Emerson

If you have the opportunity to pick up a copy of Poet's Choice, Edward Hirsch's latest effort (or non-effort), which I did, used, and for only a few bucks,--DON'T. An over-stuffed compendium of pedestrian paeans and glorified glosses--the stuff of his newspaper columns--, the book will inevitably disappoint those of you who took up his previous effort, The Demon and the Angel, which, despite its hokey over-Romanticizations, was at least an enjoyable read in a general-interest sort of way. The "chapters" in Poet's Choice (130 in all) average around 2 pages, a ridiculously cursory length when you consider Hirsch cites at least one whole poem, and sometimes two. Aside from two brief intros, the book doesn't hold together; there's no weight to the pieces therein. The Demon and the Angle, however, reminds me how I need to revisit Lorca and, even more so, Emerson, who Hirsch cites early and, to my pleasure, often:

"Doubt not, O Poet, but persist. Say, "It is in me, and shall out." Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity."

from "The Poet"

"The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why . . . Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment."

from "Circles"

How important to be reminded of our first literary loves, of how we need NOT to know sometimes, how we need to return. Hokey or dis-proven Romanticism? Perhaps. But at a time when it seems every poem wants to over-intellectualize, there's something to be said for abandonment and ravishment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you want a great bio on Federico Garcia Lorca, check out Leslie Stainton's Lorca.

Other notable literary biographies:
Robert Gittings's John Keats
Paul Mariani's The Broken Tower and Dream Songs
David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde

Less compelling reads:
Paddy Kitchen's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (Just plain uninspired)
Ekbert Faas's Robert Creeley: A Biography (Poorly written, completely lacking in vividness)
John Felstiner's Paul Celan (Way too much time spent working out the poems' etymologies)

Has anyone read either of these? If so, which one is worth reading first:
White's Hopkins: A Literary Biography
Martin's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life

What other bios do you recommend?

By Ahhh Grow Free

I thought I would round out my reading on Hart Crane by falling into the Clive Fisher biography, Hart Crane: A Life. So far so good. It's definetly better than John Unterecker's Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (which concentrates way too much on Crane's family dynamics, and which over-emphasizes, I think, his relationship with his mother, relying far too much on their correspondence), but has yet to capture the lyric prose and critical prowess of Paul Mariani's The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane. I'm a huge fan of Mariani's biographies, and if you haven't already, and you're looking for a great summer read, definetly check out his bio on Berryman, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman.

Anyway, here's an interesting fact from the Fisher bio:

Hart Crane was born on 21 July, 1899. On that very same day, in Grace's [his mother's] childhood home of Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway was born, also to a woman named Grace. Also born that day: Zelda Fitzgerald and Al Capone.

CUE Reviews

CUE's getting some positive buzz over at Tony's blog, and over at Verse.

Elephan' twirl

Rodney has a thoughtful quote by Glynn Maxwell on Hart Crane over at his blog.

The View Soon

Photo by B. Cully

Now Reading

After a long spring semester, I'm finally getting back into a reading and writing scheduel. Here's what, on and off, I'm dipping into:

The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner
O My Land, My Friends (Selected Letters of Hart Crane)
Echolalia by Deborah Bernhardt
Shattered Sonnets Love Cards . . . by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Richard Ellman's biography, Joyce
White Buildings (always)

Not much straight up poetry on this list, so if anyone has any recommendations, I'm all ears. I'm looking for something dense, sound-driven, playful, orphic. If my pantheon includes Hopkins, Celan, Crane, Mullen, and Volkman, who would you suggest?

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
--The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused--nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear--no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

-Philip Larkin

Vendler, YES, Vendler...

"What sorts of discoveries in style does the youthful poet need to make? A governing stylistic decorum needs to be acquired (down to the smallest details of technique); this consciousness of the lyric medium is accompanied psychologically by a growing awareness of the problems attending acccurate expression of inner moods and attitudes. The poet needs also to identify the salient elements of the outer sense-world that speak to his idiosyncratic imagination; to devise his own particular axes of time and space; to decide on the living and non-living beings who will populate his work; and finally to find a convincing cosmological or metaphysical frame of being within which the activity of the poem can occur."

Helen Vendler from Coming of Age as a Poet

Candidates for the Dick of the Week Award 5/19/06

Michael Savage who, on his radio show, declared that former President Jimmy Carter is a "Jew-hater" and a "war criminal" who "is like Hitler" because of his criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank. Savage also called Carter a "communist, anti-American, anti-Semitic bastard."

Bill O'Reilly who claimed that the NY Times and other "lefty zealots" believe "the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide"

Pat Robertson: "[I]f I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms."

Fox News which on May 21 will air a one-hour special, Global Warming: The Debate Continues, in which host David Asman will "speak with scientists who are skeptical of what they view as alarmist fears about climate change." Among the roster of contributors are several global warming skeptics with ties to the energy industry and records of misinformation on the issue.

(Quotes courteousy of Media Matters for America)

Barthes On Talking

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."

from A Lover's Discourse

Yes

"A poem must be intellect's debacle."

-Paul Eluard

More News....

Just found out Verse has accepted a poem! And the hits just keeeeep oooonnnn commin'...

CUE News

In our first ever act of nomination, Sally Keith's poem, "Restoration," has been awarded a 2007 Pushcart Prize! Go Sally! Go CUE!

Peeves 2

"Artists" more interested in acting the part than doing the work.

from Broken English

"The fragment is a form we approach in aftermath (its alternative status, as the product of forethought, is rarer, and sponsors a special set of reflections . . .). The study of fragments is the study of time's effects, and an artifact's endurances. Poets establish what remains, sang Holderlin, himself the poet of the fragmentary, and what remains in time are fragments, traces, debris. Nothing lasts longer than ruins, Brodsky remarked. And time reduces works to patterns of extent and extinction; yields up fortunes of was, not will.

Still, the fact of fragmentation creates the possibility of the fragmentable: and this is the mind's art, the art of apprehension and precaution (for the mind can make time, for a time, seem small).

The writer around whom the rummaging or rubbling of deterioration goes on represents something, rather than representing something to us. For just as the act changes in time, the reader changes in the act (you never read the same book twice). What we mean at the moment we write and what we mean at the moment we are read are both bifold (transitive and in-); so literary meaning starts fourfold and goes from there, split on split. In a charged field, difference makes things spin."

from "Broken, As in English" in Broken English: Poetry and Partiality
by Heather McHugh

Crane Theory

The validity of a work of art is situated in contemporary reality to the extent that the artist must honestly anticipate the realization of his vision in "action" (as an actively operating principle of communal works and faith), and I don't mean by this that his procedure requires any bona fide evidences directly and personally signalled, nor even any physical signs or portents. The darkness is part of his business. It has always been taken for granted, however, that his intuitions were salutary and that his vision either sowed or epitomized "experience" (in the Blakian sense). Even the rapturous and explosive destructivism of Rimbaud presupposes this, even his lonely haunteur demands it for any estimate or appreciation. (The romantic attitude must at least have the background of an age of faith, whether approved or disproved no matter.)

Crane to Waldo Frank
June 20, 1926

I'm a Lil Late to the Party, and

if you are too, check out Stephen Colbert doing the White House Correspondent's Dinner.