Say Something Wonderful

Alte Rockers in the House Tonight...

2011-12-06T20:31:00.003-06:00

Fall, Snyder, Menashe

2011-08-23T09:43:00.005-05:00

Up at 6:15 today--well, earlier, really--to get my son up for school. Fall term has started, for the kids, anyway, and that means my own fall can't be far behind.

This came in over the transom yesterday, and although I'm not a fan of Garrison Keillor, who posted and read it on The Writer's Almanac, it seemed appropriate, somehow.

The Trail is Not a Trail

I drove down the Freeway
And turned off at an exit
And went along a highway
Til it came to a sideroad
Drove up the sideroad
Til it turned to a dirt road
Full of bumps, and stopped.
Walked up a trail
But the trail got rough
And it faded away—
Out in the open,
Everywhere to go.

That's Gary Snyder, from a book of out-takes (i.e., "uncollected work") he published back in 1986, just as I was graduating college, Left Out in the Rain. I miss reading Snyder in the uncomplicated way I did back in high school; my mind gets cluttered now with issues of cultural appropriation and so on, but those don't get in the way with this little squib.

I don't love the repetition of "sideroad" and the way it turns into "dirt road," although if you buy me a cup of coffee I can probably explain it away somehow. I do, though, quite like the way that "got rough" surprises me by turning an expected negative (the going gets rough) into a virtue, and the poem opens nicely into dialogue with a couple of other texts: Frost, of course ("The Road Not Taken") and Milton (the end of Paradise Lost, where "The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide" etc.).

Sorry to learn this morning that Samuel Menashe passed away. Here's one of his, to say goodbye:

Old Mirror

In this glass oval
As love's own lake
I face myself, your son
Who looks like you--
Once we were two

Kidney Stone: The Playlist

2011-07-19T08:18:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure (hah!) of passing my first kidney stone. I'll spare you the details; in fact, given what I've heard from friends who have been through this, I had a relatively easy time of it.

Suffice it to say that when I got back from an overnight stay at the hospital, as I waited for nature and medicine to take their course, I distracted myself by putting together a Rhapsody "Kidney Stone" playlist. A number of Facebook and Twitter friends made suggestions, as did emails from my college roommates. The jokes are generally bad, real groaners, and obvious from the titles; the only one that relies on knowing the actual lyric is probably the Chumbawumba song, which has a lovely line about "Pissing the night away."

I'll probably tweak the order some, but for now, for posterity's sake, let me post the more-or-less final list here. If you have additional suggestions, feel free to leave them as comments!

Tom Petty, "The Waiting (is the Hardest Part)"
The Monkees, "Steppin' Stone (I'm Not Your)"
Mott the Hoople, "Roll Away the Stone"
Toni Braxton, "Let It Flow"
Van Morrison, "And It Stoned Me"
The Temptations, "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone"
Laura Nyro, "Stoned Soul Picnic"
Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"
Mumford & Sons, "Roll Away Your Stone"
Aretha Franklin, "It Hurts Like Hell"
Janet Jackson, "Get It Out Me"
Jerry Jeff Walker, "Get It Out"
David Wilox, "Get it Out of the Way"
Holly Cole, "Make It Go Away"
Terebinth, "This Too Shall Pass"
Cat Stevens, "Can't Keep it In"
Bob Marley, "Waiting in Vain"
Tower of Power, "So Very Hard to Go"
R. E. M. "Everybody Hurts"
Sade, "Flow"
Leonard Cohen, "Passing Through"
Chumbawumba, "Tubthumping"
Carly Simon, "Haven't Got Time for the Pain"
Donovan, "Mellow Yellow"
Coldplay, "Yellow"
Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"
Debussy, "Passepied" (from Suite Bergamasque)

77, 76...

2011-06-23T08:03:00.000-05:00

My paper for the upcoming IASPR conference, "Can't Buy Me Love? Sex, Money, Power, and Romance" is done and polished, or as done and polished as it's going to be. It focuses on two novels that I've taught several times, Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation and Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Natural Born Charmer, but it uses two secondary sources that are new to me: Jan Cohn's 1988 study Romance and the Erotics of Property and Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by sociologist Eva Illouz.

Of these, the Illouz strikes me as the more useful, even though I only bring it in at a couple of points in the argument. I'll blog about it at greater length at Teach Me Tonight later this summer. For now, let me just say that it strikes me as a book I'd like to bring to my students' attention, since it focuses on how leisure and consumer activity (when I say "consumption" I think Keats and TB) became and remain integral to the culture of romantic love. The one student I've had who actually read it said that it was a book she had to keep putting down, because it was making her think too much about her own life. That's the kind of book I like to assign!

***

Three of the four of us, chez Selinger, are working on fitness goals this summer: specifically, we're trying to get to 100 consecutive pushups, using a handy book by the fellow who does this website. I'm up to 103, spread across seven sets--no more than 31 in a row, though. Supposed to try 37 in a row on Friday. We'll see.

I'm also doing Zumba three or four times a week, at an hour a pop. That was how I got the IASPR talk written, too, come to think of it: one hour of writing a day, then stop, no matter how much or how little I'd done. I wonder if I can structure my days that way more often, as the summer goes on: an hour of this, an hour of that. Haven't managed it so far, but I did get in some laps yesterday, and some extended sessions on the guitar. Working on basics--major scales, for example--and on learning some four-note, jazzier chords. Major 7ths, 6ths and such. Always wanted to know those.

***

Inbox down to a half-dozen messages. A lot of work to be done, but today will mostly be about getting ready for the IASPR trip: errands, printing, packing, etc. After that--the getting ready, and maybe the trip itself--a new phase of the summer begins.

Numbering Days

2011-06-12T12:22:00.006-05:00

My friend Mark recently posted about his moderate, middle-aged ambition that "perhaps by 50 (and I still have a few years before then) I can know the canon of English poetry as well as any of my peers."

This got me thinking about my own countdown to 50, which doesn't feel to me like a matter of years, though it is, but a matter of days.

How many days? I checked. And without spilling the beans on my birthdate online, let's just say, it's about 900.

Of those, 78 are left in this summer, for me. (For my kids, it's only 63.)

So--what am I going to do with them? And, more important, how am I going to get my 15-year-old son to do something with his days, so that I don't go crazy watching him veg on Facebook and Fail Blog? Boy needs a project, but more than that, he needs to know that he needs a project--and that's something that I can't teach or tell him, anymore.

Summer updates, coming soon to a moribund blog near you!

My Research Agenda (Or, "Ooh! Shiny!")

2011-02-25T14:03:00.005-06:00

A friend once described my research agenda in two words: "Ooh! Shiny!"

By this, I take it, she meant both a compliment and a warning. The compliment has to do with my ability to take an interest in many, many things. To be dazzled, even, by them, and attracted, and eager to get to work. The warning has to do with how scattered my research and publishing threatens to be.

Instead of working on aspects of a single project, talk by talk and essay by essay, I seem to have spent the past few years working on a set of disconnected, purely contingent tasks: an essay on Muriel Rukeyser, an essay on poetry and the novel, an essay on Latino/a poetry, a talk on Bollywood, etc. Even my courses work this way, shifting focus and text from quarter to quarter, busily seeking with a continual change.

Over at Stupid Motivational Tricks I find an entry--one of many--about what it means to have, or not to have, a research agenda. In response to a blogger who was frustrated by her lack of inspiration, Jonathan writes:

The writer seems to be thinking in terms of individual articles resulting from isolated flashes of inspiration rather than an overarching research agenda. Without such an agenda, individual ideas have no framework to sustain them. This lack of a framework, together with a belief in "inspiration," is a sure-fire recipe for "writer's block."

He goes on to summarize his own research agenda in a single sentence: "My research agenda, for example, is explaining the development of late modernism in contemporary Spanish poetry and fusing together strands from intellectual and literary history through the work of authors who belong to both." He elaborates the various "components and dimensions" of the project, which lead to a variety of individual projects, but they're all linked, or in some way in dialogue with one another.

I think it might be useful for me to brainstorm a list of the things that I've been working on, and see which of them fit together, and how. I don't expect there to be a single agenda there, connecting across genres (poetry and popular fiction) or across topics (love and Jewish American culture, for example), but maybe something will come of it.

At the very least, I suspect I have two research agendas: one on love, which spans a variety of media and genres (poetry, fiction, film, popular song) and one on poetry as such, which includes the Jewish American poetry interest. (I'm not particularly interested in reading or studying Jewish American fiction.)

That's a discovery, this morning. Not sure what to do with it, but if I can begin to articulate what I want to do in either category the way that Jonathan does, I'll be on to something, I think.

Image: "Shiny Things," an original painting by bishopart, via Etsy.

"Character Strengths"?

2011-02-25T06:51:00.003-06:00

Got an email this morning from the "VIA Institute on Character."

"Research is clear," it announced. "Focusing on what's right with us is more effective than focusing on what's wrong. Switch your focus today!"

Given how much I struggle these days with feeling down, and knowing that one way to increase your level of happiness is to put your character strengths into practice, as often as possible, I swung by their website to take the VIA survey and find out my "Character Strengths."

My top strengths, in descending order, seem to be:

1) Curiosity and interest in the world
2) Capacity to love and be loved
3) Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
4) Fairness, equity, and justice
5) Humor and playfulness

I'm a little surprised by 3 and 4, to be honest. Maybe they're on my mind because of all the grading I've been up to recently. (That and the political Tweets I follow.) And I'm sorry to see "Humor and playfulness" last, below them, although that, too, may have as much to do with context as anything else.

I took this survey years ago, but I'm damned if I can remember how I did on it then. And I'm not entirely sure how I can put any of this to use in the immediate future. Maybe, though, it will make me feel better about giving out so many Cs to my students on their first round of papers. Fairness, equity, and justice, that's me.

Bronk, Actually

2011-02-24T22:09:00.002-06:00

I've been busy, this quarter. Busy since November, evidently.

Wrote a long Parnassus piece on Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, and Stanley Moss, whose page proofs I've just put to bed, so that should be out soon. (By long, I mean 41 pp. in print, which is long even for me.) Edited. Taught. Did family things. Lived, worried, fought off the glums. Wrote funny lyrics, worked on my voice and my dancing. (I'll be front man for the Alte Rockers next month, at the synagogue Purim spiel.) Little of this, little of that. The usual.

Didn't see much point in blogging, so I didn't.

Lately, though, I've been thinking about my projects and plans and research agenda, and as I do, blogging keeps coming to mind. Not as a publication outlet, but as a place or a way to do some thinking aloud.

I miss it; or, rather, I miss the man I was when I was doing it more often and more thoughtfully. Reflective, with time on his hands. "The man who has had the time to think enough," as Stevens says. Or drink enough, anyway!

So I'll probably ease back into this. Just so you know.

***

In the mean time, to hold the fort, here's a little poem by William Bronk.

Bronk's a poet I had to age into. When I was in my, what--late 20s? Early 30s? Something like that--my friend Mark handed me a copy of Living Instead at Chapters bookstore in Washington DC, because he thought I'd enjoy it. I did, albeit a decade later, and that process of coming to like something fascinates me.

Anyway, a year or two ago I bought a stack of remaindered Bronk collections at my local Half-Price Books. This is the opening poem of The Mild Day, a collection that Talisman published back in 1993:

SAFARI

It's like going to Africa to live
with animals all around us, animals
regardless of us and we not the life
of the place ourselves as in this universe,
on earth even, forces are
that we don't see the way animals
could be seen but are around and are
regardless of us who are not the life of the place.
Awed, we stand our foreign ground. We watch.

Maybe tomorrow, or the next day, I'll say a bit about why I like this poem. Wouldn't be the worst use of my time. And who knows what might come of it, or this?

Thinking in Titles

2010-11-09T20:30:00.004-06:00

Spent the day thinking in titles:

Ishq, Actually? Popular Culture at the Crossroads of Sacred and Secular Love

Dead Women are Not Romantic:“Popular Romance” Reads “Literature”
Hot Poems and Literary Curries: “Popular Romance” Reads “Literature"
Hot Poems and Curries of Convention: “Popular Romance” Reads “Literature”

Feeding a Fine, Stout, Healthy Love:When Poetry Meets Popular Romance
The Arts of Love:Lyric, Ekphrasis, and Popular Romance

Some Strange Music Draws Me In:When Lyric Love meets Popular Romance
Shapely Stories, Shards of Love:When Lyric Poetry Meets Popular Romance
Starved by Sonnets, Fed by Song:When Lyric Poetry meets Popular Romance
Extravagance and Convention:Love Poetry and Popular Romance
O Golden-Tongued Romance!Some Encounters of Lyric and Companionate Love
When Lyric Love Meets Companionate Marriage:On Poetry and Popular Romance

So, nu? Thoughts?

Decisions, Decisions

2010-11-07T08:16:00.009-06:00

This spring and summer I'll be heading off to a string of conferences: first to the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) conference in Vancouver, then to PCA in Texas, and then, in June, to New York City, for the the Third International Conference on Popular Romance. I need to decide what to speak about for each of these--which is to say, to plan my research and writing agenda for the rest of the school year.

Folks, I'm stumped. Let me list the parameters, and may be you can help.

My current project list Prof. H. M. Wogglebug’s Great Big List of Things to Do!") tells me that a few writing projects are already locked in, which might help shape my decisions.

First off, there's my current work in progress, an essay on poets Mike Heller, Harvey Shapiro, and Stanley Moss. Not much to be done with that for a panel about romantic love at ACLA, or at the popular culture conferences. On the other hand, the ACLA panel would be a good venue for me to revisit and build upon my work from the last piece I did for Parnassus, on three Palestinian poets. When I invited my colleague Nesreen to participate, I did so because I wanted to do more with Darwish for this next ACLA meeting: maybe something on Darwish as a love poet.

Now, though, I'm having second thoughts--that seems so far from everything else I'm working on these days (popular romance, Bollywood film, etc.) that I'm not sure it's the best, most focused use of my time. Not to be crass, but what does it get me to give that talk? No closer to a new book, or at least to any book that I know I'm already working on. (It could be the start of another book...but at this point, I need to finish up projects, not start entirely new ones!)

(It's also anxiety-provoking to give a professional talk on poetry that I can only read in translation, unless I'm specifically discussing the translations as poetry in English--for example, I could talk about Michael Sells little book of translations from Ibn 'Arabi, Stations of Desire, because it also includes original work by Sells, so there's some overlap. But again, that's not popular culture, or part of any project that I know I'm working on yet. So is it worth pursuing?)

What else am I up to?

There's a revision I have to do by December 31, turning my IASPR talk on shame and happy endings in romance fiction--the one I gave last summer--into a publishable essay for the conference proceedings. That has some application to a project I could work on for the PCA and IASPR conferences. At the moment, this piece ends by focusing on Jennifer Crusie's novel Welcome to Temptation, but I drafted a section on the ending of Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Natural Born Charmer, a book I know very well, having taught it several times in the last few years. I could easily talk about this book from a couple of perspectives: the complexity of its ending, which is what I've already drafted, and also its reflections on the aesthetics of popular romance vis a vis modernism and other forms of popular culture.

One thing I could do would be to decide, right now, that the PCA and IASPR talks will be about Natural Born Charmer, from one perspective or another. Hm. Maybe that's a good idea. Feels oddly limiting, but that's probably a good thing--my impulses are always to scatter myself, so if it feels wrong, it's probably right.

I know that I'll be turning a conference paper I did some years ago on Jennifer Crusie's mysteries into my contribution to the anthology that I'm co-editing on her work. I could revisit that paper for ACLA, and talk about the encounter of various genres in Fast Women: romance, noir detective fiction, even poetry. But that doesn't allow for much discussion of the international / comparative issue at the heart of the seminar. Or I could do a paper about poetry in popular romance more generally: how it's used, and what happens when it shows up. (How, though, to establish the corpus?) There's a Turkish bestseller that brings Rumi into a story about domestic love-life in 20th century America: Forty Rules of Love. It might be an interesting point of comparison to...something. Maybe to some other book that has love and poetry in it. If I'd read it. Which I haven't, yet.

Or, since I'm thinking about doing a book about Bollywood movies at some point, I could take advantage of ACLA to do another Bollywood talk. The one on Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na went very well, and turned into a couple of spin-off projects: a second talk, this one at the Film / Love conference next week; a summer research grant to revise and expand it for possible publication.

If I were to do something about Bollywood, I might focus on issues of sacred and secular love in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. That's a topic that interests me more generally. It could even be comparative: RNBDJ and Redeeming Love, for example: the Francine Rivers novel that I'll be teaching in the winter. Or maybe with that Forty Rules book in the mix. Or maybe add in Joey Hill, the BDSM romance author, since her work gives a slightly different twist to the whole notion of worshiping the beloved. (Heh.)

Or, since I have another paper on Sufi poetry in the ACLA seminar, I could do something on Jodhaa Akbar, although that film has already gotten some attention from scholars (unlike RNBDJ, whose status as romantic comedy has made it less appealing to serious critics). Or Sufi love in Darwish, where it also comes up as an anti-mono-cultural trope. Heck, I thought of doing something on Sufi love in the songs of Richard Thompson, but that's been discussed by others... and I'm not quite sure what I'd say about or do with it. (Thanks to Mark S, though, for putting that Frank Zappa song "Dirty Love" into my head with "Sufi Love" as the new lyric.)

Speaking of songs, I could do something on the intersections of high and low culture, Western and non-Western versions of love in Leonard Cohen songs. I've been struck by how the lay critical discourse about Cohen--on this or that on-line forum about his work, for example--marks an ongoing version in popular culture of the kinds of discussion that go on (or used to go on) about poets in academia. So there's another crossroads: academic and non-academic "scholarship."

And ACLA is in Canada. And he's a Jewish writer, and my department chair thinks I need to keep pushing the Jewish studies work.

Oh, I don't know, friends. I don't know. Help!

RWA Research Grant Opportunity!

2010-10-31T09:15:00.001-05:00

The Romance Writers of America have announced their seventh annual Research Grant competition, with a December 1, 2010 deadline for proposals. You can apply for up to $5,000 USD in support--that's a major grant, in my book: more than equal to what I'd make in a summer of teaching at DePaul.

This grant had a transformational effect on my own work, and on the current wave of contemporary romance scholarship. Sarah S. G. Frantz, founder of IASPR, was a previous recipient; Catherine Roach and Pam Regis, both of whom appear in the first issue of JPRS, have also received support. So did Jayashree Kamble, whose dissertation on popular romance is a tremendously useful resource--when my students ask about romance covers, I send them to her chapter!

You can find a full list of previous recipients on the RWA site, if you want a sense of just how varied the projects have been.

Here's a sample of the description at the RWA site:

Romance Writers of America announces the seventh annual Research Grant competition. The grant program seeks to develop and support academic research devoted to genre romance novels, writers, and readers. Appropriate fields of specialization include but are not limited to: anthropology, communications, cultural studies, education, English language and literature, gender studies, linguistics, literacy studies, psychology, rhetoric, and sociology. Proposals in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies are welcome. The ultimate goal of proposals should be significant publication in major journals or as a monograph from an academic press. RWA does not fund creative work (such as novels or films).
RWA's review committee, which includes academics with doctorates, makes grant recipient recommendations to the RWA Board of Directors. RWA will fund one or more grants up to a total amount of $5,000. Funds will be calculated/awarded in U.S. dollars. Individual applicants may request up to the total amount. The research grant(s) are intended to support direct research costs associated with the project, including travel, but not equipment.

RWA retains the right to award less than a proposal’s budget, or less than the total amount designated for the competition, should the review committee so recommend.
Objectives:

The objectives of the program are:
To support theoretical and substantive academic research about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
To encourage a well-informed public discourse about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
Eligibility:

The RWA Research Grant Program is open to faculty at accredited colleges and universities, independent scholars with significant publication records, and dissertation candidates who have completed all course work and qualifying exams. No candidate need be a member of the RWA.

Criteria for Selection:

Preference will be given to scholars with a distinguished record of research and publication. In addition, criteria for evaluation are:
The significance of the proposed research
The definition, organization, clarity, and scope of the research proposal.
The quality or promise of the candidate.
Likelihood of timely completion of the proposed research

If you have any questions, you can ask the RWA or get in touch with us previous winners. We're a friendly bunch, as a rule.

Good luck!

Course Correction?

2010-09-28T09:10:00.005-05:00

My Modern American Poetry course isn't going as well as I'd like. In fact, I'm downright discouraged about it. The format--lots of poems, thematically organized, followed by a free-range, rambling discussion--worked wonderfully the last time that I did it, but with this group, and with me, this year, it seems haphazard and unsatisfying.

I just sent an email to the students, checking in with them. Often my sense of a course is darker than theirs. But when I look around the room and see the students who are, themselves, poets--the ones who know the most coming in--looking pained or bored, I get worried. Not what I'm used to, folks.

Here's what the email said:

Good morning, everyone! We're a few weeks into the quarter, and I wanted to write and check in with all of you about how the class is going.

Our current format--vast amounts of reading, arranged thematically; unpredictable and open-ended discussion--doesn't work every for every student or every group, and I want to give you the chance to give me feedback on it.

Would you prefer a smaller number of readings, or more explicit instructions in advance about which ones to focus on? Would you rather cover fewer themes, and spend more time on each? Would you like me to assign (or at least recommend) some secondary readings? Or is everything fine so far?

Please let me know what's going well, and what you'd like changed, as we head toward the middle of the term!

Two responses so far:

Good morning! Thanks for the check-in. The class is going really well for me at this point. I'm really enjoying the reading, and I like the format. The fact that there are so many readings assigned really opens things up, I think. (Not to mention the fact that it increases the likelihood that there'll be something in there that appeals to everyone in some way.)

The one thing I do think would be helpful though is if one or two secondary readings were assigned/recommended. I think it helps frame things out a little more, and also gets the wheels turning for final projects.

And this:

I appreciate the inquiry. I like the sort of open ended structure. I don't feel overwhelmed because I know we're not expected to be experts of every poem and I appreciate at least being exposed to them, especially thinking about them in a thematic context.

I would like some more suggestions/information about the "expectations" for the short papers . I know that too is also pretty open ended, but I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a long response to the reading and class discussion or involve research, etc.

I'll hear more tonight, I suspect, from students who work full time during the day. Will let you all know how it goes.

***

Today's song, a neotango from Italy, danced here by an unknown couple (unknown to me, anyway). Note to self: Romance Conference in Argentina--investigate!

Modern Poetry: Portraits & Ladies

2010-09-22T13:47:00.006-05:00

Last night was the second meeting of my MA-level Modern American Poetry class--the first in which we've actually had some poems on the table to discuss. As we did, I noticed what might be a promising new unit tucked inside my syllabus, which I'm noting here for three reasons:

so I don't forget it
so other teachers can steal it
so other poetry readers can suggest additional texts, contexts, and resources.

The reading assignment for the week was this:

In Vol. 1, read the selections from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; also “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Calvary Crossing a Ford”; read Dickinson, poem 657 (“I dwell in Possibility”), Masters, “Petit, the Poet”; Stein, from “Tender Buttons,” read “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass,” the four poems called “Chicken,” and “Susie Asado”; Amy Lowell, “The Pike” and “Venus Transiens,” Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” Stevens “Thirteen Ways…” “The Poems of Our Climate,” “Of Modern Poetry,” Loy, “Songs to Joannes” parts 1 and 2; Williams, “The Young Housewife,” “Portrait of a Lady,” from Paterson (302-307), Pound, “The Return,” “A Pact,” “In a Station of the Metro,” Cantos I and II; H.D., “Epitaph”; Jeffers, “Ave Caesar” and “Carmel Point”; Moore, “To a Steam Roller,” “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “Poetry,” Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Geronition,” The Waste Land, PART ONE; Reznikoff, “The Shopgirls Leave their Work,” “About an Excavation,” Niedecker, “New-Sawed,’ “Poet’s Work,” “Something in the Water,” “Popcorn-Can Cover”

That may seem like a crazy quantity of reading. OK, it is a crazy quantity of reading, deliberately so. I like to immerse my students in a lot of poetry right away, partly so that they can begin to find poets and poems that they like (Robinson Jeffers? Who knew?), and partly so that I can see, as this course goes on, which poems particularly jump out to me as interesting, teachable, and fun.

Two main topics framed our discussion: first, questions of form (i.e., organic and constructivist varieties of free verse, a first taste of collage poetics and other experimental forms, etc.); and, second, some of the modernist unsettlings of the lyric speaker, whether through irony and persona or through the fracturing of syntax and paraphrasable meaning.

These went...OK. What I need to do next time is group the poems with those goals in mind, and make them more explicit right from the get-go; also, I may need to sift out a secondary goal that I had in mind--namely, to introduce students to Imagism and some other literary schools--and do that on a separate night.

(NOTE TO READERS: what American poems would you suggest for teaching about Symbolism--the school, not the technique? When I'm doing an international class I can bring in early Yeats or French poets in translation; who among my compatriots, though?)

But I digress.

The little mini-unit that went best, and that might make for a fun assignment or lesson on its own, centered on three poems: Williams's "Portrait of a Lady," Amy Lowell's "Venus Transiens," and Gertrude Stein's "Susie Asado." All three are "portraits of ladies," but fractured and surprising. They let you talk about different sorts of free verse, about issues of gender and representation, about uses of allusion, about the lives and careers of the poets.

But why stop at three? If I were to do this again, I'd want to add, at the very least, Ezra Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme" (in the Norton already) and T. S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady" (not in the Norton, but readily available, thanks to the Poetry Foundation). What else is out there? I can think of others by men--say, Wallace Stevens's "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch," although that's from several decades later, well into the '40s, if memory serves:

So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just abover her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

Any other late-Victorian or early-modernist portrait-poems come to mind? Would love a few more by women, whether of women or of men. I think this has legs, as they say, as a teachable unit--especially since it gives me the chance to show some nifty slides of actual art if the conversation flags!

***

Since I'm writing a piece about Midrash and Mashups, here's an oldie but goodie from DJ Earworm. Enjoy!

Slumps & Silences (coda)

2010-09-17T11:34:00.002-05:00

A kind note from a friend reminds me that brooding over the past isn't all that useful or interesting, ultimately. And a whisper from my subconscious reminds me that there's a poem I used to love that's all about such matters, at least in one of its echoes and allusions.

The poem is James Merrill's "Lost in Translation," which you can find here, with partial audio. the echo is of Paul Valery's "Palme," which comes up at several points in Merrill's narrative and reflections.

As my former Rebbe (i.e., dissertation director) Stephen Yenser explains:

Merrill has absorbed much of "Palme" in "Lost in Translation," and lines especially relevant to this constellation of puzzle pieces occur in Valery's seventh stanza:

Ces jours qui te semblent vides
Et perdus pour l'univers
Ont des racines avides
Qui travaillent les deserts.

Merrill quotes Rilke's translation as his epigraph:

Diese Tage, die leer dir scheinen
und wertlos fur das All,
haben Wurzeln zwischen den Steinen
und trinken dort uberall.

And here finally is Merrill's own rendering, published several years after "Lost in Translation":

These days which, like yourself,
Seem empty and effaced
Have avid roots that delve
To work deep in the waste.

More on what's now blossoming from those roots next week.

Slumps & Silences (SMT)

2010-09-17T07:57:00.008-05:00

So I haven't posted in a week or so.

In part this is because my wife's been in Haiti, which means that I've been holding down the fort, domestically speaking: more a matter of extra schlepping (home, work, home) than extra work. I wanted to boast, at the end of the week, that I'd gotten all my work done AND taken care of the kids, but in fact I've been scatter-shot on both fronts. Particularly unimpressed by my cooking, or lack thereof, and by my flat-out forgetting my son's first guitar lesson of the season yesterday. Wasn't on the calendar, so it didn't happen. Ah, well.

I was struck, this morning, by a post at Stupid Motivational Tricks called "Slump." Here's how it begins:

I was in a bit of a slump between about 1998 and 2005 or so. You wouldn't really know it from looking at my cv, though. I continued to write and publish. There are no gaps, periods of more than 2 years without significant publications. From my perspective I was in a slump, because I was writing more than I was publishing and having a hard time putting together a book manuscript. I wasn't having a very good time in my job and suffered from mild to moderate depression. What I did, essentially, is write myself out of it. Now it is clear to me that the work I did during this period wasn't wasted in the least, but I went 15 years without publishing a book.

I still bear some ill effects from that period. It took me longer than it should have to become a full professor, and my salary is still far below where it should be in relation to my accomplishments and those of comparable people in my department. I was barely hanging on in terms of living a satisfactory life, but I was still able to write, somehow.

What interests me here is the fact that I went through a similar slump during those years, but handled it differently. Rather than keep writing and publishing, I gave a big push up through the tenure year (2000-2001), then stopped cold: no published essays, no conference papers, even. The gap shows up pretty vividly on my CV--there's activity, including all those NEH seminars, but there's no writing or publishing.

On the other hand, unlike Jonathan (at SMT), I was having a very good time at my job in those years. And not just at my job. At home, in my marriage, as a father, I used that time to go (slowly, slowly) from "barely hanging on in terms of living a satisfactory life" to having a very happy one, not least as I recovered from the sadness of my father's death and the worries involved in some other family medical stuff.

If I bear some ill effects from that period--certainly it's taking me longer than it should to become a full professor!--I also bear some very good effects. More good than bad, on the whole.

This makes me wonder. If it weren't for the money, could I go without writing and publishing entirely now, and just read, give papers, and teach?

Most of me says "yes," to be honest. But the flash of upset I felt in a conversation yesterday--someone said I was a major figure in popular romance studies, and I thought "no I'm not; I haven't published anything yet!"--suggests that maybe there's writing and publishing that I really want to do, now. Internally motivated, not externally, I mean.

And there may be some poetry work I really want to do as well. The poet's I've been reading recently--Lawrence Joseph, Mike Heller, Harvey Shapiro, Stanley Moss--are reaching me emotionally in a way that poetry hasn't for a while. Not sure what that shift will lead me to write about them, but it's interesting to observe.

When I think about those years and these questions, two songs come to mind. I'll put one in another post; with my wife coming home this evening, here's the one for today:

New Year

2010-09-08T10:57:00.003-05:00

The new school year has begun, here at DePaul--just in time for the Jewish new year, which kicks off just after my first class, as it happens. My syllabi are ready, my assignments written and printed, and I have...what, five hours left before I get to the classroom? Hard to buckle down and get something done in that time; my inclination, I'm discovering, is to toss everything else to the wind and focus on my classes--just as, when I'm writing, I toss everything to the wind and do only that.

What to do? Stop, breathe, step away from the computer, look at my lists, get something done.

Sadly, I'll have to pass the picket line of a rather nasty organization to get to services tonight. They're protesting at a bunch of local synagogues (God hates us, for various reasons) as well as at the local Holocaust museum (God hated them, and the next one will be worse) and a local high school (God hates gays, whatever their religion). Sigh. At least these folks don't blow themselves up or kill anyone. They bring this little poem to mind, from Alicia Ostriker's the volcano sequence:

One of these days
oh one of these days
will be a festival and a judgment

and our enemies will be thrown
into the pit while we rejoice
and sing hymns

Some people actually think this way

Yup. Some of them do--and I'll be seeing a few, albeit briefly, tonight.

Today's song, in honor of the New Year, a hymn from Leonard Cohen. "There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."

Stupid Motivational Tricks (Ongoing Series?)

2010-09-02T11:00:00.008-05:00

I've decided to browse old posts periodically at Stupid Motivational Tricks, both to get motivated and to find some provocations--ideas or tricks of the trade that I can use to put my writing back on track. When I have groups that interest me, I'll post them here, with or without commentary.

(The present / future tense is a Mayhew mode. It interests me.)

Since there are several clicks involved in linking each of these to its parent post, my inclination is to go without. If you want to track one down, go to the SMT blog and search for a phrase from the passage you like, or simply start at the top and scroll down. (I'm working my way backwards--am only around August 15 at the moment.)

I may change my mind about linkage as this goes on. And I may repost bits of these as questions I'll answer--writing prompts, in a sense--as the weeks go by.

***

Writing, unfortunately, is highly dependent on states of mind. That is kind of a curse, because having to be "in the mood" can eliminate 90% of times when you have a spare moment or a free afternoon to write. Moods can be triggered, however. The best way to enter a state conducive to writing is to begin writing. The right mood will kick in--or not--after you've started.

***

You want to seek out those flow states of intense concentration, cultivate that ability in yourself. But you don't want to be so dependent on those states that you can't work unless you are in the flow. The flow can't be your fetish. The flow comes more from habitual action than from random, muse-like inspiration. On days when the flow is completely absent, there is still plenty to do: correct format and bibliography, read over completed drafts of other chapters.

***

Do you want to be known as X's disciple, or as the Y's teacher? Do you see yourself as a theorist, a critic, or a scholar? Are you mainly an expert on Joyce or Twain, or on Ireland or Sweden? Do you define yourself by period or by theoretical approach?

In my case, I don't want disciples, nor to be known for whom I worked with. I'd like to be thought of as someone who defined the terms of the debate in my field, someone who raised the standard for what excellent work is in my subfield, and made this subfield relevant to those for whom it would otherwise not be so important.

***

I'm intrigued by this 16-Week Challenge, which was linked to on the SMT blog. It's designed to spur research and writing productivity, not least by making the progress systematic. Not sure the math is right for someone like me, on a quarter system. (10 week challenge?) Worth thinking about, however. What would my challenge parameters be?

***

If there's housework going on, I can't do academic work (writing, reading, you name it). When I hear housework, I stop what I'm doing and go clean, vacuum, tidy, scrub a bathroom, etc. This isn't a conscious decision; it's visceral. Years of training go into it, including a childhood of watching (and helping) my mother clean house while my father was off in his study, smoking and grading or reading.

This leaves me at the mercy of everyone else in the house, of course. But it's the bed I've made, and by god, I'm going to sleep in it. Or, in this case, go change the sheets.

***

Song o' the day? A lovely one by a short-lived "supergroup," Little Village:

Of Necks and Brows

2010-09-02T07:21:00.009-05:00

As most of you know, I belong to a proudly stubborn and stiff-necked people, celebrated as such in Howard Nemerov's delightful "Debate with the Rabbi":

You've lost your religion, the Rabbi said.
It wasn't much to keep, said I.
You should affirm the spirit, said he,
and the communal solidarity.
I don't feel so solid, I said.

We the people of the Book, the rabbi said.
Not of the phone book, said I.
Ours is a great tradition, said he,
And a wonderful history.
But history's over, I said.

We Jews are creative people, the Rabbi said.
Make something, then said I.
In science and in art, said he,
Violinists and physicists have we.
Fiddle and Physic indeed, I said.

Stubborn and stiff-necked man! the Rabbi cried.
The pain you give me, said I.
Instead of bowing down, said he,
You go on in your obstinacy.
We Jews are that way, I replied.

Unfortunately, as of yesterday that metaphor has taken on a "stubbornly" literal meaning for me. Can't turn my head to the right, or lean my right ear down towards my shoulder. Not sure if this is from over-turning it at some point the day before, or from spending too much time looking to the left while typing up notes and quotes for an essay. In either case, it'll be a week or so before I have my range of motion back--and in the mean time, reading, writing, driving, web-surfing, etc., run the gamut from just-a-tad-awkward to sharply, gaspingly painful.

Ah, middle age!

***

If you're one of my handful of regular readers, you may have noticed a small change to the site two days ago. Under the picture of me getting hugged by Jeepers, Koala of Love (tm), I've added a tag line: "Proud Members of the Middlebrow Network."

What's the Middlebrow Network, you ask?

According to their website, the Middlebrow Research Network is

an AHRC-funded project that provides a focus for research on the loaded and disreputable term 'middlebrow' and the areas of cultural production it purports to represent. The network is both transatlantic and interdisciplinary: we work to foster discussion and collaboration across geographical and disciplinary divides.

Their Very Useful Website offers a range of materials, including a database of researchers (you'll find me there), links to events and publications (which I've just begun to browse), and some handy descriptions of "middlebrow" art and its audience from critics past and present.

Several of those definitions quite struck home for me:

"The B.B.C. claim to have discovered a new type, the 'middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like." Punch, 23 December 1925.

(Hey! That's my birthday. Kismet.)

"It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel - the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel - seems to exist only for women." George Orwell, 'Bookshop Memories.' (The full citation is on their website.)

At this point, I mostly read a branch of fiction that men avoid. Not sure what "Galsworthy-and-water" means, but the rest seems apposite enough.

"The broad working definition I employ throughout this book is that the middlebrow novel is one that straddles the divide between the trashy romance or thriller on the one hand, and the philosophically or formally challenging novel on the other: offering narrative excitement without guilt, and intellectual stimulation without undue effort. It is an essentially parasitical form, dependent on the existence of both a high and a low brow for its identity, reworking their structures and aping their insights, while at the same time fastidiously holding its skirts away from lowbrow contamination, and gleefully mocking highbrow intellectual pretensions."Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 11-12.

There's something quite negative about the details of Humble's description ("parasitical"? "aping"?), but I don't know the texts she's discussing, and don't want to assume that she's wrong. By the late 20th century, however, in the texts I know and love, there's a lot less primness in the middlebrow, while its mix of "narrative excitement" and "intellectual stimulation" remains intact.

I have a hunch--and it's just a hunch, so far--that this network and this term of inquiry will be quite useful to me in the years ahead, not just for my work on American romance fiction (which is often considered "lowbrow," but includes a large number of middlebrow texts as well, at least by Nicola Humble's definition), but also for my work on the pleasures of poetry. On which note, I look forward to reading Jane Dowson's conference presentation on "Poetry and the Middlebrow" over at the Network's Resources page, and posting on that in the future.

What's the brow-line on that Nemerov poem, after all?

***

Today's song: a little Hebrew qawwali for you, by Shye Ben Tzur. The lyrics (translated by someone on YouTube, so these may not be quite right) suggest that it's a devotional love song: "The Rose of my heart has unfolded / To you I shall sing / When I sing to you / The Rose of my heart unfolds / On my breast you have struck one beat / And within it you have planted endless rhythms / On the sail of my lungs you blow your breath / And within infinite compositions echo," etc. Enjoy!

Taking Out the Garbage

2010-08-31T06:21:00.001-05:00

Laura writes:

Have you re-read Crusie's essay about Taking Out the Garbage? That might give you some ideas for the longer term.

In the short term, I wonder if you could make sure you have a set length of time each day, towards the middle or end of the day, which you set aside for writing, and into which nothing else is allowed to encroach. Then, if you start the day with admin/more routine things, you'll be able to mull over the topic in the back of your mind for a lot of the day before your writing block of time arrives, so hopefully when it does arrive, your brain will be bursting with ideas and ready to get down to writing straight away.

Those are both good ideas, Laura. The Crusie essay, in particular, spoke to me when I re-read it--especially since I re-read it last night after spending twenty minutes or so writing a comment on Israeli / Palestinian politics over at my rabbi's blog. (And did so again--leave a comment, I mean--this morning.)

"I’m still honing the skill of figuring out what’s important to me and ignoring all the noise that doesn’t matter," Crusie writes, if you don't know the essay. "It’s a skill we all need to learn and relearn because until we understand what’s important, we’re not going to be able to protect our work or our lives." She goes on to explain that this "noise" is particularly problematic when you want to be a writer, which also applies to being an academic writer:

The problem with being a writer (one of many) is that it’s all in our heads. It’s not like ditch digging where you can fume all day and still have a perfectly good ditch when you break for dinner. The time-spent list for writers isn’t what we’re doing, it’s what we’re thinking. If we’re stirring spaghetti, for instance, we’re not cooking (unless we’re obsessing over al dente or worrying about salt); we’re doing whatever occupies our minds. If we’re thinking about why the heroine didn’t tell the hero about that secret baby, we’re thinking about writing. If we’re obsessing over RWA business or that lousy review or how unfair it is that a crummy writer just got a better contract than we did, we’re thinking about an organization or somebody else’s opinion, or somebody else’s career. If those things are high on our priority lists, then we can fume virtuously, knowing we’re putting our energies where we want them. If not, we need to do some reordering in our lives because we can’t do good work if we can’t give ourselves to the work, and we can’t give ourselves to the work if our heads are filled with this kind of noise.

This summer I ignored a lot of noise quite successfully: political noise, mostly, from home and abroad. I wonder whether I need to continue to do so, given how much of my time and mental energy can get sucked into that vortex. Supporting views I agree with has seemed important--actually, supporting a person whose views I agree with, since there are folks in the congregation who have been very unhappy with his very public positions, and I want him to know that he's got a few of us in his corner. But how to balance that with other priorities--well, that's a good, practical question, and I'm going to think about it.

"The time-spent list for writers isn’t what we’re doing, it’s what we’re thinking." That's the kicker, isn't it?

In terms of setting a time aside for writing, I'm going to try that--although given my troubled sleep schedule, I think I'll make that a morning ritual rather than an afternoon or evening one. Reading and writing are hard for me in the afternoon and evening: reading, because I tend to fall asleep; writing, because there's nothing like that first cup of coffee to get me humming with sentences. But the core idea--make this an appointment, part of the job, not an extra to be added when you can--seems very useful to me. Not sure if I can make any time sacrosanct here at home, but I can try.

More about motivation, Laura's other comment, in another post, probably tomorrow. Today's song, running through my head when I woke up, is an old one from Brazil--enjoy!

There was a time...

2010-08-30T10:11:00.003-05:00

There was a time when I took a lot of pride in being more professional, organized, and productive than other graduate students. Once I was out of graduate school...no, once I was hired by DePaul, with a baby, then two children, that self-image fell by the wayside. Hoping to get it back.

First steps, for the brand new year? Well, I've put Jonathan Mayhew's Stupid Motivational Tricks as my home page, or one of my home pages. I'm going to try to stay off social media (Twitter, Facebook) between 9 and 5, just as though I were at a "real" job where that wasn't allowed. Got some action lists written, and I'm trying to work from them, rather than responding all day to the incoming email stream.

We'll see how it goes.

Today's song goes out to my Rabbi, Brant Rosen, in thanks for his blessedly skeptical blog posts about the current revival of the Mid-east "peace process." It's an oldie but goodie from Peter Tosh:

Writing; Mashrou' Leila

2010-08-27T09:00:00.004-05:00

Writing's getting hard for me these days.

Not the word-smithery aspect: that comes as easily (and as painfully, sometimes) as ever.

No. The hard part for me now--and by "now," I guess I mean "in the last few years"--is the time-management aspect.

You see, when I write, I tend to get obsessed. I eat, sleep, breathe the piece, take hours on a sentence or a paragraph, getting the rhythm just so. I dodge email, drop other tasks, and focus. My shift this summer from blogging again (hurray!) to total silence? That was because I was writing--one conference paper, one thirty-page introduction to some essays. (Well, that and a LOT of editing.)

The trouble is, I can't sustain that sort of obsession. Especially when it's the school year, and I have to, you know, teach. Grade. Meet with colleagues and students. (Pesky things.)

Now, I have a lot of writing ahead of me this late summer and fall. A lot I want to do more generally. And if I'm going to get it done, I'm going to have to find a better rhythm for my days: one that incorporates the pesky stuff (students, teaching, colleagues), a lot of reading (poetry, fiction, scholarship), family duties (up at 6:30, makin' those breakfasts!), and somehow writing as well.

Haven't done that before, or at least, not in many years. Not well. And I'm not really sure how to start. Every time I think I should get started on an essay, there's something else that pops into my head: a grant application that's due soon; an essay to edit by someone else; another book I really ought to read.

What I need is some new rhythm to the day: a time for this, a time for that, in which writing takes its place w/o expanding to obsess me.

Any of you productive folks out there have any suggestions?

***

Today's song is "Raski Leila," by the Lebanese band Mashrou' Leila. I think it's about eggplant. Enjoy, while I go do some reading, or editing, or...you know...that other thing.

Last Call, Film Lovers!

2010-08-26T08:48:00.003-05:00

The last call is out--absolutely, positively, this time--for the 2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television. The conference runs November 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee, and the Final Deadline for proposals is September 15, 2010.

I'm running an "area" at the conference: Global Perspectives on the Alpha Male in Love. So far we have enough papers for one panel, max, so there's plenty of opportunity here for you to speak on your favorite man's man, ladies' man, man about town--whatever that town may be!

Here's the Call:

Masterful, confident, erotically charged, the “Alpha Male” has been a cinematic icon from Rudolph Valentino’s Sheikh Ahmed ben Hassan (The Sheik, 1921) to Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown (1999) and Hritik Roshan’s elusive criminal, “Mr. A” (Dhoom 2, 2006). As the hero in romantic films, this ideal of masculinity has proven enduringly popular with both male and female viewers, even as successive waves of feminism, in the West and around the globe, have challenged the sexual politics he implies.

How do representations of the Alpha Male in love differ across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries? How have they changed across the past century, responding to historically- and regionally-specific shifts in gender roles and ideals? What happens to the Alpha Male hero when he stars in a romantic comedy, as opposed to a drama or melodrama? How much can we use this iconic figure to track the power of the female gaze or women’s desires, as has been done with the Alpha Male hero of popular romance fiction, given the fact that men continue to predominate in the writing and direction of the films (as opposed to the overwhelmingly female authorship and audience for romance novels)?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers and panel proposals that examine all forms and genres of films featuring “Alpha” protagonists in love, as well as films which challenge, revise, or subvert the conventions surrounding this character. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Sheiks, Captains, Emperors, (The Sheik, Persuasion, Jodhaa Akbar)

• Alpha Male meets Alpha Female (The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

• Austen’s Alpha: Darcy and his Descendents (Pride and Prejudice)

• Sink Me! He’s an Alpha in Disguse! (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro)

• Alpha / Beta Reversals and Alter-Egos (Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na)

• Suspicious Minds: the Alpha Criminal and Detective (Devil in a Blue Dress, The Big Sleep, Breathless)

• Athlete Alphas (Love & Basketball, Bull Durham)

• Alpha Lovers in Space (Han Solo, James T. Kirk)

• You’ve Got Male: Alphas in “Chick Flicks”

Please send your 200-word proposal by e-mail to the area chair:

Eric Murphy Selinger
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
DePaul University
802 West Belden Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
eselinge@depaul.edu (email submissions preferred)

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal.

Lucid as Euclid?

2010-06-25T11:47:00.004-05:00

Ahoy all my Science & Math-minded friends!

Can you think of any available work--a book, a chapter, an essay, a website, a YouTube clip--that could introduce some more-or-less mathematically illiterate English majors to non-Euclidean geometry?

I don't care so much about their learning the geometry itself, or the various geometries. It's the intellectual adventure of the discovery that I need to communicate: the interest and excitement of it, and the worlds it opened up.

This will be a secondary source for my next interdisciplinary senior seminar on popular romance fiction, by the way. One of the novels I teach, Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm, features a mathematically-gifted 19th century hero who works on the problem. It's been hard for me to get students to focus on that aspect of the novel, or see its relevance to the other material in the book; I need something that will bring the topic to life for them.

By way of early payment, here's a musical tribute to the man behind the story in real life (well, one of them, anyway) from Tom Lehrer:

Help a Prof Out (2): Modern Poets?

2010-06-24T14:45:00.004-05:00

Thanks to everyone who weighed in about my survey course ideas! A number of voices saying that they like the variety that a survey brings to the table, whether it's organized by theme (as in the syllabus I posted yesterday) or simply by the order that poems and poets appear in a book (as I mentioned in passing).

As my friend Sara put it, over on Facebook:

I'm answering as someone who could be one of your students. I've never taken a poetry class and would have a lot of trepidation about doing so. I really like the themes approach, because I feel that I'll probably like some of the poems in each section whereas with a chronological or authors approach I'd be very afraid of not liking or understanding whole sections of the course, and hence I wouldn't take such a course. Also as a very casual visitor to the world of poetry I'd want to be exposed to more than 8 or 9 poets.

That's a useful perspective, and a persuasive one--it's always a pleasure to watch students discover a poet or poem they love, and often those discoveries happen while splashing through the shoals of charming minor poets, rather than swimming with the big fish of the canon.

I use the phrase "charming minor poet" advisedly, thinking of the opening of an essay I once wrote about Hayden Carruth:

When Bantam books shipped Hayden Carruth's anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us to likely reviewers, he got a bitter letter in reply. Its author, a friend of John Crowe Ransom, had looked in vain for the "tougher, more philosophical" work that made Ransom a "serious and important" figure. "He complained that I had used only the slighter poems, the elegiac and gently ironic poems," Carruth recalled in an essay the following year. In a word, "he accused me of turning Ransom into 'a charming minor poet.'"

"Well," Carruth muses in response, "charming minor poet is what we usually call Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Crabbe, John Clare, Padraic Colum, and many others, and personally I wouldn't mind belonging to that company at all, at all. What else is there, except oblivion on one hand and the fluke of greatness on the other?"

Before I commit to a survey course, though, let me say a word or two about the other kind of modern poetry course I've often taught, and see what you think about that.

The second model I've used is an author-based course. I choose some number of poets--8, 9, 10--and have students order either a Collected or Selected poems by each. We then read widely and variously across each poet's career.

The advantage of a course like this is that it enables both me and my students to read poems that never make it into the anthologies, either because they are (shall we say) charming minor work or because they're simply too long. The charming minor poems of Prufrock and Other Observations, for example, are my favorite part of the book. A handful of middle-aged poems by Allen Ginsberg (like the two called "Don't Get Old") are as good as Howl or Kaddish, maybe better, at least to my middle-aged ear. The experience of reading all of H. D.'s Trilogy is radically different from the experience of reading anthologized excerpts--it's much more fun, much closer to a fantasy novel, to my ear at least. Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron" is a joy, but nowhere in the Norton; poets like Stevie Smith, A. R. Ammons, and Robert Hayden come alive when read at length, but I'm not sure they have the same appeal in short bursts.

(The opposite is true of other poets, of course. Every time I teach the three or four poems by William Bronk in Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry I fall in love with his work, but to read him at length, a book or more? Help!)

Author-based courses also let me hitch my teaching more closely to my scholarship. When I'm writing about poet X, I can simply order up a book by him or her; when I've spent years getting to know the whole career of poet Y, I can take my students on a guided tour.

Finally, the books for author based courses are more expensive--but they can be really lovely, a physical pleasure to hold and to read. There's something quite satisfying about working with a Library of America Collected Poems, or one of the slim, elegant American Poets Project volumes, or just a book of poems, rather than a Norton. Books designed for readers, not for students, I mean.

Why, then, don't I always teach an author-based course?

Because then--ah, then!--I have to choose. And, because I'm a liberal child of the '70s, I can't just choose blindly. No, I want to choose a proper mix of genders, races, aesthetics...and if it's the Modern Poetry course, a mix of US and non-US poets. And I can't have more than 9. And that, friends, is hard, for a ditherer like me. My desktop and notebooks are littered with lists of authors, sometimes gathered by theme, sometimes just by affection:

Yeats
Eliot
HD (f)
Moore (f)
Williams
Stevens
Smith (f)
Rukeyser (f)
Hayden

Nine poets: four women, five men, but only two and a half from outside the US (Eliot counts twice), and only one poet of color. Argh! And would I rather teach Moore than Niedecker? Or Millay, whom students often like? And what about Auden, and Ammons, and O'Hara, and Merrill (both of whom taught wonderfully last quarter)? What about Hugh MacDiarmid, whose little aubade "Morning" was a surprise hit back in May?

The Day loups up (for she kens richt weel
Owre lang wi' the Nicht she mauna lig)
And plunks the sun i' the lift aince mair
Like a paddle-doo i' the raim-pig.

Oh, I don't know, friends, I just don't know. Any thoughts? Any advice?

Help a Prof Out (1): Modern Poetry

2010-06-23T15:22:00.009-05:00

Sixteen years ago, at a campus-visit interview somewhere in the Southwest, I found myself grilled by an English professor who wanted to know exactly who would be on my modern American poetry syllabus, were I to get hired.

I tossed out a few different models that came to mind: I might teach it this way, with this focus; maybe that way, with another. He was unimpressed. "You're the professor now," he said. "You have to decide!"

Did I? I've now taught a dozen or so sections of DePaul's Modern American Poetry (and Modern Poetry) courses, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, but I've never taught the course the same way twice.

Some years I've focused the course on a particular theme ("Faith, Doubt, and Myth" last fall; "Long and Longer Poems" a few years back). Other years I've chosen an anthology or two and had the students read every page, cover to cover, without organizing the poets into schools or movements or ranking them in importance. Last quarter I planned to do the "read every page" approach at the undergraduate level, for the first time--then balked, realizing that it wouldn't work, since the reading just wouldn't get done. Instead, I sorted the poets into loosely organized groups and worked through those, more or less chronologically, first on one side of the Atlantic and then on the other. (My anthologies were Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry and the Bloodaxe book of 20th Century British and Irish poetry.) It worked pretty well, except for the fact that I'd assigned a lot of poems which I'd never taught or even read before--and I didn't have nearly as much time as I'd hoped to get them prepped.

So: here's my dilemma.

To simplify my life in the next four years (my countdown to 50--and to my son's departure for college), I'd like to design one Modern American Poetry syllabus and one Modern Poetry syllabus and then stick with them, teaching them over and over again. What, though, should they look like?

The simplest solution would be for me to narrow the scope of the course to the first half of the 20th century, and teach it from an anthology that includes both modern American and modern non-American poetry. Three come to mind:

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which includes about 900 pages of 20th century poetry, along with plenty of older poems, from Caedmon's Hymn onward.
Poems for the Millennium, the Jerome Rothenberg / Pierre Joris-edited anthology of international modernist poetry, much of it in translation.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which runs from Whitman to Stephen Spender and Keith Douglas, and includes a bunch of manifestos and other ancillary documents at the end.

Each of these has its advantages and disadvantages. Consider the Norton Anthology of Poetry (or NAP, for short):

It would give the students plenty of context for any given modern poem, which is a plus. I can't assume they've read anything prior to my classes--so if I want them to think about, say, Stevens and Keats, it might be useful to have the Keats right there at hand.
The NAP is also a book I could use for my Introduction to Poetry course, so that students could go from one to the other without buying a new textbook.
On the other hand, the NAP offers essentially no biographical or other contextual information for any of its poets, and it necessarily includes fewer poems by its modern folks than an anthology just of modern poetry will give.

What about Poems for the Millennium?

Having taught from it before, I can testify that its description of modernism--overall, and as a group of related 20th century -isms--has the most potential to excite and seduce students.
On the other hand, that excitement tends to come, for my students, as much from the headnotes and afterwords supplied by the editors as it does from the poems they choose. In fact, it may come more from those notes than from the poems, which are sometimes more fun to read about than they are for my students to read.
Obviously the scope of this anthology goes well beyond the Modern American purview, which means that I'd really have to use it only for the Modern Poetry survey, and work up a separate syllabus, with a separate book, for the other. Not the most efficient approach.

That leaves the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (NAMP). How does it measure up?

I don't love some of the inclusions--the older versions of early Yeats poems, for example, that this edition uses instead of the superior later revisions, or the particular selections of Stevie Smith. I could, of course, supplement these with handouts or links.
I find it annoying that this "modern" anthology includes poems from the 1960s and later (all of the George Oppen offerings, for example), while shunting modern poems from the 1930s into a second, separate anthology of Contemporary Poetry (e.g. Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead). Would I make my students buy both for a handful of poems? Use some second text or on-line links? Not ideal, but doable, I suppose.

Of these three, I suppose I like NAMP the most, and I have taught with it more or less successfully before, structuring my course around a series of topics and themes, rather than authors. (As you'll see below, I used both volumes of the Norton that quarter, the Modern and the Contemporary.) Here's what I did that last time; after I post it, I'll publish this, take a break, and come back to the question of whether I should teach a survey or a course on particular authors (say, 8 or 9 of them) later.

What’s a Poem? What’s a Poet?

In Vol. 1, read the selections from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Yeats, “The Fisherman,” “Adam’s Curse,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”; Masters, “Petit, the Poet”; Stein, from “Tender Buttons,” read “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass,” the four poems called “Chicken,” and the selection from “Rooms,” also “Susie Asado”; Amy Lowell, “The Pike” and “Venus Transiens,” Stevens “Thirteen Ways…” “The Poems of Our Climate,” “Of Modern Poetry,” Loy, “Songs to Joannes” parts 1 and 2; Williams, “The Young Housewife,” “Portrait of a Lady,” from Paterson (302-307), Pound, “The Return,” “A Pact,” “In a Station of the Metro,” Cantos I and II; H.D., “Epitaph,” Moore, “To a Steam Roller,” “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “Poetry,” Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Geronition,” The Waste Land, Reznikoff, “The Shopgirls Leave their Work,” “About an Excavation,” Toomer, “Gum,” Bunting, “What the Chairman told Tom,” Niedecker, “New-Sawed,’ “Poet’s Work,” “Something in the Water,” “Popcorn-Can Cover,” Zukofsky, “From Poem Beginning ‘The’”; read the manifestoes from pp. 895-925 and Pound’s “A Retrospect” (929-938).

In Vol. 2, read Thomas, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” Lowell, “Epilogue,” Koch, from Days and Nights, “One Train May Hide Another,” Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet,” “from Garbage,” Ginsberg, “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them,” “A True Account of Talking to the Sun…,” Ashbery, “the Instruction Manual,” “Farm Implements and Rutabegas in a Landscape,” Howe, “from Thorow,” Ali, “Ghazal,” Bernstein, “Autonomy is Jeopardy,” and “from The Lives of the Toll Takers.”

Gender and Sexuality

In Vol. 1, read Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy” (166), Stevens, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” Williams, “The Young Housewife,” “Danse Russe,” “Portrait of a Lady,” Pound, “Portrait d’une Femme,” “The Temperaments,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” part I, Canto VII, H.D., “Sea Rose,” “Garden,” Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Whispers of Immortality,” “The Waste Land,” Millay, “First Fig,” “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” Bogan, “Women,” Smith, “This Englishwoman,” Niedecker, “Well, Spring Overflows the Land,” “What Horror to Awake at Night.”

In Vol. 2, read Swenson, “A Couple,” Rukeyser, “The Conjugation of the Paramecium,” Jarrell, “Next Day,” Berryman, “Dream Song 4,” Levertov, “Song for Ishtar,” Ginsberg, “Sphincter,” “Personals Ad,” Sexton, “Her Kind,” Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” “Orion,” “Planetarium,” “Power,” Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” Clifton, “homage to my hips,” “poem to my uterus,” “to my last period,” Atwood, “from Circe / Mud Poems,” “Manet’s Olympia,” Boland, “Mise Eire,” “The Pomegranate,” Goodison, “Nanny,” Nichols, “Invitation,” Doty, “Homo Will Not Inherit.”

Faith, Doubt, Myth:

In Vol 1, read Dickinson, “Brain is Wider” 38; Hardy, “Hap” (44); Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “As Kingfishers,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” “Hosting of the Sidhe,” “The Magi,” “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” Frost, “Design,” “Directive,” Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (on-line; Google it); Pound, “The Return,” HD, “from The Walls Do Not Fall” and “From Tribute to the Angels,” Eliot, “Preludes,” “The Waste Land,” “Journey of the Magi,” “Little Gidding,” Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” Smith, “Our Bog is Dood,” “God the Eater,” Kavanagh, “Canal Bank Walk,” Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “In Praise of Limestone,” Oppen, “Psalm,” “from Of Being Numerous.”

In Vol. 2, read Bishop, “At the Fishhouses,” “Over 2000 Illustrations…,” Duncan, “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” Larkin, “Water,” “Church Going,” “Faith Healing,” “High Windows,” Kumin, “In the Absence of Bliss,” Merrill, “b o d y,” Ali, “Ghazal.”

War and Genocide:

In Vol. 1, read Hardy “Drummer Hodge” (47), “In Time of ‘the Breaking of Nations’” (59), Kipling, “Shillin’ a Day,” “Recessional,” “Epitaphs of the War” (150), Yeats, “Easter, 1916,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Politics”; Sandburg, “Grass,” Thomas, “Rain,” Loy, “Der Blinde Junge,” Pound, “Lament of the Frontier Guard,” Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, parts IV and V, Canto LXXXI, Sassoon, “Dreamers,” “The General,” H.D., “from The Walls Do Not Fall,” McKay, “If We Must Die,” Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches,” “Louse Hunting,” Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Strange Meeting,” “S.I.W.,” Reznikoff, from Holocaust; “I sing of Olaf glad and big,” Jones, “In Parenthesis,” Auden, “Spain,” from “In Time of War,” “September 1, 1939,” “The Shield of Achilles.”

In Vol. 2, read Olson, “Pacific Lament,” Rukeyser, “Poem”; Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Duncan, “Up Rising / Passages 25,” Larkin, “MCMXIV,” Hecht, “The Book of Yolek”; Hill, “Ovid in the Third Reich,” “September Song”; Simic, “Prodigy,” “Eastern European Cooking,” “Cameo Appearance,” Palmer, “Sun,” Komunyakaa, “Starlight Scope Myopia,” “Facing It,” Fenton, “Dead Soldiers,” Forche, “The Colonel”

A Botched Civilization?

In Vol. 1, read Yeats, “Meru,” “Long-Legged Fly,” Williams, “To Elsie,” “The Yachts,” Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” from Canto XIV, XLV, Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Ave Caesar,” “The Purse-Seine,” “Carmel Point,” cummings “the Cambridge ladies,” “next to of course god America I,” Brown, “Sporting Beasley,” Hughes, “from Montage of a Dream Deferred,” Auden, “The Unknown Citizen.”

In Vol. 2, read Olson, from “The Maximus Poems” (6-11, 12-14); Hayden, “Middle Passage,”; Rukeyser, “from The Book of the Dead: Absalom; Alloy,” Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” Brooks, “Vacant Lot,” Larkin, “Homage to a Government,” Creeley, “I Know a Man,” Ginsberg, “Howl,” “America,” “Mugging,” Levine, “They Feed They Lion,” Gunn, “The Missing”; Harper, “American History,” Cervantes, “Poema para los Californios Muertos.”

Against Empire as Such:

In Vol. 1, read Yeats, “September, 1913,” “Easter, 1916,” Johnson, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” “The Creation,” Loy, “English Rose,” Moore, “England,” “A Midnight Woman to the Bobby,” “The Harlem Dancer,” “If We Must Die,” MacDiarmid, “O Wha’s the Bride?” Reznikoff, “It Had Long Been Dark,” Tolson, “from Harlem Gallery,” Bunting, from Briggflatts, Brown, “Memphis Blues,” “Slim in Atlanta,” Hughes, “Weary Blues,” “Madam and Her Madam,” Cullen, “Heritage,” Kavanagh, “from The Great Hunger,” “Epic.”

In Vol. 2, read Bishop, “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” Hayden, “Witch Doctor,” “Night, Death, Mississippi,” some Louise Bennett?, Ginsberg, “from Kaddish,” Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” “The Sea is History,” “The Schooner Flight,” Brathwaite, “From The Arrivants,” “Calypso,” “Ogun,”; James Wright, “A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow…”; Baraka, “Poem for Black Hearts,” “A New Reality is Better than a New Movie!” Clifton, “I am accused of tending to the past,” “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation,” Heaney, “Punishment,” “Casualty,” “Terminus,” de Souza, “De Souza Prabhu,” “Conversation Piece,” Goodison, “Guinea Woman,” Ali, “Ghazal,” Nichols, “Wherever I hang,” Marilyn Chin, “How I Got That Name,” “Autumn Leaves,” Alexie, “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City,” “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,” “Crow Testament”

Birds, Beasts, and Flowers:

In Vol. 1, read Frost, “The Most of It,” Williams, “Spring and All,” DHL, “Medlars and Sorb-Apples,” “Southern Cyclamens,” “Snake,” “Lui et Elle,” “Bavarian Gentians,” Jeffers, “Fawn’s Foster Mother,” Hurt Hawks,” “Vulture,” Moore, “To a Snail,” “The Pangolin,” “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,” Auden, “In Praise of Limestone.”

In Vol. 2, read Bishop, “Roosters,” Swenson, “Unconscious, Came a Beauty,” “Strawberrying,” Duncan, “A Little Language,” Ammons, “Gravelly Run,” “Small Song,” “The City Limits,’ Merrill, “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™Windbreaker,” Merwin, “For a Coming Extinction,” Snyder, “Milton by Firelight,” “Above Pate Valley”; Hughes, “The Horses,” “Pike,” “Second Glance at a Jaguar,” Oliver, “The Black Snake,” “Hawk,” Heaney, “Death of a Naturalist.”

Modern Love:

In vol. 1, read “Poems of 1912-13” (54-57, up through “The Voice”); “Adam’s Curse” 100, “No Second Troy” (101), “Eros Turannos” (167), Lowell, “A Decade,” “From Songs to Joannes,” WCW, “This Is Just to Say,” “The Ivy Crown,” DHL, “You,” Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” HD, “Fragment Sixty-Eight,” Parker, “One Perfect Rose,” Crane, “Voyages,” Hughes, “Lament Over Love,” Reznikoff, “from Love Poems of Marichiko,” Auden, “This Lunar Beauty,” “Lullaby,” “As I Walked Out One Evening.”

In Vol. 2, read Swenson, “A Couple,” “In Love Made Visible,” Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb,” Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage,” Merrill, “Days of 1964,” Creeley, “For Love,” O’Hara, “Les Luths,” Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” Snyder, “The Bath,” Plath, “The Applicant,” Lorde, “Love Poem,” Atwood, “[You fit into me].”

A Tiny Test

2010-06-23T13:44:00.002-05:00

Just to see whether my new (repaired) link between this blog and my other social media (Facebook / Twitter) is live, here's a one-line poem by Harvey Shapiro, from A Day's Portion (1994):

Tranquility

His liver-spotted hand on hers.

If this works, I should be able to see the post on Facebook, and a link should be posted to Twitter. If not--well, we'll see. It's hardly a priority, but would be nice.

Wish me luck!

Alpha Males in Love

2010-06-22T15:47:00.005-05:00

The call for papers has been extended one last time (last call!) for the big Film / Love conference next November in Milwaukee.

The final-but-final deadline is now September 15, 2010, and although I have a handful of papers already accepted, I’d love to have some more proposals for my panel, International Perspectives on the Alpha Male in Love. (As you'll see below, this includes films that challenge, revise, or subvert the conventions surrounding this figure.)

Here's the formal CFP, one last time:

2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television
November 11-14, 2010
Hyatt Regency Milwaukee
Deadline: September 15, 2010

Masterful, confident, erotically charged, the “Alpha Male” has been a cinematic icon from Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik Ahmed ben Hassan (The Sheik, 1921) to Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown (1999) and Hritik Roshan’s elusive criminal, “Mr. A” (Dhoom 2, 2006). As the hero in romantic films, this ideal of masculinity has proven enduringly popular with both male and female viewers, even as successive waves of feminism, in the West and around the globe, have challenged the sexual politics he implies.

How do representations of the Alpha Male in love differ across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries? How have they changed across the past century, responding to historically- and regionally-specific shifts in gender roles and ideals? What happens to the Alpha Male hero when he stars in a romantic comedy, as opposed to a drama or melodrama? How much can we use this iconic figure to track the power of the female gaze or women’s desires, as has been done with the Alpha Male hero of popular romance fiction, given the fact that men continue to predominate in the writing and direction of the films (as opposed to the overwhelmingly female authorship and audience for romance novels)?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers and panel proposals that examine all forms and genres of films featuring “Alpha” protagonists in love, as well as films which challenge, revise, or subvert the conventions surrounding this character. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Sheiks, Captains, Emperors, (The Sheik, Persuasion, Jodhaa Akbar)
Alpha Male meets Alpha Female (The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
Austen’s Alpha: Darcy and his Descendents (Pride and Prejudice)
Sink Me! He’s an Alpha in Disguse! (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro)
Alpha / Beta Reversals and Alter-Egos (Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na)
Suspicious Minds: the Alpha Criminal and Detective (Devil in a Blue Dress, The Big Sleep, Breathless)
Athlete Alphas (Love & Basketball, Bull Durham)
Alpha Lovers in Space (Han Solo, James T. Kirk)
You’ve Got Male: Alphas in “Chick Flicks”

Please send your 200-word proposal by e-mail to the area chair (me!)

Eric Murphy Selinger
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
DePaul University
802 West Belden Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614

eselinge at depaul dot edu

Fathers' Day

2010-06-20T08:41:00.007-05:00

Happy Fathers' Day (or is it "Father's Day"?) to any fellow fathers who happen to read this.

I'll be honest--I miss my father terribly this morning, and think of him daily. He'd have loved, I think, how my children are growing up, and hopefully how I have been as well. I spent a lot of years rebelling against him, but with his death, that changed--I might be closer to him now (in behavior, attitude, habits) than I'd be were he still alive.

In particular, I've found myself embracing his cosmopolitanism. Dad had little use for anything "tribal," as he saw it; the world was so vast and various and interesting that to focus only on one's own little slice of it seemed perverse at best. When I was a boy, he and my mother went to India for a summer, and they took us kids to Israel, Greece, Jamaica, the Bahamas (or was it Bermuda? I can never remember), and of course Hawai'i, where we lived for four years. He kept a list of places around the world he wanted to visit--it was taped inside a kitchen cupboard, where he'd see it frequently. And, indeed, he worked his way down through it over the years. Only a few lines left, there, at the end.

(When my wife and I put up maps in our kitchen, of the US and the world, he loved it; he'd be even happier to hear the kids debating where they'd like to go for the next big family trip, once we get the money. My son likes Spain, or Chile, or Argentina--somewhere he can use his burgeoning Spanish. For my daughter, it's New Zealand. Vancouver seems the compromise; certainly it's the most affordable!)

He told me before he died that he'd always figured he'd die young, like his father and grandfather before him, which was why he did his best to get to all those places on summer breaks and such. "I didn't save anything for retirement," he said, "because I never expected to have one." And he was right.

Dad died shortly before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the Bush presidency seemed a temporary annoyance, the country was at peace, the economy was strong, and his children (and grandchildren) were all settled, secure, and comfortable. I'm glad he missed the years that followed, although he'd have loved the Obama campaign and victory--and the fact that my older brother was an Obama delegate to the Democratic convention, as he had been for Michael Dukakis back in '88. (Dukakis? Yes--history repeating itself, the second time as farce: years before he had worked on the JFK and RFK campaigns, and we grew up in the '70s with a huge RFK poster on the wall.)

I don't think he'd appreciate my plan to stop reading the news all summer, but given how upset and obsessive I get about it, especially news from the Middle East, perhaps he'd understand. More on that in another post, perhaps.

For now...well, Dad was also a sports fan, which suggests to me that if he were alive this morning, he'd be watching the World Cup. So that's what I'm going to do, with a second cup of sweet black coffee and some rye toast. The kids are already downstairs watching, and once my wife finds out that the Scottish announcer is on, she'll probably join us. (Something about that accent she seems to like. All those years working on my Irish brogue, only to discover it was the wrong accent! Ah, well--something to work on in the next two decades of the marriage, eh?)

Zichron l'vracha--to remember him is a blessing.

Easy to think...

2010-06-18T22:26:00.004-05:00

Easy to think of low points from today, what with the computer crash, a bill situation, classroom flashbacks, etc. Also realized, as I graded, that I've fallen into a new, glum habit of thought: when my students do well, I credit them or their prior teachers; when they do badly, it's my fault--a badly-designed assignment or lousy lecture, or something like that.

On the other hand--what? High points:

1) Watching R handle the computer crash w/o losing her cool. Lucky man, I am.

2) Giving a well-deserved "A" to a student who'd struggled with depression early in the quarter, then came back to write three elegant, thoughtful, witty papers for me. I didn't teach her to write like that, but I did keep her engaged with the course through emails and conferences, as well as the lectures themselves. If I'd really done as bad a job this quarter as I keep thinking, she'd have failed or dropped the class; instead, she aced it.

3) Cleaning the main floor of our house in time for R to meet with a prospective client--one who showed up at the house an hour early. Ha!

4) Hitting the "Post" button with those grades--a quick tap with the finger, before I could stop and second-guess (OK, fifth-or-sixth-guess) them any more. When I started at DePaul I had to drive to the office to file the grades; that's an hour of driving I didn't have to do, and a lot less worry, after.

5) Curling up in the afternoon and again after dinner with Steven Moore's The Novel: an Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, while a line of thunderstorms swept through. Found that by accident at the public library...what, yesterday? The day before? Lively book, and part of the "scholarly base" I need (and want) to lay down this summer. More on both, anon.

And that, friends, makes five things that made me happy today.

Degrading

2010-06-18T12:46:00.002-05:00

Degrading is almost done!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

One snag: my "User Profile" is evidently corrupt, which means my computer can't load up my files, bookmarks, email archive...anything.

Thanks to Rosalie, I have backups for all of this, and at some point can create a new User Profile with the old data. Until I do, though, I'm going to stay off the computer, wrap up the grades, and clean house.

New living room setup, new family room setup, soon a new User Profile--if this were a novel, I'd groan at the symbolism. As it is, I'm going to log off, tidy up, and bid farewell to a tough spring quarter.

Summer is i-cumen in, folks. See you soon.

An Unexpected Letter

2010-06-16T09:08:00.005-05:00

I hadn't expected to get so many kind messages in response to my last post! Laura here; private notes by email; and, of course, many comments from Facebook friends--I'd forgotten that the blog was hitched to my Facebook account, but I'm glad now that I made that move last spring, or whenever it was. You've made me glad I posted. Thank you all.

***

Another pleasant surprise in the email box: a message from one of my Say Something Wonderful seminar alumni, linking to some student work.

Hey Eric!

I hope you're doing well. Just want to share some cool poetry video essays my students created using Vendler's framework. You can view them at the school Web site in The Sound of the Page section. They'll be available as Podcasts on iTunes in a few days, too.

Also, I used the Humament strategy again this year and got some pretty cool stuff from students.

Thanks for your guidance!

On another note, I'll be moving to a new high school on the southwest side in the fall. The name of the school is Zaragoza. I'm really looking forward to this new opportunity.

Salud!

R--

If you click over to the video essays you'll hear (with some text on the screen) some of R's students reading poems, then giving close readings of them based on a couple of chapters from Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, Poetry, notably the chapter on "Poems as Pleasure." I've found my own students, at college, hear their own prose much better when they have to read it aloud; I suspect that's the case for R's as well, so there's a good lesson in expository prose tucked inside each explication.

The "Humament" exercise comes from Tom Philips' ongoing art project, A Humument, in which each page of a Victorian novel is turned into an artwork, with bits of text still showing. Here's an example:

As you can see from that final phrase-- "that / which / he / hid / I / reveal," or maybe "reveal / I"--this is a way to make one text say a second, preferably a counter-text or unspoken set of desires. R's students took on Luis Urrea's The Devil's Highway, "which tells the true story," he writes,

of 26 Mexican men who attempted to cross the US / Mexico border in 2001. They were abandoned by their guide and left to die in the desert.

We used the Humament activity to examine subtext. The assignment asked students to consider what these men wished they could have said. What they produced became long-term displays in our classroom. Many of the students said this was one of the 'coolest' activities they'd ever done.

I'm delighted to know that our seminar discussion of the Philips, and of Ronald Johnson's Radi Os, which led us to A Humament, continues to ripple out into the pedagogical pond.

***

Mood-wise, a little down this morning again--this on a beautiful clear day, too. Logging off to grade a while, on the theory that wrapping something up (as I did yesterday) will give me a boost. If not, there's always the local pool!

Four Months Later...

2010-06-14T10:06:00.002-05:00

Has it really been four months since I've posted here?

Yep.

Why so long?

The usual reasons--teaching, writing, grading, family. Agonizing self-consciousness, since it seems that some of my relatives check in to read this, which I'd never expected. Grinding doubts about the project. (How many blogs do I still read with any regularity? Who does this one really serve?) Conference-going; post-conference scrambling; extra committee work. The allure of the 143-character tweet.

Also, though, another reason.

Since mid-April, more or less, I've been wrestling what I guess you'd call a mild case of depression. I had to take a lot of pseudo-ephedrine to deal with a sinus problem, which screwed up my sleep, and somehow things just snowballed. For six weeks, more or less, I would wake up scowling and cursing, still exhausted, and my mind seemed tuned to what Annie Lamott calls KFKD, that inner radio station that broadcasts, nonstop, that everything you've done and are doing is wrong. I'd spend most of the day the same way.

I call it "mild" because I held it together for my classes, usually. But before and after them, I was a wreck.

One result of this was a sort of grim, determined pulling back from social media--and from social activities more generally. I told myself this was about the workload, an effort to be more efficient, but in retrospect it seems more a sort of electronic version of curling up in a corner of the closet. (If you could see my closets, you'd know why I had to do this electronically.)

I actually hadn't thought anyone noticed the change. Until, that is, a couple of weeks ago, my wife asked me, "who are you, and what have you done with my husband?"

Long story short, I've been making some changes in the sleep regime, the exercise regime, the medical regime. Lots of regime change all around. Aside from one or two crashing returns to the blues, things seem to be getting better, so I'm giving these shifts a few weeks. If they work, fine; if not, don't worry, I'll get professional help. (I find it hard to imagine that they won't, as my natural state is so buoyant--but then, maybe that natural state is changing as I age? Well, we'll find out.)

And since one effect of the downward slide seemed to be a lack of posting here, I figure one way out might be to start sending these little messages out into the ether again--not so much about myself, I hope, but about what I'm reading, writing, thinking, doing this summer.

My first in a decade without teaching, by the way. And the kids off at day camp. Time to get something--finally, finally--done.

For my Local Friends

2010-02-11T08:51:00.002-06:00

Please come and enjoy a performance featuring Eric and Friends in the

Alte Rocker's Annual Purim Performance!

Don't miss out on our latest hits, including

***Geese on the Ark***

***(Senator is a) Centerfold***

***My Bubbe, She Sent Me a Sweater***

Saturday, February 27, 2010

It's the "Oy Vey Cafe"

7:30 Alte Rockers and JRC Purimshpielers Concert,

including abbreviated English Megillah reading

(Come at 6:30 if you want to hear di gantze megillah reading)

JRC, 303 Dodge, Evanston, IL

(just north of Howard, east of McCormick)

Parking available west (across Dodge) in the Levy Center parking lot

No RSVP...no Hot Tix...just be there!

FW: [Say Something Wonderful: 676] If you're in the neighborhood

2010-02-02T12:57:00.001-06:00

I love watching ideas I’ve gathered for my NEH poetry seminar take new forms as they spread around the country. Here’s the blurb I just received for a workshop (for parents and teachers) to be led by a 2009 Say Something Wonderful alum. The phrase “Poetry as a Second Language” came to me from the poet Charles Bernstein; Poetry Out Loud is the program from the Poetry Foundation; the writing prompts here came from this particular teacher, and the phrase “near-infinite particularities” comes (directly or in paraphrase, I’m not sure) from Baron Wormser and David Cappella’s A Surge of Language, which I’ve used as a textbook in the seminar for several years. Fun to see them mixed and matched this way!

Poetry as Second Language (PSL):

Immersion in the Language of Poetry

We will look at 4 ways we can immerse kids in the language of poetry: the first way is through Poetry Out Loud--we will see performances by 8th and 9th graders (one 8^th grader will also perform a slam to differentiate it from POL and rap); the second way is through hearing, daily, the teacher read a poem and having the students copy down another poem dictated to them (there will be a handout of short poems available); the third way is through writing poems (a quick look at examples of 2-word, circle, and change poems (and see how the "form" of the poems applies to short poems by Pound, Kooser, and Kenyon); and the fourth way is through close reading (we will talk together about our reading of Blake's "The Tyger" and Oppen's "Psalm" and see, perhaps, the near-infinite particularities potential in a poem).

Afternoon Inquiry

2010-01-07T14:07:00.001-06:00

Hi Dr. Selinger!

I took your Modern American Poetry grad class last winter, and I am now teaching a class on poetry and would really like to bring in a poem we read and discussed last year, but I cannot, for the life of me, find the poem in our anthology.

Would you by chance recall the poem about the woman sitting on the park bench eating the rotten peaches? It describes how she eats the peach, and I believe she doesn't have any teach. Anyway, it basically illustrates how people can find beauty in the simplest things, even items that the general public would find rotten (aka the peaches).

If you can think of this poem it would help me out greatly because I have been flipping through the pages of the anthology for hours and it's been driving me absolutely nuts!

Thanks so much!

---J

***

Dear J:

Was it possibly the William Carlos Williams poem about plums, not peaches? That wasn’t in our anthology; I put it on screen, via the Poetry Foundation’s archive. Here’s a copy—let me know!

To a Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on

the street a paper bag

of them in her hand

They taste good to her

They taste good

to her. They taste

good to her

You can see it by

the way she gives herself

to the one half

sucked out in her hand

ComfortedComforted

a solace of ripe plums

seeming to fill the air

They taste good to her

Morning Exchange (Pre-Coffee)

2010-01-07T07:04:00.003-06:00

From: Ben
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 1:40 PM
To: Leah; Joseph; Bob; Selinger, Eric
Subject: Shihab Nye poem

What do you all think of this poem? I think I like it, but I kind of get confused in the middle. And not sure if the title makes sense to me. Even still, I think I like it. I do miss the poetry discussions, for sure. I keep looking for a summer seminar for 2010, but nothing's going to be as good. Let me know...and Happy New Year!

Password

By Naomi Shihab Nye

I have made so many mistakes

you might think I would sit down

Here when it rains

the streets fill up like rivers

A woman swirls away in her Italian car

and the whole city mourns

They say she could sing

till something that might not have happened

had a chance again

You know, that gift we give

one another

How can we help someone else

want to live?

The man who sprays trees

stands beneath his hose

bathing in poison

He says a mask gets in his way

Here the roses stay on the branch

till sun steams their petals

like blackened collars

I miss the evenings

we walked among train tracks

reading messages in the weeds

even the strangest parts of ourselves

growing dear

A child awakens crying for candles

Those little tiny skinny ones he says

meaning incense sticks

He wants to clutch them in his bed

I have slept so many times

you might think I would really be awake

by now

***

Dear Ben,

Hmmm…

The last stanza clues me in that I should take what came before it as a sort of dreamy mood piece, or at least that’s how it strikes me this morning.

Like a late-60s Dylan song (or Eliot’s “Preludes”), this gives us some glimpses of “here,” or at least what “here” is like through the speaker’s eyes. She introduces herself (someone who’s made so many mistakes, but who keeps standing, looking around); her gaze and her interest go out those around her, and we get her sense of what the community (“we”) around her contains—and we get a little hint of her back story, of a time when “we” would interpret just the sort of elusive signs that the poem offers us, together. Then to the child, then back to herself, w/ a repetition & variation of the opening stanza. She’s not a mistake-maker, or not that alone; at the end, she’s a sleeper who isn’t quite awake, but who’s seen, and offered us, a bunch of sights that might well wake us up to something.

Speaking of which, I’m going to get some coffee. More later, maybe, when it’s started to kick in. But you get the idea: I’d treat this as a mood-piece, and one that gives us a character to inhabit who has a bit of an emotional arc across the series of stanzas, although not a terribly clear-cut or dramatic one. And I’d look for the lines & phrases where the poem seems to describe its own moods & methods, its interest in capturing and inviting us to consider “the strangest parts of ourselves.”

2010-01-06T09:11:00.001-06:00

Mary Jo Salter, “Lullaby for a Daughter”

Someday, when the sands of time

invert, may you find perfect rest

as a newborn nurses from

the hourglass of your breast.

William Matthews, “A Major Work”

Poems are hard to read

Pictures are hard to see

Music is hard to hear

And people are hard to love

But whether from brute need

Or divine energy

At last mind eye and ear

And the great sloth heart may move.

Lorine Niedecker, “Poet’s Work”

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

ENG 220: Vendler

2010-01-05T13:29:00.008-06:00

Finished Sherry Thomas's Delicious last night: book #2 of the year, both of them romance novels. Have abandoned re-reading the Niven, for now.

***

Prepping tomorrow's ENG 220 (Reading Poetry). This year, for the first time, I've given the students a couple of excerpts from Vendler's "Instructor's Manual" for the textbook. Not sure why, other than a desire for them to get these ideas first and foremost from her. Whether that's to give credit where credit is due, or whether it's because I no longer feel as much the Poetry Man as I did when I came to DePaul, nearly 15 years ago, now, I'm not entirely sure.

In case you don't want to read all the way through, here's the bottom line--the actionable summary, to use bureaucratic language.

Putting first things first, I want students to see, above all, how the mood in question has been freshly imagined. Second, I want them to see how this fresh imagination has been enacted structurally. How does the scene open? Where does it continue? How does it end? Third, I want them to see the elements of drama--changes in sentence structure, syntax, linguistic register, imagery, focus, stance, distance, rhythm. Fourth, I want them to see elements of pattern: repeated syntax, figures like anaphora or alliteration, repeated structures (parallelisms, catalogues, rhythms).

Sounds like a checklist to me! Imagination, structure, linguistic drama, pattern. They can do that. Now I just have to find some fun poems for them to work with.

***

"The television speech by a candidate for political office has metaphors and similes, imagery and rhythm, lead-in and climax, alliteration and assonance, personification and division into parts. None of these aspects has any special relation to poetry; all utterance (even ordinary conversation" tends to exhibit figures of speech and features such as sound-repetition, rhythm, and imagery. It seems to me a mistake to teach, as a way in to poetry, aspects of language that are equally common in sermons and letters" (Poems, Poets, Poetry, Instructor's Manual, 2)

***

Another idea that could be put into action, as an assignment:

A word in a poem is used because it 'fits' the overlapping schemes of the poem better than any other word. From one angle, it fits because it is a word the speaker of the poem might 'really' use.... From another angle, it fits because it has the right number of syllables for that place in the line. From yet another, it fits because it begins with the same letter as a word closely allied to it nearby in the poem. From yet another, it fits because it disrupts the expected rhythm and therefore introduces force into the line. From yet another, it fits because it inserts semantic surprise, on the one hand, or semantic confirmation, on the other, into the semantic configuration of the poem or stanza. Substitute another word for this one and you have a loss of force, a loss of surprise, a too-short line, an inappropriate diction for the envisaged speaker, or an absence of a binding phonetic link beween a given word and another 'belonging' to it (as, say, an adjective 'belongs to' its noun). Neither orators nor letter writers take such care with every word as poets do (PPP, IM, 3)

Take a poem, and have the students identify as many ways as possible that some key word "fits" into it--which means, in practice, to identify as many "schemes" (structures, patterns, etc.) as possible within the poem as a whole.

Would probably work best with a shortish poem.

***

Even more important, more "fundamental," though, is this: lyric poetry isn't a "linear" form. The primary focus isn't in recounting the plot, nor in espousing an idea or persuading us of an argument. "The poet uses arguments and ideas as one might use ingredients in a recipe: they are handy items to include, but they recombine to make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." Rather, the goal in lyric is "utter centripetal coherence."

"Instead of a firmly linear progress through successive events, we see a progressive deepening of understanding of a single thing."

"At the end of a poem, that [instigating] emotional confusion has not been abolished; it has been clarified"--poems end with what Frost called a "stay against confusion," albeit only a momentary or temporary one.

***

"It is important that students become accustomed to ask, 'What is the succession of feelings conveyed by the poem?" rather than 'What does this poem mean?' or 'What is the speaker saying?'"

***

A lyric, then, is a minutely organized whole that represents--by its imagination, its diction, its syntax, its sentences, its structural units--one or more emotions. It uses the standard resources of rhetoric (images, figures of speech, climax) but is not defined by them. It is defined, first of all, by its putting a new spin on an old emotion. We call this new spin 'imagination.' [...]

But lyric is also defined, structurally, by its concentric or radial tendencies, its aversion to a simply linear movement, its relative lack of interest in plot or character, and -- most conspicuously -- its intense interest in presenting linguistic drama. [...]

The most important revolution in attention induced by a poetry class is the student's return to the 'surface' of language after he or she has perceived the 'depth' of feeling. [...]

Students should be guided to return to the surface--to pay attention to the words--not so they can extract 'meaning,' but so they can see the linguistic drama."

***

"Most daily discourse, spoken or written, is relatively predictable. Poetry is not predictable. It can begin in complacency and end in terror; or it can begin in boast and end in apology. Almost no poem closes where it began. For that reason, a poem cannot have a 'meaning.' Instad, it has many 'doings.'"

***

"The point of the study of any art is to be able to see what to appreciate, to be able to distinguish the well-made from the inept, and, at the furthest point of understanding, to admire the incomparably imagined and superbly accomplished."

I like that. And I like even more that the examples she gives are all from fashion: a skirt cut on the bias, a gusset under the arm, silk facing, etc. Henry Tilney would approve.

Brand New Start

2010-01-04T09:31:00.004-06:00

Kids off to school--one syllabus done (or done enough to distribute)--one more to write, and then off to teach 'em.

My second syllabus, which I'm finishing on the fly, is for ENG 220, Reading Poetry. The was the course that DePaul hired me to teach, more or less, and I've done it 24 times now--but not in a year, so I'm feeling rather excited about getting back into the groove of it.

I've ordered the new edition of Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, Poetry for my textbook, but haven't spent enough time browsing it to see which of the poems I like to teach have been cut, or to decide which of the poems she's added I want to assign. Most weeks, therefore, just have a bare-bones assignment on the syllabus (e.g., "Vendler, chapter 5")--I'll have to choose poems as the quarter goes on, and get the word out to my students by email or something like that.

(I've also warned them, right on the syllabus, that I'll be having them read poems in class for the first time, in order to train them in on-the-spot analytical moves. To be fair, I'll also let them assign me poems right in class, so that I can model unrehearsed close reading for them. Keeps me young, that.)

So: it's 10:45, more or less, and I don't teach until 4:20 pm. The challenge for me this Winter Quarter will be to use these blocks of pre-class time, and not simply for classes. Logging off to mull over the lists, then, and get something done. Maestro Weller, send us out:

Kadangyan

2010-01-03T12:19:00.002-06:00

Thanks to new reader Clasificados for this tip: a fun tribal rock band (in manner of Australia's Yothu Yindi) from the Philippines. Sadly, not on Rhapsody, so I can't add it to the 2010 mix, but it's catchy--and in the 8 degree weather here (about -13, for everyone outside the US), it's also deliciously warming. Enjoy!

Syllabub

2010-01-03T08:31:00.000-06:00

I had the alarming sense yesterday that the day would be taken up by errands, maintenance, etc. In the end, it didn't work out that way: dry cleaning, a bit of shopping for dinner, checking & re-flating the minivan tires, but R did most of the busy-work, freeing me up to work on my syllabi for Monday.

I'm working, first, on English 469: Topics in American Literature: Popular Romance.

At the moment, our Required Texts are:

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer
Laura Kinsale, Flowers from the Storm
J. R. Ward, Dark Lover
Joey Hill, Natural Law
Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down
Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
Beverly Jenkins, Captured
Nora Roberts, Montana Sky

I say "at the moment" because I've just heard that the Victoria Dahl may have been hard for the bookstore to come by. NOT that I heard this from the bookstore, mind you--but I've called to follow up, and won't rest easy until I know for sure that it's in stock. (If it isn't, I'll use another Dahl--but the topics I wanted to pursue with Talk Me Down don't come up the same way in the next two books in that series, so I'll be thrown off, just a little. "Recalculating," as the GPS unit likes to say.)

Of those, I've taught five before (SEP, Kinsale, Ward, Hill, Herendeen); three are new, although I have a ringer in my class to help with the Roberts: a Fulbright scholar writing her dissertation on NR, who's come to Chicago to work this year. (I'm co-director of the diss.)

Here's the tentative Course Description:

American academics began to study popular romance fiction seriously in the 1980s, with the publication of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, by Tania Modleski. The conventions, genres, and readership of romance fiction have all evolved dramatically since this time, however, and critics have not always kept pace with them. In this course, we will explore some of the varieties of popular romance fiction (and of romance criticism) currently published in the United States. Using tools from cultural studies, feminist psychoanalysis, the philosophy of love, and aesthetic analysis, we will learn to read popular romance from a variety of contemporary authors and subgenres; in the process, we will get to know something about the lively, reflective on-line romance community. Our challenge, week by week, will be to make the novels as interesting as possible, by any means necessary.

As for the Course Requirements:

All students in this course will be expected to do three things:

Come to class with the books and / or articles read, and contribute to class discussion;
Deliver a thoughtful, well-organized in-class presentation on one of our novels—think of this as a succinct mini-lecture, about 10 minutes long, with an accompanying handout of quotations from critics, discussion questions, or anything else that can provoke subsequent discussion; and,
Write a scholarly or creative nonfiction essay (12-15 pp.), probably based on the presentation, that uses critical approaches studied in class to analyze one of the course texts.

My next big task is to assemble the secondary texts we'll read in the first couple of weeks. Here's the list I have so far--but it's more or less the same list I used two years ago, which leads me to believe that I've missed a few things. If you can think of anything for me to add, let me know!

Week 1: Introduction to the class, to each other, and to the novels we will study. Initial assignment of presentations. Discussion of "romance" as a literary term, especially in American literary history, with passages from Hawthorne, James, and Northrop Frye.

Week 2: Introduction to some of the critical debates surrounding popular romance fiction.

Germaine Greer, selection from The Female Eunuch (1970)
Tania Modleski, “Mass Produced Fantasies for Women” and “Harlequin Romances” (Loving with a Vengeance, 1982)
Janice Radway, “from New Introduction” (1991), “The Readers and their Romances,” and “The Act of Reading the Romance: Escape and Instruction” (Reading the Romance, 1984; rpt. 1991)
Laura Kinsale, “The Androgynous Reader”; Linda Barlow, “The Androgynous Writer”; Susan Elizabeth Phillips, “The Romance and the Empowerment of Women” (Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz, 1992)
Tania Modleski, “My Life as a Romance Reader” (Paradoxa, 1997)
Jennifer Crusie, “Romancing Reality: the Power of Romance Fiction to Reinforce and Re-vision the Real” (Paradoxa, 1997), “Defeating the Critics” (1998), and “Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women” (1998); available on line at http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays.
Pamela Regis, “The Romance Novel and Women’s Bondage” and “In Defense of the Romance Novel” (A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 2003).
Eric Selinger, “Re-reading the Romance” (essay-review of recent criticism, 2008)
Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, selections from Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels (2009).

After that, we turn to the novels themselves. Here's the order so far:

Week 3: Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer (Contemporary)
Week 4: Laura Kinsale, Flowers from the Storm (Historical)

Week 5: J. R. Ward, Dark Lover (Paranormal)

Week 6: Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (Historical—mmf)

Week 7: Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down (Contemporary)

Week 8: Joey Hill, Natural Law (Erotic—BDSM)

Week 9: Beverly Jenkins, Captured (Historical—African American)

Week 10: Nora Roberts, Montana Sky (Contemporary)

If anything occurs to you about the sequence, let me know that as well! I'll begin assembling ideas for secondary reading, topics, questions, etc., as the next week proceeds.

Reading & Watching

2010-01-02T09:23:00.000-06:00

First book read of the new year: Lead Me On, by Victoria Dahl.

First movie watched (on DVD): Paperback Hero, with a young, very cute Hugh Jackman & Claudia Karvan as a truly delightful Aussie heroine.

In lieu of music this morning, here's a teaser from the latter, thanks to someone at YouTube:

***

Back on the 29th I spent some time reading "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," by Andreas Huyssen (1986), which you can find over at Google Books. An oldie but goodie--ideas I've known, vaguely, for a very long time, but crisply expressed, and potentially useful both in the classroom (my students don't know this stuff) and for my current work on popular fiction.

***

Modernism: "an aesthetic based on the uncompromising repudiation of what Emma Bovary loved to read" (Huyssens, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, 45). And, again, this: "the repudiation of Trivialliteratur has always been one of the constitutive features of a modernist aesthetic intent on distancing itself and its products from the trivialities and banalities of everyday life" (47).

Williams? Reznikoff? Joyce? Hmmm.

***

"Mass culture and the masses as feminine threat--these notions belong to another age..." (62). Hmmm. In my classrooms, I still encounter it from students (male and female). Shall I blame older colleagues?

"After all, it has always been men rather than women who have had real control over the productions of mass culture" (62). True for popular romance fiction?

***

"None of this is to claim that the distinction between high art and mass culture no longer exists, either in Western societies or elsewhere, as some might argue, for it very much does. Differences will always remain in quality, ambition, and complexity between cultural products, in demands on the attentiveness and knowledge of the consumer, and in diversely stratified audiences. But what used to be a vertical divide has become in the last few decades a horizontal borderland of exchanges and pillagings, of transnational travels back and forth, and all kinds of hybrid interventions. Complexity does not reside only on one side of the old binary." (Huyssen, “High/Low” 370)

***

Also stumbled on this, from Bourdieu: “the ‘popular aesthetic’ is defined in relation to ‘high’ aesthetics and that reference to legitimate art and its negative judgement on ‘popular’ taste never ceases to haunt the popular experience of beauty” (Distinction 32).

I think I need to revisit Mr. B. This little scrap (found in the pages of someone else's dissertation) feels relevant to Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Natural Born Charmer, which we'll probably start with in my graduate romance class this quarter.

10 Years Ago...

2010-01-01T12:28:00.006-06:00

There's a mini-meme floating around Twitter, with folks posting who they were or what they were up to 10 years ago.

As soon as I asked myself the question, I winced. You see, I celebrated Y2K at a big family gathering out in California, a long-time dream of my father. At the time, I didn't realize that he didn't expect to live much longer, but evidently he'd assumed for many years that he wouldn't much outlive his own father, who died in his sixties--and, it turned out, he was right.

Once that sadness subsided, though, I got to thinking: where was I, other than that, ten years ago? What did I do with this decade?

Well, let's see.

2000 was the year I went on a four year publishing / conferencing hiatus, more or less, in order to invest more of my energy in family matters. That hiatus didn't start until the end of spring term, though; until then, I was busy flitting from conference to conference, mostly giving papers that year on Ronald Johnson. (Mark, Joel, Peter, remember that panel in Louisville? The Buffalo conference?) Ten years later, the book that grew out of that work has finally appeared, and although sales have been...er...a little slow (will we break 100 this year?), Ronald Johnson: Life and Works has already shown itself to be the foundation for future scholarship on the poet. (I can't tell you how I know this, but I do.)

What else was I up to? I had a fellowship from the DePaul Humanities Center to work on a project I called "Delight in Disorder: The Theory and Practice of Pleasure in Post-war American Poetry." I never did write that book, but the conference on poetry and pedagogy that I put together as part of the fellowship turned into five NEH grants to work with small groups of K-12 teachers. Last month, I realized that the theoretical and literary-historical research I began back then is actually the underpinning of my popular romance scholarship, so that what seemed like a sharp turn in my professional trajectory now looks like a calmer, more natural progression.

Ten years ago I was writing an essay on poets' memoirs for Parnassus: Mary Karr, William Corbett, Thylias Moss. Gosh, I haven't thought about that piece in ages, but I sure remember writing it, painfully, night after night in the upstairs study of my brick Chicago house. Oh, and I was editing, too: Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections, a book that still brings me little royalty checks every year or two, God bless it. I'd meant to follow up on that book with a monograph on the subject, but never quite pursued that, either. Maybe this decade.

Ten years ago, I was gunning for tenure, pumping up the CV, writing and planning and plotting each move to reach that goal. I was up until 2, 3, 4 in the morning, as often as not, writing or prepping my classes. I remember waking up, head down on the kitchen table, and staring at the laptop in disgust. Glad to be past that. Ten years ago, I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old. Toilet training. Getting up, night after night, to give Thing Two her bottle, change a diaper, and the rest. Glad to be past that, too--although as my friend the koala will tell you, I still have a knack for charming & calming small creatures.

Ten years ago, I didn't play mandolin--hadn't picked up any instrument in ages. Ten years ago, I hadn't started having a cocktail (like my father before me) before dinner. At which thoughts, I think I'll end this little ramble, mix a couple Manhattans, and practice a song or two before the slow-cooked beef is done. And since that phrase is in my head ("ten years ago"), here's the first outro of the new year. Rick Danko swallows the line, but that's how it starts--enjoy. And thanks for listening to an old man reminisce.

Reading

2009-12-30T08:50:00.004-06:00

My friend Mark seems to have disabled the "link to a single post" feature on his wonderful blog, Culture Industry, so you may have to scroll down a bit to find his post from Tuesday, December 29, 2009, but it's worth a gander, maybe.

The post is on something that fascinates me: his reading habits.

Mark, you see, is a reader of poetry. A real reader: upwards of..well, let him do the numbers:

I was always astonished by the statement I read somewhere by some recent MFA grad who was gushingly thankful for having been required to read 50 books of poetry during the course of his two or three years in the program. Wow – fifty whole books! (Read that with heavy irony, okay?) Sorry, fella, but it's a really slow year when I don't read at least half again more than that, & lately I've been trying to keep up a pace of at least 100 volumes (counting chapbooks, of course, but also counting big things like The Prelude & "A" & JH Prynne's Poems) every calendar year. And that's not counting magazines, journals, & miscellaneous stuff online.

...as poet & lover of poetry (not necessarily identical subject-positions, we all know) I simply want to know as much of the stuff as possible, to hoover down as much of that sweet word-work as I can. The Doritos effect.

He also evidently re-reads books: 2, 3, 4, 5, dozens of times.

Now, I'm not a list-keeper, the way Mark and my other friend Lazaraspaste seem to be, so I don't know how many books of poetry, or novels, or anything else I read in a year. I tried to keep a list like that last January, and gave up after about a half-dozen entries, bored with the enterprise. But I doubt I read anything close to 75 books of poetry in a year, and I fear I don't read close to that even if I add in the romance novels. Maybe I'll try to keep track this year, just to see, here on the blog.

Dispiriting, but I'm not going to give myself grief over it.

And I wonder what the critics who pathologize constant romance reading would make of Mark's steady consumption of poetry. What unspoken desires and psychic conflicts are superficially assuaged by each new chapbook, but truly (that is, unconsciously) exacerbated, demanding yet another dose?

***
Currently reading (although I'll start the list officially on the 1st) Sherry Thomas's romance novel Delicious, and re-reading The Ringworld Throne, by Larry Niven (SF). No poetry on the table at the moment, although that will change, soon enough.

***

This morning's music: Lasairfhiona, a wonderful singer from the Aran Islands, discovered on our last trip to Ireland. Enjoy!

"Part of the Process"

2009-12-29T11:23:00.005-06:00

I spent this morning--or at least the two good working hours thereof--plugging away without much success at my current work in progress: an essay on Jennifer Crusie, optimism, and popular romance fiction. When done, it will be my contribution to the Crusie collection I'm editing with Laura Vivanco, and my goal is to finish it, or at least a passable draft of it, sometime in early January.

At the moment, the piece is in two parts: an introduction, which talks about the century-old critical bias against literature that aims to encourage its readers, and a discussion of two novels by Crusie, Anyone but You and Welcome to Temptation. I've stolen the first part from an early draft of the introduction to our volume as a whole; as Laura realized early on, it was more the early draft of an essay than of an introduction, and it struck me a few months ago that this was the essay where it belonged. The second part was a conference paper, two years ago, which I'm going to update and expand.

Earlier this month, I used this approach--new introduction + old conference paper, revise as needed--to draft my contribution to the New Approaches to Popular Romance volume. That was an intensely painful process at first: two or three days of maddening frustration, then some kind of breakthrough, then a couple of weeks of solid writing, with every other project put on hold. Got it done just in time for my birthday, which went well. But now?

Well, I'm still in the "maddening frustration" portion of the process with this one, which means much heaving of sighs and snippiness when interrupted, but that will pass. What worries me is that I won't have the luxury of the "solid writing" part of my usual compositional rhythm, what with the new quarter starting on Monday, a couple of syllabi to write, and so on.

The trick I need to master, or master again (did I ever know it?): how to keep a writing project moving forward in small increments, steadily, rather than lurching about in great ungainly surges. And, related to that, the trick of steadily building the scholarly base for this new work, so that I have new ideas, new references, and so on in mind as it develops.

***

On the musical front, I've decided to work my way through a book of medieval music for mandolin that I got last year at Christmas, and left unopened, mostly, throughout the year. Starting (why not?) with the first song, which I'll practice all week before moving on to the second, and so on. I'll have to switch things up a bit once we have the song parodies chosen for my next Alte Rockers gig, but for the next month or so, this should keep me playing at least a little, more or less regularly.

The first song is this, Cantiga 101 from a gathering of songs for Santa Maria by King Alfonzo X:

The sheet music has a bunch of variations in it, and I'll play with the melody a bit myself once I've mastered the basics--try it on various instruments, etc. Good to have a focus, in any case.

Romance Fiction and American Culture: Call for Papers

2009-12-29T09:05:00.002-06:00

Another Call for Papers with a deadline coming up.

Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?

Edited by William Gleason and Eric Selinger

Call for Proposals—by January 4!

Last April, Princeton University hosted a groundbreaking two-day conference on popular romance fiction and American culture. Gathering scholars, authors, editors, and bloggers, this interdisciplinary gathering featured panels on romance and history (both political and literary), romance and religion, romance and sexuality, and romance and race. Each explored the ways that popular romance fiction has reflected, and also helped shape, American culture from the late 18^th century to the present.

Conference organizers William Gleason (Princeton) and Eric Selinger (DePaul University) now invite proposals for a collection of essays that will build on the work of the conference: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? We welcome proposals from academic scholars from any field—American literature, popular culture, religion, women's and gender studies, African American Studies, or any other relevant discipline—as well as from authors, editors, and other members of the romance community who wish to reflect on their practice in light of the volume’s concerns.

We are eager to consider proposals or abstracts on the relationships between popular romance fiction and

the history of reading in America, from Pamela to the present

American cultures of sexuality, masculinity, and femininity
American religious cultures, in Christian and other traditions
Race, ethnicity, and exogamous desire
“High” culture: literary fiction, poetry, visual art, etc.
Other popular genres: mystery / detective fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, non-romance bestsellers, chick-lit
Other popular media: film, comics, music, gaming
The culture of sport (football, baseball, NASCAR, etc.)
American political / military culture, from the early Republic to the present
American psychological / therapeutic / self-help culture

We also hope for papers on the romance industry in America and the diverse community of romance readers, authors, and reviewers, both as they are and as they are represented in the media:

Romance sub-genres—Western, Gothic, Regency, Medieval, Paranormal (vampire, were, empath, etc.), Futuristic/time travel, Multi-cultural, Erotic, Gay/lesbian, etc.—and their shifting appeal to readers
American romance and other traditions: comparative studies, texts in translation, transnational encounters
Romance publishing: major presses, series and lines, the rise in e-publishing
Representations of American romance writers, readers, bloggers, book groups, conventions, etc.

Detailed abstract or draft essay and a short CV are due by January 4, 2010. Final essays will be due in June, 2010. We are happy to answer any inquiries.

Prof. William Gleason, bgleason at Princeton dot edu

Prof. Eric Selinger, eselinge at depaul dot edu

FW: Last Call for Papers for IASPR conference in Belgium (5-7 August, 2010)

2009-12-29T08:58:00.001-06:00

To test the handy-dandy “Post by Email” feature here at SSW, I’m forwarding a Call for Papers.

Last Call for the IASPR conference in Belgium! Romantic love and its representations in popular media, throughout the world! Please forward to interested colleagues, listservs, and graduate students—still enough time for them to get proposals together, even if they’re stuck at MLA.

http://iaspr.org/conferences/belgium

Call For Papers (DUE: JANUARY 1, 2010)

The Second Annual International Conference on Popular Romance:
Popular Romance Studies: Theory, Text and Practice

Brussels, Belgium
5-7 August, 2010

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking proposals for innovative panels, papers, roundtables, discussion groups, and multi-media presentations that contribute to a sustained conversation about romantic love and its representations in popular media throughout the world, from antiquity to the present. We welcome analyses of individual texts—books, films, websites, songs, performances—as well as broader inquiries into the creative industries that produce and market popular romance and into the emerging critical practice of popular romance studies.

This conference has three main goals:

To bring to bear contemporary critical theory on the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from all national and cultural traditions
To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of popular romance, by documenting and/or theorizing what happens to tropes and texts as they move across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries
To explore the relationships between popular romance tropes and texts as they circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film, or from song to music video), between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers

After the conference, proceedings will be subjected to peer-review and published.

IASPR is pleased and proud to announce that the Keynote Speakers for the conference will be Celestino Deleyto, University of Zaragoza, Spain, Lynne Pearce, Lancaster University, UK, and Pamela Regis, McDaniel College, USA.

Please submit proposals by January 1, 2010 and direct questions to: conferences@iaspr.org.

We are currently pursuing funds to help defray the cost of travel to Belgium for the conference. If these funds become available, we will notify those accepted how to apply for support from IASPR.

To Blog or Not To Blog...

2009-12-28T10:36:00.002-06:00

My latest post, over at Romancing the Blog, opens the question, at least for me.

The hiatus here will continue at least through New Years--but as you see, I have a new look, a new photo, and some new links in the list. More to come, maybe, in a few days.

Something pretty, for your trouble. Thanks for stopping by!

The Great Debate (Judy Grahn Edition)

2009-11-04T15:32:00.001-06:00

Fascinating debate on Monday night, in my Modern Poetry class, over how to read a short poem from Judy Grahn's "She Who" sequence (1971-72). Grahn's a lesbian feminist poet, and this sequence is a wonderful mix of theological, political, and interpersonal poems.

Near the middle, we get this boast:

I am the wall at the lip of the water
I am the rock that refused to be battered
I am the dyke in the matter, the other
I am the wall with the womanly swagger
I am the dragon, the dangerous dagger
I am the bulldyke, the bulldagger

and I have been many a wicked grandmother
and I shall be many a wicked daughter

Given this poem's invocations of "She Who," a sort of neo-pagan Goddess, I've always connected that line about "the bulldyke, the bulldagger" not only to sexual terminology of the period, but also to the bull-leaping and Goddess worship back in Knossos, as in this picture:

I take it, that is to say, that this poem is entirely self-celebratory--a sort of chant or rune in which the "I" who speaks gets to take on the time-defying, deliciously "wicked" nature of She Who herself.

What, though, to make of the poem that follows?

foam on the rim of the glass
another wave breaking

foam on the rim of the glass
another wave breaking
she once wanted to be a sailor

now she sits at the bar, drinking
like a sailor

My students were sharply divided. Some thought this was a sad scene: a woman who "once wanted to be a sailor" reduced to drinking away her sorrows, with the pervasive lowercase letters and that sharp linebreak at the close ("drinking / like a sailor") emphasizing the downbeat tone. Others took "drinking / like a sailor" as a livelier twist, such that this woman who once wanted to be a literal sailor has now discovered that kind of adventure and open possibility in her bar-life, and by extension in her erotic or communal life there in the bar.

For some, that is to say, this was a step down from the poem before it, and for others a continuation of--an instance of--the "wickedness" with which that poem ends.

Your thoughts, O Blogosphere?

On Today's Agenda

2009-10-19T10:57:00.002-05:00

It's Monday, and that's my long day this quarter. I got in about an hour ago (10 am), and won't leave until after 9 pm, when my night class gets out and I hit the freeway home.

So: what am I up to today?

***

Spent some time this morning on a committee project. I'm chair of our department's one-year-old Curriculum Committee, ascending to that noble throne last month. On the table first is a new one-course "Diverse Traditions" requirement for English majors, which we approved last year without ever quite defining what counted as a "Diverse Traditions" course.

Heh.

As you can imagine, this has led to a certain amount of internal wrangling & Chicago-style politicking. I'm not at liberty to divulge the details, but broadly speaking, we're having to decide which courses will count for this requirement.

Here's some of the language I've been playing with to define the requirement, which I'll bring to the committee and to the department overall in the future for debate. Your thoughts, everyone?

In “Diverse Traditions” courses, students will study authors, texts, or topics that have historically been marginalized by the dominant culture’s literary canon. [I keep wanting to add, "hereinafter referred to as "DCLC," pronounced "De Klerk," but I'll save that for the meetings.]

To receive “Diverse Traditions” status, a course must focus on at least one of the following:

1. Works in English by racially or ethnically marked authors (e.g., Latino/a, Asian American, African American, Native American authors), with attention to how such categories of difference have been constructed and contested over time;

2. Works in English by women, especially authors who have historically been excluded from the literary canon, with attention to how the relationships between gender, authorship, and social power have been constructed and contested over time;

3. Works in English by sexual minorities, especially authors who have historically been excluded from the literary canon, with attention to how the relationships between sexuality, authorship, and social power have been constructed and contested over time;

4. Works in English by working-class authors, especially authors who have historically been excluded from the literary canon, with attention to how the relationships between class, authorship, and social power have been constructed and contested over time;

5. Works in English by immigrant, exiled, or diasporic authors, especially authors who have historically been excluded from the literary canon, with attention to how the relationships between national identity, authorship, and social power have been constructed and contested over time;

6. Works in English by religious minorities, especially authors who have historically been excluded from the literary canon, with attention to how the relationships between religion and social power have been constructed and contested over time;

7. Non-Anglophone works (in translation) from predominantly Anglophone countries (e.g., Britain, Ireland, the United States), with attention to how such literature complicates or counterpoints the national literary narrative of that country;

8. Works by Anglophone authors from outside England and the United States, especially by authors who have historically been excluded from the Anglo-American literary canon;

9. Works of new interest in light of emerging categories of diversity (e.g., Disability Studies, Masculinity Studies), if the course introduces students to these emerging theoretical approaches in a way that will profitably complicate the way these works are taught or read in other contexts.

By separating these out, my plan is to allow debate and voting--if necessary--on each one, line by line, so that no single category can sink or delay the program as a whole.

From “Spring,” in James Thomson’s The Seasons

2009-10-18T12:22:00.001-05:00

A lively discussion's underway over at Teach Me Tonight about the nature of love (here and here) in romance novels and elsewhere. Whenever I hear these discussions, I think of a line from James Thomson's The Seasons—"Perfect esteem enlivened by desire"—which Jean Hagstrum borrowed for the title and epigraph of a very good book a few year ago. The line comes from the "Spring" section of The Seasons, and although you can find the whole text on Google Books, I thought I'd post the immediate context here, for easier reference. (I've added the verse-paragraph breaks, to make the selection a bit easier to read.)

One thing I do notice: Hagstrum (and I, following) have always cut off the quotation at "enlivened by desire." In fact, there's an immediate adjective: "desire / Ineffable." What to make of that, I'll decide another time.

But happy they! the happiest of their kind !

Whom gentler stars unite, and in one fate,

Their hearts, their fortunes, and their beings blend,

'Tis not the coarser tie of human laws,

Unnatural oft, and foreign to the mind.

That binds their peace, but harmony itself

Attuning all their passions into love,

Where friendship still-exerts her softest power,

Perfect esteem enlivened by desire

Ineffable, and sympathy of soul;

Thought meeting thought, and will preventing will.

With boundless confidence : For nought but love

Can answer love, and render bliss secure.

Let him, ungenerous, who, alone intent

To bless himself, from sordid parents buys

The loathing virgin, in eternal care,

Well-merited, consume his nights and days ;

Let barbarous nations, whose inhuman love

Is wild desire, fierce as the suns they feel ;

Let Eastern tyrants from the light of Heaven

Seclude their bosom-slaves, meanly possessed

Of a mere, lifeless, violated form ;

While those whom love cements in holy faith.

And equal transport, free as Nature live,

Disdaining fear. What is the world to them?

Its pomp, its pleasure, and its nonsense all?

Who in each other clasp whatever fair

High fancy forms, and lavish hearts can wish;

Something than beauty dearer, should they look

Or on the mind, or mind-illumin'd face ;

Truth, goodness, honour, harmony, and love,

The richest bounty of indulgent Heaven.

Meantime a smiling offspring rises round

And mingles both their graces. By degrees

The human blossom blows ; and every day,

Soft as it rolls along, shews some new charm

The father's lustre, and the mother's bloom.

The infant reason grows apace, and calls

For the kind hand of an assiduous care.

Delightful talk ! to rear the tender thought.

To teach the young idea how to shoot,

To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,

To breathe th' enlivening spirit, and to fix

The generous purpose in the glowing breast.

Oh, speak the joy ! ye, whom the sudden tear

Surprizes often, while you look around,

And nothing strikes your eye but sights of bliss

All various Nature pressing on the heart ;

An elegant sufficiency, content,

Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books

Ease and alternate labour, useful life,

Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven.

These are the matchless joys of virtuous love ;

And thus their moments fly. The Seasons thus,

As ceaseless round a jarring world they roll,

Still find them happy; and consenting Spring

Sheds her own rosy garland on their heads :

Till evening comes at last, serene and mild ;

When after the long vernal day of life.

Enamour d more, as more remembrance swells

With many a proof of recollected love,

Together down they sink in social sleep ;

Together freed, their gentle spirits fly

To scenes where love and bliss immortal reign.

This & That

2009-10-18T09:21:00.001-05:00

Trying something new here: the "write it in Word, as a Blog Post" option. We'll see if it works.

***

This from Ben Friedlander, over at Facebook: "Tropes involve mental processes; grouping them under the heading 'metaphor,' which is done surprisingly often, is a little like using a globe for a street map."

I remember an interesting discussion of Auden's line, "The hourglass whispers to the lion's roar" (or "lion's paw," in other versions of the poem) that tried to walk students through the set of mental processes it takes to make the line meaningful. Where was that? Reading Poetry, by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath. From the results of this Google search, it looks like the line gets used that way a fair amount, actually.

***

So now the test: will this post? Is it preferable to the usual interface? One click, and we'll see!

LIVE at the Poetry Foundation!

2009-10-17T14:43:00.002-05:00

Well, not LIVE exactly, but close enough. A column of mine, "Ten Poems I Love To Teach," has been published by the Poetry Foundation, and last week I was interviewed for about an hour for a possible podcast about two of the poems, "The Sun Rising" and "Wild Nights," to be hosted there as well. When it goes up, I'll post the link. In the mean time, you might want to take a look at the new Learning Lab the Poetry Foundation has set up, especially if you're a teacher. Lots of resources, some of which I was a consultant or editor for.

***

(A twinge: not that this will count for my promotion. But compared to the colleagues I have who were passed over for tenure, for flimsier reasons, I don't have much to complain about--and unlike some of my colleagues at other schools, especially public universities, I haven't been asked to teach for free or even cut back on travel. From now on, when someone asks me whether the glass is half full or half empty, I'm going to tell him, "Dude, I have a glass." Pollyanna, c'est moi.)

***

This is the first time I've posted anything here in several months. As I wrote last year (last school year, or Jewish year, take your pick), I find Twitter and Facebook now do the job of social connection that this blog once did. I'm not sure whether I'll have the time to post here with any regularity, or to do so particularly thoughtfully. But the mood struck, and the computer was on, so here I am.

***

The picture I've added above is of the late, great poet Ronald Johnson in his kitchen, back in San Francisco, I believe. The book I co-edited on Ron--the link is to your right--has sold perhaps a hundred copies so far. A labor of love, as they say, as was Ron's work, so I don't feel terribly bad about the slow sales. As the poem says, I never expected much!

***

Tonight is the Sharing Fest at my wife's church: a fundraiser for parishes in Haiti, Nigeria, and Mexico that she's run for the past seven or eight years. Last year, as usual, this was a terribly stressful time for her, not least because she was heading for Haiti herself soon afterward. This year, someone else is finally running the show, and there's no trip to follow. Much calmer, chez nous, but a real sense, also, that a year has passed.

It's as though I've had three or four New Years in a row: the school year starting, the Jewish holidays, now this. I have such vivid, horrid memories of the time when R was away: sleeplessly grinding out an overdue essay on the poet Lawrence Joseph, taking care of the kids and R's father, who was staying with us at the time, hearing from an editor that my piece was simply too late to use. It all worked out, in the end--but not without some anguished phonecalls back and forth to the tropics (Blackberry works in Limonade!) and a flurry of groveling emails.

Now that piece is out, and the Parnassus essay on Darwish and other Palestinian poets that followed, hot on its heels. I have several projects in motion--books, a new journal, classes, new committee work--but nothing that has me as unhappy as I was a year ago.

As good a time as any to return.

Bi-Annual Review

2009-07-12T15:37:00.002-05:00

The other day I found a "Projects List" dated September 20, 2007.

At that point, I had 27 active projects. Or, rather, 27 active projects listed; there were at least three others that I must have been repressing at the time. Let's call it 30, more or less.

So--how'd I do?

Three of the projects I simply backed out of. One I pursued, but it failed, and in failing, took another down with. Five are still in progress, although of those, one is close... Well, let's be cut & dried about this. Five are still on-going.

So: twenty projects, of various sorts & sizes, done, and five to go. Plus a few new ones? Yes, but the total is still well below 30. Heck, it might even be in the high single digits!

Turning a corner? Here's hoping.

Take a Message to Bibi

2009-07-10T07:05:00.003-05:00

Evidently Bibi Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, has been calling David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel "self-hating Jews." Most of the rebuttals have been of the "no they're not!" variety. Here's a different one, courtesy of the great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. (Thanks to Bob Bires for sending me the poem this morning.)

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

NEH Musings; Finkelstein on Mackey

2009-06-23T08:50:00.008-05:00

Yesterday I wrote this:

Shirts to the laundry today? Move the long-sleeves downstairs, and the short-sleeves up. Purge NJ's closet: he's grown out of half his clothes. Stacks of trash & old boxes from the basement storage out to the alley. (Water damage--perfect opportunity to clean things up and out.) Lots of things to do.

Of course, today should really be all about the NEH seminar: emails to participants, gathering handouts, planning the first week, etc. And it will be--but as I listen to the Giggle Twins play foosball downstairs (my daughter & her sleepover friend) before camp, I find myself thinking, oddly enough, of an essay by Norman Finkelstein: "Nathaniel Mackey and the Unity of All Rites," Contemporary Literature XLIX, 1, 2008.

Here's how the essay begins:

Casual readers perusing the 2006 winner of the National Book Award
for poetry probably got quite a surprise when they opened Nathaniel
Mackey’s Splay Anthem. Their first shock would have come from the
eight-page preface, an unapologetic declaration and exposition of the
obsessive seriality that has possessed Mackey’s poetry since he began
publishing it more than twenty years ago. Bristling with neologisms
and arcane references, the preface presents Mackey’s entwin(n)ed
sequences as a practice akin to the poetics of the Kaluli of New
Guinea, a poetics that “posits poetry and music as quintessentially
elegiac but also restorative, not only lamenting violated connection
but aiming to reestablish connection, as if the entropy that gives rise
to them is never to be given the last word” (Splay Anthem xvi).

After quoting nine lines of the poem, Norman ends the paragraph this way:

The eccentric lineation and spacing, the enjambment making for a
continuous but still unsettling syncopation, the free-floating pronouns,
and above all, the disquieting physical intimacy that seems to
be part of some strange act, part performance, part ritual—this
“croaking / song / to end all song” (3) might be more than enough to
dissuade our hypothetical poetry-shelf browsers from turning the
page, National Book Award or no. For despite divisions into individually
numbered poems (some enigmatically composed beneath lines
across the page) and sections, the book proceeds relentlessly through
such strange enactments for the next 125 pages. In short, Mackey’s
poems cannot be read casually; they may not be readable as individual
poems at all.

What strikes me, nags at me, in this opening is the figure it invokes of the "casual reader" and "poetry-shelf browser" who would pick up a book based on its status as an award-winning text, only to find him or herself "dissuaded" from turning the page, precisely because this poet's work "cannot be read casually." Why does this figure haunt me so?

***

Then I stopped and got busy.

***

Procrastinating last night I sketched a new draft table of contents for my romance book. Still not done with that, but at least I opened the file and played around a little.

More NEH work today, and some urgent emails about Brisbane. If I can, I'll get back to musing on Mackey, though. His piece has some relationship to this NEH seminar, and I want to figure out what that relationship is. More on that later today, I hope.

So, For My Next Big Number?

2009-06-22T20:40:00.004-05:00

Shouldn't be thinking about this now--too many other things on my plate--but I've been mulling over some possibilities for my next Parnassus review.

From my chats with Herb, I gather that there are a bunch of Collecteds as yet unclaimed: Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Barbara Guest, Thom Gunn. A few more that I know of, both Collecteds and new Selecteds: Helen Adam, for example, and Judy Grahn has a Reader coming out soon. (I've always loved the Common Woman poems, & had the chance to teach a few from the Nelson anthology last spring, to good effect.)

Who else have I thought about doing? Eamon Grennan, whom I read last fall. Reznikoff. Oppen. Zukofsky. (I'm probably too close to you, Mark, to get the nod for that.) Harvey Shapiro. Mike Heller. William Bronk. Some combo of these--i.e., Henry Weinfield did a book on Bronk and Oppen, so that's a threesome that could be considered. Nate Mackey, whose prose I know better than his poetry. I'd love to write about Norman Finkelstein again, but don't know whether Herb would bite, except perhaps in an omnibus of some kind. (On poetry & the sacred? Joy Ladin did such a bang-up job on that a few years ago, I doubt its time has come again. And Norman, you and I go back a ways, which is an issue chez Parnassus, as it should be.)

Some of the poets I'd love to spend time with--Duncan, Eluard--have been written about recently, so they're out of the running. Some that I've touched on in the past--Sherman Alexie, say--have new work out, but I'm not keen on turning back to old projects, even if the opening to that Alexie piece was one of my best gambits. (It went sharply downhill from there.) I'd love to do something on the books by Larry Joseph that didn't make it into my symposium piece, Into It and Lawyerland, but he and I have known one another a very long time, so the rule above applies. A pity: that's a project I'd like to build on.

International poets? Translations? (I don't have any languages to speak of, anymore.) Who have I missed? Maybe Agha Shahid Ali? What would y'all suggest?

Five-Week Drill

2009-06-22T10:21:00.005-05:00

Five weeks ago I posted a "six-week drill": a list of fourteen things I needed to do before my fourth NEH Summer Seminar kicks off at the end of June. Well, the end of June is fast approaching--I have one week left in that drill, which hasn't exactly worked out as planned. Let's see how I did, and what's left.

What do I need to write & do by then, or to get there?

Wrap up logistics for the NEH seminar. Books, readings, housing, stipends, festivities, etc.

Ordered the books, arranged the housing and stipends, set up the opening festivity. Still need to copy the readings, and gather anything I don't have in the files. Also need to buy binders, etc., to put them in. Budget cuts meant no student assistant for this, so I need to get on it.

Do reading for the NEH seminar--not just the assigned stuff, but a general refresher course, to shift back into poetry-teaching mode.

Did some of this, and need to do more. Pleased at how much I've been enjoying the poetry criticism / intro to poetry textbook / poetry itself that I've been reading recently--the year off from teaching 220 (Reading Poetry) was maddening by the end, but it's clearly

Choose the poets / texts for my Modern Poetry survey next fall. Something new, but not too new. Sick of the huge sweeping survey, but if I only did, say, 6 or 8 poets, who would they be? (British, Irish, American, as I please.)

Worked on this, and came to a tentative decision: use volume 1 of the Rothenberg / Joris Poems for the Millennium anthology, supplemented by some more canonical readings in link, pdf, or handout form. This morning, another array came to me: Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Hughes, Auden, Loy, Millay, H.D., de Burgos. But if I can spend an hour or two brainstorming what the supplementary list would look like, I still think the R/J might be the way to go.

Prep and teach another four weeks of classes. Ahem. Which means something like four more novels. (I miss teaching poems. Four more poems I could handle.)

This took more of my time than I anticipated. But it's done, and the classes are graded, and you just can't argue with that.

Revise the introduction to the New Approaches book.

The file's been opened, but I haven't done this yet.

Revise my own essay for the New Approaches book.

Ditto.

Edit four more essays, maybe five, for NA.

There were four, and three of them are done. One to go.

Write and distribute the Call for Papers for JPRS, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, of which I am the Executive Editor.

Wrote it, got feedback--as soon as I get the final thumbs-up from my Managing Editor and the president of IASPR, we'll be ready for distribution.

Assorted work for IASPR, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

Did some assorted work for IASPR, although I think that most of it was associated with the next bullet point:

Do more fundraising and planning for the Brisbane Conference (AKA "Popular Romance Studies: an International Conference")

That took a lot of my time in the past few weeks, but in the final talley we have 24 talks from a half-dozen countries: Australia, India, Indonesia, Korea, New Zealand, and the US. I've wrangled them into panels, too.

Decide on the topic for my own Brisbane paper. Can write it in July? While teaching NEH seminar? Hmmm...

This also took a lot of time. As you know from earlier posts, my original thought was to speak about Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the Clapton album with the Nizami subtext. Watching a recent Bollywood film, Rab ne Bana di Jodi, inspired me to speak about watching Bollywood as an non-Indian American, or maybe to look comparatively at the topos of "redemption through love" in RNBDJ and the romance novel Redeeming Love (a classic of Christian inspirational romance by Francine Rivers, which I've been meaning to consider for classroom use).

In the end, though, I just don't think I have enough time to work up that talk before the conference, so I've decided to focus on something I know as much about as anyone these days: popular romance pedagogy. With a nod to my series of NEH poetry workshops for middle-school teachers, I'm calling the talk "How to Teach a Romance (and Learn from One, Too)." The other, comparative piece I'll save for next year's PCA, maybe.

Take care of final logistics for Brisbane: hotels, publicity, contact with local authors and writers' groups, etc.

Did a lot of that, and once we have the final thumbs up from everyone about the schedule, with a website up and so forth, I'll do a bit more.

Revise my monograph proposal on romance fiction (including Byatt? Many decisions to be made for this, still.)

This, no work on at all. Which bothers me, but there's simply too much urgent work that needs to be done, displacing thought about this. I can live without it a while longer, if need be.

Learn (on trumpet) the music I'll be performing with my son's junior high school band.

Did it, and had fun playing with him. Wish I could spend more time on music again.

Learn (on guitar) the parts for five more Alte Rockers songs. (Have I told y'all about the Alte Rockers? Remind me to do so, if not.)

Did it, with great anxiety. I haven't had to play lead before, & was unprepared to start. As an unexpected plus, my son took up the rhythm parts on about half of the songs. Good times, that, and a long-term plan brought to fulfillment.

In addition to the work I listed, there was a fair amount of unexpected work to be done: committee work, for example. And there's still a lot of work to do before next Sunday, when the NEH seminar starts, and even more before I leave for Australia. Nervous about both of those.

In short, I could use to pick up the pace a bit. But not an unproductive period, either.

Reading Weinfield

2009-06-13T15:05:00.002-05:00

Reading Henry Weinfield's The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk, published by Iowa earlier this year.

Near the start, this passage leaps out at me: "...the book as a whole is not really driven by any particular thesis. I believe that Oppen and Bronk created great and enduring poetry, and I have simply wanted to articulate what it is in their work that I find so valuable and distinctive" (3-4).

How rare, how sweet, that project seems. The luxury of it, even.

More passages, more thoughts, in the days to come.

Jots

2009-06-09T11:39:00.008-05:00

Just learned (just checked) that my local public library has the new third volume of the Rothenberg / Joris Poems for the Millennium anthology, this the one that focuses on international romanticism.

Will go check it out, in every sense of the word.

Inclining, today, to order vol. 1 in that series and supplement it with handouts, pdf files, links, and the like. It's more relentlessly avant-garde than I'd ordinarily teach, but that means the other material won't be hard to locate. And so far, anyway, I haven't found anything remotely like it for the first half of the 20th century.

***

Spent the morning working on NEH and Brisbane business. Oops! Just thought of two emails to send about Brisbane...be right back...

OK, they're sent. Basically making sure that the funding we have is in place, even as I decide whether to put any more of my own funds on the line to bring scholars to Australia. How much am I in for so far? About $250. Maybe another $250, if that gets some folks from India to come?

(Wish I had the check from my last Parnassus piece in hand, to help me figure out my budget. A teaser from the lastest piece, on various Palestinian poets, over here at the Big Jewish Blog. Scroll down until you reach the inset quote, to find it.)

***

Spent last evening guilty, heartsick. My daughter had come home crying from school, for a variety of reasons, one of which had to do with a teacher. Sent an angry email to the teacher, who had no idea that she'd caused my girl such grief. She's been a beloved teacher of both my kids for many years now, and felt ill-used, even betrayed. But when Meg's crying for 90 minutes, thinking her favorite teacher had sent her packing on the last day she'd be at the school...well, 'nuff said.

They've since patched things up, and I've written to apologize, but the damage is done. Now I'll spend a day looking at my email, hoping for an 'apology accepted' and wishing I'd kept my temper in check.

***

A nice note from D-- about my PromotionFail(tm):

I'm shocked! Parnassus is the most distinguished place to publish on contemporary poetry. I would kill to get a piece there! And it is obvious that you are doing more significant service -- to the entire Chicago area -- than any lit teacher on the planet. The NEH programs by themselves are world class service to the profession. In all honesty, at [UNIVERSITY] you would have been promoted years ago."

Thanks, D! Per my chair's advice, I've printed the email and stashed it away for next time. Keep those cards & letters coming, as they used to say.

***

A Facebook "tag" the other day got me thinking about books that stay with me. My slightly inebriated list of 15, per the request, looked like this:

1. Andre Norton, Witch World
2. Frank Herbert, Dune
3. Robert Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
4. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
5. A. S. Byatt, Possession: a Romance
6. Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me
7. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Avatar
8. Jerome Rothenberg, A Big Jewish Book
9. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
10. Philip K. Dick, VALIS
11. Ronald Johnson, ARK
12. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
13. Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems
14. Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
15. Laura Kinsale, Midsummer Moon

Somehow I missed Lord of the Rings, which I've read and re-read since childhood, and Earth House Hold, the book of essays and journals by Gary Snyder that's been calming me down since that whole email thing last night. And a host of others. But an interesting exercise, and one I may try with my students someday.

***

Perking myself up with this song, this morning (it's Wednesday now, about 9:30 my time). Some bad news about Brisbane--a couple of speakers unable to come--but by gum, I'll be there, and it'll be grand.

(I find the embedded quotation from Bob Marley in the chorus oddly moving--the ripples of culture that spread from the Hebrew Bible to the African diaspora to world pop to indigenous rock, counterpointing the genetic distance between any & all of these groups. Something to be done with that--but for now, just watch & think of me.)

This morning, at least...

2009-06-08T09:43:00.006-05:00

This morning, at least, I find myself aware of two different impulses at work in my syllabus musings.

On the one hand, there's the simple desire to get a syllabus together, order books, and gear up for next year.

On the other, there's the desire to rethink my own sense of modern and contemporary poetry--to figure out what, now, really moves me, as a reader and teacher and scholar.

I've wanted to let the latter determine the former. That is, I've wanted to choose the books and poets for the class so that they'll let me do the reading and research I want, concentrate on poets I love, and so forth.

The trouble is, the categories of "poets I love and want to investigate" and "poets I feel one really ought to teach in a Modern Poetry survey" may overlap in less-than-optimal ways. My inclinations these days draw me to re-read American poets of the '50s and after, but my sense of pedagogical duty leads me to assign an earlier group of poets, and one that spans national boundaries.

As a result, I spin my wheels.

Maybe the thing to do is re-run last year's double-Norton survey, trimming a few poems from it and polishing the lectures, to simplify task #1. And, meanwhile, force myself to read more independently, following my curiosity, until a clearer array of books, authors, texts, comes to mind? Postpone the sexy new Modern Poetry course until I know what to do with it?

***

Here's the mix I taught a few years back, with a week on each:

T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems

HD: Collected Poems, 1912-1944

William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems, 1909-1939

Muriel Rukeyser: Out of Silence: Selected Poems

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems

Elizabeth Bishop: Complete Poems

Robert Hayden: Collected Poems

Stevie Smith: New Selected Poems

Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

Wendy Cope: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

Of these, who would I do again, and who would I cut?

Bishop is a cut. Rukeyser's a maybe. Larkin and Cope I'd put on the block. That leaves five: Eliot, H.D., Williams, Hayden, and Smith. Three men, two women. Could add four more and be done. But who?

Every choice seems bad this morning, which suggests a survey would be best.

***

Faith, Doubt, Myth

Who'd I do last time?

On the Big Survey Syllabus: Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Pound, H.D., Eliot,Graves, Smith, Kavanagh, Auden, Oppen, Bishop, Duncan, Larkin, Merrill, Ali. All as individual lyrics or short excerpts (in H.D.'s case) from longer texts.

Of those, a few get taught in other courses or have been taught, by me, too many times: Hopkins, Frost, Bishop, Larkin. Kavanagh was there for a single poem; I don't know the work all that well.

Not in that list, but right for the topic: Snyder, Ginsberg, Grahn, Howe, Mackey, Ostriker, Johnson, Schwerner. Many of those, I note, in long poems, rather than individual lyrics. Larry Joseph, whom I've now written about at length. Joy Ladin. Norman Finkelstein.

Nine classes, though--that's all I've got.

Hmmm... Who sounds like fun to me, now?

Arrays

2009-06-03T08:11:00.004-05:00

Models I'm mulling over for 366 (Modern Poetry):

Books about modern poetry: The Pound Era, maybe some biographies & critical materials. A few suggestions came in--see the comments for my last post--but I could certainly use some more. Rachel Blau du Plessis' The Pink Guitar? Who writes well, readably well, about modern poetry outside the US?
Poets and their Prose: choose some modern poets whose essays and / or letters are available, and build a course around them
Another big survey, with one or two anthologies. Maybe pair Poems for the Millennium with a volume of the Norton, or pair the two Oxford anthologies (Nelson's & Tuma's).
A thematically-chosen group of modernist poets, focused on one or another of the topics that went really well last time, like "Think Globally, Write Locally" (modern poets of various peripheries-become-central and / or poets with a particularly international purview) or "Faith & Doubt" (modern poets of religion, religious crisis, revisionist religion, mythology, etc.) or even "Modern Love," although I wonder whether the students from my Love Poetry course would be sick of that by now.
Looking at option 4 here, I could simply reprise my two-volume-Norton survey from last time, dropping the units that didn't go so well and so forth. Tweak the old, rather than leave it behind.

Any thoughts about which books / poets might fit well in options 1, 2, or 4 here?

Best Books on Modern(ist) Poets?

2009-06-01T19:08:00.002-05:00

So here's the question.

I've been mulling over the syllabus for next year's Modern Poetry course. Ten weeks, meets once a week (nights), undergraduates. Last fall I taught a crazy, sweeping survey, organized by topic, built around the two-volume Norton Anthology of Modern / Contemporary Poetry. The assignment for a week's reading looked something like this:

Faith, Doubt, Myth: In Vol 1, read Dickinson, “Brain is Wider” 38; Hardy, “Hap” (44); Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “As Kingfishers,” “Spring,” “The Windhover"; Yeast, “Hosting of the Sidhe,” “The Magi,” “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” Frost, “Design,” “Directive,” Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (on-line; Google it); Pound, “The Return,” HD, “from The Walls Do Not Fall” and “From Tribute to the Angels,” Eliot, “Preludes,” “The Waste Land,” “Journey of the Magi,” “Little Gidding,” Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” Smith, “Our Bog is Dood,” “God the Eater,” Kavanagh, “Canal Bank Walk,” Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “In Praise of Limestone,” Oppen, “Psalm,” “from Of Being Numerous.” In Vol. 2, read Bishop, “At the Fishhouses,” “Over 2000 Illustrations…,” Duncan, “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” Larkin, “Water,” “Church Going,” “Faith Healing,” “High Windows,” Kumin, “In the Absence of Bliss,” Merrill, “b o d y,” Ali, “Ghazal.”

Needless to say, I sometimes had some doubts as to whether all the reading was done. Needless to say, my students felt a bit overwhelmed--frustrated, too, that they'd read vastly more for any given class than we could discuss at length or in depth. On the other hand, this had the advantage of letting those students who had a taste for Yeats find Yeats, Oppen find Oppen, Smith find Smith, and the like.

I'm up in the air as to whether I should teach the course the same way again next fall, with some sort of minor tweaking--a different anthology, say, or pair of them for contrast--or whether I should (as I usually do) try something quite different.

One "quite different" model I've mulled over for several years now would build the course around books about modern poets and modern poetry. Earlier this evening I paged through Frank Lentricchia's Modernist Quartet, for example, and was struck by how much knowledge students would gain from it about not only the work of the four poets he discusses (Frost, Stevens, Pound, & Eliot) but about their lives, their times, their contacts, and so forth. Of course, these are all American poets--Eliot switch-hits, but is treated here as American--, all of them are white, and all of them are men. I won't teach a class like that, even if I do like the associated video:

But if I were to build my course around some books about modern poetry, in English or even more comparatively, what are the best texts out there to choose from? Not textbooky texts, but books designed to be read for pleasure, however erudite. Biographies, cultural histories, that sort of thing.

Alternatively, if you had to pick 9 essential "modern poets"--not exclusively American--who would they be? Anglophone only lists are good, but I'm open to teaching folks in translation, also, if good translations are out there.

Suggestions, anyone?

The Other Night in the Chat Room

2009-06-01T05:00:00.001-05:00

Yo Eric! When do you go to the land down under?

7:23pmEric

Unless you're making a dirty joke (to which the answer is, "how soon have you got?"), it's not until July 26. First comes the NEH seminar: 4 weeks, M-F, 3 hrs a day!

7:24pmN--

Ah, I thought you looking more immediately for reading material for that long flight.

7:30pmEric

No, not yet--although I will be sooner than I think. I may do something on love & popular music for this conference; we're branching out, in the Association, from just romance fiction into romance in other media.

7:32pmN--

Branching out sounds like a good idea. But how would you keep it related to "romance" as in the sort of novels you currently study?

7:41pmEric

We call it "representations of romantic love in popular media," so we get some parameters from "romantic" (as opposed to agape love, say) and "popular," but in practice these are going to get a bit blurry, I suspect.

7:45pmN--

Popular media--I see. Presumably contemporary popular media. I was wondering about Renaissance love poetry and so on.

8:06pmEric

Actually, once you get "popular" into the mix, you have a wide open field. Sir Walter Scott, Byron, both bestsellers, so they'd be in the mix; in the Renaissance, I wonder if the opposite of "popular" might be "court," but I'm not entirely sure...

8:11pmN--

Scott, Byron...this broadens things considerably. At a certain point, I wonder if it doesn't simply become "representations of romantic love in literature and culture." But by then, you've drifted pretty far from your original interests.

8:13pmEric

Well, yes and no. MY original interest is the broad one (lit and culture), but if you think about it, we'll have defined a field from the popular on up, rather than from the literary down, so the question of whether this or that is "worth studying" won't come up. (As it does, now, with the romance novels--many of which are actually in some interesting dialogue w/ Scott, Byron, Milton, Shakespeare, etc.) Me, I'm thinking of doing something on "Layla" for Brisbane: Clapton's & Nizami's.

8:15pmN--

Gotcha. But plugged or unplugged?

8:17pmEric

Oh, plugged! I'd love to do a reading of the whole album--it's presented as Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, so how the blues about money, etc., fit in will be fun to think through--also the male comradeship & rivalry as enacted by Clapton's & Duane Allman's guitar duels, the mix of voices--could be a very fun project, I think.

8:20pmN--

For sure--especially since you would go beyond the lyrics to deal with matters of musical form. And you can't beat that extended piano solo.

8:21pmEric

Yes--and figuring out how to "read" it, musically (and as a commentary on the lyrics, AND as a lead-in to "Thorn Tree in the Garden") will be a treat. Can you think of any pop music criticism that does anything like this? Damned if I can, off the top of my head.

8:23pmN--

Maybe Anthony DeCurtis; he's about the most sophisticated pop music critic I know (we hung out at Emory; he had a temporary gig there while I was finishing. He had written a dissertation on contemporary fiction, but eventually dumped academia and became editor of Rolling Stone.)

8:26pmEric

Hey, sounds promising! Thanks!

Keenaghan on Duncan (Contemporary Literature)

2009-05-28T08:51:00.003-05:00

If I'm going to start publishing in peer-reviewed journals again, I'm going to need to spend a lot more time reading them. I cut back a few years ago because so many of the pieces I read were poorly written, pedagogically useless, and profoundly insular in their thinking. They'd been written, it seemed, in order to cut a notch on the author's CV--a motive I can respect, I suppose--but not one that spurs me to go and read them.

But enough of that griping! As I say, I need to start publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and that means I have to find journals and pieces that I can respect, or at least find interesting. I'm going to start with Contemporary Literature, a journal that I've published in and reviewed manuscripts for, over the years. It happens that their latest issue has a piece about a poet I like, Robert Duncan, by a critic whose work I've previously enjoyed, Eric Keenaghan. (My collection of essays on Ron Johnson has a Kennaghan essay in it.) Even the topic appeals to me: "Life, War, and Love: The Queer Anarchism of Robert Duncan’s Poetic Action during the Vietnam War." (OK, the first part appeals to me; the subtitle is clunky, but no one worries about such things anymore, right?)

What follow are some quotations from the piece, interspersed with comments from me. I didn't cut & paste page numbers; if you like the ideas, go and find the piece yourself!

"In Duncan’s anarchistic philosophy, poetry is not a revolutionary’s tool; rather, it is a creative means of striving toward an alternative vision of life, one rivaling the state’s idea of what life ought to be."

Hmmm... Does "the state" have ideas? Feels like a first-class reification to me, like a student speaking of "society," but I'm not sure if the move is Keenaghan's or Duncan's.

Reading on, it sounds like it's Duncan’s: OK, he's a poet, not a critic, & can do what he wants.

In a 1969 installment of his serially published H.D. Book, he asserts, “As the power and presumption of authority by the State has increased in every nation, we are ill with it, for it surrounds us and, where it does not openly conscript, seeks by advertising, by education, by dogma or by terror, to seduce, enthrall, mould, command or coerce our inner will or conscience or inspiration to its own uses” (2.4: 47).

Says Keenaghan, Duncan's work and thought "can help us rearticulate current conceptions of biopolitics by foregrounding how poetry and desire play significant roles in resisting the state."

I'm not sure I care about that project ("resisting the state"), or believe that it's possible for poetry to play a "significant role" in it, unless you think of "poetry" in the broad sense of "imaginative productions": all the arts, popular culture, and the like. Perhaps if some specific case were before me--marriage equality, justice in Israel / Palestine--I could be convinced. Keenaghan will talk about the Vietnam war as an instance, I gather.

...LONG passages about Foucault. I'm glad he turns to Dewey instead, eventually...but still, this is the discourse (even the diction) I have trouble with: "Poetry, he [Duncan] believed, was an especially useful discursive praxis for reimagining freedom and commonality, outside the biopolitical state’s liberalist life model."

Do I really have to learn to talk like that?

Keenaghan offers a reading of Duncan's poem "Up-Rising," starting out by putting the poem into the context of its publication history. A lot of quoting from the Letters here--letters between Duncan and Denise Levertov. "The controversy surrounding “Up Rising” resulted, for Duncan,
in a year-long writing block, which would lift only in July 1966. Duncan’s production was stalled because he was “[w]aiting for the content of ‘Up Rising’ to undergo its sea change or alchemical phase towards rendering up its purely poetic identity” (Duncan, Letters 528). In other words, he was waiting for that poem’s content to become, of its own accord, something more than an occasional political piece. But that “alchemy” did not happen on its own."

That could be useful to me in the classroom. I teach "Up Rising" now and then.

Rather than as a transparent expression of his own antiwar politics, Duncan encourages us to read the outrage or wrath of “Up Rising” as a product of its writing, a community’s reaction to the reality of a war in the process of becoming real only as it trickles down from the level of the state to the level of the people. Making the war real through communal poetic endeavors is to partake in the exercise of producing new forms of life, outside the state-endorsed American way of life that idealizes individual personhood.

That strikes me as a bit less useful, not least because the poem isn't a "communal" endeavor.

Duncan disliked Levertov's war poems becuase in them, according to Keenaghan, "The state
impinged upon the individual, forcing her to voice her resistance with the same language that the state itself promoted—that of personality and personhood, privacy and privation, property and propriety."

Hmmm... could be useful, although I'd say that it's still at such a high level of generalization that it's not all that engaged with the poems as such.

Writes K,

By opening ourselves to language’s sentimental force, we foster an intimacy that lets the truth of the situation, what Badiou terms the “real,” disrupt our acceptance of an American way of life and cult of personality prescribed and administered by the state.

That invocation of Badiou strikes me as entirely tactical, the sort of thing that one learns to do in graduate school. I find the description of the "American way of life and cult of personality" here to be vague and overgeneral. On the other hand, the notes of sentiment and intimacy strike me as true to Duncan's work: it is both sentimental and intimate, at its best.

I like this:

In his late essay “The Self in Postmodern Poetry” (1979), Duncan wrote that he lived by the tenet “mistrust thy self,” a perversion of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” “All of experience seems my trust fund to me; I must cultivate the mistrust that alone can give contrast and the needed inner tension for vital interest” (226). Another way of putting this would be, One must war not with others but with one’s own self. Life bears intellectual and material benefits only if one “cultivate[s]” a “tension” with one’s own experience.

Says Duncan (in an essay short-cited as "Returning"),

"I see my creative imagination raising a war in things in order to come into the world of opposites and contraries. . . . For, until we see the elements in their dynamic strife, as contraries, we cannot begin to transform contraries into contrasts” (61). Such dynamism, once restored to oppositional elements, would let Duncan rediscover what he calls the “aliveness” of things, in their pluralistic and incomplete natures. “Here, as in physics,” he continues, “the difference between the inorganic and the organic, the bios, is that between a crystallized form and a form of unresolved inner struggle” (61). Perpetual, internal struggle is the only way we know we’re alive. For poetry to help us live, writers must continually combat their precepts and reinterpret their experiences to avoid static—and statist—complacency.

I can think of any number of poets--poets who write about politics and those who write about many other things--I could read in light of these ideas:

“Each of us must be at strife with our own conviction on behalf of the multiplicity of convictions at work in poetry in order to give ourselves over to the art, to come to the idea of what the world of worlds or the order of orders might be” (111–12). This turmoil, to which one consciously and willingly subjects one’s self, is a means of “carry[ing] into the public field the inner battles of the individual poet’s soul” (112). Contention, war, strife—they transform privacy into publicity; they break the wall whereby the liberal American subject safeguards her own self.

ARGH! There, again, that twist into a radically different diction: "the liberal American subject." Maybe I could read that contrast in dictions in some useful way, as itself a kind of "strife"?

***

What I like most in the piece seems to be the scraps of Duncan! Listen to the contrast between the poet and the critic in the following:

“The very life of our art is our keeping at work contending forces and convictions,” no matter if they do prove to be “painful disorders.” It is a “creative strife,” this “breaking up the orders I belong to in order to come into alien orders.” This aesthetic obligation is utterly ethical, a testament to the poet’s social responsibility.

Keenaghan's gloss is true, I suppose, but tonally jarring: the adventure, the romance of Duncan's "alien orders" (like Ruth amid the "alien corn," in Keats) is lost. Duncan's vision may be ethical, even "utterly" ethical (whatever that means), but it's not only ethical, not simply a matter of "social responsibility."

***

Ooh! Duncan and Browning? Nice!

Duncan writes of his admiration of Robert Browning’s dramatic lyric: “Against the private property of self, he created a community of selves, taking existence in other times and place, other lives, other persons” (113). This community facilitates the writer’s development of “conscience,” which “lies in the depth and wholeness of his
involvement in the work where it is” (114). Such “involvement”—in both the senses of “participation” (another recurrent word) and of “folding” (as in the author’s invagination into the text)—precipitates what Duncan terms “a crisis in language and world,” not a consolidation of one’s opinion about either (114).

Not sure about that "invagination," but the rest I like, including the attention to various senses of "involvement."

***

Useful, this:

The crisis at the heart of Duncan’s Vietnam-era poetic is summed up in the following sentence: “All national allegiances—my own order as an American—seemed to be really betrayals of the larger order of Man” (115). If we are not open to the multiple possibilities language awakens us to, if we choose the nation-state and its way of speaking over the other possibilities presented by poetry and its inwardly and outwardly conflicted authors, we lack the resources to productively contrast Americans’ liberalist understanding of personhood as private, bourgeois, and propertied, as well as proper and proprietary. We opt to become like President Johnson, who, in “reading a script rationalizing his monstrous actions, written by a
public relations agent, is dehumanized by a mediating language” (138). If we read poetry, rather than a propagandistic script, we have a better chance of encountering “an other speech”; our new linguistic contacts reintroduce us to our selves. Alienated and altered, we find ourselves “belonging to the process of the Cosmos,” not to the
“progress” lauded by modernity and Western nations (123, 114).

***
Now we move into the LOVE part of the essay, from Eris to Eros. A longish passage, which quotes a longish passage, worth quoting.

First Keenaghan, then Duncan, then K again:

To conduct his chief enterprise of narrating “the fiction of what Man is,” “the would-be poet stands like Psyche in the dark, taken up in a marriage with a genius, possessed by a spirit outside the ken of those about him” (H.D. 1.3: 67, 68). Alienated from his “ken,” the male poet cross-identifies with his gendered mythic other and imagines himselfas “possessed” and “married” to a force that dispossesses him of himself. As in the classic myth, Eros is that husband:

We are drawn to Him, but we must also gather Him to be. We cannot, in the early stages, locate Him; but He finds us out. Seized by His orders, we “fall in love,” in order that He be; and in His duration the powers of Eros are boundless. We are struck by His presence, and in becoming lovers we become something other than ourselves, subjects of a daemonic force previous to our humanity. (69)

Through eroticism, liberalist fictions of personhood are undone. Vulnerability, becoming undone by an otherness that augments us, is necessary, though risky, for telling the tale of the human differently.

***

Because politics is born from an irresistible seduction, Duncan does not speak of writers as Romantic agents realizing their will through authorship; instead, writers are, first and foremost, readers. In reading we are most vulnerable, or open, to desire’s unknowing nature and thus to language’s politically transformative force.

Poetry therefore obliquely restores human agency to politics, which Duncan reconceives as politicized passion: “What we follow is enacting the role of Isis in reading or writing, for we must search and gather what we are searching for as we do so” (“Two Parts” 98). Just as Isis must collect and reassemble her husband Osiris’s dismembered body, readers are charged with collecting and remembering a desire deemed irreconcilably other.

[...]

“And those of us who saw and acknowledged came into a work or quest: to gather up out of the darkness of democracy and communism the thing we saw. It was the new Adam. It was the new Eros that Psyche saw” (98).

[...]

To write is “to recall the Palace of Eros,” Duncan writes elsewhere in The H.D. Book (1.6: 132).

I think I need to read The H.D. Book.

***

Near the end of the piece, Keenaghan begins to convey some of the romance of Duncan's ideas, catching their tone in a way I enjoy:

This queer nationalism is a process of establishing cosmopolitanism that begins when we set pen to paper or pick up a book, those acts through which we find ourselves “leaving the mother-land or father-land of the national state and entering a Mother-land of an international dream” (132). In sum, poetry’s political act begins when we let the written word we have gathered seduce us, when we let the page lure us into a global, communal life that has not yet come to pass. Such beginnings are endings, too; for when we accept them, we also embrace the termination of our fealty to the state, at least for the duration of reading and writing, and instead think in terms of the life of the world. To embrace such an attitude is always painful. Finding one’s self necessitates declaring war on the only life, on the only nation and self, one has ever known.

This set of ideas strikes me as useful in reading, not only Duncan, but a variety of other poets (Ammiel Alcalay, for example). And the piece as a whole has introduced me to some exciting passages from Duncan's prose: essays, The H.D. Book, the letters. I found it less helpful as a reading of particular poems (i.e., "Up Rising") and as you've seen, I experienced a visceral revulsion against some of its political material. Still, all in all, I'm glad I read it.

More of these to come.

Easing Back

2009-05-15T21:42:00.003-05:00

Spending such time--so much time, I mean--teaching romance fiction this quarter that poetry has become extra-curricular again: inviting, escapist, romantic in its own right.

This is, I think, a very good thing indeed.

Bronk & Duncan, recently. And, for the plane tomorrow, Lisa Steinman's introduction to the art, which I've had on my shelf unread months now.

Easing back.

What Is To Be Done?

2009-05-14T08:57:00.007-05:00

"No serious poetry can be described as self-expression."
--Robin Blaser

***

You know how, in football, they have a "two-minute drill"? Two minutes left in the half or the game, and they snap off a series of plays without a huddle, maximizing yards in the time that's left? (I think that's what it means, anyway. It's been decades since I watched a football game.)

So here's the deal: I'm in a six-week drill.

Six weeks from now, my fourth NEH Summer Seminar, "Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry" kicks off at DePaul. Six weeks from now the final, copyedited manuscript of New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction heads off to MacFarland. Six weeks from now this unfortunate--but productive--academic year will be gone, daddy, gone.

What do I need to write & do by then, or to get there?

Wrap up logistics for the NEH seminar. Books, readings, housing, stipends, festivities, etc.
Do reading for the NEH seminar--not just the assigned stuff, but a general refresher course, to shift back into poetry-teaching mode.
Choose the poets / texts for my Modern Poetry survey next fall. Something new, but not too new. Sick of the huge sweeping survey, but if I only did, say, 6 or 8 poets, who would they be? (British, Irish, American, as I please.)
Prep and teach another four weeks of classes. Ahem. Which means something like four more novels. (I miss teaching poems. Four more poems I could handle.)
Revise the introduction to the New Approaches book.
Revise my own essay for the New Approaches book.
Edit four more essays, maybe five, for NA.
Write and distribute the Call for Papers for JPRS, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
Assorted work for IASPR, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
Do more fundraising and planning for the Brisbane Conference (AKA "Popular Romance Studies: an International Conference")
Decide on the topic for my own Brisbane paper. Can write it in July? While teaching NEH seminar? Hmmm...
Take care of final logistics for Brisbane: hotels, publicity, contact with local authors and writers' groups, etc.
Revise my monograph proposal on romance fiction (including Byatt? Many decisions to be made for this, still.)
Learn (on trumpet) the music I'll be performing with my son's junior high school band.
Learn (on guitar) the parts for five more Alte Rockers songs. (Have I told y'all about the Alte Rockers? Remind me to do so, if not.)

What do I not need to do in the next six weeks?

Finish the Crusie book introduction, and get that moving again. (That's first off the bat AFTER Brisbane, when I'm chuffed and ready for action.)
Decide on future long-term projects (books, peer-reviewed articles, etc.). Many sound promising right now, but there's no need to choose among them until I get past the short-term hurdles.
Buy or learn any other musical instrument.
Give myself grief over anything. Eh-nee-thing. Including whether or not I'm blogging, here or anywhere else.

There's probably more, but that's enough for now. More as it comes to me.

And, since I'm going to Australia, how about a signoff song from Yothu Yindi?

Glimmering

2009-05-13T20:33:00.003-05:00

Opened, tonight, The Opening of the Field.

"I saw a snake-like beauty in the living changes of syntax."

Thinking that I may need this back.

Stay tuned.

Thanks

2009-05-03T08:02:00.002-05:00

A scatter of very sweet emails and comments have me rethinking the shut-down. If I can think of ways to make this sucker sing, I'll bring it back. Suggestions on the ways are certainly welcome, although I suspect they have more to do with everything going on in my non-virtual life (classes, commitments, etc.) than with varieties of blogging experience.

In any case, I'm touched. And grateful.

E

Shutting Down

2009-04-30T17:16:00.002-05:00

Well, folks, it's time to make this official.

As of today, I'm shutting down this blog.

The keeping-up-with-friends that I did on this blog I do now via Facebook and Twitter. The thinking out loud that I did here? *Sigh* Well, I hope it was of use to somebody, but given my promotion debacle this year, I think we can all say that it didn't serve me very well, and it's sure not going to help me in the future.

If you think that's galling, imagine how I feel about my NEH seminar work. My college made it clear: teaching an NEH seminar for K-12 teachers is less valuable than writing a peer-reviewed journal article, even if the former changes lives and the latter usually drops without a ripple into the MLA / JSTOR / MUSE vortex.

I could cry, folks, but what's the point? The Powers That Be have spoken.

I'll still be on line; you can find me at Teach Me Tonight and Romancing the Blog and maybe my old Big Jewish Blog too. But my heart's just not in this blog anymore, and with this school year coming to a close, it just seems time to stop and take stock of what's worth going on with, at least in professional terms.

Maybe this summer will set me right. Maybe working with teachers again, or going to Brisbane, will make me want to take up blogging about poetry and teaching again. For now, though, I'm just sad, and tired, and done.

Thanks for reading!
--E

Myself and Strangers?

2009-03-22T20:56:00.003-05:00

Gertrude Stein says somewhere that she writes "for myself and strangers."

I need something more than that, I think.

Writing simply for myself--an essay, for example, written solely to advance my career--feels a bit unsatisfying, although now that I know the promotion demands it, I'll write a few this way. They won't be entirely "for myself" now, after all, but for my family, just as the pieces I wrote before tenure were. (Each essay, each book, had a job to do, then. Once I had tenure, that motivation vanished, and I flailed about for a very long time before finding something more that I cared enough to write.)

Writing for strangers? I've never done it. In theory I find it an intriguing idea: to write about something that I think is worth knowing, without any particular audience in mind. In practice, though, I don't think I'd be motivated to get the job done.

What I like, in the end, is writing for--and editing for, and organizing for--someone or something or some group of people that I actually care about.

The love poetry book wasn't just to get me tenure: it was everything I knew about love at the time, a portrait, however distanced, of the first years of my marriage. The Jewish American poetry book grew out of a couple of friendships; so did the Ron Johnson book, although that was also for Ron himself, a sweet man and a lovely poet, and for my father, who wanted me to finish it, so I did, eventually.

The Parnassus pieces? As the years have gone by, they've often been written for Herb, the editor there, who had faith in me across years of writer's block. The one about poets in novels was written to advance the romance project, in gratitude to the RWA for their support; my latest, about Taha Muhammad Ali and Mahmoud Darwish (and Samih al-Qasim) grew out of my meeting Taha years ago in Chicago, and has turned into a chance to spread the word to colleagues (at DePaul and in the Jewish community) about some books that matter, deeply, to me.

As I look ahead, the projects that draw me most keenly are the ones that I connect to groups of friends and colleagues, and nowadays that mostly means friends and colleagues in Romancelandia, where they abound. What I need to find, alongside these, are some poetry projects that I connect with specific readers (you know who you are) or poets for whom I feel the same personal affection I did for Ron. As I type this, I realize: this is one reason I've never tried to gather my stray essays into a collection, or hammer them into a monograph. The question that pops into my mind ("Who'd read it?") isn't a rhetorical one or a critique of the academic publishing industry. It's a practical one: whom among my friends, my colleagues, my family, would that book be for?

As I say, it may be that the pressure of the promotion will change these dynamics. Maybe I'll start churning out copy like a text machine (get on up!), simply to put those notches in my CV. Knowing this about myself, though, I suspect that I'm better off using this insight to sort out priorities. The pieces that aren't "for myself and strangers" are the ones I'll be most motivated to write, to finish, to publish, and with limited time, I might as well start there.

How Can I Use This?

2009-03-20T22:29:00.002-05:00

How can I use this failure? That's the question on my mind tonight.

I'd like to think of this as some kind of opportunity. But for what? To do what?

Let's put it this way: what have I been doing in order to get this promotion that I no longer have to do?

Or, rather, what have I been doing thinking it would help me get this, that didn't, which I can scrap?

What have I been up to for other reasons--money, for example--that I can drop, now that I have a more important overall goal? (I.e., to get the thumbs-up next time.) What have I been avoiding, out of fear or laziness, that I now have the motivation to pursue?

And, conversely, what have I not been doing that I can use this setback as the opportunity to do, turn back to, work through, begin? Anything I've wanted to do in the past, and set aside, that now looks like a good idea again?

Oops.

2009-03-19T09:51:00.003-05:00

Well, I'm back, and with bad news, alas.

My application for promotion to Full Professor was turned down by the college committee at DePaul--and not just turned down, but soundly, firmly, grimly, unequivocally spanked. Not enough publishing in peer-reviewed venues, not enough leadership in committees and DePaul undertakings: come back, they said, when you've fixed those flaws, and you'll have a proper case.

Now, as you can imagine, I'm quite disappointed, and not a little humiliated. On the other hand, my hunch coming out of the interview was that things had gone awry, and everything the report ended up saying was something I'd feared that weekend. I had time, that is, to get used to this in advance.

The nice thing about missing out on a promotion, as opposed to tenure, is that nothing really changes. I still have my job, my benefits, my future in the profession. All my current projects will keep chugging along; if anything, they'll have a bit more steam. Had I known I was headed down the wrong path all these years, I'd have set some different priorities: less NEH work with teachers, fewer lesson plans online, more traditional publishing, more time in the trenches of some committee, etc. Clearly I'll have to set some of that aside until the promotion comes through, which is annoying, but there's plenty of time for it after.

After my son's Bar Mitzvah, two weeks ago, I had the odd feeling that something had come to a close, or maybe full circle. My father's death almost 8 years ago was keenly on my mind, and all the changes that came right after it, both personal and professional. (Four years of near total writer's block, for one thing.) This promotion was supposed to be based on the work I'd done in that time, and one message I take away from the no vote is that I took a bit of a detour back then, and it's time to get back on the main highway. I'm struck by how many new ideas for projects have popped into my head in the past 24 hours. Not new ones entirely, but spin-offs, expansions, and the like, of the sort I used to do quite routinely, just to be efficient. (In grad school, I never wrote a paper without submitting it somewhere, for example.)

If you're out there (and not many of you are), and you do work on modern / contemporary poetry, help a prof out. What recent articles or books would you recommend I look at to inspire me as I head back into the fray? (RECENT is the key word here. I'm always inspired by re-reading The Pound Era, but Hugh Kenner cuts no mustard nowadays. Need to relearn the idiom, as much as anything.

And, since one might as well have fun with such a moment, here's Chrissie Hynde with the song of the day. Wish me luck, folks, as I take what's coming to me.

City of David

2009-01-16T08:26:00.002-06:00

This just up on Josh Corey's website: a poem by Allen Grossman, from his new book, Descartes' Loneliness:

City of David

Jerusalem is a grave of poets. Name
two who are buried there:
the poet Dennis Silk is buried there.
He lived with a dressmaker's dummy,
in a cave, on the Hill of Evil
Counsel due south of Zion Mount.
She bore him children
after her kind.—In any case, whatever
she gave birth to did not live.
Famous Amichai, also a poet,
is buried there. From his apartment on
the eastern slope you can see
a gate of the City, called David's Gate.
In '48, on a beach at Tel Aviv,
the poet Amichai held a dying soldier
in his arms. The soldier whispered—:
"Shelley." And then he died.
Poets built Jerusalem. Therefore,
poets have a duty to destroy
Jerusalem. If I forget thee,
the world will be better off.
The tree a cat can get up into,
a cat can get down from by itself.

"The Prehistory of Love"

2009-01-12T11:21:00.003-06:00

"The Prehistory of Love." That's the title of chapter 3 in Paz's The Double Flame, assigned reading for my love poetry class this Monday.

Paz begins by reflecting on Greek poetry, which he finds as a rule "more erotic than [it is] amorous" (54). By which, he elaborates, it's a body of work in which "we see, and hear, the lovers in their different moods--desire, sensual pleasure, disillusionment, jealousy, ephemeral happiness--but never the sentiments and emotions of the Other" (55). There are no lovers' dialogues in this body of work, and love, for Paz, is essentially a dialogic, or at least relational, phenomenon.

As I told my class last week, it may well be that the most genres for love are drama and the novel, rather than lyric poetry. Is this a problem for my own future teaching the class, I wonder? Will I tire of teaching lyric, or find it frustrating, given my steady diet now of romantic fiction?
Or, conversely, might a lyric poetry that records, or at least registers, the Other's voice and subjectivity--through resistance, or active listening, or implied response--be enough to satisfy me, and him?

In any case, according to Paz the first texts that prefigure "what love was to be for us" come from Alexandria and Rome. "Love is born in metropolises." Lovely thought, for a city boy like me. (OK, I'm from the suburbs. But domesticity has a home there, surely--a split level, with shuffleboard court and wet-bar in the family room.) Why in cities? Because "in the Alexandrian period...an invisible revolution takes place: women, shut up in the gynaeceum, come out into the open air and appear on the surface of society," making names for themselves in the political realm and in the city's burgeoning world of "tradesmen, craftsmen, and small property owners" (59). "The appearance, in the new cities, of a freer woman" is what allows "the erotic object [to begin] to transform itself into a subject" (610).

Love as such is born of women's rights and the rise of the middle class: sounds good to me, but I'm biased, I suspect.
I'm not sure if it's really about the "middle class," though. Paz speaks about the importance in Rome, a bit later, of "patrician women" and courtesans as the crucial figures. "Both patricians and courtesans were free women in several senses of the word: by their birth, their means, and their mores. Free above all because to an unprecedented degree they had the freedom to accept or reject their lovers. They were the mistresses of their bodies and their souls. The heroines of erotic and amorous poetry come from both classes (62-3).

Doubling back a bit:

To Paz, the first great love poem is a piece he calls "The Sorceress," Idyll 2 by Theocritus (circa 275 BC). Is it anywhere on line? Here's a prose translation by Andrew Lang. For Paz, this is the first poem to show "rancor and love conjoined...the inextricable commingling of hate and love, spite and desire" (56). The speaker of the poem, Simaetha, "is a commoner, a young woman such as exists by the thousands in every city of the world, ever since there have been cities" (57). To make such a woman the heroine--or at least central figure--of a major literary text "was an immense literary and hsitorical innovation" (60). She's struck by desire for one "Delphis," a young athlete who obsesses her, whom she summons to her house. He woos her, plies her with promises, and they go to bed. They're lovers for a short while, after which he disappears for two weeks, and reports come to Simaetha that he's now fallen in love with another, of one or other sex.

"Simetha's love," says Paz, "is made of persistent desire, despair, anger, helplessness. [...] Between what we desire and what we value there is a gap: we love what we do not value and we desire to be forever with a person who makes us unhappy. In love, evil makes its appearance: it is a pernicious seduction that attracts us and overcomes us" (59). We are, he says, "very far from Plato" (59).

The next poet he speaks of, moving from Alexandria to Rome, is Catullus, whose work looks back to Sappho and to the Alexandrian model supplied by Callimachus.

In Catullus's poems for the woman he names "Lesbia," a patrician that scholars have identified as one "Clodia," about whom Paz says absolutely nothing. (Hmmm...) Catullus's lyrics record the stormy relationship between himself and Lesbia; again, we find this "union of opposites--desire and contempt, sensuality and hatred, paradise glimpsed and hell endured" in which "our flesh covets what our reason condemns" (62). Together, the poems comprise "a sort of novel in verse (63) in which the male speaker is in a "situation of dependency" and the love plays out as "an exercise in freedom, a transgression, a defiance of society," although he doesn't spell out exactly how this is so (63).

Three crucial elements for modern love poetry emerge in these texts, says Paz: choice (the lovers are free, at least vis a vis social norms); defiance (love as a transgression), and jealousy. Paz jumps from Catullus to talk about the "fatal pearl" of jealousy in Proust, whom I've never read, alas; from this diversion, however, he makes his way to this lovely passage:

We live with phantoms, and we ourselves are phantoms. [That is, we're always imagining what's going on in each other's minds, making up stories about each other and indeed about ourselves, some of which are quite painful and self-tormenting.] There are only two ways out of this imaginary prison. The first is the path of eroticism, and we have already seen that it ends in a blind wall. The question of the jealous lover--what are you thinking about? What are you feeling?--has no answer except sadomasochism: tormenting the Other or tormenting himself. In either case the Other is inaccessible and invulnerable. But we are not transparent, either, for others or for ourselves. [...] The other way out is that of love: surrender of self, acceptance of the freedom of the beloved. Madness, an illusion? Perhaps, but it is the only door that leads out of the prison of jealousy. Many years ago I wrote: Love is a sacrifice without virtue. Today I would say: Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other (66-67).

The next poet he discusses is Sextus Propertius, whose lyric poems of relationship with "Cynthia" are another "novelistic" account of "meetings, separations, infidelities, lies, surrenders, endless quarrels, moments of sensuality, passion, anger, morose melancholy" (68). He delights in the "modernity" of Propertius; he notes that Propertius is the first to write a love poem in which the beloved's ghost visits the speaker after her death (passed down, he writes, to "Baudelaire and his descendents" 71), and this leads him into a longish disquosition on a poem by Quevedo ("Amor constante mas alla de la muerte") and brief mentions of other poems by Baudelaire, Nerval, Novalis, and others.

A brief discussion of Greco-Roman novels of love: Daphnis and Chloe, in particular.

Some interesting thoughts about freedom in these texts. Not political freedom--that wasn't an option--but rather, in the face of monarchic rule, "political freedom was replaced by inner freedom," by which he means something like freedom in the private or domestic sphere: work, marriage, etc., as separated from the broader life of the polis. "Political duties, extolled by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, are moved to the sidelines of society by the search for personal happiness, wisdom, or serenity" (85). Private virtues predominate, and private pleasures, including those that earlier philosophy thought of as an enslavement, like the pleasures of passion. We start to see the idea that marriage should be by the consent of the parties, even if the heads of the families still make the primary arrangements. Again, Paz insists, "the emergence of love is inseparable from the emergence of women. There is no love without feminine freedom" (85).

Love ends up being a form of "civil disobedience," not in the name of principle (as for Thoreau) but in the name of "individual passion" (87). He concludes this way: "love is born of an involuntary attraction that our free will transforms into a voluntary union. Voluntary union is love's necessary condition, the act that turns bondage into freedom" (87).

Thursday's Child

2009-01-08T20:38:00.002-06:00

No picture today. You can find those yourself, if you need them. Instead, this, by a poet I've just discovered, and like quite a bit:

Travel Tickets

On the day you kill me
You’ll find in my pocket
Travel tickets
To peace,
To the fields and the rain,
To people’s conscience.
Don’t waste the tickets.
--Samih al-Qasim, trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari

More tomorrow.

Paz On Love

2009-01-07T09:02:00.005-06:00

Shoving politics out of my mind for a while. Back to Paz on love.

When we left off, Paz had just finished laying out the differences between sex and eroticism (see yesterday's post). In chapter 2 of The Double Flame, he moves on to another distinction: that between eroticism and love.

He begins with "one of the first appearances of love, in the strict sense of the word," in Western literature: the story of Cupid (or "Eros," as Paz calls him) and Psyche in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, from the late 2nd century AD. He's fascinated by what strikes him as "the real novelty of the story," which is that "a god, Eros, falls in love with a maiden who personifies the soul, Psyche" (29). Writes Paz:

I emphasize, first of all, that their love is mutual and returned: neither is an object of contemplation for the other; nor are they rungs on any ladder of contemplation. Eros loves Psyche and Psyche Eros, and very prosaically they end up marrying each other. There are countless stories of gods who fall in love with mortals, but in none of these loves, invariably sensual in nature, does attraction for the soul of the beloved play a role (29).

For Paz, the distinction between eroticism and love lies in this combination of mutuality and specificity. "Love is attraction toward a unique person: a body and a soul," he writes. "Love is choice; eroticism is acceptance" (32). [By "acceptance" he means, the book explains, a feeling like Molly Bloom's, in her closing monologue: "he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another." That's erotic, but it's not love, which at its most basic means "the passionate attraction we feel toward one person out of many" (34).]

Love is thus at once a subset of the erotic and a launching into realms well beyond it. "Without eroticism--without a visible form that enters by way of the sense--there is no love, but love goes beyond the desired body and seeks the soul in the body and the body in the soul. The whole person" (33).

Question: would this mean, then, that it's impossible to love someone one doesn't know in person? What about falling in love by letter, as Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning seem to have done? "Do you think we should meet?" (That's not EBB, of course, but You've Got Mail, but the principle applies.)

Because love overlaps with the erotic, but cannot be reduced to it, it necessarily combines disparate, even opposing elements. "The attraction that the lovers experience must be involuntary, born of a secret and all-powerful magnetism; at the same time, it must be a choice. In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter" (33; my italics).

I emphasize "encounter" because it hints at the essential intersubjectivity of love, the fact that it demands the encounter of two independent subjects, rather than simply my delight in or attraction to some object of my desire. As Paz puts it, in love we witness "the transformation of the erotic object into a free and unique subject" (34).
This reminds me of the heartbreaking moment late in Lolita where Humbert Humbert suddenly glimpses the horror he's visited on the girl--now a young woman--he obsessively desired through most of the novel. For the first time, he sees her as a "subject," not an object; his remorse, however brief, is the closest he ever gets to actual love.
Which, in turn, reminds me that the story of Cupid and Psyche also features what is, for Paz, a three-part structure that will endure in Western love stories: "transgression, punishment, and redemption" (29-3o).

Denis de Rougement (and others) have claimed that this vision of love-as-encounter is exclusively Western, and indeed, even in the West, relatively recent, invented, so it's said, in 12th century Provence. Against this, Paz insists on the human universality of love as such.

"There is no people or civilization," he writes, that does not tell stories or sing songs about "the encounter of two persons, their mutual attraction, and the labors and hardships they must overcome to be united" (33). In some civilizations, at some periods, however, this core story gets elaborated into a full-blown ideology, "a way of life, an art of living and dying, an ethic, an aesthetic, and an etiquette. A courtesy, to use the medieval term" (34).

Now things get interesting!

"Courtesy," Paz reminds us, "is not within the reach of all: it is a body of knowledge and a practice. It is the privilege of what might be called the aristocracy of the heart. Not an aristocracy founded on bloodlines and inherited privileges, but on certain qualities of the spirit. Although these qualities are innate, in order that they be manifested and made second nature, the adept must cultivate his mind and his senses, learn to feel, speak, and sometimes remaind silent. Courtesy is a school of sensibility and selflessness" (35).

From the idea of "courtesy" he moves on to "courtly love," which is for Paz "a knowledge of the senses illuminated by the light of the soul, a sensual attraction refined by courtesy" (36). Examples of such love, Paz notes, can be found in the Islamic world (Persian and Arabic), in India, and in the Far East (The Dream of the Red Chamber, from China, and from Japan The Tale of Genji). This leads him to an interesting conclusion: "Whenever a high courtly culture flourishes, a philosophy of love springs forth. Those philosophies of love have the same relationship with the general feeling of love as this one [the general feeling] has with eroticism, and both of them with sexuality" (37).

Thus: "sex is the root, eroticism the stem, and love the flower" (38).

***

Some differences between East and West follow, and a few useful apercus.

In the East (the far east, he means), love is "conceived of within a religious tradition," whether Buddhist or Taoist. In the West, ever since Plato, "the philosophy of love lay outside official religion [pagan or monotheist] and at times was in opposition to it" (39).

"Love in the West is a fate freely chosen," which means that "no matter how powerful the influence of predestination--the best-known example is the love potion that Tristan and Isolde drink--in order for their destiny to be fulfilled, the cooperation of the lovers is necessary" (40).

"The history of poetry is inseparable from that of love" (43).

Paz gives a brief summary of the Symposium, which makes this book quite useful for teaching undergrads--you can get them up to speed on some crucial bits of cultural history in a single chapter, as you see.

He discusses the story Aristophanes tells about the original androgyne, with its ringing affirmation that "we are incomplete beings, and the desire for love is a perpetual thirst for completion" (43), but he points out that this is not Plato's final speech on the subject, and turns to Socrates' lesson from Diotima: "Eros is neither god nor man; he is a daimon...the preposition between defines him" (44). The child of Poverty and Abundance (or Plenty, or Resource, Poros is the Greek), Eros is "a mixture of several elements united and animated by desire" (45).

Now, as we all know, this disquisition (by Socrates, I mean) leads him to the ringing conclusion that "love is desire for the perpetual possession of the Good," or some such phrase. Love in Plato is therefore an "ascent": "it goes from the love of one body to the love of many, then from the love of all beautiful forms to the love of virtuous deeds, then from deeds to ideas and from ideas to absolute beauty, which is the highest life that can be lived" (48).

But, Paz notes, that's not love. That's Eros, or "eroticism," and stands in contrast to the mutuality and intersubjectivity that lie, for Paz, at the heart of love. He doesn't say that ancient Greeks never felt what we call love, mind you; he just says that they didn't make a philosophy out of it. "Diotima seems to know nothing of fidelity, and it never even occurs to her to give thought to the feelings of the man or woman we love: she sees the beloved as a mere step on the ascent toward contemplation. In reality, love for Plato is not strictly speaking a relationship; it is a solitary adventure" (50).

"For Plato, erotic objects--whether they be the body or the soul of the ephebe--are never subjects: they have a body and do not feel, they have a soul and remain silent. They are really objects, and their function is that of being stages in the ascent of the philosopher toward the contemplation of essences" (51).

Paz notes, astutely, that although the Symposium is in the form of a dialogue, it is in fact "made up of seven separate discourses": in this text, as in the version of love it describes, "there can be a dialectic, that is to say, a division of discourse into parts, but there is no true dialogue or conversation" (51-2).

"In the Symposium," he concludes, "eroticism in its purest and loftiest expression, the necessary condition of love--the other man or woman who accepts or refuses, who says yes or no and whose very silence is an answer--does not appear" (52).

A curious structure to this chapter, starting with the story that does illustrate love-as-such and ending with one that seems to...but oops, look again, it doesn't. I almost wish he'd have circled back to talk more about the Apuleius, and how the story of Cupid and Psyche illustrates love instead, just to clinch that in the minds of my students.
On the other hand, since we're about to turn to Sappho for a while, it's probably better to leave them with a taste of Eros in their mouths. We won't really reach love-as-such for a couple of classes, and there's an awful lot to say about th'erotic on the way.

Tuesday's Child

2009-01-06T17:29:00.000-06:00

7:03: "The purpose of awakening is black coffee." Alice Notley, "The Prophet"

***

Kids off. Bulgar pilaf with cranberries and almonds for breakfast; caught up on some romance reviews at Dear Author while it simmered. The new Lydia Joyce sounds promising.

Trying to imagine a site like Dear Author about poetry: not just a site with reviews, but one that gives, like, low grades to books. Is there something out there like that? If not, why not? What would the absence say about the differences between reading poetry and reading genre fiction? (Poetry, too, after all, a "genre.")

Has anyone who studies fandom ever turned his or her attention to poetry readers? I suspect there's a good deal to be said from that perspective: the passion, the depth of knowledge, the feral infighting...

***

Spent too much of my first day back at school restlessly checking news from Gaza, and it tugged at my attention today as well. The latest horror--30 or 40 civilians killed at the UN school where they were taking shelter--haunts me, and reports that Hamas gunmen were firing from the school, in which they'd barricaded themselves, booby-trapping it first, makes things worse, not better. (It's entirely believable, but sadly no more so than any other explanation.)

Those poor children--so many, and more to come.

Muriel Rukeyser's little poem from 1939 keeps running through my mind:

M-Day's child is fair of face,
Drill-day's child is full of grace,
Gun-day's child is breastless and blind,
Shell-day's child is out of its mind,
Bomb-day's child will always be dumb,
Cannon-day's child can never quite come,
But the child that's born on the Battle-day
is blithe and bonny and rotted away.

Sorry so glum, but what can you do? Brant Rosen reposts an interview with Israeli geographer Arnon Soffer, one of the idea-men behind the original Gaza pullout, back on May 21, 2004:

...when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.

In case you couldn't tell, he's not saying that as a warning (like, let's not let this happen). He's just planning ahead. "The only thing that concerns me," says he, "is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

I am sickened and ashamed.

***

Anyway, I did my best to keep my attention elsewhere a while this morning. For the love poetry class, I'm rereading Octavio Paz, The Double Flame, chapters 1 and 2, along with Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. The goal is to gather a shared vocabulary for talking about love (and desire, and related matters) as the course begins. Paz starts by setting up an analogy between poetry and eroticism:

"The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language" (2).

How so? Well, eroticism is "sexuality transfigured," in which "imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite," just as imagination, in poetry, turns "language into rhythm and metaphor" (3). Eroticism makes sexuality "say" something more than reproduction, so that pleasure (and aggression, and any other element of sexuality) becomes an end in itself. Likewise, "in the poem...language deviates from its natural end, communication" (4). The language of poetry circles around, looks back on itself, aspires to shapeliness rather than simply to clarity. Thus "Poetry puts communication in brackets in the same way that eroticism brackets reproduction" (5).

The implications of this? "St. John of the Cross did not wish to say anything that departed from the teachings of the Church; nevertheless, his poems said other things" (5). Poems always (at least potentially) say something more, something other that what is intended or what is useful, socially speaking. "There is always a schism between social and poetic expression: poetry is the other voice," says Paz (6).

Paz distinguishes love from eroticism, and both of them from sexuality.

"Sex is the primordial source. Eroticism and love are forms derived from the sexual instinct: crystalizations, sublimations, perversions, and condensations which transform sexuality, very often into something unknowable" (7). Eroticism "is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings" (8).

First Paz talks about the imagination's role. "Eroticism is invention, constant variation; sex is always the same." This multiplicity inheres in the nature of the erotic: "in every erotic encounter," says Paz--even in our most "solitary pleasures"--there is "an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire" (9).

He then discusses the social side of things. Sex as such, he says, threatens society: it's "like the god Pan," at once creative and destructive; it "ignores classes and hierarchies, arts and sciences, day and night--it sleeps and awakens, only to fornicate and go back to sleep again" (10). [Ah, those were the days!] Human cultures invent taboos, prohibitions, inducements: eroticism includes both "repression and license...sublimation and perversion"; it generates cultural production, from laws to rites to arts, around the twinborn poles of "abstinence and license" (11-12).

Writes Paz, "Every great historic religion has given rise, on its margins or at its very heart, to sects, movements, rites, and liturgies in which the flesh and sex are paths to divinity. It could not be otherwise: eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness" (15).

This will set up one of our recurring topics: the relationship between sacred and secular love poetry, and by extension the relationship between sacred and secular love.

Paz then turns from religion to its inverse or mirror image, "libertinism." A longish disquisition on libertinism, which in my experience is as foreign to students as sexual rites and liturgies. In the 18th century, "the libertine was the intellectual critical of religion, laws, and customs," and "libertine philosophy turned eroticism into moral criticism" (22).

Sadly, that "moral criticism" ends up preaching its own rather nasty moral vision, at least to Paz:

"For the libertine the ideal erotic relationship means absolute power over the sexual object, and an equally absolute indifference toward its fate; while the sexual object is totally complacent toward the desires and caprices of its lord" (22). As a result, "the libertine turns everything he touches into a phantom, and he himself becomes a shade among shades" (24).

This from Sade, of course, whom I haven't read since high school. Does it have any bearing on the actual behavior of anyone else?

Thank heaven, Paz has no taste for Sade. "A prolix and dull writer," he calls him, "the opposite of an artist" (24). He prefers Shakespeare, Stendahl, even Freud, "a man of science and a tragic poet" (25). He gives the last word in the chapter to D.H. Lawrence, who envisions, through eroticism, a "return to the place of origin, where death and life embrace," as in the poem that he quotes, "Bavarian Gentians."

So much for sexuality and eroticism (chapter 1), what of love? More on that anon.

Start as you mean to go on--

2009-01-01T11:06:00.003-06:00

Pancakes, mimosas, Mistress of Mellyn, Andrew Lawrence-King on the wire-strung harp. Nathan sleeping in, but Margaret up, debating the merits of various romance heroes & heroines with my wife.

Dodging news from Gaza for a while.

***

Bought a red Moleskine notebook to keep track of my reading this year. So many "best of" lists by friends; maybe this way I'll have one to post next December. Should it only be for reading, though? Music? Whiskey? Brands of chocolate stout? (Young's for my birthday a week ago; now we're on to Brooklyn Brewry.)

***

Today's poem? In honor of the news, how about "Rita and the Rifle," by Mahmoud Darwish? Rita was a young woman--an Israeli Jew, as it happens--that he loved in his youth; the poem was turned into a wildly popular, much-loved song by the Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife. You can find the original Arabic here; after the English, below, I've pasted a performance of the song, one lick of which sounds oddly like the 50's ballad "Mona Lisa" to my ears.

Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
kneels and prays
to the divinity in those honey-colored eyes.

And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle.

Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again.

Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita.

Between Rita and my eyes--
A rifle.

Here's to a good year--and Lord knows there's plenty of room for improvement!

Welcome to the Working Week

2008-12-29T16:07:00.002-06:00

Counting down, here, to the end of 2008. A tough year for this blog; here's to a better, more interesting one in the months to come.

It was warm enough to run today, so run we did, R & I. (She's following the blog now--hi, love!) Took a pitchfork to my in-box, which is more of an in-tower at the moment, a desktop Barad-dur. Got some very anxiety-provoking emails from editors and impending campus visitors; literally shrieked in frustration at one point, scaring my poor daughter silly. Took my son to the library in search of histories of rock and roll, and a stack of CDs. Not, shall we say, the most productive day, but for the first day back to work, not altogether a failure.

In fact, one success: a sheaf of paperwork I should have filed last June (you read that right, alas) for my How to Teach a Poem workshop series is now done, done, done. Scoring high on the guilt-o-meter, that was. Three days left to finish--well, why commit myself? This & that.

Time to sign off & clean up. More tomorrow.

Monday Morning

2008-12-15T08:09:00.003-06:00

We open the week with a "this just in," via the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog. It seems the editors of Max Planck Institute's journal, in Germany, wanted to grace their cover with something poetic--and hey, what could be more poetic than this graceful bit of chinoiserie?

Of course, it might have helped if someone at the Institute knew WTF the characters said. Quoth the Independent:

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming "Hot Housewives in action!" on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their "enchanting and coquettish performance" was highly recommended.
The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to "the northern mainland" seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor.
The Max Planck Institute was quick to acknowledge its error explaining that it had consulted a German sinologist prior to publication of the text. "To our sincere regret ... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker," the institute said in an apology. "By publishing this text we did in no way intend to cause any offence or embarrassment to our Chinese readers. " (My emphasis.)

This seems to be a much more reputable site for Chinese poems, useful for teachers and such--it has the originals, a transliteration, a prose crib, and a sample verse translation. Ah, but what about those "deeper levels of meaning"?