March 16, 2010
Julius Caesar is a play with three– count ‘em three– central protagonists.
There is Caesar himself, of course, whose presence remains (literally, at one point) despite being brutally murdered halfway through the play… as Caesar himself puts it just before he is set upon by the conspirators:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
There is Brutus, whose actions and thoughts all necessarily revolve around Caesar, but whose words bring Hamlet to mind:
He would be crowned.
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder
And that craves wary walking. Crown him that,
And then I grant we put a sting in him
That at his will he may do danger with.
Brutus is the flawed hero of a play that bears another’s name. Brutus is the most complex character in the play– we see him deep in thought, talking to a wife he clearly loves, interacting with servants he cares about as human beings– but tragically fixed in his idealism. This one-sidedness is very different from that of Cassius– is there any more decisive smack-down in any play anywhere than the moment when Antony parleys with Brutus and Cassius and dismisses Cassius with the words "Old Cassius still"?– but is just as surely his own undoing. Brutus is intensely thoughtful, but he is his own fixed point from which he will not– cannot– diverge. So much so that Antony can, at the end of the play, eulogize him thus, without irony:
This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar.
He only in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
And then there is Antony, the character I find most compelling of all. From the moment Antony comes to Caesar’s still-warm body he, in popular sports parlance, starts playing this new deadly game "outside of his head." I’m not sure there’s a more powerful sequence in drama than that beginning with Antony’s vow by Caesar’s body to the famous, multi-layered, masterful "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech in which he indicts, tries and convicts Brutus and the rest of the "honourable" men who killed Caesar.
The play is named after Caesar and features Brutus, but it belongs to Mark Antony.
Tags:
101010 challenge, books, julius caesar, reading, william shakespeare
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March 15, 2010
We’re mostly hydrogen which means we’re mostly empty space. A scale model of a hydrogen atom with a 1-inch thick nucleus would enclose an almost completely empty sphere with a diameter of more than a mile. A scale model of our need with ourselves at the center would enclose a space greater than the blast radius of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.
More than sixty-trillion neutrinos spin off the solar wash from our sun each second, passing through the empty space in our mostly-hydrogen selves leaving the emptiness unchanged. I think of you every second and my humors reconfigure themselves, leaving me just what I was before, but different; just what I’ll become, but the same.
There’s a deeper mechanics that can explain the spooky dance and spin, how from different directions one turn affects the other, one reach acts as two, and how we can move forward and back in time, without touching.
There’s a book somewhere in the infinite library where all of this has already been written, illustrated with a periodic table where 1 is I, 2 is You, and 3 has to be We.
There’s a calculus I can’t calculate in this convergence to a single point, the equations marked by strange symbols I can’t quite decipher, one which looks like an unknown sum, another a fraction, a third that stands-in for dust.
Tags:
abcd10, abecedarium, hydrogen, Writing
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March 14, 2010
In Joyce’s story “Clay,” Maria is the clay—completely molded by events outside herself. None of Maria’s emotions originate from within herself… each is a reaction to the needs or emotion of someone else: she’d rather not take a gift, but she does; she’s sorry she mentions matters; she is summoned to resolve disputes without being involved in any disputes herself; she’s summoned to sing when she’d rather not; after just a page or two her thought to herself that it was “so much better to be independent” is laughable. And sad. The clay (presumably) she touches during the first “wrong” round of the game is fitting… being consigned to a Joycean convent a very close second place.
Eveline and Maria: what a strange pair. Eveline, too, is lifeless, but by virtue of being numbed to the world around her. Maria is reactive, but in no ultimately meaningful way, a life of minutiae and trivia that she elevates to an anesthetized substitute for passion.
I had to search for “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” to try to figure out the “mistake” Maria made singing it. It turns out to be a telling one: Maria sings the first verse twice, one in which the speaker exists in a state of already existing love, riches and remarkable ancestry, foregoing the second in which she would be singing of ‘”suitors that sought her hand” and active vows of love and faith—a state in which she would not only be wanted, but in which she would have to be an active participant in her own life, something she, like Eveline before her, will never be.
Tags:
books, dubliners, james joyce, motleyread, reading
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March 14, 2010
[Shared by Ed Byrne, an apt poem for Pi Day]
“Pythagoras Goes to Work”
Triangulate the sun’s ascent. Two oaks
the baseline on this steel-chill winter’s day.
Diversion, suddenly now, in the way
a hawk bisects low triangle of sky
as if she lectures on geometry
to clouds that hover close. The more he looks
the more he calculates a feathered Pi
that multiplied by gold reveals the light
the hawk explains in her wind-scything flight
to audience of fluff and haze. But soon,
no warning, hawk dives for its prey below,
a transitory scholar only; now
a blur of angling talons, wings; that’s how
the mind is ruled by blood. The dawn’s lesson.
–Lee Slonimsky
from Valparaiso Poetry Review (v7, n1)
Tags:
cpb, lee slonimsky, pi, pi day, poetry
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March 14, 2010
James Geary (proprietor of All Aphorisms, All the Time) presents selections from Aleksander Cotric’s Forbidden Thoughts, a new collection of Serbian anti-war aphorisms, including this gem:
“Nothing should slow us down; that’s why we have not opened our parachutes.”
I poked around a bit on the web and found selections from an anthology that looks rich, Serbian Secret Weapon, also with selections by Geary. Some of the selections are somehow simultaneously as sharp as a scalpel and blunt enough to bludgeon the reader, such as this by Rade Jovanović:
“We will slaughter each other.
We have no one closer than that.”
I’m still trying to figure out if either of these titles are available in an English translation.
Tags:
aleksander cotric, aphorisms, james geary
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March 14, 2010
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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March 13, 2010
The Storialist features a new poem each work day inspired by (and linking to) a photograph or work of art found on the web. Good idea and some great poems. Check it out.
Tags:
blogging, poetry, storialist, Writing
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March 12, 2010
Imagine the heart as a great spinning cylindrical habitat catapulting through deep space, home world forgotten, destination never known. The people living inside don’t feel as if they’re clinging to the thinnest skin when they walk. They can’t dig deep enough with their tiny hands to approach the bedrock of steel. But even with their primitive instruments they sense their heat disappearing, they intuit their own cooling, and from that derive a complex system of metaphysical entropy. They’re used to the sight of hazy lands curving across the sky, the rainbow arch of rivers over their heads, that nothing falls.
In the heart world’s mythology, the enlightened rise so high their nascent wings appear. Slipping spinward, the pain is enormous. They rise toward something like the sun. Left behind: first birth. Ahead: the crash and cacophony of a world on the other side of dreams. In between: the coriolis and the craving and the falling in every direction.
Tags:
abcd10, abecedarium, gravity, Writing
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March 12, 2010
“Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull in hand: ‘Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment , that were wont to set the table on a roar?’
Laughter is the father of beauty.”
–William Matthews
Tags:
beauty, cpb, hamlet, journals, shakespeare, william matthews
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March 11, 2010
“Untitled”
Stranger and stranger to one another
waitress on her hands and knees to brush
the carpet underneath a booth. You know–
crawling around on all fours like a dog
underneath a human booth etcetera
to be human—to crawl—to
walk through broken glass with gory feet.
People crying on airplanes,
weeping seven miles above the ground,
the grief
taller than Mt. Everest:
People on the street thinking:
I wanted this. And now it’s a cloud of chalk.
A pile of blood and guts and torn bones thinking
how beautiful is the tiger who killed me
the shit/ of days
–Denis Johnson
found in The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets
Tags:
cpb, denis johnson, poetry
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March 11, 2010
“Poetry fails, in each poem, to be as good as poetry ought to be—or as I somehow think it somewhere is, somewhere I’m not looking. Every flesh is flawed and poems are flesh.”
–Donald Hall
Tags:
cpb, donald hall, journals, Poetry and Poetics
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March 11, 2010
“This journal of mine will offend many people. It has offended even me… I do not feel that I have been sincere; I tried too hard to have succeeded.”
–Jules Renard
from The Journal of Jules Renard (January 1892)
Tags:
cpb, journals, jules renard, writers on writing
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March 10, 2010
“I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, make me talented. Peace and well being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice.”
–Jules Renard
from The Journal of Jules Renard (September, 1889)
Tags:
cpb, jules renard, writers on writing
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March 10, 2010
For a few minutes we’re sure our plane is going down. The flight attendants try to calm us in robotic tones over the intercom, competing unsuccessfully with the strange creaking sounds and rattling vibrations that seem to come from all around us.
We’re strapped into our seats as ordered, strangers who’ve suddenly become a community, a tribe. We sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the upright position, the last, lost People of Flight 2447 with Service to Seattle.
The fear creates a sudden bond. It compels the balding businessman who missed out on a First Class upgrade to look longingly at the crying infant he’d grimaced at then set studiously to ignoring when he got on the plane. To one side of me, two teen girls in matching college sweatshirts stage-whisper teary confessions to each other. Across the aisle a middle-aged woman leans forward, nearly hyperventilating, her Roberto Cavalli frames askew on her face, while her square-jawed seat mate– a soldier in civvies, recently home from Iraq– awkwardly pats her back and whispers something inaudible to her.
The fear moves strangers to even stranger actions. I can hear someone in First Class repeating loudly, "This is fucking ridiculous," as if inconvenienced, as if cut off in traffic on his way home from a Very Important Meeting, not facing a 30,000 foot plunge into a concrete sea. A woman behind me continually urges her small daughter to talk to Daddy on the built-in phone we all know has been disabled for the duration of our in-flight disturbance.
The fear takes our minds to unexpected places. The first thing I think of is my old cheese grater and how easily I shredded the tip of my knuckle with it the night before. I’m so fragile, I think. I try to imagine what will happen when we hit the Pacific and this plane is shredded. I wish I’d finished choosing the music for my wake and almost laugh out loud when I remember that one of the first songs on the incomplete playlist called "The End" is "In An Aeroplane Over the Sea." I wonder how long it will take all my social network friends, followers, acquaintances, contacts and connections to find out I’m gone. I realize I never collected all my passwords so someone could take care of my digital (non)presence and avoid all the creepy suggestions and connections for people to re-establish contact with, share with, or poke, the dead me.
I work with unexpected calmness. I’m suddenly methodical and orderly in a way I’ve never been before. I quickly write notes to my children, to my ex-wives, to my mom, and to a few friends I should’ve kept closer– each note more apology than farewell. I regret not having someone I’m in love with to write to, but I’m also glad that an unknown someone is spared the pain of losing one they love. And I’m spared wondering, in my final moments, if they love me at all.
I tear the pages from the notebook I always carry (in case inspiration– or severe mechanicals– strike) and put them in the plastic bag I’d used to bring aboard my carefully chosen, sub-3oz bottles of liquid items. I fold the bag up into a tiny compressed package. I theorize the most likely place for the notes to survive the watery shredding will be in my mouth behind my tightly clenched teeth… a test of the zipping seal the makers of the plastic sandwich bag never contemplated. The folded bag with the notes fits perfectly.
I don’t believe in God but I pray a little anyway, just in case. A kind of religious SETI project.
I go into full-on self-talk mode, narrating this last story as it happens, but I can only make out a few of the words I’m saying to myself: sorry, remember, wait, alone.
Tags:
abcd10, abecedarium, fear
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March 10, 2010
[I started noting great lines and stanzas to share from this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, but before long had in some way marked up the whole thing. I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Darwish—much less read any of his work—until a few weeks ago…]
“To a Young Poet”
Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.
If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.
Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.
Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.
If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.
If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.
Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.
If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.
You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.
You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.
One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.
A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.
Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.
Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.
Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.
Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.
Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.
Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.
A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.
The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.
Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.
You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.
From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.
Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?
The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.
No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.
And last but not least, Salaam.
–Mahmoud Darwish
found in Poetry (March 2010)
Tags:
cpb, mahmoud darwish, poetry, Poetry and Poetics, writers on writing
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March 10, 2010
Saint-to-be Christopher, my putative namesake, was an 18-foot tall Canaanite who carried, among other travelers, the child Christ across a flood-swollen river. His reward for a lifetime of service to besieged Christians was execution– after many tries– by decapitation, punishment for refusing to kneel and sacrifice before the pagan gods.
~~
To be enchanted is literally to come upon singing or to– somehow metaphorically and in reality simultaneously– come to song.
~~
Pound wrote of Whitman:
We have one sap and one root–
Let there be commerce between us.
And so in our shared language run common sticky threads, in some hands, wicks, in others, fuses… and surrounding all the confused smoke of inattention.
Tags:
abcd10, abecedarium, etymology
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March 9, 2010
“detective or mystery convention is of course the group exposition scene at the end, in which the detective tells a gathered group, often including the culprit, what happened. If addressed to the criminal, it’s in the second person, informing the criminal of her/his own biography. The same convention is used in contemporary poetry—informing some “you” of her/his own life. No wonder it sounds accusatory.”
–Alice Fulton
notebook entry, 8/22/92
Tags:
alice fulton, cpb, poetics, poetry, Writing
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March 8, 2010
The latest issue of Pleiades (30.1) has a great piece of criticism by Mark Halliday (“Pushcart Hopes and Dreams”), in which he discusses the Pushcart Prize nomination process and his own part nominating poems, including a close look at his 10 selections for this year. It’s an excellent work that bridges the essay and the critical review, and I highly recommend hunting it down.
But what grabbed my attention and seemed worth sharing was Halliday’s astute point about the poetics of the “post-avant” crowd, made by way of a pre-able to sharing his Pushcart selections (emphasis mine):
“With one or two exceptions, the poems I chose are easy to understand. Their thinking comes at you openly; they are not cryptic, oblique, convoluted, abstruse, gnomic, or private. They do not implicitly say to the reader, “Something mysterious and deep is going on here which you can only guess at and which could never be paraphrased.” Instead, these poems manifestly try to get something across to you, as if your understanding matters, as if life is short and obscurity is lonesome and the chances to communicate about mixtures of emotion and thought are finite.
The clarity and readability of the ten listed poems may reflect the rushed nature of my hunt: I felt I didn’t have time to sit there and ponder obscure poems for many minutes to see whether their difficulty was justified. More significantly, though, the clarity and readability of my selections reflect, obviously, my “aesthetic.” (I’ve never liked being told that I have a certain “aesthetic.” Students writing pretentiously confused and confusing poems have been known to say “Halliday has a narrow aesthetic.”) The qualities I praise in my ten choices could all be turned upside down by such readers as Charles Bernstein, Paul Hoover, Ann Lauterbach, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Cole Swensen—what I call clarity and readability, they could call obviousness, banality, reinforcement of oppressive capitalist norms… Often it has seemed to me that what those readers love best is not the “language-oriented” or “anti-quietist” or “experimental” poetry they praise, but rather their own generalizations about such poetry. When they’re expressing their views, their preferences, their defenses and attacks, that’s when you can tell they really care—and that’s (significantly) when they use language with intense clarity (insofar as they’re capable of intense clarity).
Now let me hurry to acknowledge that “language-oriented” and “experimental” poetry do not have a monopoly on badness. Bad poems, like bad persons, come in all styles and all traditions and all demographics. Pretension, fakery, preening, shallowness, dumbness, sentimental wallowing—you can find these failings in every camp. The vast majority of the six hundred poems I read to find Pushcart candidates were not experimental or disjunctive, because I didn’t even go seeking in most journals that tilt that way. (Though I did try Fence and New American Writing and Jubilat.) The vast majority of the six hundred poems were fairly clear while also dreary or thin or derivative or false.”
Tags:
aesthetics, poetics, poetry
2 Comments »
March 8, 2010
My grandmother died mid-winter, the ground too frozen to dig her grave. At her burial service the next summer, the mottled sky and random rain cleared up just an hour before the strangers started to arrive. The unexpected sun dried out the artificial turf that ringed her grave, changing it from avocado to lime green. The budding leaves on the aspens smelled of sugar and sap. Ravens called to one another in their marbled voice before settling silent in the nearest trees. And something vaguely amniotic dripped with the steadiness of a heartbeat from one corner of her suspended casket to the newly turned earth too far below.
Tags:
abcd10, abecedarium, death
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March 8, 2010
In the guise of writing letters to others I write and rewrite my own story. I correspond in search of correspondence… with other people, with the world, with a mysterious karmic system some part of me must believe in because I find myself absent-mindedly wondering about the effects of its judgmental cosmic rays.
~~
Correspondence is determined by friction. Without it, the separate pieces are suitable, but the energy remains mere potential. With it, each touch is the slow strike of a match, the seams the site of a flame flowering, fusing.
~~
The real Two Cultures divide doesn’t lie between Science and Art but in the rift between Imagination and Resistance, the disjunction of correspondence and commerce.
Tags:
abcd10, abecedarium, correspondence
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