The Familiar Anew

Mark Yakich wants to know what a poem really is:

I’ve heard other poets define poems in organic terms: wild animals—natural, untamable, unpredictable, raw. But the metaphor quickly falls apart. Such animals live on their own, utterly unconcerned with the names humans put upon them. In inorganic terms, the poet William Carlos Williams called poems “little machines,” as he treated them as mechanical, human-engineered, and precise. But here too, the metaphor breaks down. A worn-out part on an automobile can be switched out with a nearly identical part and run as it did before. In a poem, a word exchanged for another word (even a close synonym) can alter the entire functioning of the poem. The most productive thing about trying to define a poem through comparison—to an animal, a machine, or whatever else—is not in the comparison itself but in the arguing over it. Whether or not you view a poem as a machine or a wild animal, it can change the machine or wild animal of your mind. A poem helps the mind play with its well-trod patterns of thought, and can even help reroute those patterns by making us see the familiar anew.

Sunday Poem

DUNK TANK 

The marine glory of gotcha, and gotcha back. Chloronic
holding pen of those we schmucked. Hocking a lugie kicked
up a notch—systemic—made ungainly, the mass

of a full-sized four-door beater. Gallons and gallons of the colder
the better suspended between clear perspex, the safest
glass-like plastic on the planet, its hind square painted

radiant college-slut blue. The seat—like a fin, a skateboard
deck made hinged, spindly—cupping the bum of a gym
teacher in a swim suit. Not the coquette, the run and hide, the hermit—

thrush in the pool’s mouth kisses his feet.
A game of social studies, three balls for a dollar, three
chances to overturn the static, the goading, drop a bully 

like a bully drops a bran muffin, chances that depend
on how eager the arm is to catch the light, how rigged it is.
Equitable estoppels, a ratio of vex to velocity, you’ve made your bed, 

now swim in it cut with it’s all for a good cause.
And after, they’ll empty, collapse; it’s rented,
so whatever was in us that's gleeful, a truck hauls off at four.

 From The Hard Return (Insomniac, 2012) by Marcus McCann

Writing Is A Job

Daniel Mendelsohn's interview in Prospect magazine is my new favourite thing. I've rounded up some highlights:

I am a great believer in deadlines. I come from a scholarly background, having done a graduate degree in Classics before I ever dreamed of being a writer; and in that world, the rule is that you can’t write anything until you’ve read everything. So for a person like me, with that training but making a living as a writer for the past 20-something years, it’s useful to impose limits, as I could spend years researching a piece.

I often like to incorporate the reaction to something—whether a book or a movie or a TV show—into my analysis of it. This, to a large extent, betrays my training as a classicist: I’m always writing as if everything has been over for 2000 years. I like that angle because you get to see the whole of a phenomenon, and part of that is how other people have reacted to it.

For me, the crucial thing is the beginning not the ending: the piece cannot be written unless I have my lede. And often I’ll be agonising because I have an idea of what I want to say about the work in general—I know what I’ve been thinking, I’ve been pondering for a long time, I have the “middle”—but unless I can think of the first sentence—which often comes on the train or eating a piece of pizza or something—then the whole thing won’t flow. I’ve never been a person who can write different parts of the piece before I start. I’m working through my thoughts as I’m writing the piece, which I suppose is why they have the shape that they do.

But I still think it’s imperative, even if you’re a weekly critic, to do more than read the book in question. It’s still inconceivable to me for anybody, including a newspaper critic with a weekly beat, not to read the other works by an author. It’s just irresponsible not to do that because you’re failing to do your job, which is to make things interesting and coherent for your reader. If you haven’t read the author’s other books, you don’t know if the book that you’re reviewing represents an evolution, an improvement or whatever.

I’ve been writing for a living for over two decades and nobody has greater respect for people who can turn in good snappy copy, at length and on time, than I do. Only real writers understand that writing is a job. 

It was my great friend, the editor and writer Bob Gottlieb, who said it. Right before my first book, The Elusive Embrace, came out in 1999, he took me to lunch and gave me a lecture about what it was like to be reviewed. He told me that the only thing worse than a stupid bad review is a stupid good review, and I have quoted him ever since—because it’s true. I think that any serious author wants one thing: to be comprehended, to be read intelligently and generously. Whether the reaction that stems from an intelligent and generous reading is praise or blame, one wants to feel that the critic has wrestled meaningfully with one’s work. What could be the value of praise that’s based on an unintelligent reading?

I like to joke that when I review things I act as if the author has been dead for 200 years, but the fact of course is that they’re not like Euripides, they’re not dead. That said, when I review a person’s work, that person is reviewed as an author, not as “a person.” When I’m reviewing a book by an author, I’m not thinking of that person as a father, husband, son or whatever… unless of course it bears interestingly on the work. The work is what matters.

I will repeat that if the review of one’s work is intelligent and legitimate, one doesn’t feel hurt personally. I can be grumpy professionally—I don’t like it when someone says that I got something wrong, that this or that in my book didn’t work, or whatever—but I’m not personally hurt.

This is precisely what editors are for: they rein you in, they keep you honest and don’t let your arguments run away with you. Bob Silvers at the New York Review is always saying, “But isn’t it also the case that the author did this or that, too—are you sure you’ve got it right?”, or “Don’t you think you should tone it down?” The best advice anybody ever gave me was when I was working on my dissertation. I had what I thought was a grand theory of the two Euripidean tragedies I was writing about, and when I first started writing the temptation to ignore everything that didn’t fit into my theory was terrific. My dissertation advisor pulled me into her office one day and said, “Your problem is that you think that what looks like inconsistencies, what doesn’t fit, are “problems.” What they really ought to be are the keys to developing a larger and more interesting thesis.” The point was that, instead of sweeping the anomalies under the rug you have to expand and adapt your argument so that it can accommodate everything in the text. I’ll never forget that moment—it literally changed that way I think about and interpret texts.

First of all, I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs. I don’t think people should be allowed to even hear the word “theory” until they’re doing graduate work—for the very good reason that it’s impossible to theorise about texts before one has deep familiarity with them (not that that stopped anyone in the 1980s when I was in grad school). Undergraduates should be taught to have a clean appreciation of what texts say and how they say them, and learn how to write intelligently and clearly about that. If undergraduates had to have a model of criticism it ought to be popular criticism rather than traditional academic criticism.

Dalton and Szymborska

Lynn Davies responds to one of Mary Dalton's poems, reprinted in The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry:

Her poem “The Boat” reminds me of Wistawa Szymborska’s "Funeral” in which Szymborska simply lists the comments of people attending a funeral. I can’t help smiling at the end. How pragmatic but vulnerable we are around death. In “The Boat”, Dalton describes the broken boat that sails down from the heavens and lands in a bed of petunias, and then she lists the people trying to use or make sense of the miraculous boat. In the “ballyhoo” at the end, as the people are arguing among themselves, the boat simply takes off into the blue again, “battered planks clanking.” It’s a noisier, more colourful poem, but I hear a similar vulnerability and pragmatism in response to mystery. Dalton makes me laugh here, as she often does in her poems.

Smarm

Tom Scocca exposes anti-snark hysteria for what it truly is—a "type of bullshit" or "a kind of ethical and moral misdirection"—and in the process coins an excellent term: smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?

Daniel Mendelsohn sees evidence of smarm in his classroom:

One of the courses I like to teach is a Great Books course that’s mandatory for first year students, and after I read their first papers it’s always very clear to me that they have no model, no template for what a critical essay is supposed to do—what (or how) you’re supposed to be arguing when you’re writing about a text or a movie or anything. They don’t understand there is a rhetoric of criticism—that there’s a stance you have to have, that you have to position yourself, that you don’t just blather about your impressions or your “opinions” or, worse, your “feelings” about a work. They literally have no idea, at first, what the point of being critical is—no doubt because, in part, they are being raised in a culture where a bland, everything-goes, multi-culti niceness is the paramount virtue. 

The Weight of Words

Donald Winkler won a 2013 Governor General's Award for his translation of Pierre Nepveu's poetry collection The Major Verbs (Les verbes majeur). The following were his remarks at the awards ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on November 29, 2013:

Tonight, in this hall, we are honouring language and its practitioners who, however unlike they may be one from the other, are all intensely aware that this human attribute is a thing of great power and nobility, but also that beyond this precinct there are arenas, not far off, where it is systematically tarnished, degraded, and impoverished. Where words of insight, words of wonder, are recast as words of pretence, words of evasion, words of belligerence, words of contempt. 

It has ever been thus.  

As a translator, my responsibility is to treat every text as an offering, to be transformed, but hallowed, as it is shepherded from one tongue to another. And my accountability is not only to my words and to their readers, but to one whose words, in another language, were set down at great personal cost, perhaps, and whose endeavour and intent must be given their due. This can only heighten one’s sensitivity to the fact that in a world where much hangs in the balance, that balance may be tipped significantly by the weight of words, and how we choose to deploy them.

"We will anxiously monitor
the storms on the sun,
we will welcome its fiery tongues,
we will be nothing but spirit
when the cold centuries come." 

Pierre Nepveu. 

May language be not a smoke screen, but a beacon. 

Thank you very much.

Sunday Poem

SONJA ON THE BEACH 

The wind stirs in the branches of the women
Pure as unthreaded pearls…
—The Thousand Nights and One Night

Sonja is not on this beach as it happens,
but a woman in a black bikini is peeling and splotching—
Please, Woman in Your Black Bikini
put on a shirt and save yourself!        Sonja

is not on this beach today, but a girl,
roughly the age she was,
has turned the colour of
chocolate ice-cream she was, that summer,
a colour still much prized among the young. And look,
there is an adult in deep desiccated brown
to illustrate what fate holds in store for them,

though surely not for Sonja—
because she is not on this beach. Brünnhilde, however,
so athletically hulking, the
dangling drawstring of her shorts
below her strong belly, sun goddess
in cornrows,
is. Planted in the sand.

Sonja is not on this beach but there is
an ostinato rolling with songs, screams, laughter, blue
dragonflying against the drone of waterskiboats,
families spilling out of canoes,
above the pianissimo güiro aspen. And Sonja,

not on this beach, has another emanation in
that woman whose truck is parked next to mine
(pink bikinis must be in style this year)
whom I saw applying lipstick
(which adhered to her cigarette butt),
in her sideview mirror.

Sonja is not on the beach this decade but
a shrieking child on the waterslide, a beachball
barely touching the lake,
a look not entirely suspicious
from a teenager walking through the lozenges of
the waves of the sun in the water
            are. And there’s a gap to represent
Sonja, who is not on this beach to witness
                                                                us, us men,
moving so awkwardly in our near-nakedness—the
incomplete uncoiling of our spines not quite
adapted to our upright posture, stiff rectangle of torso
stumping, the strain of restraining our extraverting
abdomens and the strain of concealing all this—
the lithest of teenagers could scarcely carry it off! Though
Sonja could, Sonja
who is not likely ever to visit this beach
a beach where bottles of tanning lotion continue, innocently, to be
passed, and I am hopeful
of some benevolence for my solitude amongst those,
laid out so larvally in rows,
the deeply connotative sand, and this perhaps illusory
                         sense that there is community on the beach.

From The Civic-Mindedness of Trees (Wolsak & Wynn, 2013) by Ken Howe