The Instauration Part 3

A la Mode

Our Keystone and the four Beginning Scientific Afternotes that followed it in Part 2 all concerned an out-moded 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 here and now, even as we contemplate those "eternal verities" we're supposed to be wrapped up in finding. That 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 the latters together, however often we may debate just "what's goin' on."


Fair Deal

It seems that our art is making a comeback of sorts as a part of the general uptick in "spoken word" performance. Tickets are usually a lot cheaper than, say, a rock concert by a national act. So, how to capitalize? Umm ... "ride the wave" would be one approach, it seems.

But, of the many things written about the current situation, one bit sticks with me -- and, I am sad to say, in an embarrassed way. That’s because many of the spoken word performers who read their work do so from hand-written final drafts.

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.

This was a very long time ago, dear readers, and I eventually went to typing my final drafts long before personal computers dropped below a grand, which turned an eraser-ribbon-punching chore into a backspace 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 typing final drafts of poems came just as naturally.

However, I understand many poets continue to write final drafts by hand -- whether ‘block print’ or cursive, I know not -- and have 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 poetry in performance 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.


The Life of the Poet

For those who may have read my last section, among them might have been one or two literary magazine publishers. They may well have revisited old nightmares of being inundated by scrawled felt-tip-on-napkin haikus, koans scribbled on Post-It notes with crayon and free verse hand-blocked 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 (it 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 all 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 all that anymore, it's probably a good thing to remember to put our fair copies on ‘fair’ly nice paper and use ‘fair’ly 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? Hmmm ….


Inadmissible Me

I have to admit (is this statement "admissible" or "admittable"?) that making a fair copy takes more than having nice handwriting (I don't, by the way). I found that out the hard way recently, 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 delete the last section. A cooler head (if no wiser) prompted this section 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?


Anarchic Culture

To follow up on the theme of the poet’s contribution to culture, I just finished reading Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold. I'll have more to say about the book itself in a following section, 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. 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.


On the Fly

T.S. Eliot saw Culture and Anarchy as pointed satire of British society as Matthew Arnold saw it in his day. I tend to agree, as 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.


Bookish Afternote

An episode of a popular TV show evaluating attic curios and garage-sale antiques, news reports on the impending death of the small bookshop and an effort at 'rolling my own' book have one thing in common for me: a brainstorm.

It seems persons of wealth once collected books in loose-page form, each book being held in a custom (or ‘bespoke’) 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 owner was satisfied he or she had collected enough pages, 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. This 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 now, the 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.)