Sunday Poem

GIBBERISH

is a skill I learned at camp. Our neighbours went
to another kind of church, something more effusive.
One summer I went with Scott to his church's
camp. We were told to open our mouths and speak
as the spirit moved so that the devil wouldn't
understand. I made up sounds. garbled with
belief. Decades later I read from the devil
himself: James Joyce's jigsaw of bluddlefilth, Finnegans
Wake, intoned as the spirit moved me through
accents and volumes and felt as if a geyser had opened from
my chest. I got a cheque for my performance.
Confidence powered me through an evening of drinks
with strangers and poets. Sometimes words
mean nothing and everything. Open your mouth and see.

From Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press, 2015) by Kevin Spenst.  

Clean Copy

Emily M. Keeler describes her perfect book review:

The writer covering the book has a keener-than-average grasp of the material, and can pull from more than just the book under review to make some kind of original insight that positions the book for a reader. The writer files clean copy, on time, and likes being edited and, if necessary, pushed a little bit farther in a clearer direction. The review is a well-written artifact in its own right, and it’s interesting to read whether or not I’m interested in the book itself. Sometimes this means the ideal book review has a large element of the uniquely personal response of the reviewer tied up in it; sometimes the ideal book review is a nimble argument about the themes or formal elements of the book under review; sometimes the ideal book review is an incisive close reading of the book under review to illustrate a larger point about both the book and its greater context. I’m greedy and I want all these things, all the time. I want book reviews that are appealing in myriad ways, even if the particular books under review aren’t.

The Writer Without Whom

On the 100th anniversary of Saul Bellow's birth, Vivian Gornick reminds us of the writer partially responsible for Bellow's breakthrough novel, The Adventures of Augie March:

Delmore Schwartz is to Jewish-American writing what Richard Wright is to African-American writing. He is the writer without whom, the one whose work most supremely constitutes the bridge between immigrant writing and the writing we now think of as authentically Jewish-American. As such, his work is both moving and instructive. It embodies the step inevitably taken by a marginalized people on their way to cultural equality, the one that requires them to practice imitation at the highest level at the same time that their own native material is subverting the conventional rules of the game.

An epitome of this arriviste generation of Jewish intellectuals, Schwartz was both precocious and reverential, an original and a keeper of the culture. His personality, like that of Bellow’s—shaped by an amalgam of immigrant culture, urban street smarts, and a besotted adoration of European modernism—was marked by a mesmerizing torrent of words that poured incessantly from him. At one and the same time that he was this brilliant, fast-talking New York Jew he was yet imprinted with the conviction that to serve the literary culture formed by modernism was his vocation. Talking with friends in a Greenwich Village cafe, he was where he came from; on the page, he was where he wanted to go.

The Far End of the Chessboard

In the running for the next Oxford Professor of Poetry, A.E. Stallings reports back from the rabbit-hole of the election:

I kept thinking, as I wandered through Oxford this past week (I was there to give a reading at Rhodes House), what a curious and curiouser turn of events the whole matter was. As a young and insecure American graduate student twenty years ago, Oxford intimidated me: I felt awkward, that I didn’t belong, I was out of my element. Now I seemed to be collegially accepted, claimed even, staying at the Lodgings of the Principal of my old college, collaborating in the campaign with my former tutor, having a strategic coffee in the Senior Common Room in Christ Church, meeting with students at the Eagle and Child (watering hole of the Inklings—C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, etc.), attending a dinner at high table. Had I made it somehow, a pale anonymous pawn, to the far end of the chessboard? 

Walking through the gorgeous gardens of Lady Margaret Hall, in their full glory at the beginning of June, by the banks of the Cherwell fringed with doilies of Queen Anne’s lace, I was ambushed by a bewildering mixture of melancholy and joy, gratitude and wonder. I would sometimes take a turn on the path and feel a stab of—not of nostalgia, since surely a place of brief sojourn in my youth could not be called home—but chronalgia, as if the soul of the young woman aspiring to be a poet, and the soul of the poet I had become, passed right through each other, coming and going.

Empty Signifier

Winning a poetry prize wasn't enough to rescue Phoebe Wang from the sense of isolation that comes with being a writer of colour.

I have often wondered about the importance of visibility; after all, my ethnic identity is a category that has been arbitrarily created. What is “Asian”? “Of colour”? “Minority?” These terms fail to capture the often contradictory positions of both shame and privilege, doubt and power. Therefore, what I share with other writers of colour is the experience of having our identity determined by reductionist terms, by an empty signifier of stereotyped traits and characteristics. I cannot address my racial category, because it is addressing me.

Writing Both at the Same Time

Drawing on the example of Shakespeare ("everyone knows his plays and no one worries too much about what genre they fit into"), Susan Glickman believes we waste too much time trying to classify books.

Since Aristotle first divided poetry into epic, lyric, and dramatic, students of literature have found genre a very helpful way to talk about the structure of works and the transmission of traditions. But I’m not convinced that thinking within such tight aesthetic categories is equally useful for writers themselves, whose job, after all, is to represent life.

Our obsession with those "tight aesthetic categories" may even have harmed her second novel's reception:

When asked the genre of my second novel, The Tale-Teller, I described it as “feminist picaresque”—after all, its realistic framework of life in 18th-century Quebec was constantly being interrupted by heroic tales of feral children, pirates, and escapes from harems. I was informed by agents and editors who admired the writing but disliked generic miscegenation that my book ought to be either historical fiction or fantasy, and I wasn’t permitted to write both at the same time. I stuck to my guns and found a publisher (Cormorant Books) that got what I was doing. But still, the French translation by Boreal has done better than the original; reviewers in Canada’s other official language celebrated the work for exactly those qualities—philosophical engagement and linguistic playfulness—overlooked by English reviewers who insisted on reading it as historical fiction.

Illustrating Eliot

Julian Peters adapts Prufrock into comic-book form. You can check out the rest of the pages here.