J.K. Rowling Tells All!

Yes, she put in all that Christian stuff on purpose. Oh, and Dumbledore was in love with Grindelwald.

"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down."

Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his "great tragedy."

"Oh, my god," Rowling concluded with a laugh, "the fan fiction."

I wouldn't worry much about the slash fanatics if I were her... those people always write whatever they want, regardless of canon. But I think that this revelation helps explain why Dumbledore put on the cursed ring so many years after he was supposed to have renounced the search for the Deathly Hallows. The whole Grindelwald episode was more than just a Gnostic power-trip. It shows Dumbledore trying to create his own reality in more ways than one. Think about it: he was the most brilliant student ever to attend Hogwarts, and he let himself become consumed with pride over this - remember his resentment when he had to stay home with his disabled sister instead of touring the world after his graduation. Then Grindelwald came, bringing his plans for world domination. It would have been ridiculous, if they hadn't been two of the most powerful and intelligent wizards of their age. The occult means by which they were going to effect said domination added another element of private reality. Throw in a disordered affection for Grindelwald, and you can see how Dumbledore thought he could overturn everything, not just the balance of power between wizards and muggles. He was disappointed in all his hopes - his plans for the Deathly Hallows, for the conquest of the muggle world, and not least for Grindelwald (who didn't return his affections). In fact... couldn't that be one of the reasons that Dumbledore was so intent on defeating G.? He had plenty of good reasons, but anger at being rejected would be a plausible addition. Anyway, it's obvious that he didn't magically become a different person after his sister's death and the capture of Grindelwald. He said he had learned the hard lesson that he "wasn't to be trusted with power," but passing up heading the Ministry to become headmaster of the most eminent school of magic didn't exactly remove him from a position of authority. And he kept manipulating people and events, as we all know. He wanted things his way.

So Dumbledore has changed over the years from a sort of cartoon Gandalf into this very tragic figure. I wonder how it will be for the next generation of children to read the series? Because they won't have to wait years and years to read the whole story. They could conceivably get through it all in a year. And I think that one needs to read the first book early on and grow into the last four books, really.

To comment on the first article, I find it interesting that she compares herself to Graham Greene:

"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot," she revealed. "On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

Fools, angels, etc...

While poking around on the website of the GMH International Summer School, I discovered this lecture: Gerard Manley Hopkins's Misdirected Faith.

Now, it's only logical that a self-described non-believer is not going to get Hopkins' Jesuit vocation. How could it be otherwise? I can only cite Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, who said this in Priests Among Men:

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Hopkins certainly lived his life in this way, and he has been paying for it ever since, as can be seen from this lecture. But ignorance is one thing, and ignorance arrogantly flaunted to an audience is another. It would be fun to fisk the whole thing, but I don't have the time and I don't really want it taking up too much space on my blog. So I'll just go through some of the more offensive statements:

Viewed from the perspective of a non-believer, Gerard Manley Hopkins's unfortunate religious obsession seems responsible for the suppression of one of literary history's great poetic talents and as likely for his early death.

"If only GMH hadn't been Catholic!" No matter what you believe, that's still like saying, "If only Dylan Thomas hadn't been Welsh!"

His outscape, quite literally, would be the way he clothed himself as a priest, even as he wrote like a pantheist and a free spirit.

GMH was most emphatically not a pantheist. His emphasis on the singularity and "thisness" of each thing is diametrically opposed to a view that treats the entire created universe as one undifferentiated God-blancmange.

Compare his duty-ditties for God to his passionate observation of human nature and nature more broadly, and Hopkins becomes the poster-boy for a person in need of deprogramming.

So... which of Hopkins' poems does he consider uninspired "duty-ditties?" The Wreck of the Deutschland? The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo? That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection? I don't need to go on, do I? Then there's the bit about deprogramming, which strikes a rather Stalinist note. The Hopkins I know from poems, journals and letters would not have willingly undergone "deprogramming" - there is a verse of his on the subject which begins "Fawning fawning crocodiles" - and I am glad that Axelrod doesn't flesh out this idea.

Only those blinded by a similar religious indoctrination would say his sacrificing a position of wealth and position in society, for a post as a priest and teacher, was a good decision.... How much longer he might have lived and created if he had lived the privileged life he was born to, we can't know but as likely, he would have lived much longer as a comfortable and famous poet.

Because everyone knows that the essential ingredients of great art are money, privilege, celebrity, and a cushy upper-middle-class lifestyle! Seriously, though - the image of Hopkins as a "comfortable and famous poet" is an impossible fantasy. It was his cross to be perhaps the only English poet who was ever truly ahead of his time. People often say it of poets that they are avant-garde; but that term implies followers, comrades, partisans to join the poet in his charge against convention. Hopkins was not avant-garde. He had no reader, Catholic, Anglican or atheist, who really understood his work. He was unpublishable in his age. Bridges only dared to publish the poetry in 1918, and it only became popular in the 1930's, nearly half a century after Hopkins' death. It is possible, of course, that Hopkins would have become a famous poet in his lifetime if he had been less experimental and less of a papist - in short, if he had stopped hanging out with High Church types at Oxford, let his father find him a job, and kept writing in the Keatsian vein that won him prizes when he was a precocious schoolboy. But he wouldn't be the Hopkins we know.

He made lists of what to give up for lent, but he made poems of what he knew best—the teeming natural settings he frequently visited. A trip to a new location might require his visiting a church but his journals, letters, finest creations were the notes he took observing the landscape, the clouds in a valley, the predominance of oaks and birch.

This is sloppy. It completely ignores Hopkins' intense interest in Gothic architecture, the terms of which appear throughout his notes on trees and clouds and water as well as in his poetry.

His reiteration of religious canon is boring. His poetics are new, fresh, important.

Yawn. More unsupported personal opinions.

Equally.... the case can be made that, but for his indoctrination into an overbearing society, he was one of the English language's greatest practitioners—indeed innovators —of poetry.

Isn't this all pretty much canon by now? Except for the Know-Nothing bit?

I won't flog this any longer, but I think will give Hopkins the last word, since he already had a gentle answer to such patronizing criticism of his beliefs in one of his letters:

It is long since such things had any significance for you. But what is strange and unpleasant is that you sometimes speak as if they had in reality none for me and you were only waiting with a certain disgust till I too should be disgusted with myself enough to throw off the mask.

In Order of Non-Appearance...

This is funny.

THE FUTILITY REVIEW

Our Mission Statement: We are dedicated to the non-publication of the best works of the best poets in the English-speaking world. We value diversity and strive to include new voices in our evaluation process. Our goal is to provide a non-venue for all kinds of poetry and avoid the labeling of differing aesthetics. We eschew poetry politics and never let personal relationships enter into our decisions. The bedrock principle of The Futility Review is that any poet, no matter whether accomplished or beginning, will be rejected in the same open-handed manner.

Awards and Honors: Poems that have gone unpublished in The Futility Review have failed to appear in every Best American Poetry anthology since its inception in 1988, and have been absent from dozens of Pushcart anthologies.

Be sure you click on "Guidelines":

How would you describe the poems in your submissions?

- Confessional Blubbering
- Mostly Whitespace
- Whimsical Anecdotes with Redemptive Close
- Post-Avant Jabberwocky

(Courtesy of Choriamb, of course.)

Whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how...

Two of the poems in Dappled Things really stood out for me this time, for very different reasons. My favorite poem in the issue is Gabriel Olearnik's English Apocalypse, which pleases with alarmingly whimsical eschatology, more Douglas Adams than John the Evangelist - right up until the tiger-pounce of the ending. Very well done. The other poem can't realistically be called good, but when you account for the author's age - 17 - you see that it's enormously promising. Timothy Barr's The Paschal Four is about birth, passion, death, and resurrection. After that, don't ask me what's going on in it. It reads like a bubbling farrago of Francis Thompson and Dylan Thomas, with the grandiose touches that you expect from a high school poet ("Nightish bastion," "My soul rejects the hero’s fate," etc.). But anyone who can write a line as riveting and odd as "Fugues fly from pipes veiled in my spine" is up to something. This aspiring poet has a strong instinct for the harmonious arrangement of vowels and for the feeling of a four-stress meter - although he can't decide on whether it is trochaic tetrameter, iambic tetrameter, or a four-stress accentual meter. Attention and practice will get rid of the metrical awkwardness, and hopefully the clotted imagery will become more vivid and intelligible. One fault that's easy to identify, if not to correct, is the Missing Article. It is apparent from the opening lines: "When in subtle mass I weighed, / Latent boughs kicked fleshy drum." Three nouns here, all without articles. The poet could have gotten away with the first two, but the third is intolerable and it seems to expose the other two epithets to the same sense of surfeit. It's true that Hopkins liked to omit the article, thinking it colorless; but he concealed his art. Here, the lines are so swollen with imagery that the articles have simply been washed out, like water from an overflowing bathtub. But all this aside, "The Paschal Four" manages to be the most intriguing poem in the issue. It is not content to be fashionably plain-spoken and understated. It wants to sing, loudly. So I hope that Barr will keep writing and "brace sterner that strain."

New Dappled Things!

The Mary Queen of Angels issue is out. I have a very short poem in it, one I wrote while I was in Assisi this year.

Catnip.

Eleven CD's of Dylan Thomas reading his own poetry and other people's poetry. Twelve-and-a-half hours of that wondrous Welsh voice roaring, murmuring, and half singing its way through Shakespeare and Auden and Hopkins and Thomas Hardy. $19.77 on Amazon.

What are you waiting for?!

Extremely Late Dappled Things Review

(In which I put two poems through the wringer and praise another.)

It's always interesting to see what Catholic poets do with their artistic inheritance. Some imitate medieval poets or classical poets. Some of them follow T.S. Eliot and his unique brand of Modernism. Some of them loathe every sort of free verse and stake their poetic success on a strict adherence to conventional English forms and meters. The list goes on; the rationales for the choices are probably just as various. And the last issue of Dappled Things sets out a pretty good sampling of these different approaches.

Amanda Glass has written a few poems I'm slightly familiar with (I have two of her lines floating through my head just now: "Oh give me then a requiem / To start my day out right!"). Her contribution is Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She takes the formalist route: iambic pentameter, ABAB rhyme scheme. The ABAB scheme is very emphatic (English poetry tends to prefer the softer ABCB, where you only have to rhyme the second and fourth lines), and combining it with the familiar iambic pentameter makes for a hard-to-handle form. It's like painting with primary colors: it takes a bold but discriminating hand. Let's see what she does with it:

I think our passage cannot be more plain
to eyes not earthly; and I think they smile
in ways which need no lips, when we attain
our little heights of thought, and pause, beguiled
by glimpses of far brighter realms beyond.
Like children in strange countryside, we cling
together, all-confiding, close and fond,
and with the grace of youth and joy we fling
our baubles: pealing laughter, glances clear
and heady, sweet air-kisses born of souls
which meet from shining eyes. For here
and now we can be lavish - time's grim tolls
have not yet wrecked our readiness to give
ourselves without reserve.
Nevertheless,
we have two ways to go, and each must live
the call which on each heart has been impressed,
and this must be the end of innocence
- or rather, death of childlike liberty.
A child shrinks from a child in self-defense!
I cannot help but take it bitterly
until you speak about the road you'll take,
and I can see its vistas in your eyes.
How could you not all else wholly forsake
for that? (And when will I learn to be wise?)

Some clichés leap out at me instantly: "pealing laughter," "shining eyes," "time's grim tolls." These should have been edited out. There are some awkward enjambments and even some metrical stumbles ("How could you not all else wholly forsake"). The overall theme of the poem is vague; nay, inscrutable. The angels watch us with "eyes not earthly" (one phrase I liked); they understand us and smile at our little epiphanies. Then the poem wanders off into abstraction and bland metaphors: we're all "like children" in a "strange countryside" with an oh-so-interesting vista of "far brighter realms beyond." At first I assumed that the "children" were the whole human race, but then it becomes apparent that they actually *are* children - or young people, anyway. Not little kids. Twenty-somethings. Argh.

Then we find out that there are two roads before each of us. We have to figure out which one we're called to. Up until this moment I had no idea what the two roads were, but now I slap myself on the forehead and realize they are probably the married state and the consecrated life. While you are struggling with the roads, the poem introduces a new character who seems to threaten the speaker. Suddenly the speaker is saying "You... you..." Whoa! Who is she talking to? I am guessing that the new child is a friend or sibling who is becoming a priest or religious. I will conclude by saying that the subject is edifying but its presentation is not very interesting.

***

This next poem is bad in every way. Indeed, is a pure paradigm of my least favorite kind of Bad Poem. Read it if you can:

Argument

I sit in sullen silence
on the sofa, curled up,
wondering
at every rustle and stir
from the bedroom
if you are coming
to find me,
so like a child
crouching behind a hedge
in a game
of hide and seek.

A mosquito lands on my arm
and then on my thigh.
I smack at him
repeatedly and
in futility
but refuse to move,
to get under
the net
that surrounds our bed.

-K.K. Adams

This has not the badness of the Tay Bridge Disaster, which is so bad that it is hilarious. If the Tay Bridge poem is bad like a deep-fried chocolate coated Twinkie, "Argument" is bad like a tofu hotdog.

It contains no interesting language. It makes no appeal to the ear. On the metrical level it is free verse, but a very specific kind of free verse, one that has been widely used for several decades. This "free verse" is actually an accentual meter (one that counts stressed syllables while letting the unstressed ones do whatever). This isn't bad. Accentual meter is *truly* traditional to English poetry - Beowulf is accentual. The problem is that this accentual meter has an average of two stresses a line. A large number of lines will have two stresses, and then there will be some lines with one stress or three stresses to mix things up; but it pretty much averages out to two stresses per line. "Argument" has 1.9 stresses a line, according to my count. It's the most low-key meter possible; the flame of meter turned down to its pilot light.

Take a minimalist meter, combined with aggressively plain diction, and apply it to a boring subject (essentially, "I'm sulking. [beat.] I'm still sulking.") - and you will have a perfect storm of pointlessness. Why should anyone bother to read this poem? The only evidence of craft comes from the line breaks, which seem to have been painstakingly inserted to set the words off to their best advantage. Each stingy line is served up to the reader like a single, delectable scallop in its own shell - a presentation that goes very ill with such austerity.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

***

It is a pleasure to turn to a poet with a distinctive and interesting style. Here is one of the four poems in this issue by Gabriel Olearnik:

The Builders

Come up and take them.

–Leonidas, king of Sparta, when asked
by the Persian emperor to lay down his arms.
Battle of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.


The gate was almost finished.
In those thirsty hours, a taut rack of earth we raised
With much labor. We packed the soil with shield-butts.
Waist deep in horse-flies, we stretched our lances—
Protean, slender bronze. Our cloaks were red and wet,
The air was old and saline by the end.

The foreman raised the cry. At once we
Scaled the mound and set a fence: women’s heads,
Serpents, chariot wheels, lion’s faces.
Another word and circling, avian spearpoints
Dropped tight against the wall.

Boredom, thighs tensed and rigid, moans of effort
We dredged the final draught of strength
And drew a thread of red gold on the blackness of the pass.
An ox of silk and silver approached to test
The man-stones of our house.

Impact. The charge shook the centre of the line,
Bending the façade back, but this defect
Was long planned by Leonidas, mason, master architect of war.
Our founded sandals took the strain, and each workingman,
Cuirass cushioned by his own mane of hair, pushed.
The ox impaled its trunk on fatal, burnished bronze
And bellowed. Our enemy’s boast of deathlessness
We parlayed down with lizard-killing backhands.

…

A thousand leagues away, my daughter bides her time
Lays a hand on the table
And opens her palm with a line of blue flint
and the sound of ripping sailcloth.

…

Envoi. We were what we did. Go, stranger, and say
that Lacedaemon lines are clear. Go, and say
that ruled and parsed law endures.
Go, go quickly.
I fear the thunderbirds of Ahura Mazda.
Their flight will dim the blazing white of day.

This poem does a good job fleshing out the strong governing conceit of its title. I especially liked the image of the warriors as wire-drawers, pulling a strand of red gold through the black draw-plate of the mountain pass. The fortitude and discipline of the Spartans are well honored here. The classical tone reminds me a little of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey, although that ox of silk and silver seems to have wandered in from a Lorca poem. I can't excuse the poem for its occasional carelessness, though. Some of the words don't quite fit ("taut rack of earth"? "we stretched our lances"?) and I think that "circling, avian spearpoints" would be stronger if reduced to "avian spearpoints." The pronouns will not stay put: First it's "We," then it's "I," then "We" returns as the Spartans speak from their epitaph, and the whole thing finishes with another inscrutable "I." Please, decide on third or first person POV already. The fragment near the end ("A thousand leagues away...") does not appear to have anything to do with the rest of the poem at all. I tried very hard to connect it to the Spartans and their battle-craft, but it refused to make sense. The narrative is so short, and the language so ambiguous, that I wasn't sure whether the daughter cuts her hand deliberately or by accident. But even after all these complaints (I can hear you all saying, "Hey, I thought she was going to say something good this time!"), I still like "The Builders." It makes me want to go watch 300.