For Keats' Sake!

new Dappled Things, new site

2011-11-25T13:47:00.000-08:00

This Yelp review makes me so proud of my parish...

2011-11-25T13:44:00.000-08:00

"I really used to dislike conservative Catholic churches and wanted all conservative churches to change to become more liberal, but for Our Lady of Peace, I hope this very conservative church never changes and here's why....

When you are experiencing a deep sadness you've never felt before, let's say your Grandmother (who you were close with) just passed away late at night and all you can do is cry, those same traditional conservative Catholics you can't stand will be up at 1:00AM praying the rosary for you at Our Lady of Peace.

Our Lady of Peace is one of the few churches in all of Santa Clara County that really means what its says. When it says "We have a 24 hour adoration chapel and pray the rosary every hour on the hour" THEY MEAN IT.

I went into Our Lady of Peace on a Tuesday night around 11:42PM after I learned my Grandma past away - low and behold there were a dozen people praying the rosary. Thank God they were there because I was too sad to say the words, but deep down I knew crying in church and allowing myself to mourn is what I needed to do.

Mind you this is NOT my regular church, but when life takes out a piece of your heart late at night, Our Lady of Peace (as conservative as it may be) will be open to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because no one should be denied the chance to see Jesus whenever they want."

And I really ought to be there for Adoration more often...

new Dappled Things

2011-08-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

You can see some of it here, but I warn you, you will need the print version to read most of it. Subscribe today, it's a classy publication! In this issue, I like "An Elegy for Rose," which is a really well executed villanelle. The art is also quite lovely. (I like "Woman in Irish Coat.")

Job search concluded

2011-08-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

I don't know if anyone is out there, but I have an update: it looks like I will be teaching Latin and Humanities at Live Oak Academy in San Jose! It is a Christian co-op school for homeschoolers, and it is about twenty minutes from the town I grew up in. I've spent six years now studying east of the Mississippi, and I never really thought I would return to the Bay Area to teach. Most of the jobs for Latin are concentrated in New England and the South. But it turns out that I had a connection here all along... a lady I met while doing pro-life work told me about the opening. I am feeling very happy about this, and I give heartfelt thanks to all of you who may have said some prayers for me. The past few months have been rough in some ways, and I have neglected the blog and my writing in general. Now I have a little certainty, and I feel very alive and optimistic.

I am in Santa Fe right now. It is so beautiful, and it has been raining, which is always a grace in this part of the world. After I read the email offering me the teaching job, I went to Mass in the San Miguel chapel, where my parents were married and which is the oldest church in America. It was the Old Form Mass. Afterward I walked around the corner and had some ice cream. Hmmm, I just have a feeling that this year is going to be awesome!

Graduation; Dappled Things

2011-05-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

The latest Dappled Things is out. I have a review of Nick Ripatrazone's Oblations. Also, I have completed my M.A. in Classics at the University of Kentucky. Now I'm looking for a teaching job. Let me know if there's a school in your area wanting a Latin teacher!

Rainy day sapphics

2011-03-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

Sapphics are one of the few classical forms that goes fairly naturally into English. One of the most delightful examples is this poem I found in an issue of The Formalist when I was in college. I liked it so much that I hand-copied it into my notebook.

Sappho
by Erin Sweeten

Sappho eats, but only tomatoes, pulled from
Grecian urns she's filled to the brim with water
overnight to capture the deep old chill of
predawn's arrival.

Sappho sleeps, but only on mossy branches
autumn wind has broken from Mount Parnassus'
olive trees, old, shaggy and groaning under
goddesses gleaming.

Sappho bathes, but only by sloshing water
over heated stones in a roofless room where
stars and gods of planets enjoy the view, her
body undaunted.

Sappho walks, but only if lateness coaxes
owls and cats to show their enlightened eyes in
shadows laid aground by her hissing lamp up-
raised to the wildness.

Sappho lives, but only at certain moments;
clouds become her curly, untidy hair re-
leased to wind; some branches, her elbows crooked for
rocking the muses.

* * *

Also discovered in my notebook, from high school (maybe freshman year college?):

Sun rises from east hills like sleeping lions, stark sandy folds, bronze oaks in ravines, hot sky. Moon sets on west hills, green, tangled, dionysian, full of creatures, spillways of mist, apocalypse of fog.

...They show a rough straw-golden pelt....dry gilt stubble
And the oaks so exquisitely crookt

* * *

Have recently ordered several poetry books by Nada Gordon, Kay Ryan, Monica Youn, Rachel Wetzsteon. Folly is rather like those creatures of Hieronymus Bosch playing Dance Dance Revolution at Versailles.

Scott Cairns, Jonathan Potter, et al.

2011-02-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Image interview with Scott Cairns.

Dappled Things darling Jonathan Potter will have a poem read on "Writer's Almanac" this Monday. Congrats!

This is a nifty video. A mix of improv'd poetry, dance and music. The dancers wore sensors which triggered the flights of projected words.

Dappled Things and Flarfy Things

2011-02-09T13:34:00.001-08:00

So I'm assuming you have all seen the new Dappled Things website and the fifth-anniversary issue, featuring, among others, James Schall, Joseph Bottum, Duncan Stroik, and Joseph Pearce. The new site is lovely and perhaps more "literary" in appearance. The front page also changes more often - right now you can find links to Sarah Ortiz's Etsy store and to the website for the Revised Roman Missal, which contains Matt Alderman's line art. I have high hopes for our little magazine, and I'm pretty excited about the issue we're working on now (watch for poems from Timothy Murphy and Pavel Chichikov).
* * *
In the interest of sampling all things counter, original, spare, strange, I have recently become enamored of flarf (warning: may lead to Trochee Fixation). To be honest, I haven't done a careful analysis of flarf assumptions and politics, or figured out whether the parabens and hormones I am ingesting when I read the stuff are going to kill me in twenty years. All I know is that it tastes awesome, in that fake-Mexican-food-Chalupa-Supreme sort of way. But flarf is such a flaming snow-cone comet of hype and irony that I doubt I will be thinking about it in a few years. Anyway, I was reading the ol' Poetry blog last week when I came across this sneering reaction to an article by Micah Mattix, a professor at Houston Baptist University and one of the poets we recently published in Dappled Things. Basically Mattix says that recent efforts to push flarf as the future of poetry are misguided, since flarf is rooted in the same narrow ideology that gave us Language poetry and its cynical sycophant, the poetry of disjunction (or "elliptical lyric"). Instead of writing flarf, Mattix says, we should write in "natural" poetic forms:

What is needed now is not more ideological poetry but a new discovery of the “fundamental and perennial rules” of poetry. Without rules, there is no order and, therefore, no recognition. In the end, it is this recognition that makes experiencing art worthwhile. Via complex forms, we recognize the paradoxes of our present existence, or our fractured, conflicting selves, our yearning for coherence, transcendence, and closure, and the infinite beauty of the Creator.

Harriet went bananas over this, tittering at the idea of a "right-wing think tank" thinking about flarf (I admit that it is an amusing picture! but you don't have to be liberal to care about poetry), and asserting that Mattix "seemingly hasn’t read anything ever written about poetry or aesthetics." After the offended lefty knee-jerking subsides, the blog goes on to ask a good question: "But which forms, precisely, are “natural?” Which are not? And where (geographically, historically) do these “natural” forms come from?" Mattix replied with a longer dissection of the limitations of ideology, and concluded cryptically:

Beyond signification, hierarchy, self-reflexivity, closure, and ambiguity, what are other new discoveries in natural forms? To be honest, I am not sure, but this is really a question for poets.

In some respects, asking this is like asking a chemist what new isotope he will discover next. Who knows? However, having mastered the rules of his science, the chemist works to discover new rules, new compounds, and, therefore, contributes to his craft.

Mattix's takedown of ideology is refreshing, and ultimately he seems to be calling for a dimension of freedom that modern po-biz lacks. But his coy refusal to give specific examples of natural form is maddening! Where are these splendid songs that take into account "the inescapability of meaning and significance" and "how people really use language" while recognizing the "inescapability of form" and how the rules of poetry "are the very rules of God, reflected in the material world and existing independently of matter only in God himself"? We do get a third-party quote praising Dante's terza rima for embodying Trinitarian theology, but that's all. I want more.

It is strange to me that Mattix took flarf as his jumping-off point; it just seems like a trendy opening for him to talk about Maritain and poetic form. In fact, I think he has misjudged flarf. He supports his assertion that flarf is just another ideological spasm with a quote from flarf poet Rod Smith about "bad poetry" being just a label that the privileged use to maintain hierarchy. I myself criticized this statement in my little flarf essay. But the flarf movement is not a monolith, and Mattix ignores the opinions of other poets like Sharon Mesmer, who cited, as inspirations for flarf, "a dissatisfaction with certain LangPo products, a crying need for humor, and the creeping realization that American poetry overall was a bit lacking in life," a lack of life stemming from an "over-reliance on theory." Flarf, of course, started life as a juvenile prank that turned into a mailing list. Any theories about its poetics came after the fact. Does Mattix want a poetry that captures the way people really speak? Flarf certainly captures the way people speak on the internet.

The question of whether flarf has form is actually very interesting. Your typical "disjunctive" poem, of the sort that circulates like a smooth, die-cast token of avant bona fides, is marked by relentless change. Every sentence starts a new subject. It's like channel surfing, and my primitive human brain finds it perverse and annoying. A flarf poem, on the other hand, often concentrates obsessively on a word or phrase and develops its obsession using that stodgy traditionalist technique, comic timing! "Pizza Kitty" for instance: it was written using the results of a Google search for "pizza + kitty," and the two words recur over and over as in a sestina. If it had any agenda other than making me snort coffee from my nose, I missed it, sadly. Repetition is, of course, the essence of poetic form. Meter consists of certain repeated rhythmic patterns; rhymes repeat sounds; a sestina repeats the same six words in a fixed order; the Psalms repeat syntax in the figures of parallelism. The fact that flarf cobbles together phrases from the internet isn't remarkable. Collage has been important since the Modernists, and even existed in ancient times: look at the art of the cento, in which poets took lines from Virgil and Homer and rearranged them to make new poems. Sometimes this definitely took a subversive turn, as in the case of Faltonia, an early Christian poet who wrote the life of Jesus using the verses of pagan Virgil.

Flarf is less ideology and more id. Just look at "Chicks Dig War," which, the Constant Critic says, "deserves all the nervous accolades being spilled like martinis onto its open flames." People have been comparing it to "Howl," but to me it also seems like a hyperactive development of "The Naming of Parts," another poem about war, sex, information overload, and Mad-Libbing. (Dylan Thomas reading here) It's queasy and hilarious and horrible, being a sort of vortex created by barbaric YouTube comments and letters to Salon.com. Its guilt-tripping misogyny touches a sore nerve previously stung by Wilfred Owen's "Greater Love," a beautiful, cutting, unfair poem.

In the end, I can't say whether flarf is too "ideological" to count as one of Mattix's natural forms. I can only say that I process it as poetry and experience the sort of psychosomatic feedback which indicates that this is poetry in search of a reader. I can only say that it sticks in my memory, which is the sine qua non of strong poetry. Nada Gordon had this to say in response to a critic, and it's true in my case:

Even so, and even as an insider, my sense is that Flarf poems actually are memorable, although more perhaps because they are "bad" (In the sense of Eartha Kitt's "I Want to be Evil") or obnoxious or funny than because they are “good”: once you have heard titles like “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” “Chicks Dig War,” or “Mm-Hmm” you will have a difficult time forgetting them even if you want to. They are mindworms.

Poems don't achieve mindworm status unless they have "self-reflexivity of sound or meter, some sort of closure, ambiguity, and so forth." Flarf, or at least some flarf, must be legit even by Mattix's standards.

The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed

2011-02-09T12:30:00.001-08:00

Is a poetry of place even possible anymore? As more and more of the countryside is eaten up by housing tracts, as television and recorded music continue to iron out regional accents and musical traditions, our attempts to display terroir in art sometimes seem like boosterism. Everywhere I go in America, I find individuals who are bravely devoted to their local bands, beers, pubs, coffee houses, chilies, cheeses, churches, mountains, and hiking trails. And yet... and yet... I wonder if there is anywhere in America where the complex interplay of landscape, language, history, and culture could give us a poet like Garcia Lorca or George Mackay Brown or Seamus Heaney: greatness that is also local.

I wonder about this because it is a greatness I look for and quietly long for, although it embarrasses me to admit it. The longing is complex; it is a combination of homesickness and poem-sickness. It begins as a childish encounter with your surroundings, and increases exponentially with an awareness of the foreign: British children's books, Bible stories set in exotic lands of election and exile. My awareness of place was also sharpened because my family flew to New Mexico every summer to visit my grandparents in Santa Fe. I exchanged my green suburban valley for a lofty desert plain, Martian-looking volcanic mountains, piñon trees, adobe houses, Indian pueblos, and austere and fiery cooking:

vs.

California showed up in my poetry early on. I was nine (or was it ten?) when a long drive back from Oregon took me past Mount Shasta and then miles of orchards. The contrast of lemons and snow made me a little dizzy and I wrote a poem about a fairy lady who lived on a snowy mountain and was courted by a prince from the lowlands. I christened the imaginary country Ralay Calee, which at the time sounded wonderfully musical. The obvious echo of "Cali" skipped my mind. "California," of course, is a made-up name to begin with--it originates from a Spanish fantasy novel--so it intrigues me that I thought of my own home as a natural fairy-tale setting. As I got older, I wrote poems about exploring the creek near our house, about the summer and the trees, about the orchards and the city. I fell for Hopkins, who, crucially perhaps, is something of a wannabe regionalist--a fundamentally suburban poet who was deeply affected by place, to the point that each poem breathes the air of the place where it was written. North Wales in particular was his "mother of muses": his mature style was born there, and for the rest of his life a trip there would get his fitful creativity flowing again. When he struggled to describe what he wanted in a poem, he invoked old Anglo-Saxon rhythms; but also a kind of "starriness" and "quain" (I can't define it either!) derived from Welsh-language poetry. Sprung rhythm made verse "stressy," but Welsh chimes made it "starry." An obsession with assonance is part of it--I have followed mine from Hopkins to Lorca to Dylan Thomas to Sylvia Plath, and I am not over it yet--but there is a certain elusive note which I (perhaps foolishly) think of as "Anglo-Welsh," in the bell-notes of "The Candle Indoors," in the dark owl-notes of "The Moon and the Yew Tree," and especially in the crazed virtuosity of "Author's Prologue." Dylan Thomas also excels at an Elizabethan sort of virtuosity--see "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"--but "Author's Prologue" is different. And so strikingly hypnotic that, if you look to the right of the youtube video, you can jump directly to Sylvia Plath chanting away under its peculiar spell. (in "On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad")

Where was I? I really need to come back to the New World.

Christian Wiman wrote a nice little piece on the Orkney Island poet George Mackay Brown. It begins thus:

For contemporary American poets a poetry of place almost always means a poetry of missing places. Whether because of itinerancy or the pace of change, American poets don't inhabit the same places they inhabited as children, much less the places where their parents and grandparents were children. Some tend in memory a kind of ambered past which no longer has anything to do with an actual place (think of Philip Levine's Detroit); others actively seek out sites on which to feed their feelings of dislocation and dispossession (Richard Hugo's drive-by elegies are an example). And if the proliferation of poems written about distant family history may be partly explained by current literary fashion, it's also a genuine expression of personal and cultural need, an attempt to inhabit some more permanent past, as if by rooting themselves in a place of their own making, American poets might grow more knowingly out of it.

There are also poets like Tony Hoagland, who makes his living writing plangent-yet-prosy verse about the rootlesness of Americans: the title of his latest collection, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, should tell you what you need to know. Hoagland always seems to be writing about "America," an undifferentiated blob-place consisting of a single endless interstate punctuated by fast-food joints. He writes about reality, certainly, but I for one can only read so many Hoagland poems before I become irritated and start wondering, "Why don't you turn off the TV? Why don't you find another form of Saturday recreation that doesn't involve going to the mall?" But my anger is misplaced--even self-righteous. Hoagland is writing precisely for the rootless, for people who have no spiritual traditions to help them resist the consumerist bacchanal. They may have gone far in their formal education, but they missed out on certain civilizing influences. How are they supposed to reject the world and its works and pomps? If they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?

My parents were disconnected from their parents. We were middle class. There was no religion in my family. So there was an absence of ceremonial knowledge, there was an absence of inherited knowledge, there was an absence of family stories, and there was an absence of instruction. (transcript)

As an unhappy teenager, Hoagland clung to poetry for stability. And he says that poetry continues to hold him in place: "I am a very typical American: I'm de-racinated, I'm rootless, I have no root system. At least a very typical middle-class American, I suppose. Poetry has been that culture for me."

Even when American poets settle down and choose one state as their home, they can sound commitment-phobic. This is the playful trope in Joan Logghe's poem, "Something Like Marriage": "I’m engaged to New Mexico. I’ve been engaged for 18 years. / I’ve worn its ring of rainbow set with a mica shard." We may enjoy living in an area, but we are always ready to cut it loose if a more tempting opportunity beckons. When I say "we," I mostly mean Americans with a strong family history of emigrating, which includes moving around the US. There are also Americans who dig in and stay put, sometimes never traveling 50 miles beyond their birthplace. Those of us with a family history of migrating tend to look at these people as stuck and probably bound for poverty. Something is always telling us to trade up, to get out before everything goes to hell. There may even be some good old-fashioned fear of death involved: just as contemplating marriage can make you vividly aware of "til death do us part," contemplating making a permanent home suddenly steeps your surroundings in the solemnity of death. I have a friend at UK who is married, has a new baby, owns his own house, and is firmly determined to live in Lexington for the rest of his life, barring some unusual catastrophe. I remember him driving past the university hospital and saying, calmly, "I'll probably die in that hospital." He even sounded pleased.

In The Place That Inhabits Us, one Ann Fisher-Wirth has a poem asking her family to scatter her ashes around Point Reyes. She sounds like she means it. A strain of hopeless, headlong love runs through the anthology, and occasionally it hardens and dignifies the poem's utterance, so that it seems backed by necessity.

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

Three Oaks - Eyvind Earle

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

This is Dana Gioia's "California Hills in August." An understated poem, with rough four-stress rhythm, and a final stanza which reverberates deep in my heart. Or here's Adrienne Rich, taking a break from politics:

I am stuck to earth. What I love here
is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks
small canyons running through pitched hillsides
liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading
to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle
on their blond hills.

In the same poem, speaking to someone absent, she sounds a familiar note of exile: "This is no place you ever knew me." A Californian could say that to the familiar ghosts of most of history's writers. California is neither Asia nor Europe, though it stands about halfway between them. On the coast, a sense of oceanic dizziness coexists with a particular, almost painful, beauty. The dizziness might be represented by Whitman's offering:

Facing west, from California's shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the
land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western Sea—the circle almost circled;
For, starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia—from the north—from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south—from the flowery peninsulas, and the spice islands;
Long having wander'd since—round the earth having wander'd,
Now I face home again—very pleas'd and joyous;
(But where is what I started for, so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)

This was included in a division of the book titled "Like One Eternity Touching Another," from a poem by Yehuda Amichai, describing the hills north of San Francisco touching the ocean. I think in a flash of a tiny valley where a salty wind raced through the long grass, shush, shush, small dairy farms sheltered, a pond for cattle was a slice of sky, and the ocean reflected itself into that strangely bright air; and I ate the best strawberry in my life: red as a Chinese wedding dress, still warm from the sun. Hang on for dear life, the Pacific seems to say.

The Bay Area is one of the epicenters for Language poetry, which is notorious for making the reader do most of the work of determining meaning. This sort of disorienting and disjunctive writing is not much in evidence here. Few of the poems in this anthology deviate from the standard American style of colloquial free verse narratives. Some of them are more rhapsodic free verse, some of them are even metrical (Dana Gioia, Kay Ryan, Thom Gunn, and (oddly) Ursula LeGuin all appear), but there are perhaps two or three poems which really distort sense and syntax. Gertrude Stein might have had a field day "describing" the Golden Gate Bridge, if she hadn't ditched Oakland for Paris, but the charm of this anthology is precisely in the little jolts of recognition: I grew up there! I know exactly what that plant smells like! etc. This anthology isn't on the cutting edge of formal innovation. As I read, I often turned away from the poetry to consider the place--sometimes because the poem was good per se, but often because, although mediocre verse, it pushed the right buttons. Some of the poems were both evocative and finished, though, like Kay Ryan's "Green Hills":

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the langour of their
rolling over.

I like to read that over and over again, it is so weirdly musical; such a perfect little artifact. This slender anthology is giving me ideas for what I might write, and I think it is a worthy addition to the oak-mast and leaf-duff of California poetry, which is still relatively thin. I could say more: about Gary Snyder, the Beat legacy (if you can call it a legacy; more like a meteor trail), Czeslaw Milosz at Berkeley... I could quote lines and phrases: "the valley of the ghosts of orchards," "Altamont of my rib, aqueduct of your chest," "California, easy to lose, bound with rivers." There's too much to talk about.

There was one poem, "Wild Fennel," which described a terrain so familiar that I was convinced the author (Catharine Clark-Sayles) had been walking near my family's house. She tells of walking at the feet of the "western hills" in the damp chill of early spring, stopping with her husband to watch the red-winged blackbirds "where they nest in last year's reeds." She reaches into the "fine feathery greenness" of wild fennel to sniff the sweet anise scent, and finds some tiny seeds that the birds have missed. She eats one and offers the other to her husband who takes it with "a look as old as Adam"-- a nice touch. The blackbirds, too, with their "metallic cries" and "flickering red patches" offered their own pleasant jolt of recognition: she records them saying "Here, here, I am, here" whereas I have always heard them saying "Oh my go-osh," like so many Valley girls. I am far from home, and I don't know where I will be living even next year, but I know that a certain stretch of California, from the Russian River to San Luis Obispo, is the place that inhabits me.

Finals Week - can't write anything til Monday

2010-12-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

I'll get back to the blog next week. Look for my review of The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed.

Dappled Things is back... for the moment

2010-12-13T07:58:00.001-08:00

The newest issue is finally online. You can read one of Steven Milne's poems here (I gushed about him back in November, remember?). His other poems are also wonderful, although you can only read them in the print magazine. I was also impressed by "Poem with a line from the Desert Fathers" (Sabrina Vourvoulias), which is a sinewy, courageous meditation on this astonishing little story. The way she puts the key line is, "Why not become fire?" There is also a nicely-done critical essay on the novelist J.F. Powers, and some book reviews that may interest you.

We are currently putting the finishing touches on the Christmas issue, which will be a celebration of DT's fifth birthday, and hopefully the new website will be ready by then. Despite this good news, though, Dappled Things has been suffering in this economy (as have we all), and donations have slowed down so much that the journal is in danger of folding in the next year. If you feel so moved, please send DT a Christmas present via PayPal, or send a check here:

Dappled Things Magazine
2876 S. Abingdon Street, C-2
Arlington, VA 22206

Dappled Things is the only Catholic litmag in English today. We fill a niche, we meet a need... but there's more to it that: Dappled Things has drawn on some of the liveliest circles of young Catholic writers and given them a forum for their most purely imaginative efforts. Paper architecture, dystopian fiction, holy/unholy sonnets - all of this is leading somewhere, and I want Dappled Things to keep taking me there.

I have copied Bernie's message for anyone who didn't get it through email:

Dear Friends of Dappled Things,

As many of you will have noticed, there has been a long delay in releasing the Mary, Queen of Angels 2010 edition online. The reason is that we have a brand new website in the works and were aiming at releasing that edition once the site was ready. So the good news is that the issue is now online. The bad news (no, not the news mentioned in the subject line, read further for that) is that the new website has given us more trouble than we expected, so we are publishing this issue still under the old format, hoping to have the Christmas edition up in just a few weeks to inaugurate the new design.

Let me add that the Mary, Queen of Angels edition is truly an exceptional one. Here's what one reader wrote to us after receiving the print edition of it: "I have to say this issue is really something else . . . . 'After' is . . . one of the best [poems] (DT or otherwise) that I've ever read . . . . If DT isn't on everyone's radar, the world is blind." Click here to read the poem online.

In this issue you will also find:

* The dramatic, haunting photographs of Rick Westcott;
* A wonderful reconsideration of the unjustly forgotten Catholic novelist J.F. Powers;
* "I've, like, got to get there, like, now" a delightful rant by the inimitable Eleanor Bourg Donlon on language, unintelligibility, and irreverence;
* Reviews of award-winning graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang's new book of stories, The Eternal Smile; and of House of Words by Jonathan Potter, a beautiful book of poems which is the first title from Korrektiv Press, a promising new venture by the writers of Korrektiv.org;
* "Achilleus Now," an insightful feature essay by Robert T. Miller on his experience teaching great books and how old books still matter to young students;
* Great new stories and poems that you can only enjoy as a subscriber to our marvelous print edition.

Please stop by the site to enjoy all of this wonderful new work. And if you like what you see, please consider making a donation to Dappled Things. Despite the enthusiastic messages that we regularly receive about the magazine, the response to our just-launched annual fundraising appeal has been dismayingly slow. Unless this picks up soon, Dappled Things will have to close down shop in the new year (this is the bad news from the subject line). As the only Catholic literary magazine in English that is currently in print, we think this would be a loss to our culture and the Church. If you agree, please don't let this happen. Stop by the website today and make your secure donation by credit card via PayPal. Or you can send a check, payable to Dappled Things Magazine, to the following address:

2876 S. Abingdon Street, C-2
Arlington, VA 22206

Don't assume that someone else will do it. Please contribute today as you are able.

Wishing you a lovely Gaudete Sunday,

Bernardo Aparicio Garcia
President, Dappled Things

Sundry Sunday Links

2010-12-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

Bob the Ape has made a poem out of one of my posts! After six years of scribbling for St. Blog's, I've finally arrived. Thanks a million, Bob!

Dylan has joie de vivre.

"If you're close enough to read this, you must be a New Critic." Poetry bumperstickers! For AWP! Most of them are obnoxious (really obnoxious) in-jokes, but I can't help but laugh at some of them. Oh, and I'D RATHER BE SCANNING QUANTITATIVE METERS, kthanxbye.

I want this book for Christmas. I'm such a sucker for chiming Anglo-Welsh chamber music.

An article on the wild, untameable holiness of prosody. I don't agree that meter is never imitative (I've certainly speeded up verses to express quick motion), but I think Rothman makes a good point: "...prosody has nothing to do with the referential functions of language. Rather, verse draws its power from an utterly different faculty, the number sense, which orders experience not by construing it into propositions but instead by categorizing and counting, an activity that does not require linguistic syntax." In other words, more poetry critics ought to know music theory.

Wind and Window Flower

2010-12-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

Photo credit
I've never lived anywhere cold enough for frost crystals to grow on my windows, and lacy window-frost has always seemed like a trope to me. Sort of like nightingales. But this is why Google Image search was invented! Ecce pruina.

Suddenly obsessed, I went to this page which is maintained by a physics professor from Caltech. As I suspected: "Window frost was more common in the past, when houses still had single-pane windows." I'm crazy about this site. It seems that frost, hoarfrost and rime all denote specific ice formations... I'm especially awed by the "frost flower," which appears to be made of cotton candy. Had no idea that water could do that. Apparently it results from water slowly freezing out of wood...

True to the Caltech spirit, there is also a page devoted to the art of growing one's own snowflakes in a vapor diffusion chamber.

And yes, this is a poem about frost by Robert Frost. Happy Advent!

C.S. Lewis and the perils of poetry

2010-12-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

All C.S. Lewis ever wanted to be was a great poet, and when he realized that he never would be, he resigned himself to producing marvelous prose. As a hopeful young poet myself, I find his longing poignant and frightening. How he must has slaved at that unreadable epic of his... but all the industry in the world won't get you the muse or the duende.

Is it too psychologizing and unfair to assume that his poetic failures had something to do with his hatred of Eliot? For years, the two men nursed a dark dislike for each other; only gradually did they lower their defenses and discover how much they had in common. It is clear to me, though, that Lewis's total scorn for modern poetry didn't do his own poetry any favors. Beyond even that, he was apparently impatient with even the most traditional sorts of poetic apprenticeship. In other words, he just didn't think like a poet; in some ways, he was too intelligent. There's a certain amount of stupidity that goes into good poetry.

The following "confession" was meant to be satirical, but as you will see, it is Dame Irony's revenge:

A Confession

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening -- any evening -- would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things… peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

I think most people who like this poem like it for the catalog at the end, with its nouns as bright as enameled roundels on a medieval chalice. But sadly, Lewis spends the preceding stanzas playing laborious Salieri to modernism's scabrous Mozarts. He was normally a perceptive critic, and it shouldn't have taken him twenty years to admit that the sun could rest on the horizon like a sick man after the doctor has "put him in the dark of ether." Couldn't he translate the Latin occidens? Eliot was certainly subject to the "stock response" of west-evening-death; he just expressed it in it a fresh way. To which Lewis seems to reply: "Don't get fresh with me, kid. I know what a sunset looks like." How he could bear to re-read that laboured, dissipated simile of the ship "whose freight was everything" leaving mankind forever? Forever? Everything? Three modifiers for "leaving behind"? Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

The chilblain on the cocktail shaker's nose is at least funny as parody, and the rhythm of "Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes" is jolly; but in this stanza he falls victim to the main hazard of trying to parody surrealism: he dredges up images that are actually rather apt and satisfying. Waterfalls will now remind me of torn underclothes because of you, my dear Lewis. If the hokiest poetaster can say "scarf of mist" or "bridal-veil falls," surely a comparison to ragged cloth shouldn't stump even poetic beginners. As for the moon as a "hump-backed crone," one wonders again where Professor Lewis's Latin was when he was writing this, as gibbus (a "gibbous moon") is Latin for "hump." (I would be shocked if he slammed Virgil for personifying Mount Atlas as an old grey-bearded giant.) The metaphor he offers instead, the eye of the Cyclops, seems much more shocking. And again, the whole counter-image is a depressing, long-winded retreat from the pungent images that we are meant to laugh at. The moon is a "prodigy," which isn't an image at all. A prodigy is merely something extraordinary or ominous, and it summons no clear visual image whatsoever. Not content with this vagueness, Lewis changes "prodigy" to "riddle." Then comes the Cyclops' eye, "glaring from the Cyclops’ brow / Of the cold world," and I want to break something because HOW can the cold world be the brow of the Cyclops? If the cold world is earth, there is no freaking way that our round planet can be the moon's eye-socket. If the cold world is the moon, there's no way it can be both eye and brow. If the cold world is Space...

All right, I feel better now that I've taken a box-cutter to the sofa.

The impression you get from this poem is that C.S. Lewis could not deal with metaphors or similes, which would be a grave defect in an admirer of Homer, or of pretty much any poet, ancient or modern. That would be a false impression. It is lovely to turn to his prose and breathe in the subtle wood notes of a description like this one from That Hideous Strength:

Perhaps the winter morning sunlight affected him all the more because he had never been taught to regard it as specially beautiful and it therefore worked on his senses without interference. The earth and sky had the look of things recently washed. The brown fields looked as if they would be good to eat, and those in grass set off the curves of the little hills as close clipped hair sets of the body of a horse. The sky looked further away than usual, but also clearer, so that the long slender streaks of cloud (dark slate colour against the pale blue) had edges as clear as if they were cut out of cardboard. Every little copse was black and bristling as a hairbrush, and when the car stopped in Cure Hardy itself the silence that followed the turning off of the engine was filled with the noise of rooks that seemed to be calling "Wake! Wake!"

When I first read that perfect, homely simile, "every little copse was black and bristling as a hairbrush," and almost tripped over the numinous cry of the rooks, which whisks you up to the sublimity that a lesser writer would have labored in magenta and cerulean to induce, I was thrilled and shivery. Notice that he doesn't say that the trees were like virgin pillars in the green halls of Diana. He says they resemble a hairbrush. He also says that the clouds are like cardboard, which doesn't seem so distant from those tin-can glaciers. I want to revise my earlier assessment of the poem: it's not that he thinks the modernist images are weird, it's that he thinks they're ignoble. His prose, however, seems to quietly resolve this anxiety.

What gets to me the most about Lewis's poetry, and most suggests that his efforts in verse were more careless than he knew, is the sheer sloppiness of the prosody. A.N. Wilson mentions the terrible enjambments and unscannable lines that mar Dymer, that still-born epic; and "A Confession" launches itself in iambic pentameter, absorbs Eliot own pentameter line, and then collapses into tetrameter: "In VAIN. I SIMply WASn't ABle." Or maybe there is a rest after "vain"? But the next line is definitely tetrameter: "To me each evening looked far more." The stanza concludes with a baggy alexandrine that looks like "The Wreck of the Deutschland" in cargo pants. But wait... was this supposed to be a return to iambic pentameter?

LIKE the dePARTure from a SIlent, yet a CROWded, SHORE

Or maybe another tetrameter?

Like the dePARTure from a SIlent, yet a CROWded, SHORE

I would be very surprised if any two people scanned this poem in the same way. It's obvious to me that Lewis's mind got way ahead of his iambs, and you can see him powering through their little hurtles with more haste than grace. I've seen this tendency in every poem of his I've read. (Count the stresses in that last sentence: Lewis would have had no qualms about sticking it willy-nilly into a poem!) If he had something to say, he was usually better off working it into a book or article; but he craved the megaphone of verse. The poems betray their prose fervors:

On a Vulgar Error

No. It's an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way Prosaic
mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say How
modern and how ugly? They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.

This seems a mere appendix to some essay on modernity. There is not much here that would not be more convincing in prose.

Now, you should never turn your back on Lewis. Like the sea, he is capable of lifting a freak wave and knocking you out. I would be grateful ever to write something so good as this:

The True Nature of Gnomes

Paracelsus somewhere in his writings tells us
A gnome moves through earth like an arrow in the air,
At home like a fish within the seamless, foamless
Liberty of the water that yields to it everywhere.

Beguiled with pictures, I fancied in my childhood
Subterranean rivers beside glimmering wharfs,
Hammers upon anvils, pattering and yammering,
Torches and tunnels, the cities of the dwarfs;

But in perfect blackness underneath the surface,
In a silence unbroken till the planet cracks,
Their sinewy bodies through the dense continuum
Move without resistance and leave no tracks.

Gravel, marl, blue clay--all's one to travel in;
Only one obstacle can impede a gnome--
A cave or a mine-shaft. Not their very bravest
Would venture across it for a short cut home.

There is the unbridgeable. To a gnome the air is
utter vacuity. If he thrust out his face
Into a cavern, his face would break in splinters,
Bursting as a man would burst in interstellar space.

With toiling lungs a gnome can breath the soil in,
Rocks are like a headwind, stiff against his chest,
Chief 'midst his pleasures is the quiet leaf mould,
Like air in meadowy valleys when the wind's at rest.

Like silvan freshness are the lodes of silver,
Cold, clammy, fog-like are the leaden veins
Those of gold are prodigally sweet like roses,
Gems stab coolly like the small spring rains.

(first published in Punch, October 14, 1946)

my apology for poetry

2010-11-28T17:25:00.000-08:00

Crazy Brain II - Peter Ciccariello

How in this swank parade of fragments, erasures, selflesh, no one knows; interrogations and extraordinary renditions, surrendering to information, to mind as screen, surfing channels, survival of the flittest, self a locus where voces cross always. Voice is Latin for word. Where are the women in the litmags? Why aren't we submitting?

Because I am at home, taking care of my two metaphysics. Particular friendships are dangerous. Also the unobservable virtual unicorn particles. I am afraid they are right. The beginning of fear. The worse the better. The night the day.

Degrees of Separation

2010-11-27T21:01:00.000-08:00

I met a man once in Manhattan who had known Auden. Not as remarkable, perhaps, as meeting someone who had known the secretive Greta Garbo, but I'm a West-coast girl and have only been twice to New York. Over tea, he gave me a new simile for the poet's face: "like a waffle iron," he said, which I found vivid. And Auden met Yeats once, and thought he was "pure evil." And it is a little known fact that Yeats once met Hopkins in Dublin, though it was a dull evening and they didn't have much to say to each other.

I don't like the idea of talking to famous people - it makes me dizzy. I'm afraid I would talk gibberish; or worse, fall completely silent. Though Seamus Heaney visited Lexington just before I began studying here, and I do kick myself for missing him. Oh well. I can continue folding my paper snowflake.

Hopkins' grandfather, as it so happens, studied medicine with Keats. Whew. After that I can't go on. Everything goes misty. What other poets can I wiki-walk over to? Hmmm... my mother and Dana Gioia were in a class together in the seventies. I met Erik Keilholtz in San Francisco once; he had given a lecture on Fra Angelico. Erik was friends with surrealist poet Philip Lamantia, who was friends with all the Beats.

I wonder dreamily if I can connect myself to Virgil somehow. I did meet Cardinal Arinze once. He is hilarious. He also knows Pope Benedict, who knew John Paul II, who knew... and etc., etc. Every pope either knows the old pontiff or knows other cardinals who knew him. This is the easy part. Virgil, on the other hand, knew the Emperor Augustus. Is Constantine the first link between popes and emperors? I assume they weren't talking before the whole "In Hoc Signo Vinces" incident.

But what I'd rather imagine is that Virgil used to get his breakfast sometimes in a thermopolium near the Palatine Hill, and he had a bit of a crush on the cute guy who worked there, one Quintus Fabius, who later opened a new shop trans tiberim, or as they now say, in Trastevere, where he made friends with a Jewish scribe, whose grandson briefly worked for the poet Statius... and so on for centuries... and the farmer from Bracciano, just north of Rome, met a girl from Gubbio, and they got married, and their son, who was studious, became a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, and one of his students fought in the Second World War, survived, and took charge of Zubboli's Books in Assisi, and when I dropped in in 2007 and asked if he had any Vergilio, he said no, but we do have some Ovidio. And he smiled wryly through his white beard and sold me the Metamorfosi di Publio Ovidio Nasone.

Who are you connected to?

New Pavel Chichikov! new links!

2010-11-21T08:25:00.000-08:00

A new book from Pavel! Must get this now!

I ran across Pavel's poetry when I was in high school, and I've been reading him ever since. If I ever get over my spider/moth phobia and make friends with the insect kingdom, it will be his doing.

He also has a podcast. Maybe I should get me one of those.

* * *

I updated the links in my sidebar today. Are there any that you guys think I should add? This is your moment to agitate for your favorite arts-related blog!

Optime valeatis.

lush new poetry in Dappled Things

2010-11-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

I just got the newest issue of Dappled Things in the mail... it looks lovely, as always. Alas, the website has not been updated yet, so if you don't subscribe, you'll have to wait a bit. I am still gleeful that we have published the poems of one Stephen Milne. Perusing his website, I marvel at the way all of his poems hit a certain baseline of interest and pleasure, a rare feat for a contemporary poet (or for any poet, really). I am tempted to wonder if this is because he is English, which seems like an embarrassingly retrograde thought... but maybe British poets haven't heard of the false dichotomy between anecdotes in colloquial language on the one hand and High Experimental Word Salad on the other. Or maybe it's just because he's good. This is poetry in love with place, in love with visual detail, in love with history. It seems to take its cue from those crunchy, countryside-loving poets whose names begin with H: Hopkins, Heaney, Hughes, Hill. Check out "Hopkins at Bovey Tracey" for a taste.

We are also publishing a nice essay by Robert T. Miller on teaching the Iliad. Miller is a law professor at Villanova University and a friend of James Matthew Wilson, who wrote (and is still writing?) one of the most thoughtful critiques of contemporary poetry and criticism that you're likely to find: parts I, II, III.

Poetry "Do"s and "Don't"s

2010-11-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

Verbal fashions which may or may not be real. Because I'm feeling silly.

The Aeneid and Zombies

2010-11-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

Chaucer is back! And he has thought up even more middle English horror novels for your entertainment:

In thys sequel to the moost-loved epique of classical tymes, the howlinge soule of Turnus gooth nat to helle but rathir infecteth the manye deade left from the horribel werres that the booke doth narrate. Zombie Pallas, Zombie Mezentius on hys Zombie horse Rhaebus, and Zombie stag-of-Tyrrus-that-Ascanius-accidentallye-killede, all lumber wyth muchel gore and litel speede Aeneas-toward. Aeneas hideth wyth the men of Troye in a shoppinge mall, in which he saith to them “Peraventure oon daye yt shall do us goode to thinke upon thes tymes,” and hys men saye to hym, “Peraventure oon daye ye shal get a newe lyne.” And then thei shal maken good battel ayeinst the Zombies, bewieldinge the many wepens that are redily founde yn an anciente Etruscan shoppinge malle. Many a zombie is slayne wyth a club of golf, a baseballe bat, or a smalle terracotta figuratyve sculpture. At the ende of the greate tournement ayeinst the undeade, Aeneas sheweth his hardinesse and knighthede by backinge ovir the last of the zombyes wyth a truck, commetinge upon which deede of chivalrie he saith: “Hic sunt lacrimae rearended!”

More terrible macaronic puns await.

AE Stalling's "Anti-Muses"

2010-11-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

I was very sad indeed when this post disapeared from Harriet, but I found it again on Squandermania and decided to repost the whole thing here. Enjoy!

Like the Muses, they are attracted to talent and promising projects, and the presence of several at once probably means you are on to something big. Still, they can frustrate or even destroy the most inspired tender new poem, and send the poet into despair, alcoholism, or flash fiction. The more we know about them, the better.

Their mother is Amnesia, “Forgetfulness.”

They are goddesses, 13 in number:

Typo
She who holds the alphabet under her terrifying mis-spell.

Blabē
The Anti-Muse of computer (typewriter, fountain pen, goose quill) malfunction

Keno
The Anti-Muse charged with the terrifying void of the blank page. As her symbol is Zero, she also governs poetry royalty checks.

Krisis
The Anti-Muse of unsympathetic, snarky and condescending reviews. Yes, it is possible to dismiss an entire book of poetry on the grounds of capitalized lines.

Tripsichorē
“She of two left feet.” If your rhythms clunk, your lines lurch, your sonnet does not scan, this Anti-Muse may well be to blame. Mind you, if everything you write goes da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, you may be under the sway of her equally evil twin, the jackbooted Metronomē.

Errato
Not to be confused with her half-sister, Erato. She is the (Anti-) Muse of false revision. Also, she whispers the name “Cortez” when you should be writing “Balboa”.

Anecdotē
She governs rejection slips and rigged book-publishing contests and all impediments, real and imagined, to publication. She also inspires poets to versify pointless incidents from their everyday lives.

Telephonē
Her name means “voice from afar,” thus “interruption”. Sometimes this Anti-Muse manifests herself as the shrill ringing of an annoying device. Sometimes it is a small child calling for a cookie from across the length of the house. Her seat of worship is Porlock.

Pezo
She is the Anti-Muse of Prose disguised as Verse by Line-breaks.

Chimaera
Represented with the head of a warthog, the body of a Slinky, the wings of a bat, and the tail of a beaver, she holds sway over all mixed and misbegotten metaphors.

Polyhohumnia
The Anti-Muse of verbiage, 1000 words that create no picture. She also governs graphomania in all its manifestations, and the related ekdotomania, the compulsion to publish a new book every year.

Hyperbolē
The goddess of blurbs.

Ann-Athema
A total lack of subject matter, thus a curse on confessional poets with nothing to confess. Suddenly the poet starts writing poems about sitting down at his desk with his leisurely morning coffee, looking out the window, and writing a poem ("Morning Coffee"). See also Anecdotē."

the poetry of old textbooks

2010-11-10T13:48:00.000-08:00

A First Latin Verse Book, circa 1890.

First Exercise

1. Rome was falling.

2. Fire in the city.

Second Exercise

1. Vergilius, the poet, made most-beautiful songs.
2. The beautiful mother comes, the beautiful girl comes.
3. A bird comes, the messenger of light.
4. The horsemen come out of the wood.
5. The horsemen hurry through the waves.
6. The wind carries the swift ships.

Third Exercise

These-things remain to-us.
Buried bones.
The waves of the sea.
Lay-aside tears now.
Let others relate these-things.

Fourth Exercise

The wind carries the swift ships over the waves of the sea.
The husband crosses the ocean: the wife returns to the city.
A year ripens the grapes on the sunny hills;
A year carries the stars in fixed succession.
The wind carries the swift ships over the waves of the sea.

Name that Rhetorical Device! and some links

2010-11-08T06:57:00.001-08:00

As I look at my post on "Fern Hill" again, I see that I was trying to express how the word "sea" is contained in "easy" and "mercy," so that it seems to emerge of necessity. "easy...mercy...sea." Mer-sea. Ain't I clever! But I have been tallying up instances of this device for a while. Does anyone know if it has a name? Here are three examples:

Her earliest stars, earl-stars, stars principal, overbend us - Hopkins

Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim. - Seamus Heaney

egret, killdeer, bittern, tern. - Robert Hass

Interview with AE Stallings, and three eery new poems.

I would really like to read what Victor Segovia wrote when he was trapped in the mine.

Coolest poet name ever. And she gives good review-writing advice.

The new musicality.

If you haven't seen the ongoing poetry articles in the Atlantic Monthly, here is the series so far: 1,2, 3.

And a little treat from My Mom the Style Icon: a dress with an Alan Ginsberg poem on it.

On the power of Y

2010-11-06T08:41:00.001-07:00

Sometimes a poem's stylistic power comes from the smallest, humblest units of meaning. Alliteration, metaphors, nonce words, magical conceits - all of these splashy tactics are wonderful, but sometimes you can work wonders with a quirk of syntax or the connotations of a suffix. I was marvelling at this as I read "Fern Hill" again the other day. This poem is unashamedly lush, but some of the greenery is suprisingly common and dandelion-like. Think about adjective suffixes for a moment, and the finicky differences in tone that they can create. "Childlike," vs. "childish," The visceral, tactile quality of toothsome, loathsome, handsome, lightsome. That marker of latinity: feral, liminal, sepulchral, cerebral. Then there is the -y suffix, which has a diminutive, childlike feeling to it. Airy, watery, fuzzy, yummy... happy, tipsy, itsy-bitsy... you get the picture. Dylan Thomas uses it brilliantly in Fern Hill. It's a very simple tincture of childhood in this nostalgic, happy-sad poem; and he gets it just right: not so much of it that it becomes babytalk.

Look at the first stanza. "easy, happy, starry, lordly, barley." The 'y' in barley isn't a suffix, but it's an elegant little echo. "easy" and "happy" are insistent motifs in the poem. Next stanza: "happy, only, mercy, slowly." I love the bittersweetness of "only" and "mercy," where the -y becomes a little filip of innocence under the influence of "happy." Third stanza, laying it on thick: "lovely, lovely, watery, nightly."

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.

Now we're mid-poem. Switch! The tone becomes bass-like and sonorous.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

No '-y' endings here, except for 'very' (and perhaps "whinnying"?) Is that devious or what? Then the next to last stanza: "happy." That's all. But the repetition makes it clear and obvious. Final stanza: "easy, mercy."

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

That final line is well known for its beauty. But marvel for a minute at how that last word, "sea," rolls up like a huge snowball from the white field of all those teeny little words: "easy, happy, starry, watery, lovely."

Some Poetry Blogs Reviewed

2010-10-31T07:36:00.000-07:00

I've only recently started to follow poetry blogs in any quantity. When I started reading blogs, Catholic blogs were the first ones I bumped into, and I set about making a little niche for myself within that sphere. I've always been on the fringe of it, but I've been happy. However, when I started For Keats' Sake, I originally had grand hopes of becoming a slender bridge between St. Blog's and the poetrysphere. That hasn't happened, of course. I do think that I've brought some more poetry to St. Blog's, but I haven't ever broken out of the Catholic orbit and into another. To do that, I would have to have read and commented on poetry blogs and made friendships with poets. And I am pathologically shy when it comes to my own poetry. I do not play well with others. The very thought of applying to a writing program spreads an ugly, uncollegial smirk across my face... and the prospect of swishing into a room full of live poets and chatting with them is really scary. I'm working on desensitizing myself, of course. Last week I went to a small reading on campus, talked to the editor of the Heartland Review, read a couple of (other people's) poems, promoted Dappled Things a little, and did not die.

I have read Harriet for some time now, and kept up with poetry news via Choriamb, but I have seldom ventured into Harriet's blogroll and started browsing. I'll try, and get discouraged. Ron Silliman is kind of like the Amy Welborn of the poetry blogosphere. He used to have a Mark Sheavian flora of poisonous com-box warriors, but he finally got fed up and disabled comments. I've never really gotten into his blog, sad to say, because the ratio of links to commentary is just too high. The blogs I gravitate to feature an intimate, epistulary voice with a lot to say about a topic that interests me. Smaller blogs. Blogs with little salon-like circles of friendly, non-flamey readers. And a lot of poet bloggers commit the same faults that most obscure bloggers (like myself) commit: not posting often enough, getting bored with their blogs and dropping them for a month with no explanation, posting too many squibs and not enough essays. Also, some of them are written in non-sequential, eye-gouging experimental prose. Just what you'd expect from a poet, ha! But reading through a variety of these blogs has also encouraged me. Many of them are also crossover efforts, to some extent. I haven't run into any other trad-Catholic poet bloggers yet (besides the merry little band I already link to!) but I've found bloggers who are self-consciously Latino, or Wiccan, or gay, or even (scandal!) formalist. This really cheers me up. I'm sure they would coalesce into a band of maenads to rip into my politics (such as they are), but otherwise there's some welcome ideological diversity.

So here are a few poetry blogs I want to read:

Isola di Rifiuti
John Latta has a wonderfully recognizable, Anthony Blanche-ish sort of voice. He affects apostrophes in his past tenses ("All the surrounding houses demolish’d, ailanthus and other weed trees partout."), which is enough to make me feel charmed. And he writes nice, bedsheet-sized posts on everything from modernism to Martial.

The Newer Metaphysicals
I was attracted to this blog by a series of posts titled "Manning makes Fun of His Elders," in which the eponymous blogger fisks various famous definitions of poetry:

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is thus completely revolting Carl, if my morning's experiments are to go by. Remark, for instance, that it is impossible to get the weedy taste out of the dough batter, and the subsequent mouth-burning is an experience comparable only to the most recent Ted Kooser collection.

I'm sorry to say that I just can't get enough of this sort of thing.

Squandermania
Don Share is the senior editor of Poetry, so maybe that accounts for the coherence and disciplined posting schedule on his blog. Check out this essay on Pound which turns into a heartening stand on behalf of learning foreign/classical languages.

George Szirtes
Another poet-blogger with a voice I just like. He is an Anglo-Hungarian poet and translator, and in response to this submission guide:

XYZ will accept no poems about cats, funerals, churches, the Holocaust or disasters seen only on television.

once wrote a poem titled

BURYING A CAT
ON THE DAY PICTURES OF THE BELARUSSIAN EARTHQUAKE
WERE BROADCAST ON THE NINE O’CLOCK NEWS

He is, needless to say, worth reading.

Poetry and Popular Culture
This blog is much less garish than you might expect, as it has a retro focus. Mike Chasar's own description is perfect: "Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War." See this post on a Depression-era can of "Magic" birdseed and get addicted.

OMG I think I like Flarf....

2010-10-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

This post started out as a rant about why flarf is inane and a waste of time. I still think it's inane and a waste of time, but at some point I realized that I like a number of inane, time-wastey things; and why shouldn't flarf be one of them?

Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

This ode to flarf reminded me of Dylan Thomas's stated MO:

What I like to do is to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly-realised truth I must try to reach and realise.

I lean heavily towards this kind of writing, this view of language as lovely stuff. Dylan, though, sees himself as a grown-up and a professional, while the flarfistas are gleeful, bratty kids.

What I like about flarf:

1. It's childish. It's very much in the spirit of the rude songs and word games that gave us such pathetically all-consuming joy on the playground. (Okay, maybe some of us enjoyed singing "Here comes the bride, undressed and wide" more than others.) And to become a poet today, you are expected to put away childish things when you go to grad school and undergo initiation into theory. (I imagine it must be like training to become a geisha.) Eventually, poets were bound to snap and go back to making mud pies and eating paste. That's sort of what I get from this interview with flarfista Sharon Mesmer:

....you can throw into the mix the inevitable influence of the New York School and its various generations, a dissatisfaction with certain LangPo products, a crying need for humor, and the creeping realization that American poetry overall was a bit lacking in life. To me, this lack of life can be blamed on the over-reliance on theory that leeched into the work. Now, that said, I'm certainly not suggesting that everything theory-related is bad! Or that these responses should never have happened. Questioning reader involvement, authorial hierarchy, what the page constitutes – all very necessary. I'm just saying it might be time to come up for air now.

I agree with that last sentence, and I think a lot of people would. What we do after we come up for air may differ. Some write poetry about lolcats.

2. It's humorous. Most contemporary poetry wants to be one or more of the following: ironic, honest, smart, disorienting, everyday, conscientious, or experimental. It's not often trying to be funny. You can't help snorting, though, at titles like "Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas," "The Swiss Just Do Whatever," and "Chicks Dig War." The humor ranges from sweet lolcat silliness to 4chan-like trollery - many of these poems are just dying to be called "inappropriate."

3. It's a true vernacular art form. The flarf poets were not the first people to make poetry out of spam. Remixing, auto-tuning, meme-seeking, googlewhacking, refrigerator magnets - all of this comprises a thick leafmeal of pop collage in which flarf can bloom. I'm not a die-hard democrat when it comes to art, but American poetry has become academic, and any poetry movement that might actually appeal to ordinary smart people who read xkcd or the Onion comes as a relief.

So flarf is fun and fun is good (saith Dr. Seuss), but combine the word "Flarf" with "Poetics of," and you murder the joy. You would think that flarf poets would succeed in keeping anyone from taking them seriously, but that underestimates the zeal of grad students with dissertations to write. Flarf has a dark side - or worse, a beige side. From Poets & Writers:

Edge Books publisher Rod Smith, a poet himself, says he feels the collective is prompting a bit of anarchy in the poetry world by widening the vocabulary of what is permissible. "Aesthetic judgments about what's bad in a very hierarchal society are usually serving upper-class people with a certain amount of privilege," he says. "So for a bunch of poets who are very well schooled in a variety of traditions of American poetry to take what's considered bad and throw that at people is a very interesting maneuver. It's not simply bad poetry; it's quote-unquote bad poetry written by people who know how to write poetry."

Yeah, down with skill! Beauty is oppressive! I agree that the loudness and rudeness of flarf are a tonic to the hyper-academic or virtuously workshopped poetry that has ruled for the past few decades, but a little violence and inanity goes a long way.

My main problem with flarf as the future of American poetry? It's lazy. A poetic form that robots can excel in as easily as I can does not set the bar very high. Look at this piece of ready-made flarf from my own combox:

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to get rid of nastiness of the life

Is it not gently, hypnotically rhythmic? Is it not devastating in its campy glorification of avarice? How uncomfortably intimate that "Let`s take this option together." You may argue that it's not flarf; it's the stuff that flarf is made of. Okay. But my work is literally cut out for me (cut and pasted out of a combox), and I can dash off something in minutes. I just can't respect that as my life's work. Exegi monumentum AOL perrennius.? Please!*

The humor of flarf, as I mentioned before, is uncommon in modern poetry; and a lot of poets (and poet-wannabes) are simply unable to cope with such impropriety. This sometimes results in real-life Monty Python sketches like this: writer for Jezebel goes to a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, and hears a flarf piece which catches her fancy. She is not a big poetry fan, but this absurd, obscene poem makes her laugh. "But then," she says, "I was informed that I was loving it all wrong, because I laughed at the funny parts."

You can read more here (warning, gross language): "Let The Laughers Stand Up!": Scenes From The World's Most Annoying Poetry Reading. After she finished reading her poem, the author, Ariana Reines, asked the audience if there were any questions. One woman glared at the unpoetic interloper and said her laughter at the "sexier" parts had made her "uncomfortable." A bunch of other audience members agreed, and they piled onto Jenna like the Spanish Inquisition.

"Why are you mad?" called out [poet] Eileen Myles — again, I think — when my friend repeated that it was a savagely funny satire that we were responding to. The first woman, the one with the nasty look and the somewhat aggressive sense of propriety, said she hadn't meant to imply in any way that she thought laughing was wrong. "Of course laughing's not wrong!" I shouted. I couldn't help myself. I wasn't about to have my feminism impugned by these people — or my manners. "Why are you angry?" said Eileen Myles. "First you were laughing, now you're angry."

"Wait, no!" called out Reines. "We're all having a great time here! Come on, it's a party!"

I know that poets don't care if nobody likes them, but... dammit, this is why no one likes you!!! The red-state folks hate you, naturally, but even your fellow blue-staters find you insufferable. I am reminded of a review I read on Amazon, in which the writer said that reading poetry should be like licking shards of broken glass. He was serious. You can't have a conversation with such people about audience. Even Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to the world, as opposed to a suicide note. What, are we all cooler than her now?

Flarf comes out looking pretty good in this article:

For what it's worth, I went up to Ariana Reines afterwards, and told her I very much enjoyed her poetry. (It's really good! Not that I know anything about poetry.) And, I said, I hope my laughter didn't offend you.

She took my hand in both of hers, and replied, "I thought your laughter was great."

I can't really bring myself to love flarf, though. Flarf is free to be mean, retrograde, un-PC and awful, which can be fun for a while - but eventually one gets tired of being bludgeoned. I was both fascinated and revolted by "Chicks Dig War," which is apparently "something of an anthem for the Flarf Collective and its supporters." It's also a barbaric yawp from the id of a misogynistic liberal douchebag, brought to you by the Internets. There is some criticism of it here, along with a video of Gardner reading it. As is YouTube's wont, some commenters did not appreciate the irony, if that's what it was.

There's also a strain of political agenda in flarf which constrains all the naughtiness along disappointingly partisan lines. Flarf thrived on Bush, but it seems to have died down a little under Obama. From the same interview with Sharon Mesmer:

How might the poets—not just flarf poets—treat Obama? Have you sculpted any Obama poems?
SM: At around 8am on the morning after election Gary sent around a message that read "FLARF IS DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!" And then Rod Smith sent around a response: "o, wait a minute." Later, Gary sent around a fake Associated Press-type news release: "Historic Election May Signal Death of Flarf." And then a few days after that I sent around a poem (and keep in mind that Obama is the first political figure I actually love) called "Sorry, Even Mariah Carey's Dog Has Had Enough of Obama." He'll probably get his share of flarf. But whatever happens, I can say with certainty that I will always be incredibly grateful and amazed that he became our President.

So, no Obama raping a kitten, then. He might be allowed to ride a unicorn though.

*I have raised a monument more enduring than AOL. - Horace

Correction 11/1/10 - After listening to some of Ariana's poem, it didn't sound like flarf; and then I went back to this post, which I had skimmed through for the Jezebel link... the woman who started the row was--gasp!--Nada Gordon! One of the very founders of flarf. How surreal. So the only one who came out looking good was Ariana Reines, I suppose. Read the comment thread, if you dare--the freeze-dried intellectual hauteur on display is downright frightening. Did I mention that poets scare me?

The Ant and the Grasshopper

2010-10-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

At last! The children's contribution from the Lexington Conventiculum. Adorable, nonne? I thought the "Nunc tibi est moriendum!" was kinda harsh, but that's what big sisters are for... And "formicamica" = cuuuuuute!

Thinking of the Chilean miners...

2010-10-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

...this poem came into my head because of the opening:

Nick and the Candlestick
by Sylvia Plath

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

This is one of my favorite Plath poems. The occasion is the poet nursing her infant son Nick by candlelight. The creepy conceit is that she's nursing him in a cave.

I must confess that I have always loved caves, the fairy-tale premise of some hole in a hill, a muddy rabbit-run behind a boulder which leads to another world--a world with trees of gypsum, perfectly quiet weather, and a stone dome of its own, eerily devoid of stars. So the gothic ickyness of the cave in this poem is weirdly fascinating to me. What does make it horrible is that the miner seems to be trapped in the cave, with piranha-like fish nibbling on her toes. I love the way Plath smudges the lines between the physical room she's sitting in--a drafty room in an old house in the Devonshire countryside, I think--and the desolate mind-cave she takes with her everywhere. The cave isn't total fantasy--the blue light might be from the moon coming through the window, you can imagine cold draughts of air, and the candle of course is a physical candle, in a brass candlestick with a figure of Hercules kneeling at the base (she writes about it in another poem). I love how she feels her way into the poem, moving from assonance to assonance, hand over hand, like someone groping through darkness. ("Waxy / stalactites," "Drip / thicken," "womb / Exudes," "Black bat / wrap / raggy"...) It's musical and kinetic. At one point the musicality goes too far, when she says the black bat airs weld to her like plums, which is sort of baffling. I take it as a tactile expression. She is like the pit of a plum, with the plum-flesh vampirically glomming onto her. Think of trying to cut open a plum and pry the pit out, and you'll feel how hard it would be to pry off the black bat airs.

The candle gutters and shines out again, and she "finds" a baby. Here the poem begins to turn from ghoulish to poignant. This is Sylvia's own description of the poem: "...a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ill, does redeem her share of it." The woman may be trapped in the cave, but she can still exercise her free will within it: she has a job: she is a miner, and miners are searching for precious ore. Her great find is a ruby, the living ruby of her child. Sylvia Plath was often a disturbed and unhappy person, but she loved her two children and mothered them as best she could while suffering from depression. "O love, how did you get here?" She is amazed that this luminous, pure child could be born into the cruel "cave" she lives in, which is her personal darkness, yes, but also this fallen world under the rule of its dark Prince. (I don't know that she would have used these theological terms, but that's how I understand "the world's ill.") There is gratitude along with pity in her voice. The cave is no place for a baby, and so she tries to make it more homey. The roses and soft rugs are expressions of her love, but what soft and perishable items they are--"the last of Victoriana," she says wistfully. Those last four stanzas make my hair stand on end. Somehow the roses and rugs generate a real air of coziness which begins to glow stubbornly in the grim cave, warming the woman along with her child, although intellectually she doubts that her new decor has made any difference. Comfort me with chintzes, sustain me with teacups! You can set a Victorian armchair down there and put doilies on all the rocks, but those blind fish are still in the water, waiting to snack on you. Your attempts at domesticity are useless. You can make cheesecakes and sing nursery rhymes, but it's all a figleaf...

But no. Your love makes a difference. The roses are bright and fragrant, the rugs are deep and soft. The candle's yellows hearten and it "recovers its small altitude"--the candle is at least as real as the cave. Something about the delicate balance of the words--the brave, rough 'r's in "rugs" and "roses" contrasted with their possibly ineffectual prettiness, and the unscornful sadness of "last of Victoriana"--makes them seem like tiny facets of some ambivalent jewel. The two fierce provocations that follow are splendid: "Let the stars plummet to their dark address": who knew that the plain word "address" contained a latent glamor waiting to be unlocked by the word "dark"! I think she transcends her usual technique of serial assonance in this line. "stars" and "dark" share an assonance, but the secret alchemy of the other sounds seems inexplicable, and therefore miraculous. She keeps going, pitch-perfect: "Let the mercuric atoms that cripple drip into the terrible well": what are "mercuric atoms"? In a literal sense they are poisonous radiation, or the atomic bomb... "Mercuric" seems to widen the circle from radiation poisoning to mercury poisoning... really, they could be anything that is hostile to life. (After thinking some more, I see that "mercuric" can mean "liable to splitting into smaller balls, the way spilled mercury does." She has a vivid description somewhere of mercury from a shattered thermometer.) There's something Audenesque about the "terrible well," the cryptic allegory of it. And the assonance of "cripple...drip" forms a faint tether with the stalactites at the beginning that "drip and thicken." Whatever, she says, let them drip. No one can deny the beauty of my child.

The last stanza affirms the child completely, ending with a serene nativity scene. The phantasmagoria of the cave image has retreated, and we are back in the bright, solid narrative of the stable and the manger. Although if we think a little bit, we quickly draw parallels between the desolate cave-scape in Plath's poem and Christian themes surrounding the Nativity. You can go to the Holy Land and see a cave that is the traditional birthplace of Jesus, and carols always sing of the bitter cold and dark on the night he was born. Herod tried to kill the infant Jesus, and he succeeded in killing others. There is something of the Coventry Carol in Sylvia's bittersweet poem. In this poem, though, she holds up her hand to the melancholy and says Stop. This far, and no further.

Well! It looks like "Nick and the Candlestick" is slightly relevant to the rescued miners after all. Coming out of the mine into the daylight must have been like being born again.

Famous Seamus

2010-10-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

I came home to find a "Sorry we missed you!" note from the US post stuck in my door. I sighed - and then I noticed a mail truck idling further up the street! Ran all the way there and bounced up to the door as if expecting ice cream. What I got was this:

More Poetry Goodness

2010-08-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

So freakin' adorable! (Here is the written text.)

New Dappled Things! Check out the visual art.

This site is a neat survey of British poetry magazines. I'm looking at this raucous Welsh one right now... it's called The Yellow Crane.

"Thei are fillinge me to the brim with all kindz of latin shenanigans and the partyinge heere ys out of control."

2010-08-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

Chaucer Jr. apparently rocked his first year at Oxford, judging by his casual use of Linglish - a dialect I'm familiar with by now. When conventiculum ends, I always have a little trouble choosing Latin or English, and I alternate between them for a day or two. It's fun and kind of weird to hear everyone's "real" voices. And Marcello, it was awesome to see you again!

Videos are now online... N.B. four versions of "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse," written and acted by us. And from last year, a play acted out by the kids(I wish the one they did this year were online; it was adorable!):

Poetry Links

2010-07-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

The Trousered Ape creates a Shakespearian slasher flick.

From YouTube, an old documentary on Hopkins in five parts. Look for the cool footage of St. Beuno's in Wales in part 3.

One of my favorites from Dylan T., "Author's Prologue."

Sylvia Plath reads "Poppies in October" (one of her less savage poems) and "On the Difficulty of Conjuring a Dryad" (can't you hear her channeling Dylan? pretty sure this is older), and bites Ted Hughes in the face just after 7:18. (Dude, run away!)

Oh yes, and I finished my Horace. Email me if you want it (I don't want to publish the whole thing on the web, in case some journal accepts it.)

Blog Friends

2010-06-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

Jen and Sheila both tagged me for this award. Thanks, ladies! It made my day to be reminded of our friendship, and I feel driven to update my poor, neglected blog once more.

Orders are as follows:

1) Save the image above so you can upload it on your own blog without direct linking.
2) List 5 things you absolutely love to do
3) List 5 friendly bloggers, and comment on their blogs to let them know they've received an award!

So, 5 things I absolutely love to do:

1. Be with my family and friends. I get depressed when I'm far away from my people! There are few things I like better than just being at home, or going on fun outings with my mom and my sister (beach, shopping, opera, etc.), or wandering around town with my brother, or going skiing with my dad... rosary on Friday nights at my grandma's house, capers with cousins - this is living. And now that two of my dearest Christendom friends have moved to California (for the time being), I have been able to have them over and share the pleasures of home with them. It's my wistful fantasy to have everyone I care about in one place, preferably beautiful northern CA. I think that now is as close as I will ever get to that fantasy, so I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

2. Eat and drink. These joys are closely allied to the ones above. I cooked some nice things for myself back in Kentucky, and I enjoyed my meals even when I ate alone, but I didn't care as much; and I got kind of thin and wan (stress helped with that too!). I've been an incorrigible hedonist and foodie ever since I was a toddler screaming for fresh Brussels sprouts in the supermarket and requesting Parmesan cheese for Christmas, but it's the context of food - family and friends - that makes it so satisfying. My mom will cook dinner, my dad will open a bottle of wine from Paso Robles or San Luis Obisbo... and I will try to be a good girl and remember to do the dishes. Yup.

3. Be in the Magic Poetry Zone. Whether I'm reading something that makes me feel drunk and sober at the same time, or writing something that sings and shouts and demands to be born in a particular form and and color and meter, these are the times when I feel most alive. As I've said before, they come less often now that I'm a little older and have some grown-up responsibilities. I'm not too troubled by this; I think I'm going to develop a new zest for poetry soon. I identify ruefully with this post from Heather Ettlinger's blog.

4. Read and speak Latin. I can just feel the continuity with the Renaissance and the Middle Ages and antiquity, and it thrills me to pass the charge along. And speaking Latin in public has the tang of a madcap conspiracy. Every now and then someone realizes what we're doing, and I think it adds a bit of wonder to their day.

5. Appreciate beauty. Whether it's natural or man-made or intellectual or spiritual. Kind of a broad category, but it is something I do a lot in various ways.

Five bloggers:

Dylan, whose blog is a rose window of jewel-toned poetry and apt spiritual nuggets. He knows the word-lust that Hopkins and Dylan T. inspire. He opened my narrow mind to the charms of e.e. cummings, for which I owe him big time.

someguyonthestreet. His blog has been going for more than a year now, and it's fantastically eclectic. Always enough linguistic wiki-walks to make Joyce proud.

Paul Stilwell, poet and artist. I'm a fan of his work!

Enbrethiliel. Sheila tagged you, but I'm tagging you too! Can't leave out the indie Catholic blog princess. ^_^

Steph. My friend since freshman year, starting her life as a Navy wife in CA.

'Cellar door'--and more.

2010-02-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

I just came across an article in the New York Times which examines one of the weirder memes in English letters: the alleged beauty of the word "cellar door." Most of my readers probably read this somewhere in Tolkien's lectures, if they know about it all. But Tolkien wasn't the first to say it. In fact, as I have learned to my astonishment, "cellar door" has been a hardy little meme for a good hundred years now. Part of the meme seems to demand that you not tell your readers where you came up with the claim, or else offer a suspiciously vague story of some unnamed Spanish guy or famous professor who first noticed the word's beauty.

I feel bound to mention that Michael Gilleland of "Laudator Temporis Acti" wrote a post about "cellar door" last year, in which he cites many of the sources used in the NYT article--and a couple of others, among them the original Tolkien quote. Turning to Wikipedia, you will find it cited in Tolkien and Mencken, as in the other articles; but you will also find an anecdote from the historian Jacques Barzun which is so elaborate that might be for real:

I discovered its illusory character when many years ago a Japanese friend with whom I often discussed literature told me that to him and some of his English-speaking friends the most beautiful word in our language was “cellardoor.” It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese. Was it because they find l and r difficult to pronounce, and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment? I asked, and learned also that Tatsuo Sakuma, my friend, had never seen an American cellar door, either inside a house or outside — the usual two flaps on a sloping ledge. No doubt that lack of visual familiarity added to the word’s appeal. He also enjoyed going to restaurants and hearing the waiter ask if he would like salad or roast vegetables, because again the phrase 'salad or' could be heard.

At first I thought that the opening gambit, "I discovered it many years ago from one of my Japanese friends," was a damning indicator that Barzun was remembering something that had never really happened, prompted by coming across the meme in print. But when he gives his friend's name and adds the detail about "salad or," he makes me wonder if there isn't really something special about "cellar door." I actually do find it pleasing, although not more pleasing than a hundred other unlikely-but-lovely words like "railway" or "whitewash"--and it's a kind of touchstone for me when I think about euphony in general. I'm very much on the side of those who say that sounds affect us as sounds, even before meaning. The "meaning" of a sound like "sss" or "mmm" or "ahhh" is very broad, very general; but it is there.

Not everyone believes this, though; not by any means! If you read to the end of the "Laudator" post, you will find this little thought experiment of Max Beerbohm's:

What you take to be beauty or ugliness of sound is indeed nothing but beauty or ugliness of meaning. You are pleased by the sound of such words as gondola, vestments, chancel, ermine, manor-house. They seem to be fraught with a subtle onomatopoeia, severally suggesting by their sounds the grace or sanctity or solid comfort of the things which they connote. You murmur them luxuriously, dreamily. Prepare for a slight shock. Scrofula, investments, cancer, vermin, warehouse. Horrible words, are they not? But say gondola—scrofula, vestments—investments, and so on; and then lay your hand on your heart, and declare that the words in the first list are in mere sound nicer than the words in the second. Of course they are not. If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. This rule may be applied to all the other words in the two lists. And these lists might, of course, be extended to infinity. The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes. Beauty sounds as ugly as ugliness sounds beautiful. Neither of them has by itself any quality in sound.

Where to begin? First of all, what a charming serial synecdoche for a certain very High Church, very English vision of happiness: "gondola, vestments, chancel, ermine, manor-house." This is not a list of beautiful words, this is a list of "words that make me think of Brideshead Revisited." But let's look at the words a little closer. What I am going to say about them is certainly not scientific; in fact, I am just going to go by my own tastes, which are of course subjective. Still: "gondola" is more amusing than beautiful, or maybe I should say amusing and beautiful. If I were going to use it in a poem, it would probably be in a tragicomic poem about how frazzled and overrun Venice is. In fact, I did once, in a bit of teenage doggerel (which I won't share). The word "gondola" has a kind of slack-jawed, blissed-out langour. It is hard to imagine a boat called a "gondola" moving very fast, for instance. "Scrofula" is a very different word. That initial "scr-" is seldom an indicator of anything sweet or lovely; and that "fu" sound connotes disgust in many languages. The feminine-sounding ending only makes the word more grotesque. As for "chancel," it is pleasing to the ear - but so is "cancer," if you can forget what it means. Maybe I'm simply hearing a rhyme with "dancer"? That's another aspect of euphony: the sound has a vague connotation by itself, but when you hear it in a word, it carries a little bur or tatter of every other word you've heard with that same sound in it. "Ermine" sounds ugly to me; it's a nubby, nebbishy little word, rather like "vermin." "Warehouse" sounds more beautiful to me than "manor-house" - not because I'm a redblooded 'Merican who has no use for aristos, but simply because the word is stronger and lovelier. It must be the Anglo-Saxon strength of the spondee, combined with the airiness of 'w' and the antiphonal contrast between the vowels 'a' and 'ou.'

Finally, it has often been noted that the word "beauty" is rather ugly. I've always wished it sounded nicer, and I feel the same way about the Latin "pulchritudo." Beautiful, pulchra. Meh. But Greek "kalos" or "kala" hits the mark for me. This touches on the tragic aspect of euphony: that some lovely things have ugly-sounding names, and that no word can contain the full reality of what it denotes. The word "girl" for instance--it doesn't sound as sweet as "lass" or as cute as "chica." And so it is vulnerable to defacement: how easy it is to say grrl. (Google it and see what you get!) Fortunately, the more delicate kinds of euphony and cacophony aren't a hindrance to our daily speech. "What a cute little girl!" "You girls are awesome!" Who is distracted by the euphony of these phrases? They mean what they mean. In poetry, though, the question of euphony is always open. "Girl" is such a basic, necessary noun that its euphony isn't always an issue; but an adjective like "sweet" needs looking after. It's not that it's played-out and Victorian; it just needs to modify the right words. The sound of it is surprisingly high and sharp; it's a thin, piercing, flute-like word. When you use it, you need to surround it with sounds that bring out the poignant sharpness, not the sugar-water thinness. How different it is from the Latin "dulcis" or its Spanish and Italian descendants. The "dolce" kind of sweet is a custardy, burnt-sugar sweetness. (Initial 'd's always taste sweet, really - the dental 'd' has some of the strength and cleanness of 't', but being voiceless it is sort of muted and velvetined - like a berry dipped in chocolate. Darn! This is making me hungry again! And now it's Lent...)

Chesterton was the one who named and confirmed my feelings about 'sweet' and 'dulce': please do read this marvelous passage from "The Thing: Why I am a Catholic." He's talking about the misunderstandings that can arise when Latin is translated gracelessly into English: "I will venture to take one example, about which I feel very strongly. Will somebody with better authority than I have announce in a voice of thunder, through a trumpet or with a salute of big guns, the vital and very much needed truth that "dulcis" is not the Latin for "sweet"?" He goes on to say about "sweet" much what I just did: "It is at once too strong and too weak a word." Finally, he applies this observation to the saccharine overuse of the word "sweet" in Catholic devotional books, which he blames on bad translations of French and Italian prayers. I got a good laugh from his witty parting remark: "I believe that this incongruous and inaccurate repetition of the word "sweet" has kept more Englishmen out of the Catholic Church than all the poison of the Borgias[.]"

So "cellar door" can sound strangely attractive, and "sweet" can sound irritating. How odd. Does anyone reading this have a "cellar door" (or a "sweet") of their own?

The Seven Chimes of Poetry

2010-02-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure who will benefit from this post, but I amused myself greatly by writing it. It's just a neat little way I found of organizing various "chimes" for when I'm writing.

Every reader knows that there are different ways in which two words can sound alike: rhyme, alliteration, assonance and so on. But not everyone is in the habit of thinking of all these sounds as siblings. In fact, they can all be linked together in a very simple way. Perhaps it is an oversimplification, but for the purposes of English poetry I assume that the average English word is composed of a consonant, then a vowel, then a consonant. (ex. - sun, moon, shout, with, bring, flight) This simplified scheme can be expanded to account for longer words, but it is easiest to think in terms of one syllable beginning and ending with consonants. (Obviously, this system is far less useful for Latin and Spanish!) Then all you have to do is go through all the possible combinations of consonant-vowel-consonant. And here they are!

CVC
Alliteration. You know the drill - "field and fountain, moor and mountain." Alliteration is very common in Anglo Saxon poetry, and in English poetry in general. What isn't always emphasized is that alliteration is really a likeness between consonants. When two vowels sound alike, you have assonance. Even if they are both initial vowels. (ex: "angels' age" - Herbert) As many have pointed out, Pope's line "And apt alliteration's artful aid" misses both alliteration and assonance.

CVC
Assonance. This is where you get two words with the same vowel sounds. Assonance is even more powerful, to my ear, than alliteration; vowels are the body of speech, as singers know. Some kinds of Spanish poetry use assonance the way we use end rhyme in English. The Song of Roland uses it - check out Dorothy Sayers' translation to get an idea of the effect. And if you listen to any kind of popular music or rap or spoken word poetry, you will notice (maybe to your irritation) that assonance, rather than perfect rhyme, joins one verse to the next. (I'm not really bothered by it myself. Blame my Lorca addiction.)

CVC
Skothending. I would have had to call it "final alliteration" if I hadn't come across this fantastic Norse word in some of Hopkins' lecture notes. Skothending apparently means "glancing blow," and that is the effect it gives: a very subtle one. One poem which uses it to great effect is Horace's "Carpe diem" ode. In it, Horace keeps ending words with 's' right where there is a metrical pause: "Tu ne quaesieris - scire nefas; "numeros. ut melius"; "sapias, vina liques". Somehow this enhances the haunting, waltz-like feeling of the meter. A subtle effect, and not very well-known.

CVC
Rhyme. For perfect rhyme you need the final stressed syllables to match up in both vowels and consonants. Final assonance can also count as rhyme. Slant rhymes would take a whole other post! A lot of prosody writers put three of my categories under the heading of "slant rhyme," but I think it's more useful to distinguish things like pararhyme and save the term "slant rhyme" for really distant cousins like "tree" and "fray," while allowing that someone who mixes up assonance and pararhyme and such in his line endings is, well, slant-rhyming. Seamus Heaney is a modern master of both kinds of slant-rhyme, the more and the less blurry.

CVC
Front-Rhyme. Instead of keeping the end of the word and changing the consonant at the beginning, you keep all of the word from the beginning and change the final consonant. This gives power to "The Wreck of the Deutschland" - "giver of breath and bread" - and to "Altarwise by Owl-Light" ("shape without shade...").

CVC
Pararhyme. For pararhyme, you keep the hard consonantal shell of the word but change the vowel. Wilfred Owen kind of owns this one: "Courage was mine, and I had mystery; / Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery." He commonly used it in place of end rhyme, and it was his signature technique. WH Auden has a nightmarish little poem in which a good 50% of the fear is generated merely by the pararyhmes: "reader/rider," "midden/madden," "fearer/farer," and finally - well, read it yourself! Brrr.

CVC
Homophone. "Rein/rain/reign," "rose/rose/rows," etc. It's unseldom that you would see "rows" and "rose" together in a line: usually homophones are more powerful, not as puns, but as echoes within a single word. To make up a lame example, "rain of fire," when spoken, could also be heard as "reign of fire."

* * *

Why is it important to know these things? Because then you can mix them up! Interlacing these categories successfully takes practice, but it's worth it. For a locus classicus of the technique, see these lines from "The Wreck of the Deutschland":

.........Oh,
We lash with the best or worst
Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,
Brim, in a flash, full!

I don't think I've ever seen a more exhilarating chord of assonance, alliteration, rhyme, pararhyme, and beautifully opposed vowels. I've read that phrase, "lush-kept plush-capped," so many times without ever breaking the charm that holds it so elusively together.

More subtle, but no less beautiful, is this line of Dylan Thomas: "And I rose in rainy autumn and walked abroad in a shower of all my days." Assonance is particularly strong here, with all those 'ah' sounds. The play of sharp, sibilant sounds in "rose," "shower," and "days" cuts the richness of the assonance beautifully. Mmmmm. This is making me hungry. Anyone have plans for Mardi Gras?

All Manner of Loveliness

2010-02-11T18:21:00.001-08:00

I wanted to write a real post today, but I had too much to do. So here are some links which should make you happy.

A French religious community for women with Down's Syndrome and the women called to live with them in community. (My thanks to Seraphic for this one.)

Winter vacation pictures from Cachemire et Soie. (I try and practice reading French there, but I haven't made much progress!)

Regina Doman's family lives out a parable.

Cannelle et Vannille. Period. (Just in case you haven't heard of it already.)

This artist from northern Alaska, who makes amazing jewelry inspired by her Eskimo heritage. (Thanks to my dear sister for this link.)

So much beauty, even in winter.

Poetic Conspiracies

2010-02-06T14:49:00.001-08:00

Has anyone seen this article over at Poetry Foundation? It's about Michael Field, a Victorian poet who was actually two women, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. I had never heard of "Michael Field" before, and I was quite taken by a few of his poems. This excerpt sums up the main argument of the piece:

Although Bradley and Cooper frequently acknowledged in their personal writings the prejudice against women writers, they viewed the prejudice against collaborative creativity as their larger foe. In a journal entry dated July 21, 1891, Bradley recounts an evening that she and Cooper spent at the London literary salon of American poet and critic Louise Chandler Moulton. By this point, Bradley and Cooper were known by most in their literary coterie to be Michael Field, and after an encounter with the poet/novelist Thomas Hardy and man of letters Theodore Watts-Dunton, Bradley exclaimed with emphasis that “[b]oth these men found it inscrutable, incomprehensible, that two people could write poetry together.”

At first I thought, "It is incomprehensible. Who else does that?" And then I remembered that Keats had written a verse drama (not a very good one, really) using plots and ideas cooked up by his friend Brown, and of course there is the famous collaboration of Eliot and Pound on "The Waste Land," which was going to be called "He Do the Policemen in Different Voices" before Ezra got his hands on it. I also thought of those two Australian poets who created the incompetent Ern Malley to sock it to Modernism. One of the attractive things about poetry is that, unlike film, it can be created by one person on a zero-dollar budget. But there's no law about this. You can collaborate with another writer; and as for the shoe-string budget, you can always run over it by deciding that you need to move to New York or Munich or Constantinople to write your poetry.

And lest I forget, I have collaborated on poems, just for fun. My sister and I once wrote a ballad together, trading off stanzas; and Sheila can testify that she and I wiled away an hour, while we were at Christendom, on a parody of "Jaberwocky" (she came up with all the good bits, though). In fact, I can't be really good friends with someone and not want to write stories, poems, or invented languages with them; and I do think that for some people this impulse can result in really good art. I bet that most of my readers have cherished a project or two of this sort with their dearest friends. As for famous examples of writing as a team, are there any I've missed? I'm sure there are.

I'm rather intrigued now by the ladies behind "Michael." Here is another smidgen of background information:

Though Bradley and Cooper often discussed modernizing their style and worried about becoming too traditional and passé, they never bowed to critics, even when their readership dwindled to an intimate few. In their later years, when they converted to Catholicism, as was the trend among many of their circle, their lyric poetry and plays continued to echo with Shakespearean and mythological themes and never shied away from their virile power and a masculine tone.

Read "Summer Wind" for a taste of their talent. And then read their translation of a lyric by Sappho, a version worthy to be learned by heart:

XXXVI
Sappho

Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust
Its timeless light can stain;
The worm that brings man's flesh to dust
Assaults its strength in vain:
More gold than gold the love I sing,
A hard, inviolable thing.

Men say the passions should grow old
With waning years; my heart
Is incorruptible as gold,
'Tis my immortal part:
Nor is there any god can lay
On love the finger of decay.

The Fine Delight That Fathers Thought

2010-01-31T12:29:00.000-08:00

Now that my second semester of grad school is well on its way, I feel relieved. I actually feel like I know what I’m doing this year, and random crying jags are a thing of the past (I hope). I feel like I can afford to work on my private projects more, and my confidence seems to be returning with the sunlight. Today there is lovely white snow and a brilliant blue sky. Obviously a perfect day for… blogging!

Grad school wasn’t the only thing that was keeping me from blogging very often last year. I’ve reached that point in my life where poetry is suddenly “for keeps,” and I haven’t been completely happy with my progress. Far too often, it seems, I go over things I wrote in high school and find them superior in feeling and ear to things I’ve written more recently (of course, there is also a lot of dreadfully serious gush… I have made some progress). I am a lot more educated and a little more experienced than I was then—but somehow I have less inspiration to work with.

There are plenty of professional prose writers who will tell you to grow up and stop believing in the Inspiration Fairy. And they are right. If you are a journalist or a freelancer or a screenwriter, you must keep writing at all costs or find another line of work. But when you are producing something as superfluous and ornamental as poetry (yes, I’m being facetious!), there are really no incentives beyond your own satisfaction to keep you on track. If you simply do not write the poetry, no one will notice. And this is only fair, because second-tier poetry is less satisfying than all but the silliest popular potboiler or big stupid summer action movie. People have been pointing this out at least since Horace. I myself would rather go see another Die Hard sequel than read another okay-ish ghazal in the current issue of Wingéd Zebras. (Er… well, at least the ghazal wouldn’t take several hours to read.) Anyway, my point is that I used to get very strong inspirations, and now I mostly don’t—which makes me loathe writing.

I have no idea where they came from, but I remember those startling inner weathers; the haze of meter that crept around things and turned the moon into a drum and the wine glass into an organ pipe; those urgent voices. I was spoiled, I guess; and if this “inspiration” was so important, why was it wasted on juvenilia? Sounds suspiciously like adolescent vapors to me. Except that I remember feeling it for the first time when I was nine, and it followed me faithfully through my first year at college. Now it’s over. Instead of being driven to scribbling by eerie, Apollonian compulsion, I am sitting down and saying, “Now I will write a sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet. About… something.” I have been going on like this for two or three years now, and even though I get little zaps of muse every once in a great while, it’s hard to make myself care. I think it’s telling me to shake things up and do things differently; and I’m confident now that it will show me something new once I’ve slogged away on my own for awhile.

So I’m through with drifting along and feeling mildly depressed about my lack of awesome. I’m going to think seriously (and unseriously) about poetry. I’m going to write things and see what I come up with. I’m going to study Shakespeare more thoroughly than I ever have before, and I’m going to translate Virgil and Horace into English. (I’ve already started creating my own version of the Alcaic stanza in English.) Part of my problem is that I haven’t translated anything for a while. When I was in high school, I translated quite a lot of Spanish poetry. I’ve always had a certain knack, and I need to exercise that more. I’m helping to edit Dappled Things, and I’ve had a couple of poems published there, and two reviews… I think I’m sort of stuck with this poetry thing. At least it gives me an excuse for being weird and spacey: “Don’t mind Meredith. She writes poetry. Really quite harmless.”

Someday that motto at the bottom of this page is going to get an answer. This is my fond belief, and I have the rest of my life to find out if I’m right. I can "cease to be silent" just by talking, but it’s the uti chelidon part that comes only as a gift. To be like the swallow- to sing like a bird-that’s why we try. I think of those exquisite little things from the seventeenth century, frighteningly beautiful tunes like… Sweet rose whose hue, angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his eye… or anything involving the words Ask me no more… and I could almost sing back. Then I wake up and I’m back where I started: practicing.

PS - Sheila is back with her series on "The Wreck of the Deutschland"! Check it out....

Christmas Dappled Things

2010-01-19T12:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

Has "the bleak midwinter" chilled you to the bone? Then warm up with a new edition of Dappled Things that is hot off the presses.

* * *
Of all the poems in this issue, I think I like "Moonlit Trance" the best.

lo, a blog.

2010-01-19T11:47:00.000-08:00

ex-icarus. By my friend and fellow UK latinist Dan Sheffler. Check it out!

"Thou pouring me coffee waitress, giver of eggs and toast..."

2010-01-13T15:43:00.000-08:00

I love it when people say that Whitman/Hopkins/Wordsworth revitalized English poetry by returning it to common speech. There's a seed of truth in the statement, but it's much more fun to imagine using hyperbaton whenever you talk.

Poems for when the wall came down

2009-11-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

In the New York Times.

This is what happens when I look up my alma mater on YouTube..

2009-11-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Unexpectedly... exciting footage of my beloved St. John the Evangelist Library.

Me and my friends once plotted to hide in the library after hours and spend the night... good thing we didn't!

The worlds's oldest recorded melody - enjoy!

2009-11-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

My friend Sean sent me this video from YouTube.

I have Savae's recording of old Spanish and Aztec music for our Lady of Guadalupe - it's something else.

Be Emily Dickenson for Halloween

2009-10-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

You Will Need
- An old-school nightgown or simple white cotton dress
- A ribbon
- Hair pulled back in a modest bun
- A fascicle (a small bundle of folded poems)

Extra Credit:

Hand out plastic flies while reciting the immortal line: "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died..."

Another item from Choriamb today:

The World is Fundamentally a Great Wonder: a conversation with Richard Wilbur.

I well remember what drew me to Key West in the first place. It was the 1960s, and a colleague of mine at Wesleyan, the painter Samuel Green, said to me, "Why do you take winter vacations in remote places like Tobago, using up all your money on air fare? You ought to try Key West, our American subtropics." He asked if I liked the movie Bonnie and Clyde. "Well, yes," I said. "It's morally questionable, but, aesthetically, very pleasing." "Then you'll love," he said, "the combined beauty and tackiness of Key West."

Laboring to be beautiful

2009-10-26T00:16:00.001-07:00

"I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." It was impossible not to think of these lines of Yeats while watching Bright Star. The film's very first shot is a close-up of a needle being pulled through cloth. Fanny Brawne, all of 18, is an artist with her needle as Keats is with his pen; and her work has a lushness and inventiveness that echos his. It doesn't take long for her to become an admirer of his verse, despite her initial skepticism. She's no marble-eyed muse - she's as inspired by him as he is by her.

Naturally, it delighted me to see poetry being batted around in the movie theater. I sighed happily when Keats compared poetry to diving into a lake and just floating in the luxury of it. "You're not trying to 'work it out.'" And I got a charge from hearing bits of Keats' letters, along with entire poems. Yet this is not really a film about art. Fanny's triple-pleated collars and Keats' highly-wrought sonnets are only frames for life - the setting, not the jewel. It's about love, real and true and strong enough to create a world within a world. The lovers have a courageous ease with beautiful artifice - he writes "Bright Star" and "Ode to a Nightingale"; she fills her bedroom with live butterflies - but they are only underlining the inherent artistry of all romantic love. A kiss, after all, is as artificial as a poem - as artificial as language - as eccentric as being human when you could have been a cat or a seraph. This film shows the wonder and surprise of just being in love - something that tends to get trampled over in most movies in the hurry to get to the sex scene. Bright Star shows much less, and much more.

And John and Fanny's first kiss is one of the loveliest cinematic kisses ever. There are so many beautiful images that it seems wrong to single out just one - fields of blue flowers, fields of daffodils, changing seasons, light reflecting from open books, knocks exchanged through a wall, Keats and his friends forming a human orchestra and singing Mozart. (The "Serenade for Winds" has been stuck in my head... it took me back to middle school when I first saw Amadeus. Which reminds me: I thought Keats' friend Brown came off as a little too Salieri.) And I can't go without mentioning Fanny's little sister Toots, whom Keats accuses of eating rosebuds:

The romance is pretty much the entire plot, and as long as it continues, the movie has just enough structure to absorb you. It all feels very unaffected and true to life, so much so that I scarcely feel the need to see it again.

There's no artistry to death though; at least not to Keats' death. That medieval title you sometimes come across in Catholic bookstores, The Art of Dying, is a little beyond most of us. Keats' poverty isn't insurmountable: by the end of the film his books are selling a little better and Fanny's mother has totally accepted him and welcomed him into the family. It's nothing more than the bacteria in his lungs that's keeping him from starting a life, as they say, with Fanny. His death ends the film with a leaden and inartistic thud - which is perfectly appropriate. This isn't a tragedy in the Greek sense. There's no dramatic satisfaction. The final minutes of the film are raw and hard to watch. The whole experience raises more questions than it can answer, and that's really a good thing. Before Keats leaves for Italy he has to say goodbye to Fanny, and she bursts out, "Shall I awake and find all this a dream? We cannot be created for this sort of suffering." She's right. It's all wrong. In the past, I have sometimes wondered at the vehemence of the grief that some people still feel for Keats. What makes him so special? And I myself have stood in the little room where he died, spellbound with sadness, and taken the metro down to the cemetery so I could pray by his grave. He was so good at communicating the sensuous joy of being alive and the sadness of living in death's shadow that we have learned to mourn with him; and I feel grateful to him for that. Bright Star does the work of his poetry in making you feel the weight of love and the horror and wrongness of death. If we could always see that clearly, we would always be in tears like Tolkien's Nienna. (It's a good thing we can't; how would we drive or cook or keep our mascara on?)

Near the end of the film, Keats offers that "poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery." Mystery is what he was left with, as all of us are. The poem that Ben Wishaw recites over the credits works as well as any. Poetry may be frail, but sometimes it's just enough: a patch or splice or bit of silken string that holds us together.

Oh for Keat's sake. Seriously.

2009-09-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

I just found the trailer for "Bright Star," which opens tomorrow. Blech! It looks insufferably gooey. Call me cold-blooded, but the only moment that really sent my heart racing was the second-long glimpse of Keats lining up the scraps of "Ode to a Nightingale." Eeeeeee!

Enbrethiliel's Meme

2009-09-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Dragged from hibernation again! I'd like to thank Enbrethiliel for tagging me...

Ten Honest Facts About Meredith

1. I will happily spend half an hour staring into space and morphing words into rhymes and pararhymes: "Flick, fluke, flake, flock... shock, walk, knock, lock... luck, lack, like, Luke..." and so on ad nauseam.

2. I have referred, in a poem, to eyes as "orbs." (Once. When I was thirteen, people.)

3. Until I got to high school, I had a phobia of foreign languages. I seriously thought I was incapable of learning another language. Which proves that there's hope for all of us.

4. My knowledge of macrons in Latin words is imperfect. For instance, I always thought that "rosa" has a long O, and it doesn't. And now I have to make sure that my students put macrons in the right places. Ei mihi!

5. I avidly follow fashion blogs like The Cherry Blossom Girl and The Glamorous Grad Student.

6. If I go with people to a restaurant, I'm always the last person to finish eating.

7. When no one else is listening, I read Virgil with 90% ecclesiastical pronunciation.

8. I still like Philip Pullman, even after The Amber Spyglass. Even though he's trying to build an army of anticlerical zombie children. (Can I come along, as long as I don't have to sing the Marseillaise?) I and a Certain Friend still talk about what our daemons would be, if we had them.

9. I didn't have a boyfriend in high school. I was too deeply absorbed in my relationships with old, dead poets.

10. (This last is for Enbrethiliel) My Little Pony was an alright cartoon, but Rainbow Brite was the bestest ever! I haven't heard the theme song for years, but if I did, I'd get chills.

Whom should I tag? I think most of our circle has already been tagged... Well, if you're reading this and it appeals to you and you haven't done it yet... consider yourself tagged!

New Dappled Things

2009-08-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Has the summer heat gotten you down? Fear not! The cool new edition of Dappled Things is sure to refresh you with an invigorating selection of prose, poetry, and art.

Our fiction this issue runs the gamut from the weighty to the wild. We have Dena Hunt's The Funeral, a moving meditation on the finitude of human loves, followed by a story that features a troop of Dominican friars dispassionately considering whether they should eat each other or not—Eleanor Donlon's wacky but affecting De virtute cannibalismi—and conclude with Tony France's The Ninth Floor, the often bizarre tale of a young thief set on making off with the treasures of a legendary department store:

Leyland’s catalogue was a thousand pages filled with hope, joy, and goodwill. The actual wares offered for sale seemed like a pretext for displaying tapestries, paintings, mosaics, frescoes, fountains, statuary rising above cobalt blue pools, hanging gardens, tropical forests, marble temples, and ancient ruins. Walking into the blue and gold aura of the Leyland’s Fifth Avenue main entrance reinforced the impression that at Leyland’s, merchandising, although necessary, served an ulterior motive.

If you're looking for solid non-fiction, we've got that too. Eileen Cunis delves into the Catholic tradition for insight in her essay "What is Art?," the first installment of a three part series titled "On the Vocation of the Christian Artist." Then in "The Wisconsin Baroque, Priests, and Paper Architecture" Matthew Alderman lays out a vision of how sacred architecture might develop in the future by building on—rathern than discarding—the foundations laid out in the past. Along those line, our featured article this issue—"Restoring the Fresco of Progress" by Dr. Wilfred McClay—considers the danger of paralysis in a culture that has come to question the very possibility of positive change:

But our compulsive belief in progress is being challenged constantly by the honesty of our unbelief. Hence when we speak of progress, it is so often “progress” that we speak of. The use of sneer quotes is often a way of pretending to be superior to the concept being quoted, and to those who would be so naïve or mendacious as to use the words without critical distance. But their use may also be a way of frankly confessing one’s inability to get beyond straddling an issue. It may even be a way of evading the law of noncontradiction, by both asserting and not asserting something at the same time. A way of saying tacitly what was once said biblically: “Lord I believe; help thou my unbelief.” (Mark 9: 24)

If you are looking for a new book to read this summer, make sure to check out Bernardo Aparicio and Katy Carl's interview with Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. Eire's book won the National Book Award in 2003 and is a gem of Catholic literature that has remained hidden only to Catholics. In this thought-provoking interview, our president and editor-in-chief give this fascinating memoir the long-overdue attention it deserves:

Eire’s voice is one we overlook at our own loss. His memoir, though a work of non-fiction, is suffused with the magical realism of the best Latin American novels. His is the kind of realism that grows out of an understanding that reality is, indeed, magical—full of depth and possibility, sacramental. Eire’s facts are never flat; he can follow the simplest details in surprising directions, all of which lead to either hilarious or deeply poignant conclusions, most often both. For this reason, even as Waiting for Snow succeeds as a memoir of childhood and exile, it accomplishes much more than that. Something solid moves beneath the words. Don’t be surprised at that. It is Augustine, not Rousseau, that Professor Eire is echoing in the memoir’s subtitle: Confessions of a Cuban Boy.

If poetry and art is what you crave, you have come to the right place. Just consider artist James Dean Erickson's beautiful and moving portraits of humble workers and homeless men. Erickson uses everyday materials to create works of fine art, a method that supports his interest in highlighting the dignity of those we so often turn away from in the street. And as Erickson paints with brushes our poets paint with words: take a look at Meredith Wise's "Roman April" or John Savoie's "Beads," among many others, to see what we mean.

These are just some of the many excellent fiction pieces, essays, poems, and works of art that we have prepared for you this time.

Wishing you a joyful and blessed summer,

The Editors

More humor from A.E. Housman

2009-04-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

From the indispensable Laudator Temporis Acti, a glimpse at A.E. Housman's silly side:

The Latin author Lucan
When bitten by a toucan,
Exclaimed in anguish "O!
That bird must have been frantic
To cross the broad Atlantic
From distant Mexico,
And come to ancient Rome,
And bite me in my home,
And make me cry in anguish
And in the Latin language
O!"

- A.E. Housman, Miscellaneous Verses, Chiefly Educational

Polyphonic Virgil

2009-04-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

This is a first for my blog: a CD review. I want to tell any of my readers who love poetry, Classics, or choral music that Rome's Golden Poets is a fantastic recording! Also: if anyone was put off by the king's ransom that Bolchazy-Carducci is asking for it, know that you can write directly to the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus and get it for $18. My copy got to me really fast.

The composers are Flemish, Italian, French, German, Brazilian, Hungarian, Czech, American. Dates of composition range from the 16th to the 20th century. But the Latin comes through loud and clear. The first track is a supercharged rendition of "Odi et Amo" (Catullus) by Jacob Handl (1550-1591), full of freshness and passion. Next there is a setting of "Lugete O Veneres Cupidinesque" by Gian-Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), in which every nuance of this short, perfect poem about a girlfriend's dead sparrow is carefully brought out. There are three versions of the same passage from the Aeneid, all mournfully sacral in their treatment of Dido's grief and regret. There is a 1974 setting of a passage from the Fourth Eclogue, impressive with packed chords and intelligently placed discords. But the lion's share of the poetry on this CD belongs to Horace: "O fons Bandusiae," "Felices ter," "Nunc est bibendum," "Iam satis terris," and many others. Of all these, I thought that "Iam satis terris" was especially lovely. The American Randall Thompson does beautiful things with "O fons Bandusiae": you can just feel the burning sun at "atrox hora Caniculae," and you can positively splash around in the cascading music of "unde loquaces lymphae desiliunt tuae."

I should say that the last three tracks weren't to my taste: "Eheu fugaces" and "Tu ne quaesieris" were murky and strange, which was an especially sad fate for "Tu ne quaesieris," with its intoxicating rhythm. The last track is a Latin version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," which I found extremely quaint. Otherwise, though, this is a great recording. The music has increased my appreciation of the poems. Taken as a whole, this music is a testament to the happiness hidden in those Latin classes you took in high school. It's a glimpse at the ancient, glowing heart of Latin letters, and the warmth that writers and musicians and their audiences have taken from it through the centuries. Five stars.

My next move:

2009-04-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

Grad school! I've been accepted to the Classics program at the University of Kentucky. Some of you already know about it, but for those who don't, I should say that it's an MA program, and that it's distinctive for its emphasis on active Latin and more recent Latin literature. Within the MA program is a series of courses where Latin, as in much of European history, is the language of instruction. This Institute for Latin Studies is the work of Terence Tunberg and Milena Minkova - if you go here, you can watch videos of them speaking fluent Latin to each other and to students. Last summer I went to a conventiculum led by Dr. Tunberg, and loved it. (Sadly, I don't think I'll be able to go this summer because of work.)

I'm really excited, because I know that I will learn how to teach Latin at UK, and I will go deeper into Latin literature than I ever thought was possible when I started learning the language.

My mom actually went to UK for library school. It's funny how life turns out!

A Grand Day

2009-03-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

To prove that I was not, in fact, angsty on my birthday, I offer this picture.

My mom and dad and my brother and I went for a drive in the hills and visited a couple of wineries. We went for a walk in the woods and had a picnic. Then we went to a vigil Mass, and then we went out to dinner with more family. Finally we came back home and had coffee and a fallen-chocolate-souffle cake. (YUM!!!) Mom and Dad, if you are reading this, thanks for a great day!

Warning: Lions Ahead

2009-03-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

There is one of these signs near my house. I love the way the cougar looks the same in all three panels, and how they leave the last scene to your imagination. Let's go hiking!

Sonnet VII

2009-03-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

By John Milton
On his being arrived at the age of 23.

How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear
That some more timely happy spirits indueth.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot however mean or high,
Toward which time leads me and the will of heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great taskmaster's eye.

"Some Guy on the Street" has a blog!

2009-03-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

Null Epistolary. Random acts of apostrophe, and occasional math.

Aeneas changed his relationship status to It's Complicated

2009-03-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Virgil joins Facebook.

Freaky Magic Latin Square

2009-02-17T18:48:00.000-08:00

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. Forget that "Arepo" is a made-up word, and marvel at this sentence that goes into a grid and reads the same from four directions. The guy who came up with this would have loved sudoku. I had never seen it before today, when I discovered that Geoffrey Chaucer had put it on a t-shirt. Wikipedia seems to know all about it, as usual. You can also rearrange the letters to form "PATERNOSTER" twice, with a double alpha and omega left over. This all goes nicely into a sort of crusader cross. All very interesting, but reciting it to guard your cattle from witchcraft is a bit much!

Terror vs. Embarrassment

2009-02-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

An interesting (and cathartic) review in Poetry which takes Christian poets to task for being too diffident and reader-friendly.

Terror’s potential as a creative source is all but unrecognizable in today’s religious poetry. Many critics would even contend that the genre as such no longer exists (witness Harold Bloom’s fascinating but labored attempt to articulate “the American religion” in his recent anthology). Labels aside, however, it seems clear that past pursuits of “a Discontent / Too exquisite—to tell” (Dickinson) have been replaced by slacker, more self-deprecating pieties. Instead of confronting you with a soul drowning in God, the contemporary religious poem is much more likely to invite you in for a dip.

Yes! Exactly! Hooray!

2009-02-01T19:45:00.000-08:00

Of the eight manifestos that Poetry printed this month, I found two that actually had me longing to declaim them through a megaphone (and one satirical specimen that made me laugh--just imagine Ezra Pound howling it!). I've cut out my favorite thoughts and pasted them below.

Presto Manifesto!
AE Stallings

The freedom to not-rhyme must include the freedom to rhyme. Then verse will be “free.”

All rhymed poetry must be rhyme-driven. This is no longer to be considered pejorative.

English is not rhyme poor. It is only uninflected. On the contrary, English has a richness in rhymes across different parts of speech; whereas in many other languages, rhyme is often merely a coincident jingle of accidence.

There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them.

Rhymes may be so far apart, you cannot hear them, but they can hear each other, as if whispering on a toy telephone made of two paper cups and a length of string. [The great exemplar of this is Dylan Thomas's "Author's Prologue" See "farms-arms" Or see my "Roman April."]

Off rhymes founded on consonants are more literary than off rhymes founded on vowels (assonance). Vowels are shifty. Assonance is in the mouth, not the ear. It is performative. [Listen to your average rock song: assonance, not rhyme. Vowels are harder to hide when you're singing.]

Translators who translate poems that rhyme into poems that don’t rhyme solely because they claim keeping the rhyme is impossible without doing violence to the poem have done violence to the poem. They are also lazy.

Rhyme is an irrational, sensual link between two words. It is chemical. It is alchemical.

April, silver, orange, month. [I actually have a rhyme for "orange." I am willing to sell it.]

Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say.

Rhyme schemes.

Rhyme annoys people, but only people who write poetry that doesn’t rhyme, and critics.

Perform-A-Form: A Page Vs. Stage Alliance
Thomas Sayers Ellis

The performance body, via breathing and gesture, dramatizes form. It makes it theater. It makes it action....The idea body, via text and thought, flattens form. It makes it fixed. It makes it language. It makes it literature....The work of the performance body is not without craft, control, or form. It is not lowly. The work of the idea body is not without attitude, improvisation, or flow. It is not closed.

Perform–a–formers seek a path around both academic and slam poetry....The utterance, paged or memorized, is only a schema in need of diverse modes of respiration.

Centennial of Futurism

2009-01-31T19:31:00.000-08:00

It's been a hundred years since an Italian poet named Marinetti dropped his Futurist manifesto all over Milan. Poetry is commemorating it, only half-seriously, by having a lot of poets write their own manifestos of Whateverism. I, on the other hand, am commemorating it with the following excerpt from GK Chesterton's shrewd and amusing essay, 'The Futurists.' (That guy has something for everything...)

It was a warm golden evening, fit for October, and I was watching
(with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden, when the postman handed to me, with a perfunctory haste which doubtless masked his emotion, the Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what Futurism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futurists themselves seem a little doubtful; perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out. But if you ask me what its Declaration is, I answer eagerly; for I can tell you quite a lot about that. It is written by an Italian named Marinetti, in a magazine which is called Poesia. It is headed "Declaration of Futurism" in enormous letters; it is divided off with little numbers; and it starts straight away like this: "1. We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strengt of daring. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt. 3. Literature having up to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow." While I am quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason, it scarcely seems such an entirely new subject for literature as the Futurists imagine. It seems to me that even through the slumber which fills the Siege of Troy, the Song of Roland, and the Orlando Furioso, and in spite of the thoughtful immobility which marks "Pantagruel," "Henry V," and the Ballad of Chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams of an admiration for courage, a readiness to glorify the love of danger, and even the "strengt of daring," I seem to remember, slightly differently spelt, somewhere in literature. The distinction, however, seems to be that the warriors of the past went in for tournaments, which were at least dangerous for themselves, while the Futurists go in for motor-cars, which are mainly alarming for other people. It is the Futurist in his motor who does the "aggressive movement," but it is the pedestrians who go in for the "running" and the "perilous leap." Section No. 4 says, "We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath. ... A race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." It is also much easier, if you have the money. It is quite clear, however, that you cannot be a Futurist at all unless you are frightfully rich.

Wanted: Silicon Valley Poet Laureate

2009-01-27T00:25:00.000-08:00

Quick. What rhymes with Clara?

Yogi Berra.

Father Junipero Serra.

The goddess Hera?

It's time to get your assonance in gear because the Arts Council Silicon Valley is searching for the first-ever poet laureate of Santa Clara County. It's a sweet gig: to elevate the status of poetry in the valley, a place far more famous for high-tech than haiku.

I found this hilarious article in the Mercury today. What do you say, dear Readers? Should I run? I am a model candidate! 1. I have lived in Santa Clara County all my life. 2. I have published ONE POEM in a Real Magazine, and I have been recognized with ONE PUSHCART NOMINATION (poetic fame is so relative, you know). 3. Diversity is fine by me. 4. I have shown my passion for engaging in civic discourse about poetry by writing this blog.

Duties of Santa Clara County Poet Laureate

1) Represent Santa Clara County and the art of poetry through outreach related to poetry

2) Present appropriate works at the annual State of the County ceremony and at least four selected County-sponsored events, dedications, or memorials per year

3) Act as a resource for poetry and literary activities of the Santa Clara County Library

4) Participate in National Poetry Month events and activities

5) Undertake a project that will make poetry more available and accessible to people in their everyday lives

The Poet Laureate will receive a modest honorarium.

It sounds like the Poet Laureate will actually have to produce a substantial amount of public occasional verse. (This is not required of the US Poet Laureate!) And that honorarium is only $4000 for two years. It will be interesting to see who they get.

If the official poet of Santa Clara County ends up immortalizing home, sweet home in a poem, so much the better. The result might be a sonnet that captures the pulse of life here in the valley. Might we suggest: A Valediction Forbidding Blogging? To His Soy Mistress? Ode on a Grecian URL?

"Right now there are many local poets writing about the valley, about the transition from agriculture to technology and our changing status in the world," Jones notes. "I think the great Silicon Valley poem is still out there."

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum.

2009-01-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

Wow, the inaugural poem was not as terrible as I expected it to be. It was still incredibly dull. But there was potential for hilarious and orotund badness! Oh well. Maybe next time.

Elizabeth Alexander showed the entire nation just how impoverished American poetry has become. If anyone was unaware that our poets are often rewarded for flatness, slackness, and a regal disregard for the ears of their audience, they were sadly enlightened on Tuesday.

And I'm not impressed by the pleas for lenience I've been hearing. Aretha Franklin and Yo Yo Ma are artists, and they performed. They fulfilled expectations. Elizabeth Alexander was supposed to be on the same plane, but she was not. This is the paradox of American poetry today: it has become a profession, and it has become disgracefully unprofessional.

She had her work cut out for her. She even put in a stitch or two:

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

This was the only relevant section in the entire poem! It's like Alexander was going along, tossing stuff out there, and then she thought: "What's really poetry-worthy about this occasion? That America has finally elected a black man to the presidency, that this resonates with our history--that it evokes our worst war and our most shameful crimes, but also our bravery, the bravery of individuals, the indestructible beauty of words uttered by Lincoln and King; that there is vindication here, that it is worthy and fitting to honor our ancestors who suffered so much--yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. I'll throw in a reference to that."

"Say it plain, that many have died for this day." This proposition should have been the heart of Alexander's poem; the beat and impulse of it. Instead, it was more like an awkward appendix. The poem should have been a musical but focused lyric, sure of its theme, disciplined in sticking to it, conscientious as a good movie about setups and payoffs. Instead, it languished under poetic pork and earmarks. And as for meter...

What depressed me most about "Praise song for the day" was the revelation that it was not meant to be free verse. It was supposed to be iambic pentameter. The transcript looked like this, but the formal print version looks like this. If you read the latter carefully, you can see the pentameter; but the rhythm was hardly perceptible in performance. The meter is just a shape, not a sound. One news source described it as "free verse iambic pentameter," which is like saying "crimson green" or "Chardonnay ale"--but unfortunately accurate.

And any poet who writes a line like "Love that casts a widening pool of light" for a powerful politician should be ritually expelled from the College of Bards. Finis.

Now, as to the inevitable challenge: "Why don't you try it and see how easy it is?" I was actually starting to take notes for my own effort, but frankly I have not been inclined to praise Obama even obliquely and in jest since he restored government funding for abortions in foreign countries. My last comment on this little affair: the poet and the president deserve each other. But I'd rather listen to Alexander's poetry all day long than hear some of the news that is coming from Washington now.

Adam Kirsch
Steven Colbert
The Guardian

Urgent

2009-01-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

Please pray for Fr. Foster.

Facebook and Eternity

2009-01-12T22:12:00.000-08:00

A nice post about Facebook on the Image blog.

ode on a german um?

2009-01-11T21:29:00.000-08:00

Recent keywords that have brought people to my blog:

- ode on a german um by keats
- orberg lingua latina cheat (Oh no you don't!)
- limericks about keats
- a funny poem about bailout (Try this.)
- chuck norris christmas poem
- dylan thomas, fairy rings to the moon (Dylan
Thomas's initials are so appropriate)
- iambic pentameter feels weird (Weirder than this?)
- "if you were meant to be a writer you would already be writing Catholic fiction" (Ouch.)
- golden compass keats poem
- jabberwocky in latin hassard dodgson (That was your lucky day...)
- keats in latin (Sorry. I'll try and get around to that.)
- vergil in quenya (Maybe later.)
- paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde (Excuse me?!)
- poems about march for life
- snow gods
- tennyson pigs fly ("And all thy bacon sizzled unto me.")
- the oroma in ancient egypt (what's an oroma?)
- worst cento peoms done (Hey, don't look for them *here*!)
- "dance of vowels and consonants"
- per amica silentia lunae

I will be sure to take all of this into my consideration when I blog. Also, I resolve to blog more about WH Auden. (Nearly half of the searches were Auden-related.)

Starry Kalends

2009-01-03T21:30:00.000-08:00

I just remembered another New Year's poem, this one by Hopkins. It happens to be my favorite of all the Latin poems that he wrote. It starts out as a description of Orion on a strangely warm night, the first of January; and it turns into a prayer for a good new year. I included the image of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" because Hopkins' vision has an uncanny resemblance to it! The moon's overbearing light tries to block out the stars, but they shine out anyway; their "soft glory" comes and goes and they almost seem to whirl like pinwheels in the wind.

Miror surgentem per puram Oriona noctem,
Candida luna licet
Adstet et exiguis incumbat durior astris
Nec simul esse sinat.
Verum hic Orion miror quam crescat in altum et
Quam micet igne suo,
Non suus aetherium quem purpurat impetus, itque
Molle reditque decus:
Quin versare aliquos septena cacumina ventos
Turbine posse putes.
Miror item suaves adeo spirarier auras
Egelidumque Notum
Atque hiemem tantum primasque tepere Kalendas
Quas novus annus agit,
Namque ab eo qui jam pulcerrimus occidit anni
Dicimus ire dies.
O Jesu qui nos homines caelestis et alta haec
Contrahis astra manu,
Omnia sunt a te: precor a te currat et annus:
Is bonus annus erit.
Omnia sunt in te: nostrum vivat genus in te,
Quod tua membra sumus,
Omnes concessas inquam quot carpimus auras
Suspicimusque polum.
Gratia deest sed enim multis: ut gratia desit,
Omnibus alma tamen,
Alma etiam natura subest, cui tenditur ista
Provida cunque manus.

The meter is the same as in Horace's "Diffugere nives," and "Miror surgentem" is also a poem about the end of winter. Neither poem, though, is a joyous hymn to spring. Horace says that even though spring is here now, winter will be back again, and in the end we're dust and shades. Despite the green unfading beauty of its opening, Horace's ode is all about giving up hope. Hopkins' poem, on the other hand, is an explicit "act of hope." The sense of spring is much more fragile: one day of unseasonable warmth in January is an aberration; it isn't going to last. But Hopkins has this stubborn idea that a warm New Year's Day may augur a good new year, and he prays to Jesus for this: "precor a te currat et annus: / Is bonus annus erit." There is a switch back into a minor key when Hopkins says sadly that "Gratia deest sed enim multis" - many people have no gratitude for the air and the sky and the earth in general - and then it ends with that "authentic cadence" that Hopkins loved: "Omnibus alma tamen, / Alma etiam natura subest, cui tenditur ista / Provida cunque manus." "Even so, kind nature is still there for everyone, nature to whom that provident hand is stretched out everywhere." (Someday I should try to make an actual poetic translation of this poem. It easily becomes flat and inaccurate in English.)

So I think that this will be my prayer for the new year:

O Jesu qui nos homines caelestis et alta haec
Contrahis astra manu,
Omnia sunt a te: precor a te currat et annus:
Is bonus annus erit.

Gazing upon all the pleated skirts that the world doth hold

2009-01-02T19:57:00.000-08:00

Ah, the pleasures of Bluefly and Google Image Search! My generation lives everywhere, all at once, which is what makes us so "appealing, highly promising — and also radically vulnerable," according to U. of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson. His essay in the Chronicle Review made me think about the way I have been living my life, and I was a little surprised to see just how different I am from his students. The things he talks about resonate with me, to be sure; but I think I have a different attitude about them than his students do. Yes, I'm addicted to the internet, and I know what it's like to wish for ten impossible things before breakfast; but my vision of happiness has always had something quiet, closed in, and unchanging about it. Studying abroad is good - especially if a close friend is with you. An overnight train from Marseille to Lourdes, no luggage with you but a water bottle and a bag of Italian pastries - that's an Experience, but it's all held together by the hot croissant at the station, eaten very slowly as the sun rises. In my (possibly perverse) little world, you crawl through a half-drowned cave system to find one small chamber with gypsum flowers glinting on the ceiling, you go sailing for the night watches, and you go There mainly so that you can go Back Again. This a fancy way of admitting what most of my readers know already: that I'm not one of the double-majoring, Red Bull-drinking, mission-tripping, super-connected young graduates who are profiled in that article. (Okay Mom, you can stop laughing now.) Really, sometimes I wish I were! I would get so many things done! But I'm not, so I might as well enjoy my odd way of doing one thing at a time.

"Dwelling in Possibilities" is just one of five essays from the last year that Santiago Ramos thinks are keepers. You can find the others in his post on the Image blog. I wouldn't have found some of these if I hadn't read it. Thanks, Santiago!

Poems for the New Year

2009-01-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

I like "The Darkling Thrush" myself. Thanks, Dylan!

The Dairy of a Country Priest

2008-12-30T21:56:00.000-08:00

An old post from Disputations:

After the milking this morning, I noticed that Mme. Bessie had remained behind, standing quietly in the shadows by the side entrance. She is a Guernsey, a proud member of a breed my own people have been bred to treat with reverence. Only with great effort did I refrain from bowing my head respectfully as I addressed her, "Git along."

Heh! The Diary of a Country Priest is great stuff, but this parody is so cruelly accurate! A friend of mine once said of the protagonist, "I just want to hug the poor guy and make him eat a bowl of hot chicken soup." I concurred. What he really needed to do was to get out of that carcinogenic little town and go to a parish that didn't hate priests.

I've never met a priest like the nameless curé of Ambricourt, thank God. But I did know a priest who was remarkably like the curé of Torcy.

Dappled Things - Advent 2008

2008-12-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

Get it while it's hot! Make sure you read Saint Catherine's Wheel, Afterglow Candidate, and Absent Friends. There is also a good translation of a poem by Venantius Fortunatus, but you'll have to read it in the print version.

Also see my reviews!

A merry Christmas to you all.

More Latin wordplay!

2008-12-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

Verus amicus amore more ore re cognoscitur.

This has been percolating through the Latinteach mailing list. It means, "A true friend is known by his love, his habits, his speech, and his deeds." But no one knows where it came from. If you google it, you will find a surprising number of people quoting it and attributing it to Virgil. It's nowhere in Virgil, though.

It's Bad Out There

2008-12-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

What's Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?

"Nor should we assume that the poet judge is passionate about his or her choice. He has been hired not to discover a great book (that word is frowned upon in professional circles) but merely to choose the best of those presented by screeners who are often inexperienced MFA candidates. Trapped like a spider in a web, not of his own spinning, the judge is a relativist when it comes to taste. He must be satisfied with the juiciest fly that wanders in. Once he’s rendered his verdict and written his blurb, the judge’s commitment to the book, for all practical purposes, ends."

"Imagine what 20th century poetry would be like had Ezra Pound, Mrs. Alfred Nutt, John Quinn, James Laughlin, Barney Rosset, Cid Corman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti been content to be uncommitted contest coordinators rather than passionate editors, publishers, or patrons of the art. Behind The Waste Land, North of Boston, Patterson, Howl, and other landmark books of the last century were men and women willing to risk money, credibility, even imprisonment for poetry that mattered."

Paradise Prosed

2008-12-01T11:15:00.000-08:00

Stanley Fish reviews a new translation of Paradise Lost into foolproof, unambiguous English prose. Now, I am fine with translations of Homer and Dante and Tolstoy and Bernanos. Reading the original is always best, but it's better to read a translation than to read nothing because you never got the opportunity to learn Greek or Italian or Russian. But the effort that an English-speaker must exert to read Milton is not so onerous. It means reading footnotes, not taking four years of Latin (although that enhances the experience somewhat). The only benefit I can see in this English-English translation is its potential to teach students about the limits of translation. So much sense lives in the sound of a poem. Stanley Fish shows us this, as well as what happens when you boil off the rhythms, chimes, and syntax:

At an earlier point, the epic narrator comments on mankind’s susceptibility to the blandishments of the fallen angels. Men and women are duped even to the extent that “devils they adore for deities.” The tone is one of incredulity; how could anyone be so stupid as to be unable to tell the difference? But the line’s assertion that as polar opposites devils and deities should be easily distinguishable is complicated by the fact that as words “devils” and “deities” are close together, beginning and ending with the same letter and sharing an “e” and an “i” in between. The equivalence suggested by sound (although denied by the sense) is reinforced by the mirror-structure of “adore for,” a phrase that separates devils from deities but in fact participates in the subliminal assertion of their likeness.

What, then, is the line saying? It is saying simultaneously that the difference between devils and deities is obvious and perspicuous and that the difference is hard to tell. This is one of those moments Davie has in mind when he talks about the tendency of Milton’s verse to go off the rails of narrative in order to raise speculative questions that have no definitive answer.

When Danielson comes to render “devils to adore for deities,” he turns it into a present participle: “worshiping devils themselves.” Absent are both the tone of scornful wonder the epic voice directs at the erring sinners and the undercutting of that scorn by the dance of vowels and consonants.

Or on the phrase, "mortal taste":

By eating of the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve become capable of death and therefore capable of having a beginning and an end and a middle filled up by successes, failures, losses and recoveries. To say that a “mortal taste” brought death into the world is to say something tautologous; but the tautology is profound when it reminds us of both the costs and the glories of being mortal. If no mortality, then no human struggles, no narrative, no story, no aspiration (in eternity there’s nowhere to go), no “Paradise Lost.”

Danielson translates “whose mortal taste” as “whose lethal taste,” which is accurate, avoids tautology (or at least suppresses it) and gets us into the next line cleanly and without fuss or provoked speculation. But fuss and bother and speculations provoked by etymological puzzles are what makes this verse go (or, rather, not go), and while the reader’s way may be smoothed by a user-friendly prose translation, smoothness is not what Milton is after; it is not a pleasure he wishes to provide.

I must admit that this prose Paradise seems especially useless to me because the only thing I like about Milton is the sound his words make. What is left in the prose version? An annoying God, a sexy Satan, angels with cannons, an Eve born already fallen. A mythic-lyric poem distended into an epic. I've always wished that Milton had written an epic about King David. It would have been on the right scale.

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence....

This isn't Finnegans Wake, people!

"I shan't publish it. The journals will think it barbarous.”

2008-11-18T00:40:00.000-08:00

Another review of Ron Hansen's Exiles, this one in Godspy.

Though Hopkins scrupled over his love of nature-infused poetry (wondering whether the art was suspect for its worldliness and emphasis on delights of the senses), his instincts were correct. As Hans Urs van Balthasar wrote in Seeing the Form, “The resurrection of the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to possess the infinite within the finitude of form (however it is seen, understood, or grasped spiritually), is right.”

Hmm. That's awfully confident.

Poem in October

2008-10-17T17:11:00.000-07:00

A supremely beautiful poem. The best thing is to hear Dylan Thomas himself reading it.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

Father Foster explains it all...

2008-10-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

...to Bill Maher. (Listen here on NPR, if you can stand the smarminess. I honestly found it amusing.) While filming his silly anti-religion movie, Maher went to the Vatican and ran into none other than... Reggie Foster, everyone's favorite Latin Lover! Fr. Foster took him up to his office, all the while making scandalous comments and telling "bad jokes in Latin." What really made me laugh was that Bill Maher carried away the impression that all the Vatican clergy are like Fr. Foster! (What a thought.)

Happy Birthday, Virgil!

2008-10-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

I am reading the Aeneid from the beginning, and I'm on Book Three now. Sorry, Virgil, but I'm glad you weren't able to burn it.

Dappled Things is out.

2008-10-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

I truly believe writing saves the world. Books saved my life when I was drinking: I’m not sure I would have survived if not through what was basically my only connection to reality: literature. - Heather King

Get it right here! I particularly recommend the interview with Heather King. It's like morning air and dew on the grass. Very clear and real. As for poetry, J.B. Toner's sonnet, "Drinking with Lucifer," is blackly funny and has a few great lines: "The absinthe of an abdicated will," oooo... Another sonnet, "That My Kitchen is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Extinguisher," is a highly alarming peek into a bachelor's kitchen, alarmingly bespattered with alliteration and other Hopkinsian flourishes. Joseph O'Brien's "Our Father" is a wonderful sketch of fatherhood as embodied in an Irish cop from Jersey City. And there is a villanelle by Amamda Griswold about the Gaderene demoniac which packs a punch. There's a lot of passion in this issue! Watch out for "The Game of Sean McTeague," though; it made me seasick. Eleanor Donlon took her usual Benson-esque melodrama and grafted it onto "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." The result is utterly ridiculous.

The Anti-Muses

2008-10-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

A.E. Stallings is on to them.

Like the Muses, they are attracted to talent and promising projects, and the presence of several at once probably means you are on to something big. Still, they can frustrate or even destroy the most inspired tender new poem, and send the poet into despair, alcoholism, or flash fiction. The more we know about them, the better.

My favorites are Tripsichore (She of two left feet) and Hyperbole, goddess of blurbs. May they be far from me!

In Which a General is Kidnapped and Some Horace is Recited.

2008-09-30T22:20:00.001-07:00

From Andrew Cusack's blog, a nice interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor - a most romantic figure and still writing, at the age of 93, about his opulent adventures. I am fond of the escapade where he kidnapped a German general on Crete:

In Leigh Fermor’s own account of the abduction of General Kreipe, the climax comes not as the general’s staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE partly dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the highlands and hence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as ‘a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida’.

‘We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said, “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”. It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off… The general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine - and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. “Ja, Herr General.” As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.’

It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: fabulously erudite and romantic, and just a little showy. For his greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Leigh Fermor has been responsible for some of the most brightly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.

At the recommendation of Andrew, I purchased A Time of Gifts and gave it to my father. I keep reading it in snatches - you can open it anywhere; it's like a Persian carpet - and I think I've read most of it. The brilliantly purple bits are a guilty pleasure, as I am a sometime member of the purple school myself. The 19-year old Fermor is an intellectual glutton, willing to lose himself in wonder at anything rich and strange, and, despite his wide-eyed wonder and his taste for aesthetic sweets, an unnerving escape artist and resourceful bandit, able and willing to mix with anyone and fiddle with any language. But I can't help but compare A Time of Gifts to Belloc's Path to Rome, which I'm afraid does beat it.

Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

2008-09-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

Via Choriamb, another bit of satire.

"As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry."

Whoever read this at the release of Best American Poetry 2008 was living dangerously! The thing is, it's funny because the discrepancy between the economy and poetry is so vast... but it's also vicious, because it's true!

****

And while I'm at it, here's a link to a relatively recent sbmail wherein StrongBad teaches you how to write love poems.

StrongBad wins extra points for using the word 'Meredithian'!

Merry Michaelmas

2008-09-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone....

GK Chesterton strikes again

2008-09-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England,
They have no graves as yet.

- GKC

The Pizza Indult

2008-09-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

The last forty years are so much funnier when you think of the Traditional Roman Rite as Traditional Italian Pizza!

Personally I think that this is a great improvement on "The Novus Ordo is like New Coke and the old rite is like Classic Coke."

But now I'm longing for a slice of Quattro Stagioni, or "the Solemn Pontifical Pizza."

Palin Palin Palin!

2008-09-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Okay. I know I never talk about politics here. But ohmygosh Palin! I am having so much fun listening to the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

To one Cintra of Salon, she is a "Christian Stepford wife in a 'sexy librarian' costume," "the White House bunny," a "sheep in ewe's clothing," and other things that I don't want to defile my blogspace with. (By the way, this is the same Cintra who did that smarmy "Passion" interview which was so thouroughly fisked by Secret Agent Man eons ago. Does anyone else remember that post as fondly as I do?)

She cites a theory that "approximately 80 percent of all decision making is done at the level of the limbic system -- our lowest, most colorless, reptilian emotional level." Which is to say: "Republican strategies are consistent with a belief that the voting process, for most people, is full of feelings -- but devoid of reason."

I like that thesis: "approximately 80 percent of all decision making is done at the level of the limbic system -- our lowest, most colorless, reptilian emotional level." It certainly explains Cintra's article!

The various sentences of it are so contradictory that the whole thing seems to have been written not by an honest reptile, but by a foul-mouthed robot. Compare and contrast. Palin is...

Lady Macbeth
"her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she's so hot to cut is that of all American women."

Compliant Helpless Chattel
"It is a kind of eerie coincidence that Sarah Palin is being sprung on the public at the same time as.... "House Bunny," which features a poster of a beautiful young lady with Playmate-style bunny ears, big, stupid eyes and her mouth hanging open like someone just punched her. Sarah Palin is the White House bunny."

Palin wears...

a "'sexy librarian' costume"

AND

a "virtual burqa"

Palin's problem is that...

She's an old-timey, suborned-to-husband-and-kids housewife:
"She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles -- like Old Testament-style old."

She's a mean-faced modern gal who goes to work and leaves her kids in daycare!
"Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant."

Thanks for sliming us with the contents of your bulimic id, Cintra!

And it all reads very much like that from end to end of the internet. If the Freakish Enemies of the Normal(thanks, Mark Shea) keep this up, everyone who loves babies and sunshine will be so frightened and sickened by the hate that they will reject every candidate that the said Enemies of the Normal promote. When Michael Moore is trying to tone you down... well, maybe you should take the hint and stop spazzing.

And now for a detour that will take us back into the arena of letters. Mark Shea's "Freakish Enemies of the Normal" reminded me, when I first read the phrase, of a passage in "That Hideous Strength." CS Lewis is describing the unintended effect of the brainwashing that Mark's captors inflict on him:

"As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else--something he vaguely called the "Normal"--apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was--solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience."

National Endowment For The Arts Funds Construction Of $1.3 Billion Poem

2008-09-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Onion!

"America's metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation's verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart," said the project's head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. "We need to make sure America's poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world."

The Tripods Attack!

2008-09-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

At the end of his article on Catholic fiction for InsideCatholic, Todd Aglialoro promoted two new YA novels from Sophia Inst. Press. One is sort of "Sweet Valley High" from a mordant, Catholic perspective; and the other is Chestertonian steampunk. Having spent my adolescence hiding (successfully) from Sweet Valley High and (unsuccessfully) from its more genteel, Newberry-stamped cousins, the ones they make you read in school, I chose the steampunk novel as my sample of Sophia's new project. My love of fantasy makes me biased, but I think that the best sort of niche fiction is simply too different to appeal to the mass market, rather than being a Catholic imitation of something that already exists.

So I read the book, probably too quickly, for it was not aimed at twenty-something women but at 9 to 14 year-old boys. However, I did my best to discern whether it would please its target audience, and I decided that it ought to. I gave it four stars on Amazon, and the following review:

Sophia attacks the YA market! - September 3, 2008

I think the 9 year-old boy's review says it best:

"I LOVED The Tripods Attack because there was lots of violence. I liked how it had sadness in the end, like most of the books I read. Finally, I loved how they had the flame thrower and the .45 colt."

The Tripods Attack! is wonderfully bloodcurdling and gruesome, although its dizzy Victorian setting and many in-jokes keep it from getting too dark. Steampunk is a rather Chestertonian genre to begin with, and The Tripods Attack! resembles Chesterton's own fiction in some ways. It helps that Father Brown is a character in it, as well as Chesterton himself and a young HG Wells. But there are other characters as well: the girl "with hair as red as a Welsh sunset" that Chesterton dreams of, who is really a secret agent; and the natty and evil Doctor, who proves remarkably hard to gt rid of. The end of the book is the perfect setup for the next volume, which for all I know has not even been written yet.

This book is full of action - high marks for a scene on a runaway train and for an underground cat-and-mouse chase that is almost worthy of "Alien" - and its fractured fantasy world is vividly described. The writing is always solid and often clever. The messages do stick out, as one reviewer said, but they are never allowed to get pointier than the deadly Martian fangs or the stilettos wielded by Chesterton's rogue secret agent mother. (Did I mention that this book is surreal?) Father Brown is GKC's Father Brown, and he *does* launch into the same theological expositions. McNichol could afford to be less on-the-nose next time... however, the book *works*, and it knows that even though it is a tribute to Chesterton published by a small Catholic press, it is a story, nothing more - and nothing less. Sophia took a real risk in publishing fiction for once, and I hope it pays off for them. I should think that The Tripods Attack! will be most compelling for boys from 10-14, but only an adult reader will catch all the cameos: HG Wells, CS Lewis's Ransom, even Bartleby the scrivener!

Language Panic

2008-08-24T03:47:00.000-07:00

I have sometimes wondered about the metrics of Tolkien's elven languages. How are you supposed to scan the poetry? Is it sprung, syllabic, quantitative? Well, someone decided that it was quantitative:

Kirya veasse lirin, Vaiyannar hildion erya
or Valinor marton wilien mí tarmenel auta
Ilmarin, erya ande et Mardellon hortina ráner
tar tuonen, sí vor marien Falmando ter orme,
Silmaril or lumbor kalman, san tultane hildi
an Númendor elen hirien, kala yánen Elenna
tol vingisse ve lóte estáron, tinwe Earendil.

Yes, that is dactylic hexameter complete with elisions and everything. And it's an account of the voyage of Earendil modeled on the Aeneid. (I don't know Quenya, but I recognize enough of the roots to know that the first three words are "A ship [something] I sing.") I started reading it, and my brain went into hexameter autopilot. It was a surprising sensation, closing a linguistic circuit that was never meant to be. Quenya actually goes quite smoothly into dac-hex, but I've never seen it done before. I guess there aren't that many Quenyist/Latinists in the world, sad to say. Sheila is among their happy number, though! Here are her Quenya poems:

Nainie nilden
Linde Noldova

And her Sindarin translation of Tennyson: Lend a dinen

Added: Ask and you shall receive! Two attested forms of elvish metrical verse: the linnod, which is like the second line of an elegiac couplet; and a heptameter line. Still no idea what Galadriel's song is supposed to sound like.

Ready, set, write!

2008-08-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

Sheila has begun another poetry contest. This time the form is: the cento.

My entry:

The Return
(a Hopkins cento)

I will appear, looking such charity,
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.
Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where springs not fail.
Or ancient mounds that cover bones
Spring, that but now were shut
To the stars, lovely-asunder.

I did say yes
With the sea-romp over the wreck,
And find the uncreated light.
And I have asked to be
Lower than death and the dark,
An ark for the listener, for the lingerer,
For him who ever thought with love of me.

Recipe for Happiness

2008-08-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

From Laudator Temporis Acti, this eye-opening post on macarisms.

('Macarism' is just Gringlish for 'beatitude.' Which is Linglish for blessedness.)

Take special note of the "paradoxical macarisms"!

The very short mimes of the snow gods

2008-08-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

From Works and Days, a Latin tongue-twister and scribal exercise:

mimi numinum nivium minimi munium nimium vini muniminum imminui vivi minimum volunt

Which is something like, "The very short mimes of the snow gods do not wish at all that the very great burden of distributing the wine of the walls will be lightened in their lifetime." The good blogger Orwhalyus adds that it is "virtually unreadable in Black Letter script." I can imagine.

In a similar vein, I've always liked this line from Ennius: O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne tulisti! (O you tyrant Titus Tatius, what dreadful things you have brought upon yourself!)

Note to self: never sleep in a fairy ring!

2008-08-16T22:58:00.000-07:00

This poem by Yeats is a masterpiece of the "parallel" style I tried my hand at in "Roman April." Four stanzas of repeated syntax, words, and images, with rhyme and meter as well. It's as tightly patterned as Celtic knot-work.

The Man Who Dreamed Of Faeryland
WB Yeats

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;
His mind ran all on money cares and fears,
And he had known at last some prudent years
Before they heaped his grave under the hill;
But while he passed before a plashy place,
A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth
Sang that somewhere to north or west or south
There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race
Under the golden or the silver skies;
That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot
It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:
And at that singing he was no more wise.

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,
He mused upon his mockers: without fail
His sudden vengeance were a country tale,
When earthy night had drunk his body in;
But one small knot-grass growing by the pool
Sang where -- unnecessary cruel voice --
Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,
Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall
Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,
And midnight there enfold them like a fleece
And lover there by lover be at peace.
The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;
And might have known at last unhaunted sleep
Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,
Now that the earth had taken man and all:
Did not the worms that spired about his bones
proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry
That God has laid His fingers on the sky,
That from those fingers glittering summer runs
Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.
Why should those lovers that no lovers miss
Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?
The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Yeats wrote this in 1891, when he was 26 years old. I wonder if Tolkien ever read it? It reminds me of Tolkien, anyway - the "gay, exulting, gentle race" on their "woven world-forgotten isle"; the golden and silver light that could be from the Two Trees of Valinor. The man in the poem is afflicted by something like Tolkien's "longing for elves." Every time he tries to get back to his mortal affairs - love, money, revenge, and finally death - he is baffled by a dream of immortality, first elvish and finally heavenly.

Tunes for Assumption Day

2008-08-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

Once, it is said, on an isle in an age long past,
The sky was very dark at night and the stars shone clear,
And the people looked in holy awe at times
On the lights that turned the high court of the year,
And knew the signs. "It goes to Walsingham", they said,
Hushed, for overhead, chill miles across the sky
The white track, glorious of converging light,
As though showering trees lined a path on the height,
Ran over the road to the shrine of the Lady who does not die.

- Meredith, 16 and drunk on Hopkins

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western Seas!
O Light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!

- JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Up through an empty house of stars,
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace,
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.

- GKC, Ballad of the White Horse

Per amica silentia lunae - how do you do these things, Virgil?

2008-08-10T00:18:00.001-07:00

"The Medievals were right - he is a magician." So said Belloc (I can't remember where) upon reading a line from Book II of the Aeneid: a Tenedo tacitae per amica silentia lunae. Belloc was right. Virgil is a magician. I was casually poking around in the First Eclogue a few nights ago, and when I read the last lines I jumped out of my chair, trying to say something, trying almost not to cry. I felt like I had to tell someone how awesome Virgil is, and I duly cornered my sister the next day and subjected her to a enthusiastic rant (revenging myself for her rants about Chopin - just kidding, ma soeur!). Virgil can take an idea which amounts to, "When pigs fly..." and give you something spooky and beautiful like this:

Ante leves ergo pascentur in aethere cervi

(Before the light deer graze in the aether)

That's more like Garcia Lorca than like Milton. But it was the last two lines that really took the top of my head off. They hold the very essence of evening.

et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

(And now, far off, from the highest housetops the smoke rises
And greater fall from the high mountains evening's shadows.)

If you have once taken Latin and then let it get rusty, it is worth going back just for the sake of reading Virgil. Get Clyde Pharr's Aeneid, the one with the vocabulary at the bottom of every page. It makes things as easy as possible.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

2008-08-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

Oh! well, that won't be hard at all! Argh... One step at a time, though. At the moment I am using as much of my time as I can to read "The Lord of the Rings" again. It's been a while. The surprise and suspense have gone, sadly - I wistfully remember myself at twelve refusing to continue reading for days after Gandalf died, and being nearly too frightened to read through Shelob's Lair. And the incredible rush of joy I experienced when Aragorn unfurled the banner on the black ship! Now, ten years and three oft-watched movies later, I go back to notice things about Aragorn that I never noticed, to savor favorite lines... I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. Halfway though the book, I can say that I've learned three things so far: 1. I have never quite appreciated how human Aragorn really is. 2. Everyone on the good side seems almost careless in the way they trust to "good fortune" and signs and the promptings of their hearts... but it works out for them. 3. I'm more of a hobbit than a shieldmaiden. And that's just fine.

(Note: I made the "No Admittance" sign for my grandma's 80th birthday party last week. It was also my cousin's birthday, so we threw a double party at which it snowed food and rained drink. Nobody vanished, though.)

Someone liked Dark Knight...

2008-07-31T19:04:00.000-07:00

Status on Facebook today: "[Meredith's friend] thinks that Thomas Aquinus should make Christian Bale the sixth way."

It's better than the Ontological Argument, anyway... uh oh, I hope St. Thomas will save me from St Anselm.

Not one, but two instances of Dr. Who and liturgical robots.

2008-07-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

On HWTN:"...in recent Vatican news, Pope Benedict XVI ended speculation about Cardinal Arinze's replacement, announcing the new head of the Congregation for Divine Worship was an invincible Dalek warrior from the planet Skaro. Benedict explained this move would mark the beginning of a new era of decisiveness. When asked his opinion on the future of ICEL, the extraterrestrial prelate responded, 'Exterminate! Exterminate!' Commentators cautioned at reading too much into this statement, considering that is about the only thing Daleks say, until, when questioned about the USCCB, the new prefect responded 'Ineffable! Infeffable!'

And then at Chaucer's blog:

But wait, I heard a rumor that Thomas Usk didn’t actually die, but instead was saved at the last minute by Dr. Hwaet and his beloved companion Wat Tyler? They replaced Usk with a robot that looked like a person but could really only walk and recite basic liturgical formulae.

This CDW robot must be the real deal!

My latest ripoff...

2008-07-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

This is the first stanza of Johann Moser's "Winter in Panchavati," which is itself inspired by the Ramayana (a great epic which I have never read):

"Lordly, these forests in the winter, o Rama,
And the Godavari, droning in its deep mountain gorges;
Lordly, these sun-bright uplands and arch-blue skies
And red jungle blossoms nodding in the breeze;
Lordly, all these tranquil days and starlit, frosty nights,
When by the warm brazier we blend the fragrant wine -
And we remembered you, Ayodhya, gracious city of flowers,
Gracious city of the jeweled hills beyond the mountains;
We longed to stand once more at the threshold of your glory."

This stanza has no rhyme and its rhythms are irregular. But the next two stanzas repeat the first stanza's form, placing triple adjectives and formulas and names of cities in the same places. I was struck by this way of giving form to verse, and I tried imitating it last Christmas... but I ran out of interest and put the poem aside until today, when I finally filled in three missing lines. I had made the form harder for myself by adding rhyme, and the poem became very hard to control. The matter of the poem is the Lent and Easter I spent in Rome. ("Morning stations," i.e. the station churches, were the best penance I have ever done because I hate getting up early but once you get to the church, it is wonderful.)

Roman April

Daybreak: the aquaduct pours light, o Roma,
   Bare-headed dawn in the metro waits, lonely and shy.
Daybreak: the streets are empty for archangelic hours,
   And the dark domes rise in rank on the tide of wonder.
Daybreak: everlasting fountains flash like bells
   When we take our morning stations, armed with our youth.
And we remembered you, Zion, quiet city of sunrise,
   Quiet city of perfect waters and white courtyards;
We longed to wake in the sweetness of your gaze.

Afternoon: the slow discordant chime, o Roma,
   And the long walk home, under a silver sky.
Afternoon: the Appian Way walled with antique flowers,
   And the heavy heat come to a head of rose-red thunder.
Afternoon: our fear of judgment wells
   When we feel the April tempest's gleaming tooth.
And we remembered you, Zion, fearful city of lightnings,
   Fearful city of victorious beauty and everything in an instant;
We longed to walk in the triumph of your praise.

Midnight: the Paschal fire shines, o Roma,
  The shades of night are holy where they lie.
Midnight: now awake in every tower
  The bells are dancing over Egypt's plunder.
Midnight: water falls from brazen shells
   When we sing the new-born lambs in their field of truth.
And we remembered you, Zion, espoused city of glory,
   Espoused city of singing gates and gardens of dancers;
We longed to live in the wedlock of your ways.

I like the first stanza best, but as it progressed the poem came to feel rather gushy. I don't think that this kind of complexity is very profitable, and I still prefer complex chiming and other stuff that happens within one line to overarching schemes that aren't readily apparent to the ear. Thoughts?

Dappled Things!

2008-07-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

SS. Peter and Paul 2008 issue.