Summing Up

Once we decide to swim for land, we start thinking about what we're going to do when we get there. "Motivation" -- it gets you moving, right?

And we're also going to be stopping now and then to tread water, as we search the horizon for the first signs of our goal. A tower, for instance. Or maybe a set of them (a castle?).

Well, we caught the tide and here we are. But it's not the sunshine and white sand we were hoping to find. It's rocks and cliffs and dangerous-looking coves and bad-looking crags. But, it's land.

Look, there's the castle, right there -- on top of the tallest and the craggiest cliff of them all. And here we jumped ship (it was sinking, anyway) without our climbing gear! Well, what do you want to do? Swim back to the ship that isn't there anymore?

We need more motivation. If there's a castle, then there's an aviary. There's a place to watch the stars. A place to worship or meditate. And a village. And there are other things there -- like a garden with a plant conservatory and a glade with trees and walls to hold all that and everything else. And a little retreat outside the walls hardly anyone knows about. And, within the walls, a place to ... well, heed nature.

So there's good reason to quit clinging to this rock and let the surf take us to the cliff, where we'll rest in a cove and then start climbing. Our climb will be lightened by thoughts of the people and stories and dramas and myths and battles and all the other things we'll see illustrated on the tapestries insulating the castle interiors. They'll tell us about this new land and what we may expect from it. Also, we may learn from it all a way to find our place in the sun.

Just keep moving.

________

The first part of this blog was called The Art of Definition. That part is the 2008 archive. The second part of this blog (in the 2009 archive) ran through several titles, ending with The Rogue Sonneteer. Both parts concerned prosody -- "the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry," according to the OED {online}. The first one, theory; the second, practice. But, both were about lots more, too ("form" comes to mind).

The Instauration (the 2010 archive) offered a challenging approach to the poet's second goal -- method. And it has been about lots more, too ("function" rings a bell).

Those of you who have been following all along by now have the two well-conditioned hands I think you'll need to reach the heights that your pluck --"spirited and determined courage" {ditto} -- and skill will take you.

I offer my best wishes. Good luck to you all.

"What was that?"

The Elite Eight is the final list of The Instauration. (Fanfare is appropriate here.)

This final list is one that is more prone to substitution with no loss to the general concept of a "tapestry" poem that the other two lists -- The Top Ten ("tower" poems) and The Back Nine ("fortress and grounds" poems) are. Unlike the other two lists, this one can, and does, include incomplete works.

They don't need to be complete to be useful. Also, you could put in the Dunciad instead of Essay on Man, for instance, or Samson Agonistes for, say, The Faerie Queen. Tapestries can be exchanged much more easily than towers and battlements, towns and schools, herbaria and observatories. And we can hold some extras in storage, just in case.

Have fun with this one. I did.

I'll have more to say soon about the total concept of The Instauration and the lists. For now, let me say that the lists concern what poems are for, more than anything else.

The Elite Eight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the "Pearl Poet"
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser
*Essay on Man by Alexander Pope
"The Raven" and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
Hymn to Proserpine/Atalanta in Calydon by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Homage to Sextus Propertius by Ezra Pound (translator)

What I Meant (I think)

It's easier to explain what I didn't mean: the cave paintings themselves contain (AFAIK) no secret poems in cipher. (That probably won't stop anyone from looking.)

So, any 30-millennia-old tribal epics are as extinct as the cave bear. But, to me and probably other fellow poets, the very idea that such works may have existed once excites the imagination, bolsters a sense of mission and provides a connection to prehistoric antiquity and perhaps the essence of humanity itself.

In other words: "Cool!"

Old Long Since

While ruminating over a magazine article concerning the fate of the cave bear, something occurred to me: what if some of these cave paintings (used in the article to illustrate what the now-extinct bear may have looked like) served as mnemonic devices for poets? An outline for epics composed to celebrate or commemorate big events in the life of a tribe?

This is not original -- I know I've heard or read it somewhere some time ago. But, if this hypothesis proved to be true even once, it would be staggering. Think of it -- poems more than 30,000 years old!

BTW -- I may have finished The Back Nine (search post for that name). Can you guess its guiding principle? (Hint: A castle needs more than just a tower. The "fascicles" represent, for my purposes, the plant conservatory. The third list will include poetic "tapestries.")

Sir Phil and the Worth of It

When this English poetry thing got under full steam, a poet in my Back Nine wrote "A Defense of Poesie." Ever since then, we've felt the need to defend our right to write, in every way possible.

I don't know why that is, really. I suppose our shared Anglo-Australo-American culture (is "Australo" right?) is so driven by its work-ethic that poetry looks like a waste of time. We know it's the opposite, but it seems sometimes that we're the only ones.

We also know poetry is hard work, even if it's of the "spontaneous bop prosody" type. Especially that one, since its inspiration/criticism vector is calculated simultaneously, rather than measured continuously. (I'm a math idiot, so the preceding metaphor is equally idiotic. Sorry.)

Here in the States, pragmatism is the one philosophic movement originally ascribed to our country, at least as I learned it. And in this country, nothing looks less pragmatic than poetry. Why on Earth would anyone do it, other than as a way for the non-musical to sing the blues? (Actually, not a bad purpose, come to think of it. The blues also use pathos, humor and metaphor to try and bury death, as well as uncover transformation.)

Nothing is less pragmatic than poetry? Perhaps. Nothing human is surely more powerful. What social, political, economic movement has lasted as long as anything on The Top Ten, for instance? The problem is that time tests the quality of our work -- there's really no way around that fact. Some really good poetry grabs people from the start, other works take longer -- much longer, for more than a few. However, this fact should not deter us. In fact, it should do the opposite. Poetry is the polarity, the paradox, the unknown we alone know. And we are its proof.

We sit at the intersection of time and space, alone and aware of the oncoming traffic. We can either get it in gear or get clobbered. The poetry is how we go further.

That's how it should be. For us, nothing less than the best will do.

A Bloody Sacrifice

"Give! Give! Just give yourself away!" So shouted the clergyman from his perch one Sunday many years ago -- urging the congregation to be more charitable, I suppose.

As I sat there listening to him expand on this theme, I wondered to myself: Once they've all given themselves away, who would be left to do the giving?

It's a question that harks back to a post I made not very long after I started this blog in 2008. The post is called "Ouch!" and I think it relates to this issue. Once they've put a laurel on you, you're pretty much done with being yourself whenever or wherever you feel like it. You're expected to do this, be that or whatever comes with the laurel you're given.

And that laurel may be invisible to the laureate. While the official ones are usually visible, laurels can also be imaginary. And, the imaginary ones can work more like labels than awards. (Maybe the official ones do, too. I wouldn't know about that, personally.)

A recent television advertising campaign urges recipients of a certain program to "guard their cards," that is, protect the identity guarantees that allow them to benefit from this program. I believe, and strongly, that poets need to guard their talents, time and treasure (in whatever form). A misguided laurel can just as bad as a misapplied label.

This hazard just comes with the job.

I told you it was thankless, didn't I?

The Rake Over His Leaves

My new look is the herald: I'm not taking another break so much as trying something new.

I'd been wondering over the last few months how to move from macroblogger to microblogger. Now, an elegy in elegant journalese* over a dead poetry program has prompted me to move from wonderer to wanderer.

Join the Wanderer's Progress (if any) at

http://marco218.jaiku.com

We'll see what happens together.

*By 'journalese' (in this case, anyway), I do not mean 'hackneyed newspaper or magazine writing' but the 'language of the journal' that poets (like me) sometimes use to get our points across.

____
Afternote: This is a dead link. My 'pome' of stacked microblog posts wasn't all that great, anyway. Count me '+ed' from now on!

Have Gun, Will Travel*

"If, in your working hours, you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public, nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain."

from "The Inner Ring," collected in The Weight of Glory: and other addresses by C.S. Lewis, HarperCollins, New York: 2001, pp. 156-7.

_____

*I don't have a gun. It's just a metaphor. From an old TV show about a man called ... .

The Wrest of the Story {cq}

I was dealt with firmly, but fairly, at the Carolina Quarterly. The editors at the time simply felt that the "pointers along the way" they gave me were not being taken, or even sinking beneath my rather thick skull. Everyone was more than polite about it, and I remained on "speaking and smiling-in-passing" terms with both editors throughout the remainder of my campus days. Though it hurt like s$%* to get canned, I did not blame them. They were just doing their jobs.

As always, there's more to the story: I related the positive portion yesterday in my post, but not the negative. I also reviewed a "test entry" mailed to CQ by a world-famous author. This person was likely sending a manuscript to us she'd typed herself, just to get feedback outside the New York publishing "loop" as it existed then. I did not have the maturity (or experience) to see that, and I slammed the piece -- which, by the way, was not professionally typed or edited. (Note: This was many years years before personal computers appeared on the large-scale consumer market. Tying manuscripts to fit submission guidelines in the 1970s was a real and very time-consuming chore for anyone but professional typists. Trust me.)

I felt piqued that I had to read this lengthy story at a time when schoolwork was really starting to pile up, and I vented -- probably too harshly. I was an undergrad.

No one said anything to me about it then, and other CQ staffers' comments on the manila, while perhaps less direct, were much the same. Still, my poison pen can't have helped my case very much.

I had at the time considered graduate school and an academic career, but not seriously, and I perhaps unwisely let my editors know that. There was only other undergrad on the staff, whom I did not meet until the Christmas party. He was truly on an academic track, and he regarded me disdainfully at that particular fest. It did not occur to me then (or until many years later) that maybe I had been getting to read famous peoples' stuff, and not him.

Why am I going on like this? For one thing, my dismissal from CQ was a little chip that had been sitting on my shoulder for half a lifetime, and I'm glad I just now knocked it off.

But, more importantly, I have a larger point: How many of the names on The Top Ten (or the still-evolving Back Nine) were literary scholars in their day?

Scholarship has its place, there's no doubt about it. And the academy is the keeper of that particular flame, again, without a doubt. Since the time of Auden, it's also been a haven for many poets.

But the best literature, and especially poetry, seems to emerge without an MFA or a PhD necessarily attached. That flame burns on its own, within or without the ivy walls. Even in college, I believed that.

I still do.

---

This is all I plan to say about this topic, at least for the time being. However, I need to mention one more thing to loop back on the theme that got me started: as a college student, I was not living to serve anyone but me back then, and I got what I deserved. I came to know a better way later, and, while I'd rather avoid belaboring an all-too-familiar quote, I must say it has made all the difference.

My CQ

"CQ" is journalism argot for "correct quote." It's used by a reporter to tell an editor that, yes, that's what the person being quoted actually said -- usually to cite some cracked grammar or a malapropism that is necessary not to fix because it figures somehow into the story you're writing.

But, before my journalism career began, it meant something else to me. My parents urged me to "get involved" in something during my Chapel Hill days, and, even in the mid-1970s, it was good career advice for an undergraduate. I took it, but probably not in the direction they intended.

I volunteered as a front-end reader for the Carolina Quarterly, a highly respected literary magazine then and now. I forget what they actually called my position, but I basically was assigned to read and review unsolicited submissions for the magazine. It was a non-paying, low-end job, but I was more than happy to take it.

You wrote your comments in longhand on the back of the manila envelope the story or article (CQ did not accept poetry submissions in those days) came in -- placed in your cubbyhole at the main office by the editor, who then reviewed your reviews. If you showed ability, you got better submissions to read. You did your job well but maybe lacked the discerning eye, you stayed with the not-so-hot stuff. You goofed off or screwed up, you were replaced. That's what I took from my initial interview, anyway. I was accepted on a trial basis.

Things at first seemed to be going well: I was praised for my work ethic but also given several pointers along the way. One fine autumn day, a submission came in my box from a professor of literature at nearby UNC-Greensboro. This piece did the-then unpopular thing of putting science together with literature (as well as fiction with non-fiction). The scientific discipline involved was botany. I'd already had one botany course and was preparing to take another, more advanced, course in the spring. I gave the piece a glowing review: this guy could write really well, and he could tackle difficult topics at the same time.

Some CQ staffers were enthusiastic, others less so. This story broke new ground, and it may have made some looking for academic careers uneasy (I'm guessing here). I felt it was my job (unconscious gall being my specialty) to champion the piece, and I kept asking about it. My "asking about it" included the Christmas party, where we were all informed another publication had accepted the piece already. I wasn't sure everyone's expressed disappointment was completely genuine, but maybe that was just mine clouding my own interpersonal judgment.

At any rate, my stock began to fall at the CQ. There were surely many perfectly legitimate reasons for the phone call to my dorm room in January that informed me of my departure from the staff, but the article I may have too-strenuously championed was an unmentioned one that I concluded then was the misstep that started my descent. It's what I used to salve my banged-up ego, anyway.

I was informed that my name would not be listed in the spring issue of CQ, and that meant it would not be listed on any of my future resumes, either. If I had considered going to graduate school before, I did not after. And though I had never been fired from anything before that, it was the first of many such experiences I underwent on the career path I did finally choose.

Shortly after I hung up the phone that January in 1977, I made up my mind I was a born maverick, and a maverick I would stay. Oddly, I feel I've benefited from that decision, though it may seem to have cost me dearly in most people's eyes.

"Linnaeus Forgets" by Fred Chappell was published that spring in the American Review -- a journal with a much higher profile than the Carolina Quarterly. Dr. Chappell went on to a brilliant career as an essayist, critic, novelist and poet -- and as perhaps a maverick who knew how to play that game much better than I ever did.

In any case, my views on academe and what I call The Club need to be seen, at least partly, in that light. Do I have a jaundiced eye? Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I do know: I recognized, even as an undergraduate, really good writing when I saw it. Of that, I was sure.

I still am.

The High Life

An emerging debate among poets concerns whether academic Master of Fine Arts programs training creative writing teachers really help anybody write better poetry.

The MFA initiative got its impetus (at least as far as I know) in the 1980s. I'm not sure why. I actually considered going for one myself at the time, but I ultimately decided to continue on the serpentine route my life was on then, and has taken since. I ain't braggin' -- it's just what happened.

There are hundreds of creative writing programs in US colleges nowadays, with many published poets having MFA degrees teaching the classes. (I have no idea whether you can major in it or not -- to be honest, I would hate to think you could major in such a thing as creative writing.)

Yes, my friends, I admit I had the MFA circuit in mind when I posted about The Club last year (and have since), at least to this extent: it just seemed all too easy to scribble, grade others' scribbles and everyone proclaim each other poets. I'm OK with scribbling -- I was a journalist for more than 25 years. I got paid (merely) to do it. But it's too low a standard for me. My creative work has come from the "storm and stress" of living a very uncertain life, and I'd hope my poetic craft reflects that. (I'm sure I'm not alone.)

Here's the bottom line: you determine who you are by what and who you serve. If you live life only to serve yourself, that's really all you're going to be worth in the end. If you live to serve others, that's well and good. Too often we -- all-too-humanly, I think -- expect some reward for it. However, if you can serve expecting no reward or even commendation for your service -- that's a high standard. It's aiming at the chivalrous life, to be sure.

It doesn't matter whether you have a BA (whatever the major), an MFA, a PhD, or you're a high school dropout: if you use poetry to serve this place and time, as well as for whatever and whoever comes after you're dead, then you are a true poet -- to me anyway.

It's a thankless job, and that's why it's so damn good.

P.S.: I may have more to say on this next time.

"'Zeroth' means 'My tongue's stuck in my cheek!'"

0 Twins stay that way, even if there's a triplet.
1 The more things change, the more they stay the same -- most of the time, anyway.
2 Everything dies eventually -- usually sooner rather than later.
3 Nothing ever disappears completely, if it starts as something.

Beat It

A movie comes out today (in limited release, I think) that has had poets -- in this country, anyway -- buzzing for months.

The biopic Howl covers a brief period in the life of Beat meister Allen Ginsberg, shortly after a book of his poems was published by City Lights Books in San Francisco. Some people found the poem "Howl" offensive, and Ginsberg was tried on obscenity charges.

I'll let you watch the movie to see how it all turned out.

There were some misgivings about the movie early on, mainly doubts over how any movie could capture the essence of that turbulent period in the mid-1950s, since so many others had tried and failed (one, called "heartbeat," had a great soundtrack). However, there now are hopes for this one. Starring James Franco as Ginsberg, this new film also features several acting luminaries in both leading and supporting roles.

In any case, details on the movie and the text of the poem can be found at

http://poetryfoundation.org/

I remember two small-screen attempts to capture the Beat Generation's spirit from my childhood.

One was a black-and-white TV show called "77 Sunset Strip." The intro was more famous than show itself -- in it, actors in two of the three "tough guy" leading roles did star turns when their credits rolled while the third, an unknown actor named Edd Byrnes, was shown stepping out onto the Strip, carefully styling his wet-look pomade to the intro music's finale, a blaring attempt at New York "bop" -- just when West Coast "cool" was what Middle America considered modern jazz. (The poor actor's character was named "Kookie" -- which stuck and essentially typecast his career after the show went off the air, as best I recall.)

The other attempt was also B&W TV -- a half-hour comedy called "Dobie Gillis." With another stylish intro to a set-format sitcom, the show featured funnyman Bob Denver (whose career famously survived this role, only to be forever cast in his next one on "Gilligan's Island"). In "Dobie," Denver played a bongo-carrying, work-allergic beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs (that's my guess at spelling it).

Both these caricatures were just that, and it's easy to understand why the Beat era was often portrayed that way -- the movement was brief and it fragmented early. Many baby-boomers like me were small children when the Beat era actually occurred, which has made it even tougher for Big Media to pull off an accurate portrayal of the time.

To help me get a better handle on a period that has always fascinated me but left me with a huge question mark, I recently searched the card catalog for "Jack Kerouac" and scored big time.

The book Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson is one very informative and entertaining reading experience (OK, it's a "good read" -- I just hate that phrase). Written by a woman (and fellow writer) who knew all the Beats personally (and one of them intimately) when the movement was in full swing, the book offers details and insights you can get nowhere else.

Minor Characters was, I think, published in the mid-80's, and, while as unflinching an account as can be, it may lack certain historical details that since have come to light -- I wouldn't know. But I felt like I understood the Beats much better once I finished the book than when I checked it out of the public library's B stack.

Anyway, whether you plan to catch the movie or not, this brief book will take a weekend to inform you on the Beats like no other. (She also wrote a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine back in 2007, when Kerouac's On the Road received its 50th anniversary publication. The article covers the same ground, but adds material, too.)

Her book mentions the furor over Ginsberg's poem and how it affected the Beats, but how is it pertinent to The Instauration? Well, read it and see for yourself. (Hint: It contains a vital detail about Mexico City Blues.)

AFTERNOTE (10/11/10): Recent articles on line remind me someday to rent or buy or see somehow In Custody -- a Merchant Ivory production from the early 1990s.

The Back Nine

-- Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer
-- Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sydney*
-- The Temple by George Herbert*
-- The Borough by George Crabbe*
-- the fascicles of Emily Dickinson
-- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman*
-- Songs of Innocence/Songs of Experience//Milton/Jerusalem by William Blake*
-- The Bothie of Tober Na-Vuolich by Arthur Hugh Clough*
-- Chamber Music by James Joyce

*Asterisks mean what they do in The Top Ten.

There is yet a third list, still in its early stages.

pagi recti lin ... hmmm ...

"The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word reference bible of the English language, may never appear in print and instead be accessible only online, its publisher said ... ." {Source: AP via Google News.}
Egad!!!
The 20-volume OED is sitting here in the reference shelf about fifteen steps away from where I'm writing this to you. It is covered in dust and cannot be not shelved conveniently without a custom case. I'm sure that's the way it is in most public libraries.

Still, not having access to one somewhere disturbs me a little. You can open one of these volumes, look up the word you want and spend the rest of the day reading about that word and all the other words related to it or near it. While that doesn't sound like fun to most, to me it was a paradise I indulged in virtually every rainy Saturday in college. OK, I wore out after an hour or so, but still, it was great fun.

I'd be sorry to see the third edition never be printed for many reasons, but maybe that's the way it needs to be. (Or ... in a special use all-in-one touchscreen computer? iDic ... tionary. *puts fist under chin and looks pensive*)

How does this relate to The Top Ten? While I was in college those many years ago, I ran across a mention somewhere of how Robert Browning used to buy dictionaries -- to read. That's right -- he apparently would start at A and read through Z, then sometime later go out and buy another one and do it again. And again.

If you wanted to acquaint yourself with the history of your language, that's what you had to do -- before OED, that is. That's why some kind of pagilinear (I made that word up, I think.) format is important to maintain somehow.
You just never know what you'll learn looking up something else. (As I learned from Sydney Harris, at least once a week!)

"... and me thou leavest here | Sole in these fields!"

Usually I click "New Post" and start typing away, confident I can speak my piece. But today I balk some (here in the public library, as usual, it's balky enough -- though appreciated!).

On this subject, I'm not likely to get much right, or, if I do, say only what's been said elsewhere by my betters. Still, I promised you, dear readers, and myself that I'd do it, so here goes:

Culture and Anarchy is pointed satire of British society as Matthew Arnold saw it in his day. Its tone is serious on one level, deliberately puckish on another level and stinging on still another.

Though it's written in the discursive Victorian style used in periodical writing then, the book's characteristic sniping at its academic and political targets is evenly sustained clause after clause, sentence after sentence, paragraph (some more than a page long in my edition) after paragraph, page after page, and chapter after chapter.

Most readers know the book from Chapter IV, which contains the most inspired writing. In it, Arnold contrasts what he called Hebraism with Hellenism -- twin forces of equal quality and power in Western culture, as Arnold saw it.

Hebraism, as Arnold described it, has less to do with Judaism than with what I might describe as the reforming zeal of some "Old Testament Protestants" (here my term, but one I've heard before in the South) in both religion and politics that Arnold felt had pushed society too far in a superficial direction. He wanted to balance that cultural force with Hellenism, what he saw as (my phrase again) a Socratic inquiry toward a life well-lived.

You really need to read the three chapters in front of this one to get a grasp of what Arnold means here. And you need to be there for the rest of the book, when he brings his point home.

Reading it, I admit, is a little frustrating, because Arnold keeps swinging his verbal sword at the miscues of a few long-dead politicians few people on my side of the pond have ever heard of, and he thrusts his rhetorical dirk at both them and his critics with one appositive after another, stacking the phrases into his sentences as a fisherman stacks herring. In Arnold's case, all his herrings are red.

A school inspector in England nearly all his working life, Arnold was frustrated by what he saw and was unable to change in what then passed for education of the working classes (he calls them the Populace -- contrasting them with the landed aristocratic class he calls Barbarians and the moneyed middle class he calls Philistines). He mentions the subject of education once or twice in Culture and Anarchy, but it's clearly sitting patiently at the back of his mind the whole time.

There's something else I want to mention: the effect of "Thyrsis" and the woman known only as "Marguerite." Arthur Hugh Clough and "Marguerite" were Arnold's twin inspirations while he was a poet. (I say this as a poet, not as a scholar, which I'm clearly not.) He chose Swift's "sweetness and light" as a key phrase in Culture and Anarchy, and I personally suspect these terms reminded him (unconsciously?) of Marguerite and Clough, or at least the effect they had on him.

The editor of my edition of Culture and Anarchy indicates in her introduction that Arnold's poetic inspiration left him in the mid-1860s. I instead suspect Arnold left poetry deliberately.

His monody on Clough (who died young, even by Victorian Age standards) pretty much concludes Arnold's poetic career. He issued his Poems (the collected edition, including "Thrysis," published only three years before) the same year as Culture and Anarchy. Another, I think, in that edition is his last addressed to "Marguerite," a woman he met twice in Switzerland as a younger man. Arnold also lost two of his sons the year before he published his collected poems.

Grief, estrangement and the righteous anger they can prompt make for some powerful poetic fuel. If the muse of poetry wants to use them to set you on fire, you can burn for years.

With all respect to the editor, I don't think "poetic inspiration" abandoned Matthew Arnold. She merely gave him another job to do. Culture and Anarchy is its monument, and it's living still.

Read it, if you dare.

Anarchic Culture

I can't resist (I suppose) just one or two more ... .

Just finished reading Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold. I'll have more to say about the book itself in another post, but what I want to bring up now is how I read it.

I used the Oxford World's Classics edition, around $15 in a nice, coat-pocketable paperback.

Though I posted "The Top Ten" and re-named this blog The Instauration to mark Apple including a Kindle application for its iPad, I prefer books. This is why:

When first I brought Culture and Anarchy home, I looked it over. My perusal included the cover artwork, the back cover "blurb", the table of contents, and the length of each section.

After skimming a couple of paragraphs here and there, I saw that Culture and Anarchy was less about literature and more about social commentary. I was afraid the book would be boring, so I set it aside for awhile but left it within arm's length of my reading chair.

When I decided to read it anyway a week or so later, I thought I would try a different approach in case Culture and Anarchy turned out to be as dry as it first looked.

I started by reading the Appendix (which is a response to an early version of Arnold's first chapter by philosopher/critic Henry Sidgwick), then I read the text of Culture and Anarchy at my normal snail's crawl.

After that, I read Arnold's Preface to the book. Then I read editor Jane Garnett's Introduction.

This procedure worked out for me: Sidgwick's critique provided me the introduction I needed, and the text turned out to be (for a Victorian essay, anyway) very funny and engaging without any more background than the Appendix and Garnett's Explanatory Notes (an education in themselves) provided.

Arnold (something I found out while reading Garnett's Introduction) wrote the Preface after he collected all five chapters (which first appeared in a Victorian high culture periodical of his day) into one book, so I actually found it worthwhile to read that part almost last.

A book makes the method I used very easy. I doubt it would have even occurred to me to do it that way on an electronic reader (hard or soft), and it probably would have been hard to do if it had. (Note: If you try my method on Culture and Anarchy, please do what I didn't, and read "Note on the Text" before reading the actual text. That should help.)

Also, I can also stick one book in the chair's cushion while I have another in my lap, if I need that kind of cross-reference. Ditto for the e-reader version, unless you have a lot more money than I'm ever likely to have.

When I first wrote about an electronic library some years ago (in another blog on another service), I thought it would be great to have it as a way to borrow books from an electronic repository (an e-library -- something public and local) or look at entire collections (like the eleven-volume edition of Arnold's complete works that Garnett frequently references in her notes), books I would never have the funds to buy myself or the room to store (or ever need to own in the first place).

I think books have their place. I need them, for one thing. An e-reader (hard or soft) would be for me a nice luxury. While not essential for me now, it might be someday -- especially in some public e-library form.

I also like owning hard copies of things like books and music. I think it just makes sense. So I hope both books and CDs stick around, personally. And I hope e-readers (hard and soft) continue to develop along paths that benefit the general public.

Maybe we'd have a little less anarchy that way -- and a little more culture we can share.

_____

Afternote (2/25/11): A recent episode of a popular TV show evaluating "attic" curios and "garage sale" antiques, a recent news report on the impending death of the small bookshop and a recent effort at "rolling my own" have one thing in common: a brainstorm.

It seems persons of wealth once collected books in loose-page form, each book held in a custom box made from the same type of "board" that makes hard-backed books hard -- bookboard. In the box also went items like related etchings, maps and other materials that could one day, when the collected book was "finished," be sent back to the bookseller to be custom bound. That way, the book would not only be a first edition, it would also be one of a kind. The antiques show featured one such collection, still held loose in those little fold-out boxes.

The news report detailed the rise of electronic books, the purchase of each said to be a "nail in the coffin" of the indie bookseller.

My custom-book follies include me trying to impersonate someone who knows what he is doing in taking electronic text I wrote into booklet form with a garden-variety printer and word-processing software. The result was a ridiculous and lamentable waste of paper.

So today, a brainstorm: "Why not ____ ?"

I think you can fill in the blank. (Hint: the answer would not be "better software," at least not for a book lover like me.)

Wrapping Up Note

My previous post "Our Keystone" and the four Beginning Scientific Afternotes that followed it all concerned an outmoded mindset called "modernism," not the enormous intellectual efforts of those scientists who contributed to modernism when it was still an active cultural movement.

When a cultural movement stops moving, it ossifies. So do the minds of its adherents, all of whom remain "stuck" in a dead current.

Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Marx continue to influence the living thing we call "culture," but probably not in ways even they may have foreseen. Since their contributions were made, many others have continued working on issues they raised, changing the way those issues are perceived, considered and debated.

We, as poets, need to remain alive to what's happening around us, even as we contemplate those "eternal verities" we're supposed to be wrapped up in. That effort can leave us chasing one fashion statement after another, or it can put us in a place where we can fashion statements of our own.

It's my hope that we can all do this together, however often we may debate just "what's goin' on."

It's my belief that we need to do it together, as the entries in The Top Ten can attest: they were not created in a vacuum.
_____

I'm going to need another break in posting, but I'm hoping not for too long. I plan to continue working on The Top Ten -- reading, re-reading and commenting as I feel I can.

The next milestone (which may be that giant rock I've been mentioning in my subtitles) will be Browning's The Ring and the Book. His tower poem is longer than Paradise Lost, longer by several thousand lines, and it will take me a long time to finish at any rate, especially my notorious crawl.

I also hope to post some things on the other Top Ten members, too. But these probably won't come at the pace I've been posting recently, or anything close to it.

What I'm trying to say is, "Be seeing you!" After all, this is just a village, right?

Beginning Scientific Afternote 4

"Einstein's publication of his general theory in 1916 essentially brought to a close the revolutionary period of his scientific career. In many ways, Einstein had begun to fall out of phase with the rapid changes taking place in physics during the 1920s. Even though Einstein's own work on the photoelectric effect helped set the stage for the development of quantum theory, he was never able to accept some of its concepts, particularly the uncertainty principle. ...
"At the time of his death he was the world's most widely admired scientist and his name was synonymous with genius. Yet Einstein declined to become enamored of the admiration of others. He wrote in his book, The World as I See It: 'Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. ... '"

from "Albert Einstein" by David E. Newton in Notable Mathematicians From Ancient Times to the Present, Robin Young, ed. Gale, Detroit, 1998, pp. 158-159.

Inadmissible Me

I have to admit (is this statement "admissible" or "admittable"?) making a fair copy takes more than having nice handwriting (I don't, BTW.). I found that out the hard way a few days ago, when I tried making one of a poem I'd left in draft form for a year.

My fair copy turned into a very "un"fair draft within a few lines. By the time I got to "Phoenix," she was a real mess.

At first I was embarrassed, vowing to return to the public library ASAP and delete the last three or four posts. A cooler head (if no wiser) prompted this one instead.

The problem: my poem isn't fully baked. It may never be. Some parts are still too "raw" (this conceit is getting out of hand quickly).

It also points to something else: making a fair copy takes a little more character than I wanted to admit in my earlier "Enthusiastic Me" phase. Hmmm ... .

Interesting, no?

The Life of the Poet

For those who may have read my last post, among them might have been one or two lit mag publishers. They may well have spent last night turning in their sleep over old nightmares of being inundated by scrawled felttip-on-napkin haikus, koans scribbled on Post-It notes with crayon and free verse handblocked onto a toilet roll with a golf pencil.

Creative, possibly. Submissible*, probably not. You must follow publishers' submission guidelines when sending them your work -- and that usually means (at a minimum) typed on good old 8 1/2 by 11. (Or, if you want to save trees -- that's what cloud computing's for!)

Doing so will not "kill" your poem -- that I can almost guarantee (depends on your typing skill, for one thing), any more than a band burning a CD "kills" its recorded music. What I was talking about yesterday was keeping your poem alive for you.

Gone are the days when we had to memorize all our work. Whatever may have been lost in mnemonic ability by "reducing" our poems to writing (a term that's still heard in court sometimes), we gained by not having to depend exclusively on a chain of memorizers to perpetuate them. Fair enough.

But making our own fair copies could help bridge some of that memory-reason-skill gap we sometimes experience from an overabundance of technology. (Sometimes it's just too easy!)

I remember a poem (I wish I could remember by whom) I read in a national magazine a good 20-25 years ago. It dealt with how to make a poem, and it was a dramatic monologue of some ancient bard who had to pluck a goose quill for a pen, milk a snake for some ink and skin (sorry, ladies!) a sheep for parchment. That's how he "made" a poem.

While we don't have to do that any more, it's probably a good thing to remember to put our fair copies on fairly nice paper and use fairly nice pens. (You don't have to spend a lot anymore to get "fair" materials.)

Remember, our fair copies are for us. "What for," you ask? Who knows? They may help keep the poet in us alive.

*submittable? admissible? duh ... .

Fair Deal

There's a lot of talk online these days about what role the U.S. Poet Laureate should assume.

Technically, the job is to be an adviser (-or?) to the Librarian of Congress, who appoints the laureate for, I think, a year. So, there's a lot of room for different approaches, it would seem.

Not being in academe, I am out of the loop on this one, because most published poets hereabouts are college professors. Though I do read a few things from time to time, I really have no idea how previous poets laureate have dealt with the post.

However, it seems that our art is making a comeback of sorts as a part of the general uptick in "spoken word" performance. (This is a recession, and the tickets are usually a lot cheaper than, say, a rock concert by a national act.)

So, "ride the wave" would be one approach, it seems.

But, of the many things written about the current laureate, one bit sticks with me -- and, I am sad to say, in an embarrassed way.

You see, I used to think the typewriter killed poems. No, really, that's what I thought: you could compose one in your head or write it down by hand, but once you typed it, you killed it.

OK, this was a very long time ago, and I soon went to typing my final drafts long before personal computers dropped below a grand, making that chore a cinch. Having been a journalist of one sort or another for many years, banging on a manual typewriter was natural for me, so that's what I did.

However, W.S. Merwin, according to one bio, still writes his final drafts by hand -- whether block print or cursive, I know not -- and has for many years.

This practice has a name: it's called making a "fair copy." That is to say, "fair" as in "readable" or "legible."

What makes this a deal for the poet laureate's role I can't say, except that it seems to be one commonplace thing that can bring us one step closer to the common root of our art.

I'm going to go back to making fair copies just as soon as I can. I've killed enough poems already.

Beginning Scientific Afternote 3

"Although Freud believed that he was a mere observer and was reporting accurately on his observations, he did not follow traditional scientific methods in his work. He did not generate hypotheses and test them independently, and most of his clients were middle-class women. Neither did he test people on any standardized instrument or scale. He based his ideas on conversations that he had with patients, which might have been enlightening, but were not systematic or scientific. Thus some critics would argue that all of Freud's theories are in doubt. Despite these criticisms, Freud's work continues to attract interest, and many psychologists still practice in the manner that he advocated, although many do not.
"Freud's influence is also felt in research. Numerous researchers are currently working on studies examining defense mechanisms, for example, and the evidence suggests that these devices do exist, even though they may differ in important ways from Freud's original descriptions."

from "Psychoanalysis," by Joseph M. Boden in History of Psychology, Volume I, Alan E. Kazdin, editor in chief, Grolier Educational, Danbury, Conn.: 2002, p. 65. Also see "Freud, Sigmund" by Raymond E. Fancher in Encyclopedia of Psychology, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press: 2000. Latter article includes bibliography of works from among Freud's modern critics, as well as his defenders.

Fabulous water

A closer look at Merwin's The Book of Fables shows me these prose pieces are definitely harder to classify than I suggested in the last post.

Simply slapping the label "prose poems" on the book doesn't do it justice. The jacket blurb description "enigmatic short prose" is about as close as you can get.

Likewise, calling him an "essayist" labels. Merwin's work -- prose or poetry -- is its own label.

Kind of like a watermark, wouldn't you say?

Laurels

I want to take time out from footnoting(?) to congratulate W.S. Merwin on his selection as U.S. Poet Laureate.

Merwin is a prolific poet, essayist and translator. He began writing metrical poetry early in his career and has since branched out into all modern forms, including prose poetry (a collection of them was published a couple of years ago, which the library I'm writing from shelves in the Story Collection -- and it works!).

I also commend the Librarian of Congress for this year's selection. I could not think of a better choice, personally.

Beginning Scientific Afternote 2

"Much attention has rightly been given to Marx due to the groundbreaking work of The Communist Manifesto. However, he also wrote another monumental piece, Das Kapital (1867), an economic criticism of capitalism originally penned in German. In this work, Marx focuses on the concept of surplus value and highlights that the fundamental injustice of capitalism is that it encourages employers to create profits at the expense of the employees. The economic theories outlined in Das Kapital influenced numerous followers and helped generate the science of economics. To economists, the name "Marx" has a wholly different meaning than it does to political scientists. ... While Marx wrote a great deal about social and economic conditions endured by working populations during the 19th century, his legacy is still incredibly strong today in philosophical, sociological, and political thinking."

from "Marx, Karl" by Ian Morley in The Encyclopedia of Politics, Volume One: The Left, Rodney P. Carlisle, ed., SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks: 2005, p. 303.

Beginning Scientific Afternote 1

"If the history of Western thought has anything to teach us, it is the protean nature of all theories, including evolutionary theory. Scientific theories can be and are rejected, but this process is far from easy. Any criticism of the synthetic theory that turned out to have some substance was subsumed in a modified version of this theory. Instead of being a weakness, this ability to change is one of the chief strengths of the synthetic theory of evolution. As in the case of species, scientific theories evolve."

From "History of Evolutionary Thought" by David L. Hull: the first of ten Overview Essays in Encyclopedia of Evolution, Oxford University Press, Mark Pagel, ed., Vol. I (2002), pp. E15-16. See article "Neo-Darwinism" in Vol. II of this Encylopedia, to which Hull's essay refers the reader, for additional information on synthetic theory. See also overview essay "Macroevolution" by Stephen Jay Gould for detailed summary, in Vol. I.

Our Keystone

I've seen several recent articles online discussing why various writers believe modern poetry is missing something: "not as good as" ... "not for most people" ... "not what (fill in blank) likes ... " et cetera.

The "thank Lawdy" AB English degree I got in 1977 has left me with this: the answer lies in "posts." Allow me to explain what I mean (and remember, I got a C in Expository Writing, so ... .)

"Modernism" is usually cited as the creation of four men: Darwin, Marx, Einstein and Freud. The revolution in thinking contained in their best-known books swelled a sea-change in Western culture, something that dissipated after World War I -- a cultural period sometimes called "postmodernism." (OK, that's one "post.")

This cultural period produced much searching and questioning but not too many results, sort of like examining a nose from a piece of shattered sculpture and trying to decide what the rest of the statue may have looked like.

The decades that followed the Great War erupted in a massive economic boom/bust -- and its corresponding cultural inhale/exhale -- that set up the chaotic storm/struggle of World War II. The welcome Allied victory had its downside: an even more destroyed social, economic and political aftermath -- culturally known as "post-post-modernism." (That's two.)

But the spread of nuclear weapons invented during the war plunged the world into a Cold War -- resulting in a cultural hold-your-breath-and-wait-for-the-end attitude -- that lasted until the Berlin Wall fell. Another interim period began -- let's call it "Fin de Siecle Redux" (at least if your grasp of foreign languages is as crude as mine is).

The events of 9-11-01 prompted a cultural gasp, ending that last interim period and beginning yet another global conflict -- with the cultural damage spreading like the wake of a blasted deep-sea oil derrick. So, now we have "post-post-post modernism?" (That's three.) Come on! How many "post"mortems do you need to see that a cultural mindset has collapsed and vanished under the very waves of time and space it claimed to redefine?

Most of Western High Culture set sail a long time ago: biologists figured out that Darwin was right about evolution but fell short on how it works, psychologists (and fellow psychiatrists?) decided Freud was right about the existence of a subconscious mind but wrong about how to treat many of its problems, and social scientists realized economic inequity may more often result from international monetary policy than from Marx and Engels's dialectic prophecies.

Some philosophers also have gotten on board with physicists to study being itself in a new light (or a new/old light -- more on that someday: for now, let's not get tied up in some "string theory").

Most of these revisions to "modernism" apparently have passed without notice among the art traditionally seen as humanity's bellwether -- poetry. Modern poets published nowadays seem stuck in what's sometimes called a "cultural malaise" -- their own little island? Are they lost?

I'm not necessarily including the laureates of the latter 20th Century here: Heaney, Paz, Montale, et cetera (some people are just really good swimmers!). I'm more addressing The Club (discussed in a post last year I called "First Base").

I also realize what I've posted here is very generalized. It's largely summed from what I've snatched (OK -- "apprehended" if you want to get fancy about it) from lectures I've heard and books or articles I've read in college and since, so -- again -- I'm not a qualified authority on anything. At best, I chart my course measuring by the rule of my crooked thumb.

But that thumb-rule tells me a wavy crossroad lies before us, which I suppose prompts the perennial question: "Where do we go from here?" I think clues may lie in those buoyant signposts extending from the shore we left so long ago on this light-and-dark dappled (sometimes even nauseatingly wobbly) time-space checkerboard.

I believe we're looking for a tower -- one with a light in it. That's why I call this blog The Instauration. Because we may need to find new land and build a tower ourselves. Those other guys did it (see My Top Ten) in their day, and we may need to do the same.

Pomp? Probably. Or maybe moxie. Deciding which, my friends, is where you come in. I think I see something way, way over there.

Land?

More Notes on a Legend

Finally took a much closer look at my edition of Idylls. "To the Queen" is listed by the editor as an Epilogue with a capital "E" -- which I think means it's part of the poem. I've gone back and made the fix in my post.

It also dawned on me that some may be put off by the post-Chaucerian English of Morte D'Arthur. If so, or even if not, good old Bulfinch had a volume three: The Age of Chivalry. You may recall I recommended his better known The Age of Fable for the many classical references in Paradise Lost.

Thomas Bulfinch's English is much more accessible than Malory's, and his narrative summarizes things in a much more linear flow. (Malory is pretty linear, too -- but in very small bits. Overall, his story jumps around some.)

Old Bulfinch may be just the ticket for many seeking a handbook on Arthurian legend, or as prep for reading Idylls. I passed on the chance to buy a reprint of The Age of Chivalry some 15 years ago and kicked myself since, at least until recently. Scored all three volumes (The Age of Charlemagne is the third) in one book at a used-book sale for one dollar! \o/ The text also may be available online in several places.

Back when I was writing about Milton, I mentioned that Gustave Dore produced plates illustrating many scenes from Paradise Lost. The same is true of Idylls.

Epi ... what?

An epigram is a brief statement, usually a very short poem. An epigraph is a statement that comes before a book starts. An epilogue is something at the end of a work that helps explain it, though it's usually part of the work itself.

I started to call "To the Queen" an epigram, then I changed it to epigraph and then I decided to look it up before I changed it again. I eventually saw my mistakes and then settled on the term "afterword" for "To the Queen." (Note: Since changed again: see next post.)

I'm sitting next to the Reference section of the library right now. You'd think I'd look some of these things up before I write them, but ... . (Note: I'll never worry again: www.oxforddictionaries.com for me from now on.)*

The other mistake I caught in the previous post I'm leaving intact there, but I'm correcting it here instead: part of Merlin's prophecy in Idylls is in Morte D'Arthur -- the most important part, in fact. But other parts apparently are not.

This leads me to another reason for my Top Ten -- many of them have something in them I'd written about here when I called this blog "The Art of Definition." Remember when I tried writing a poem in "songform"?

Merlin's prophecy is in a bardic triad (more like "chantform," I would think. Is "chantform" a word? I doubt it.). Several songform poems elsewhere in the Idylls are set in important places, as well. Tennyson's work here can be profitably studied by poets looking for tips on this subject.

I also erred in saying that "The Coming of Arthur" is largely a rewrite of the first book of Morte. It's actually a composite from lots of sources, including the author's rich imagination and careful character painting. In fact, I now remember thinking when I finished "The Coming ..." that I was glad I'd read the first book of Morte beforehand. I might have gotten really confused otherwise.

Me confused? Imagine that!

Done and (nowhere nearly) done

I just finished Idylls of the King, after starting sometime in late March (I'm a slow reader).

Didn't place an asterisk on it when I posted The Top Ten because I had already started reading it by then, and I was confident at the time I would finish within a week or two.

Going from Milton to Tennyson (in poetry terms) feels at first a little like going from Henry James to Harry Potter, but, the further I read, the more complex the poem became and the longer I lingered over the text.

The first book, "The Coming of Arthur," is largely a blank verse rewrite of the first book in Malory's Morte D'Arthur. I say "largely" with some trepidation, because Tennyson's version of Merlin's prophecy, as I recall, is nowhere in the first book of Malory's story, at least as written. There are some other elements that also I recall being different, and all these together make all the difference as the book progresses.

This is one very nuanced and textured tale, and its demands on the reader are sly but persistent. You can glide over reading this book, but you'll likely be missing a lot if you do.

Lord Al comes off as a little stuffy to a modern reader like me, but once you understand where he's coming from (Victorian High Culture) and the audience he is writing to (ditto), it should not be a transition you can't manage.

The only thing I found annoying was Tennyson's constant use of the word "past" as a verb. Not "past" as in "the past," but as in "he went somewhere." The King and Lancelot and Company all "pass" instead of "come" or "go", so that when you get to the last book, this becomes less a nuisance and more of a Major Theme. His spelling of the word is what kept throwing me: I'd have to re-read the line every time until I finally figured out what was going on.

The first book I found (at the public library) was published by the old Macmillan & Co. The notes were appropriate for a girl's school of this edition's pre-WWI era, as were its pocket size and prim (but nice) illustrations. Also perhaps appropriate for its time, the editor left out three Idylls -- those presumably deemed too naughty or too violent for debs of the day ("Balin and Balan," "Merlin and Vivien" and "Pelleas and Ettarre").

I read two of the omitted ones in a smelly and stained double-column compedium I also found at the library, then held off on reading anything else in Idylls till I at last scored a paperback copy at a major bookseller. Mine had a long casecutter nick on the back, so I guess that's why it was still there.

The nicked ppb was a Penguin Classic edition, and its notes were excellent.

Don't miss out on the Dedication and the epilogue ("To the Queen"). I read them only after I'd finished the main text -- both are essential for author's context, but, like me, you'll probably need the Penguin editor's notes to both.

Post-modernist, existentialist, collectivist, individualist -- doesn't matter. Despite Tennyson's readership being the "moneyed middle-class" of the British Empire in his time, there is room in this tower for every sincere lover of literature. If Idylls of the King doesn't belong in The Top Ten, nothing does.

Mixing Mortar

Here are some ideas about sources/references/whatnot for The Top Ten:

Troilus and Creseyde

-- Of course, the Iliad and the Aeneid provide basic context, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato the basic story. But I'm going stick my neck out on this one: Chaucer is known to have used Persian sources for his Parliament of Fowles, so why not this one, too? Another note for the language-adventurous: a poet who followed Chaucer's generation translated The Aeneid into what I'd call a Scots-inflected late Middle English. His name was Gavin Douglas. (I attempted to read this in college, and I had to give up. And I got an "A" in Chaucer, and this was the full Middle English class, to boot.)

A check earlier this month (June 2012) turned up a buyable Google eBook text of Troilus and Creseyde.

The Sonnets of Shakes-peare

-- Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a narrative poem in English by Emily (or Emilia) Bassano Lanier (or Lanyer). She's the woman some have said is The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. I used gutenberg.org. Also, a book about Aemilia (as the author spells it) by Suzanne Woods is available for a (brief) preview on Google Books. But the book of the original researcher, A.L. Rowse, while listed on Books, is not available for preview, at least by me.

Paradise Lost

-- As I discussed at length (?) in Could it be? {Aug. 3, 2009 in the archive}, one source to look at here is The Koran. I've used various translations, but the choice "interpretation" for the literary set likely is The Meaning of the Glorious Koran by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (really, that's his name). The Meaning is widely available in paperback.

The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenal

-- Hmmm. What I'm thinking is, "Why Juvenal?" It seems the translation appeared in 1693, just a few years after Dryden, having converted to Catholicism, refused to swear loyalty to the new king and was dismissed as poet laureate. Also, it has been pointed out to me that Dryden translated only three of the Satires. Others translated the rest. However, I can't help but think that, since Dryden authored the dedication and had its publication attached to his name, that he had some oversight (at least) for the other translations in that 1693 volume. Google Books has a scanned copy of the third (I think) printing. The dedication is essential background reading.

The Rape of the Lock

-- Essay on Criticism by Pope. Written just prior to Rape of the Lock, it served as Pope's explanation of his critical theory and practice, as well as that of the Augustan Age. Not the other poem's equal, by a long shot (after a new re-read, I realize). But it is a source for what rules Pope had to bend or even break to make his tower poem work, as well as the source for quotes we use today.

While "rape" in Pope's case refers to the Middle English sense of "violent seizure of property," I think it also contains the modern sense of the word as a sexual assault in delicate (and deft) undertones. Because the author and the poem's dedicatee, Arabella Fermor, were both Roman Catholic, they did not enjoy full privileges of a citizen/subject in 18th Century England. The poem itself pokes fun at the fully privileged (in all senses of that word) of their era, however.
Another source: Le Comte de Gabalis by an anonymous(?) French author. Pope's dedicatory letter to his poem explains its relevance. That letter is also an essential source. It is very brief, just a half-dozen or so paragraphs, but does its job admirably. For comparison, check out the monster dedication Dryden felt he had to write for his Juvenal translation (see above).

I found a version of Rape of the Lock (with the letter) on gutenberg.org, with a nice introduction and notes by a turn-of-the-last-century Princeton scholar. This edition also adds the original "coffeehouse" text of the poem as an appendix. It is also available on Google Books. There are some funkily scanned versions of Le Comte on Google Books, and a very nice but undownloadable English version at

http://93beast.fea.st/files/section2/gabalis/Villars%20-%20Comte%20de%20Gabalis.pdf

BTW, a portrait of Arabella shows her with long, natural tresses -- no powdered wig or "beauty dot", which was likely part of a culture alien to her. My point is that it's a mistake to think Arabella Fermor is the "Belinda" of the final poem. She and her social circle served as a framework for the master poet to build his small but sturdy tower of carefully connected narrative, dramatic and epigrammatic couplets.

You can get a "graphic novel" feel for The Rape of the Lock courtesy of Art Nouveau magister Aubrey Beardsley. I think Dover is the source there.

Idylls of the King

-- As mentioned earlier in this blog, Morte D'Arthur by Malory. Also, The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (published by Dover in paperback not that many years ago).

La Vita Nuova

-- The Divine Comedy. In college, I used the Ciardi translation, mostly, but looked at Binyon's, too. A short collection of works by Dante's dolce stil nuovo contemporaries (Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, et cetera) is also essential. Again in college, I bought a parallel-text translation of Italian poems published by Penguin in the late 1950s or early 1960s in a used bookstore. This was 35 years ago. The translator and editor was George Kay. I still cherish this book. My copies of the Ciardi and Binyon books are long gone -- something I still regret. Ciardi was Bantam (?), while the Binyon was in the original Portable Dante, along with, you guessed it, Rossetti's "La Vita."

But, a check (June 28, 2012) of Google Books scored me a copy of the original book Rossetti published his translation in, Early Italian Poets (readable only on Google Play). The Kay and Binyon texts are listed, but "not available as an eBook" by Google.

The Ring and the Book

-- This is a 21,000-line set of 12 dramatic monologues. Just (3/18/11) finished the first one, titled "The Ring and the Book". OK. In it, Browning (as himself) describes his gold ring and how he came by this book, which describes a murder trial of the 17th Century. The editor of my borrowed edition that has the complete Ring (a beat-up and foetid Complete Poems of) includes an essay on Browning's debt to Shelley, so, as I dove into "The Ring and the Book," I thought immediately of The Cenci, Shelley's dramatic poem about a similar crime of passion in Italy. Still diving.

After diving for two weeks, it dawned on me that I need to give The Ring and the Book a rest. The original was published in parts, one-fourth a month, and I've read about a fourth. So maybe taking breaks was the idea all along.

Four Quartets

-- Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. Also, the Bhagavad Gita by whoever wrote the Mahabharata, Revelations of Divine Love by Dame Julian of Norwich and The Booke Named The Governor by one of Eliot's ancestors. All these books are referenced, quoted or paraphrased in Four Quartets. I have not read any of them, so it looks like I'll be busy. (Revelations and The Governor are available free on Google Books. But you must pay for a copy of Dark Night of the Soul.) 

A few years ago, I read God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel at the same time as Four Quartets, and I found that they have a lot in common. Time, existence and what you do with them, for instance. But that course may not be right for everyone.

Here's another idea: look at (for instance) lines 1-3 in "Burnt Norton", lines 91-93a in "The Dry Salvages", 47-48 in "East Coker" and lines 127-128 in "Little Gidding". (Note the order [I hope -- no text in the PL] I'm using -- I, III, II, IV.)

Now, think about an old literary device called "chiasmus". Hard to do in English, but that didn't stop Pope, Milton and Tennyson from trying it anyway. I found no literal examples of chiasmus in Four Quartets. But, look at those quotes. Think about pressing grapes or compressing a document on a personal computer.

Just a thought I had the other day ... .

Here's another: look at the quotes from Heraclitus that preface the poem. They are not easy to translate. For one thing, they are in a very old dialect of Greek; for another, they are conversational and leave out (understood) words the way we do when we talk.

Then look at where they come from: a work by a German classical philologist who was breaking new ground when he collected those pre-Socratic fragments. Herr Doktor Diels even uses some English-type words in his groundbreaking book's title -- very 19th-century-unscholarly, it seems to me.

It also seems to me Eliot chose those quotes from that particular scholarly work for a number of specific reasons. He's not only sounding "modernist" by prefacing his poem with some thematically-meaningful yet untranslated Greek (even spelling 'Heraclitus' in progressive-philologist fashion), but he's also giving future interpreters of Four Quartets (us, in other words) a few additional clues as to his actual intent. 

Mexico City Blues

-- Doctor Sax by Kerouac. Written at the same time as Mexico City Blues, Doctor Sax is a free-form autobiographical 'novel' that contains clues to the myriad symbols in his epic poem. While I'm still working on this one, it does seem to me that this novel could be a real 'skeleton key' to MCB.

-- Tristessa, also by Kerouac. This "novel" reads more like autobiography, but how much really was that, there's no telling now. More like a novella in two parts, Tristessa has layers that demand concentrated attention. Part one sets the scene of his stay above a home in Mexico City, while he was writing Mexico City Blues.

-- A Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard. The first edition, printed in the 1930s and found by Kerouac in the 1950s, became his vade mecum for Buddhism. The original edition now is available in various formats. I so far have only read fragments made available on line.

But I have done a little preliminary research with available resources. Here is one possible clue: "merudvhaga" in the 1st Chorus. It looks like a Sanskrit or Pali-type word, but I suspect it's not. My tiny amount of Sanskrit (of what I can recall of it) tells me "vh" is not a letter in that language. But, obviously, "dh" is (it's one of three or four kinds of "d's" -- big alphabet).

So, as an experiment, I searched the 'net for "dhvaga" -- got back "Did you mean 'dhvaja'?" A "dhvaja" is a type of victory banner, one of eight "auspicious symbols" in various East Indian religions, including Buddhism (that's right -- the first 'd' is a 'd' and the second one is a 'dh.').

Then I searched for 'meru' -- and got back Mount Meru -- a sacred mountain that figures centrally in various East Indian cosmologies, including some Buddhist.

Was the author, say, on board a tall ship when he wrote this? On board a train passing a signal flag? Do we have a metaphor buried in this malapropism? (Note: the (?)name 'Merudhvhaga' that appears in the 40-something Chorus got me nothing on Google.)

While later references in the poem like "Amida" check out, others, like "Santiveda" don't ('Shantideva', maybe?), and I'm starting to be persuaded that at least some of the many obscurities in Mexico City Blues may be actually deliberate (or at least semi-deliberate) clues that can be deciphered in this quasi-philological manner.

As another hint, "Acadian/PureLand" may reveal two things: where Kerouac was coming from ("Acadia" was the name of a place in New France) and where he wanted to go ("Pure Land" Buddhism is, very basically [from what I can gather], Zen for the working-class person. Any time you have the "I Was First No I Was Both Are Right Neither Were" type of situation, you're possibly looking at a common ancestor.). Hope all this helps.

(Note (9/16/17): After reading over the scroll version of On The Road, it has become increasingly clear that all of Kerouac's works that he personally prepared for publication, with the exception of The Town and the City, belong in something he called The Duluoz Legend. That would include his poetry, with the above provision that he prepared it for publiscation himself, regardless of when it was actually published. So, it may be that books like Some of the Dharma, for instance, might contain 'helps' to Mexico City Blues. Is it possible that the Legend is entirely self-contained?

____

This is my list as a writer. I'm not an academic and never have been. That doesn't mean I don't believe students at all levels aren't reading this. But, if you are, how can you be sure your preceptor isn't reading it, too? Or, for that matter, your colleagues? Or your editor? Not that I'm bitter or sarcastic -- I'm having fun. Hope you guys are, too.

The Tower Block

There's yet another reason I chose most of the entries in The Top Ten, one I mentioned earlier -- some use source material almost as important as the poems themselves, while others serve as source material for other books.

For instance, Idylls of the King uses Malory's Morte D'Arthur as a vital source, which is a book well worth a modern-day poet's time all by itself. La Vita Nuova, as another example, serves as the "backstory" for at least a third of the Divine Comedy -- another important book in a modern poet's library.

Some other members of The Top Ten may not qualify in this particular respect, but that's why the list is a work in progress.

Speaking of La Vita Nuova, there's another reason I included two translations (so far). I'll get into that another time.

Explaining the Explanation

I chose the entries in my Top Ten the following way:

-- Each one had to be a book-length poem, and complete. So, The Canterbury Tales and Don Juan, for instance, were out. Each one could be a book of shorter poems in series, though. So, Shake-speare's Sonnets and Idylls of the King were in.

-- Each one had to be a significant part of the development of the English long-poem, but they could stand up as individual works, also.

-- Each one had to have some kind of link, thematically. Idylls matches up with Paradise Lost pretty well in that area. Others seem like more of a stretch. I'll have more to say about this later.

-- And each is a book you could finish with a feeling of satisfaction, or at least accomplishment. More to say about that later, too.

I have asterisked two poems, because I have not read them all the way through or I "read at" them piecemeal so long ago I need to do a more thorough job now. So, I may end up being wrong about those entries, and they may change.

The Where of Why

In "The Art of Definition," I compared writing metrical lyric poems to sculpture. The books in The Top Ten list for "The Instauration" (a word that refers to revival) are more like carpentry or stonemasonry -- they are built, rather than composed.

They are built to do something, to take you somewhere, to provide you with some type of means.

And they take more books to make. We'll delve into that some here, as well.

Til Next Time ... .

And So It Begins (Again)

What is The Top Ten (in the post below)? Is it about some Greatest Books That Must Be Read? Or some How to Read syllabus? Some Golden Treasury?

No to all. I picked the books on this list for a pretty specific purpose, which I've hinted at in the title to this series (For newcomers, this Blogger account was formerly titled "The Art of Definition," and it was a collection of posts about my approach toward writing traditional metrical poetry.).

I suppose this list might be thought of as a set of cultural benchmarks, but, really, I want it to be something more. I'd rather think of it as a process of me suggesting things and you deciding to take me up on all, some, or none of them, and then us seeing what results.

I'm just an instigator, but I hope to be one in a good sense of the term.

Next time.

Note: I used Jack Kerouac's French first name in the list for a particular reason (other than me sounding pompous -- isn't "The Instauration" pompous enough?), one that I hope to get into soon. Also, the name I've used for Shakespeare's sonnets is, according to one source, the actual title of the first edition.

The Top Ten

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer

Shake-speares Sonnets by William Shakespeare (Bray, ed.)

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Satires by Juvenal (Dryden, ed. and trans.)

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri (Rossetti, trans.)

*The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Mexico City Blues by Jean-Louis Kerouac

I'll have more to say about this list, what it represents and what my reasons are for choosing these particular items, in upcoming posts.

We're embarking on a new adventure, and I hope you'll stay tuned.

Cheers!