack the necessary discipline. :-)

Posted on 2002-01-27 at 20:57. File under literature.

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The Formalist, long one of the premier journals dedicated to metrical poetry, finally has a website.

Posted on 2002-01-07 at 21:40. File under literature.

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Moira quotes the following poem in her new blog, and I like it so much I'm going to include it here as well:

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

--Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robert Bly

Posted on 2002-01-04 at 19:44. File under literature.

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My friend Moira has started a new blog devoted to book reviews. I'm looking forward to it!

Posted on 2002-01-02 at 19:43. File under literature.

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A year ago yesterday was the last time I wrote a poem (entitled Cobalt). It's funny how the muse comes and goes.

Posted on 2001-12-21 at 22:01. File under literature.

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Moira likes my Zamyatin essay and suggests that I explore more fully the similarities and differences between We and Anthem (perhaps through a chapter-by-chapter summary) as well as what I call Rand's "heroic symbolism" (as opposed to this mealy-mouthed "Romantic Realism"). I really do think there is a strong symbolist strain in her writing, and from what M. reports Rand was quite touchy about the subject, insisting that her characters were not symbols but quite realistic -- which seems off the mark to me (esp. in her later fiction, as I discuss in my dialogue Why Is John Galt?). Since Rand thought that her characters were not free-floating symbols but abstractions derived from reality (perhaps even the paradigmatic examples of abstraction for her), there are some fascinating epistemological implications here. Hmm...

Posted on 2001-12-13 at 21:48. File under literature.

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I've been emailing with Moira about my essay on Victor Hugo. One thing I deleted from an earlier version was mention of Rand's definition of the novel:

A novel is a long, fictional story about human beings and the events in their lives. --Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto

By that definition Homer was one of the greatest novelists in history. I sense that this definition needs improvement...

It seems that somewhere along the line I stopped including quotes from Victor Hugo in each of my weblog entries. Hmph. Well, you can get the complete list here.

Posted on 2001-12-13 at 21:12. File under literature.

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Loyal readers of this weblog (yes, all three of you!) may wonder why every day I include a quote from Victor Hugo. Well, 26 February 2002 will be the 200th anniversary of Hugo's birth, so I suppose you could say I'm starting the celebration a little early. Over the last few years I have read nearly every scrap of Hugo that has been translated into English, during which process I have gathered many quotes from his writings. Rather than force people to read all those quotes at one sitting, I figure I'll parcel them out day by day and address them to the topical (or not-so-topical) issues I discuss here. Naturally what is topical today will become obscure tomorrow, but I hope that the quotes I've gathered from Hugo will remain of value when I revisit these pages in years to come.

Today's quote: "History is night. That which is no longer on the stage immediately fades into obscurity. The scene is shifted, and all is forgotten." (The Man Who Laughs, II.8.iii)

Posted on 2001-11-16 at 21:02. File under literature.

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Last night I created a new entry in my journal, completing my reflections on the plays of Henrik Ibsen (whose last play, When We Dead Awaken, I read a few nights ago).

Posted on 2001-11-10 at 18:15. File under literature.

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Last night I read both Ayn Rand's novel Anthem and the penultimate Ibsen play: John Gabriel Borkman. The latter is a strong play for Ibsen's later efforts, with quite a bit of irony and even some comedic elements. Once again we find some of his major themes (the folly living through others, the importance of independence, the evasion of honesty in living), with the focus this time being on Borkman's son Erhart, whom Borkman, his wife Gunhild, and Gunhild's twin sister Ella all pin their hopes and lives on. Erhart will have nothing to do with it and leaves them all in the lurch by running off with a strong-headed, fun-loving, thirty-something divorcee named Fanny Wilson (why is it that so many of the life-loving characters in Ibsen's plays come from outside Norway, usually it seems from England or America?). Erhart and Wilson recognize that their relationship may not last forever, but as he says "I only want the chance to live" -- a chance he was always denied by his suffocating family. So I have one more Ibsen play to read: When We Dead Awaken, the last play he wrote (in 1899). By the way, I'm reading Ibsen's prose dramas in the translations by Michael Meyer, which I have found to be the most natural translations of Ibsen's plays into English.

As for Anthem, on re-reading it for the umpteenth time so soon after reading Christopher Collins' analysis of Zamyatin's novel We, it strikes me that other than some surface-level similarities between the two novels (both are set in far-future dystopias, have characters with numbers instead of names, are narrated by their protagonists in diary form, etc.), they really are quite different. That's not to say that Rand wasn't influenced by Zamyatin, because I think she was. Indeed it's quite possible that some aspects of Anthem are intended as refutations of some of Zamyatin's premises -- I'm thinking specifically of the lack of technology in Anthem as opposed to the advanced technology present in We, which the latter has in common with 1984. But there's more to chew on here....

Now playing: Renaissance, Tales of 1001 Nights. After Yes, Renaissance is my favorite rock band -- though with their creative mix of rock, folk, and classical it's perhaps not quite right to call them a rock band. I think of them as "progressive folk". Right now I'm listening to a song of theirs about Solzhenitsyn -- not your typical rock'n'roll fare!

Posted on 2001-11-06 at 20:48. File under literature.

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In doing research for my paper on Zamyatin and Rand, I'm working my way through all the interpretive works I can get my hands on regarding Zamyatin. Thanks to inter-library loan, I'm currently reading Christopher Collins' short book Evgenij Zamjatin, which contains some good analysis of Zamyatin's dystopian novel We among other things. There are definite parallels between We (written in 1921, first published, in English, in 1924) and Rand's dystopian novel Anthem (1938), as noted by Zina Gimpelevich in an article she published in 1997 in the Canadian journal Germano-Slavica. Zamyatin's essays are also of great interest to me, since they advocate a 90-proof individualism as well as the integration of realism and fantasy/symbolism/romanticism in literature (a position that finds an echo in Rand's dedication to "Romantic Realism" -- which may mean something quite different from what her disciples say it does).

Today's quotes from Victor Hugo can be found in the preface to his play Hernani: "Romanticism, so often ill-defined, is only ... liberalism in literature." "Liberty in art, liberty in society: behold the double end towards which consistent and logical minds should tend." "Let the principle of liberty work, but let it work well. In letters, as in society, not etiquette, not anarchy, but laws."

Posted on 2001-11-04 at 16:58. File under literature.

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