All sorts of asses ‘love’ poetry. Why not? It confirms them in the assininity of their deepest beliefs. It underlies the racial laziness, the unwillingness to think, the satisfaction of feeling oneself part of the race and of having all posterity behind one in proneness and stupidity. This is what is inherent in most ‘love’ of poetry.
A smooth, lying meter that nostalgically carries them back to sleep is what they want. That’s why for a living, changing people only the new poetry is truly safe, truly worth reading. And that is why it is opposed by the best people—the intellectually deepest bogged—as if it were the devil himself.
—William Carlos Williams, “Note: The American Language and the New Poetry, so called” (1931?)
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Friday, April 26, 2013
Goldmines
One of the really wonderful things about the Beinecke Library's Beyond the Text symposium this weekend is the way in which it weaves together archival and poetic concerns. Tara McPherson was here earlier this week to give a talk in WGSS, and I found it so refreshing when she talked about the great students in the practice-based Ph.D. program at USC: "we cheat a little," she said, "because most of them come in with MFAs, so they have certain skills." It's so rare to hear that kind of training spoken of as a good thing. But it is a good thing. This morning Lori Emerson cited studying the Emily Dickinson archive with Susan Howe as her primary training for the media archaeology work she now does at Boulder.
In the second panel, on sound archives (Al Filreis, Jason Camlot, and Steve Evans), some conversation emerged—some spoken, some in the Twitter backchannel—around labor. It began with Jason Camlot and Al Filreis's discussions of workflows, which were largely "DIY" (I get the feeling Al spends a lot of time digitizin' away) and/or supplemented by grad or staff labor. (Steve Evans ribbed Al: "You guys aren't purely DIY—come on!")
These issues emerged more explicitly in the Q&A. One librarian noted that libraries' slowness often has to do with the cost of digitization, not in terms of equipment but of labor (because unlike the less formal structures Al had in place, libraries pay for this work). Lori noted that "DIY" often meant there was no one to whom to pass the torch when one person needed to step down, and that had much to do with the fact that this labor was uncompensated. As Jason rightly observed, this is a sustainability problem. Clearly this work is a labor of love for many people (in Al's case, visibly and wonderfully), but that does not then render it not labor.
The general consensus seemed to be that poetry and sound archives necessarily run on uncompensated labor, and that the basic question is how to get more of it. (Crowdsourcing came up a number of times.)
Jason Scott of the Internet Archive pointed out the incredible archival resource that the Internet Archive has been for a long time and continues to be, including for poetry materials (such as Naropa's archives). But this bounty was also framed in terms of volunteer labor, and in particular, the volunteer labor of young people.
This seemed to me to be a very problematic premise, especially the assumption that it's not only fine but a good idea to have young people do unpaid work—that unpaid work is somehow the natural province of youth. It's true that young people are often enthusiastic, want to learn, and have time to contribute. They may very well like doing the work. At the same time, the naturalization of unpaid or underpaid youth labor should be resisted ("it's mostly high school students": the {false} rationalization of a low minimum wage), as should the naturalization of not paying for cultural preservation work. Jason's responses to me are in the Storify, but one of them struck me as particularly interesting.
Can we take a moment to talk about mining?
Mining is perhaps now thought of as the quintessential poorly paid, dangerous, exploitative labor. There's a long history of labor conflict around mining. Getting the stuff out of the ground is a really unsavory process, but then, we also really want the stuff.
Mining is also the go-to metaphor for another often unsavory yet much-desired practice, the transmutation of "data" into usable "information." Mainly we have algorithms, overseen by humans, do the labor. Sometimes that's too hard, and you'd be better off having a human inside that machine; in that case you use Mechanical Turk. And sometimes the only thing of value that you need is labor, in which case we "crowdsource," mining the laborers themselves. The crowd's a goldmine. "So the hunter becomes the hunted, migrating from a situation in which users farm for gold, to a situation in which users are being farmed" (Galloway 137).
Is crowdsourcing "like" mining? As always with likeness: in some ways yes, in some ways no. This is less a matter of "exact resemblance to exact resemblance" than of the difference spreading. Is volunteering to digitize poetry sound recordings "like" mining? Not intrinsically—but if neither is paid, or paid sufficiently, then they are "like" in that sense, which is the only relevant sense for the comparison.
The canonical scene of mining strikes is actually not gold mining. The famous labor strikes repressed by Thatcher's government were mounted by coal miners. But gold mining looms large in the digital imagination for another reason: the phenomenon of simulacral primitive accumulation known as "gold farming." In the game World of Warcraft, the low-skill, time-intensive acquisition of "gold," which can then be sold for real currency to wealthier players, is famously associated with exploited Chinese workers, including prisoners.
As Alex Galloway observes in The Interface Effect, the figure of the Chinese gold farmer—and its installation as a racial other in ways that, as Lisa Nakamura has shown, conduce to deeply racialized social formations within the world of the game—is as powerful as ideology as it is problematic as a labor form. It serves to fashion exploitative digital labor as not-us.
And I would suggest that the eager twenty-year-old with a laptop functions similarly; in that way, too, digitizing sound archives is "like" gold mining, or rather "gold farming." Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for "fun," the youthful volunteer, who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. "I can get you a twenty-year-old!" is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2012. Print.
See also Galloway, "Does the Whatever Speak?" In Race After the Internet. Ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. New York: Routledge, 2012. 111-27. Print.
Nakamura, Lisa. "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft." In Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Ed. Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.
In the second panel, on sound archives (Al Filreis, Jason Camlot, and Steve Evans), some conversation emerged—some spoken, some in the Twitter backchannel—around labor. It began with Jason Camlot and Al Filreis's discussions of workflows, which were largely "DIY" (I get the feeling Al spends a lot of time digitizin' away) and/or supplemented by grad or staff labor. (Steve Evans ribbed Al: "You guys aren't purely DIY—come on!")
These issues emerged more explicitly in the Q&A. One librarian noted that libraries' slowness often has to do with the cost of digitization, not in terms of equipment but of labor (because unlike the less formal structures Al had in place, libraries pay for this work). Lori noted that "DIY" often meant there was no one to whom to pass the torch when one person needed to step down, and that had much to do with the fact that this labor was uncompensated. As Jason rightly observed, this is a sustainability problem. Clearly this work is a labor of love for many people (in Al's case, visibly and wonderfully), but that does not then render it not labor.
The general consensus seemed to be that poetry and sound archives necessarily run on uncompensated labor, and that the basic question is how to get more of it. (Crowdsourcing came up a number of times.)
Jason Scott of the Internet Archive pointed out the incredible archival resource that the Internet Archive has been for a long time and continues to be, including for poetry materials (such as Naropa's archives). But this bounty was also framed in terms of volunteer labor, and in particular, the volunteer labor of young people.
This seemed to me to be a very problematic premise, especially the assumption that it's not only fine but a good idea to have young people do unpaid work—that unpaid work is somehow the natural province of youth. It's true that young people are often enthusiastic, want to learn, and have time to contribute. They may very well like doing the work. At the same time, the naturalization of unpaid or underpaid youth labor should be resisted ("it's mostly high school students": the {false} rationalization of a low minimum wage), as should the naturalization of not paying for cultural preservation work. Jason's responses to me are in the Storify, but one of them struck me as particularly interesting.
@anarchivist @elotroalex @ncecire I like the idea of asking people to run a .wav digitizer on a record is like making children mine gold
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) April 26, 2013
Can we take a moment to talk about mining?
Mining is perhaps now thought of as the quintessential poorly paid, dangerous, exploitative labor. There's a long history of labor conflict around mining. Getting the stuff out of the ground is a really unsavory process, but then, we also really want the stuff.
Mining is also the go-to metaphor for another often unsavory yet much-desired practice, the transmutation of "data" into usable "information." Mainly we have algorithms, overseen by humans, do the labor. Sometimes that's too hard, and you'd be better off having a human inside that machine; in that case you use Mechanical Turk. And sometimes the only thing of value that you need is labor, in which case we "crowdsource," mining the laborers themselves. The crowd's a goldmine. "So the hunter becomes the hunted, migrating from a situation in which users farm for gold, to a situation in which users are being farmed" (Galloway 137).
Is crowdsourcing "like" mining? As always with likeness: in some ways yes, in some ways no. This is less a matter of "exact resemblance to exact resemblance" than of the difference spreading. Is volunteering to digitize poetry sound recordings "like" mining? Not intrinsically—but if neither is paid, or paid sufficiently, then they are "like" in that sense, which is the only relevant sense for the comparison.
The canonical scene of mining strikes is actually not gold mining. The famous labor strikes repressed by Thatcher's government were mounted by coal miners. But gold mining looms large in the digital imagination for another reason: the phenomenon of simulacral primitive accumulation known as "gold farming." In the game World of Warcraft, the low-skill, time-intensive acquisition of "gold," which can then be sold for real currency to wealthier players, is famously associated with exploited Chinese workers, including prisoners.
As Alex Galloway observes in The Interface Effect, the figure of the Chinese gold farmer—and its installation as a racial other in ways that, as Lisa Nakamura has shown, conduce to deeply racialized social formations within the world of the game—is as powerful as ideology as it is problematic as a labor form. It serves to fashion exploitative digital labor as not-us.
And I would suggest that the eager twenty-year-old with a laptop functions similarly; in that way, too, digitizing sound archives is "like" gold mining, or rather "gold farming." Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for "fun," the youthful volunteer, who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. "I can get you a twenty-year-old!" is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2012. Print.
See also Galloway, "Does the Whatever Speak?" In Race After the Internet. Ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. New York: Routledge, 2012. 111-27. Print.
Nakamura, Lisa. "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft." In Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Ed. Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Modernism and Childhood
The schedule for my junior seminar "Modernism and Childhood" is below. Comments welcome.
* * *
Modernism and Childhood
This course will examine the role of childhood in British and American literary modernism, as well as the role of modernity in childhood, with an emphasis on U.S. culture. Many modernist authors were fascinated by childhood and wrote books intended for children; meanwhile, scientific and pedagogical theories of childhood—prescriptive, descriptive, and everything in between—proliferated, revealing the degree to which childhood has always been subject to historical and cultural contingencies. In this course we will explore ideas like cuteness, innocence, play, and learning as they were constructed in the early twentieth century, and the roles that they played in the overlap between modernism and children’s literature. We will touch on some canonical children’s literature (Winnie-the-Pooh, A Child’s Garden of Verses) and some canonical modernist literature (Harmonium, Tender Buttons), as well as some literature that fits neither category very comfortably. We will also devote significant portions of the course to understanding psychoanalysis, both as a critical tool and as a set of powerful primary texts of modern childhood. Students will write two medium-length essays and complete a final exam.
Week 1
Tu 1/15 Introduction: What is modernism? What is a child?
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Gertrude Stein, “Susie Asado”
Th 1/17 “The Psychology of Modernism in Literature” (JAMA editorial, 1935) [CR]
Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon
Week 2
Tu 1/22 Childhood, 1900: pedagogy, medicine, art
Sally Shuttleworth, from The Mind of the Child [CR]
Maria Montessori, from The Montessori Method [CR]
Jonathan Crary, from Techniques of the Observer [CR]
Th 1/24 Psychoanalysis and developmental theory
Sigmund Freud, from Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Week 3
Tu 1/29 Psychoanalysis continued
Sigmund Freud, The Wolf-Man
Th 1/31 Freud, The Wolf-Man continued
“The ‘Uncanny’” [CR]
Week 4
Tu 2/05 “Innocence” and challenges to innocence
Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses [CR]
Jacqueline Rose, from Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature [CR]
Psychoanalysis exercise due: Choose one of the following concepts to explain, based on our reading of Freud: ego, id, castration complex, Oedipal complex, primal scene, uncanny. The goal is to summarize a concept as faithfully as you can, using Freud’s own words as evidence. 2-3 double-spaced pages; no more than 1000 words.
Th 2/07 “Innocence” continued: sexuality
Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack
Week 5
Tu 2/12 Barnes continued
Kathryn Bond Stockton, from The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century [CR]
Th 2/14 “Innocence” continued: race
Anne Anlin Cheng, from The Melancholy of Race [CR]
Zora Neale Hurston, from Their Eyes Were Watching God [CR]
James Weldon Johnson, from Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man [CR]
Frantz Fanon, from Black Skins, White Masks [CR]
Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred
Week 6
Tu 2/19 Hughes, Montage continued
Pastiche exercise due: write a poem on any subject in the style of Langston Hughes.
Th 2/21 Cultivating the “innocent eye”
Hughes, poems for children
Marianne Moore, “Critics and Connoisseurs”; “Lines on a Visit of Anne Carroll Moore to Hudson Park Branch” [CR]
Week 7
Tu 2/26 Colonial allegories and the innocent eye
Paul De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity” from Blindness and Insight [CR]
L. Frank Baum, from The Wizard of Oz [CR]
Arthur Ransome, from Swallows and Amazons [CR]
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” [CR]
Th 2/28 Nonsense and sound-sense
Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussycat”; “The Quangle-Wangle’s Hat” [CR]
Ogden Nash, selected poems [CR]
Week 8
Tu 3/05 Nonsense and sound-sense continued
Wallace Stevens, poems from Harmonium, “The Poems of our Climate” [CR]
midterm essay due (5-6 pages)
Th 3/07 Learning to read
A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner
3/09 - 3/24: SPRING RECESS
Week 9
Tu 3/26 Ezra Pound, from A B C of Reading; “In a Station of the Metro” [CR]; Canto II [CR]
Th 3/28 Cuteness
Gertrude Stein, “Objects” and “Food” from Tender Buttons
Pastiche exercise due: write a poem on any subject in the style of Gertrude Stein OR Ezra Pound.
Week 10
Tu 4/02 Cuteness continued
Stein continued
“Palilalia and Gertrude Stein” [CR]
Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde”
Th 4/04
Stein, The World Is Round
Week 11
Tu 4/9 Cuteness and kitsch
T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [CR]
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [CR]
Th 4/11 Playing I: Object relations
D. W. Winnicott, from Playing and Reality [CR]
Week 12
Tu 4/16 Margret and H. A. Rey, Curious George and Curious George Takes a Job
Michael Taussig, from Mimesis and Alterity [CR]
Th 4/18 Playing II: Language games
Lorine Niedecker, New Goose
selected nursery rhymes [CR]
Week 13
Tu 4/23 Niedecker continued
Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations [CR]
Th 4/25 Modernism and childhood: conclusions
Final essay due
Final exam date TBA
* * *
Modernism and Childhood
This course will examine the role of childhood in British and American literary modernism, as well as the role of modernity in childhood, with an emphasis on U.S. culture. Many modernist authors were fascinated by childhood and wrote books intended for children; meanwhile, scientific and pedagogical theories of childhood—prescriptive, descriptive, and everything in between—proliferated, revealing the degree to which childhood has always been subject to historical and cultural contingencies. In this course we will explore ideas like cuteness, innocence, play, and learning as they were constructed in the early twentieth century, and the roles that they played in the overlap between modernism and children’s literature. We will touch on some canonical children’s literature (Winnie-the-Pooh, A Child’s Garden of Verses) and some canonical modernist literature (Harmonium, Tender Buttons), as well as some literature that fits neither category very comfortably. We will also devote significant portions of the course to understanding psychoanalysis, both as a critical tool and as a set of powerful primary texts of modern childhood. Students will write two medium-length essays and complete a final exam.
Week 1
Tu 1/15 Introduction: What is modernism? What is a child?
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Gertrude Stein, “Susie Asado”
Th 1/17 “The Psychology of Modernism in Literature” (JAMA editorial, 1935) [CR]
Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon
Week 2
Tu 1/22 Childhood, 1900: pedagogy, medicine, art
Sally Shuttleworth, from The Mind of the Child [CR]
Maria Montessori, from The Montessori Method [CR]
Jonathan Crary, from Techniques of the Observer [CR]
Th 1/24 Psychoanalysis and developmental theory
Sigmund Freud, from Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Week 3
Tu 1/29 Psychoanalysis continued
Sigmund Freud, The Wolf-Man
Th 1/31 Freud, The Wolf-Man continued
“The ‘Uncanny’” [CR]
Week 4
Tu 2/05 “Innocence” and challenges to innocence
Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses [CR]
Jacqueline Rose, from Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature [CR]
Psychoanalysis exercise due: Choose one of the following concepts to explain, based on our reading of Freud: ego, id, castration complex, Oedipal complex, primal scene, uncanny. The goal is to summarize a concept as faithfully as you can, using Freud’s own words as evidence. 2-3 double-spaced pages; no more than 1000 words.
Th 2/07 “Innocence” continued: sexuality
Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack
Week 5
Tu 2/12 Barnes continued
Kathryn Bond Stockton, from The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century [CR]
Th 2/14 “Innocence” continued: race
Anne Anlin Cheng, from The Melancholy of Race [CR]
Zora Neale Hurston, from Their Eyes Were Watching God [CR]
James Weldon Johnson, from Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man [CR]
Frantz Fanon, from Black Skins, White Masks [CR]
Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred
Week 6
Tu 2/19 Hughes, Montage continued
Pastiche exercise due: write a poem on any subject in the style of Langston Hughes.
Th 2/21 Cultivating the “innocent eye”
Hughes, poems for children
Marianne Moore, “Critics and Connoisseurs”; “Lines on a Visit of Anne Carroll Moore to Hudson Park Branch” [CR]
Week 7
Tu 2/26 Colonial allegories and the innocent eye
Paul De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity” from Blindness and Insight [CR]
L. Frank Baum, from The Wizard of Oz [CR]
Arthur Ransome, from Swallows and Amazons [CR]
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” [CR]
Th 2/28 Nonsense and sound-sense
Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussycat”; “The Quangle-Wangle’s Hat” [CR]
Ogden Nash, selected poems [CR]
Week 8
Tu 3/05 Nonsense and sound-sense continued
Wallace Stevens, poems from Harmonium, “The Poems of our Climate” [CR]
midterm essay due (5-6 pages)
Th 3/07 Learning to read
A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner
3/09 - 3/24: SPRING RECESS
Week 9
Tu 3/26 Ezra Pound, from A B C of Reading; “In a Station of the Metro” [CR]; Canto II [CR]
Th 3/28 Cuteness
Gertrude Stein, “Objects” and “Food” from Tender Buttons
Pastiche exercise due: write a poem on any subject in the style of Gertrude Stein OR Ezra Pound.
Week 10
Tu 4/02 Cuteness continued
Stein continued
“Palilalia and Gertrude Stein” [CR]
Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde”
Th 4/04
Stein, The World Is Round
Week 11
Tu 4/9 Cuteness and kitsch
T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [CR]
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [CR]
Th 4/11 Playing I: Object relations
D. W. Winnicott, from Playing and Reality [CR]
Week 12
Tu 4/16 Margret and H. A. Rey, Curious George and Curious George Takes a Job
Michael Taussig, from Mimesis and Alterity [CR]
Th 4/18 Playing II: Language games
Lorine Niedecker, New Goose
selected nursery rhymes [CR]
Week 13
Tu 4/23 Niedecker continued
Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations [CR]
Th 4/25 Modernism and childhood: conclusions
Final essay due
Final exam date TBA
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Twentieth Century Poets (Forever)
It never occurred to me to peruse the USPS's fine selection of stamps online until a friend alerted me (today) to the existence of poet stamps. I'm not much for the fetishization of specific poets, much less the category "Poets." Is there anything worse than "Poets"? But I do love spotting poetry in the wild, and this particular sheet of USPS 45c/Forever stamps offers us a glorious instance—a mini-anthology—a history (forever).
The poets pictured are Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—"ten great poets," as the website copy observes—a rather hodgepodge group, but not a bad one by any means. The USPS wishes you to know that this group "includ[es] several who served as United States Poet Laureate," and that, between them, these poets have been awarded "numerous Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and honorary degrees."
Most remarkably, "[t]he sheet's verso includes an excerpt from one poem by each of the poets featured on the sheet," making this sheet of ten stamps into a tiny anthology of twentieth-century U.S. poetry. What is the principle of selection at work here? It seems somewhat arbitrary, but not way out in left field, either. The apportioning of prizes to the represented poets is undoubtedly one factor, one indicator of notability. The poets are clustered at midcentury, with none particularly recent, and none preceding modernism. They are moderately, but not aggressively, "accessible" poets; another way of saying this is that they are moderately, but not aggressively, "difficult" poets. (Of course Williams was sometimes very aggressive with his difficulty, but that has all been redwheelbarrowed away.)
I wonder what the quoted selections of poetry are. Maybe I'll order the stamps and find out—maybe I'll order the anthology and read it. It costs about as much as a small press poetry book.
"The Twentieth-Century Poets stamps are being issued as Forever stamps in self-adhesive sheets of 20 (2 of each design). Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce rate."
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
In the short legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae—we have the
classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it
if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says:
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by."
—Marianne Moore, "In the Days of Prismatic Color," 1924
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
My name is Acutifolius: having sharp edges. Underside of each frond like a powdery line of Braille. (19)
—Hillary Gravendyk, "Botanica" (I), Harm
Monday, October 31, 2011
What's so eerie about Stephen Crane's Black Riders (1894) is that it's full of love poems, and they're seriously cheesy.
Most of the book is stark, ironic, cosmic, and to some degree these elements enter into the love poems. But whereas the other poems are full of twists and turns that are witty in the same measure that they are cruel, in the context of the love poems the same twists and cruelties seem bathetic. And whereas the book's formalized, ritualistic language usually renders the poems mysterious and darkly comic, in the love poems it's embarrassing.
In poem 31, for instance, a group of workers builds something large out of stone. While they're admiring their handiwork, the edifice falls down and squishes them. And that's the end of the poem. It's like ra-ee-ain on your wedding day, and it's kind of funny.
But what to do with something like poem 40?
That repetition, that breaking off—that's classic Crane. But the repeated demands for love and on love's behalf are, weirdly, classic Crane too, and they're difficult to square with the acceptance, elsewhere, of cosmic ironies in which love and sentiment are entirely—often comically—beside the point. (Think of the woman who weeps for a drowned lover in poem 38—her grief mirrored by that of the king of the seas, who is seriously sick of having corpses rained upon him. Both would stop the deaths if they could.)
Even a poem like the one above has its moments. I'm struck by "the noise of tearing," for example. The second speaker (the coward) speaks into being a metaphorical veil that comes to have such material presence that it may tear, producing a noise, and it's the noise of tearing that the coward must avoid.
But aren't such subtleties rather steamrollered by "YOU LOVE ME?"
It's not sentimentalism exactly, but something like it continually punctures Black Riders. What a curious book.
Most of the book is stark, ironic, cosmic, and to some degree these elements enter into the love poems. But whereas the other poems are full of twists and turns that are witty in the same measure that they are cruel, in the context of the love poems the same twists and cruelties seem bathetic. And whereas the book's formalized, ritualistic language usually renders the poems mysterious and darkly comic, in the love poems it's embarrassing.
In poem 31, for instance, a group of workers builds something large out of stone. While they're admiring their handiwork, the edifice falls down and squishes them. And that's the end of the poem. It's like ra-ee-ain on your wedding day, and it's kind of funny.
But what to do with something like poem 40?
AND YOU LOVE ME
I LOVE YOU
YOU ARE, THEN, COLD COWARD.
AYE; BUT, BELOVED,
WHEN I STRIVE TO COME TO YOU,
MAN'S OPINIONS, A THOUSAND THICKETS,
MY INTERWOVEN EXISTENCE,
MY LIFE,
CAUGHT IN THE STUBBLE OF THE WORLD
LIKE A TENDER VEIL,—
THIS STAYS ME.
NO STRANGE MOVE CAN I MAKE
WITHOUT NOISE OF TEARING.
I DARE NOT.
IF LOVE LOVES
THERE IS NO WORLD
NOR WORD.
ALL IS LOST
SAVE THOUGHT OF LOVE
AND PLACE TO DREAM.
YOU LOVE ME?
I LOVE YOU.
YOU ARE, THEN, COLD COWARD.
AYE; BUT, BELOVED—
That repetition, that breaking off—that's classic Crane. But the repeated demands for love and on love's behalf are, weirdly, classic Crane too, and they're difficult to square with the acceptance, elsewhere, of cosmic ironies in which love and sentiment are entirely—often comically—beside the point. (Think of the woman who weeps for a drowned lover in poem 38—her grief mirrored by that of the king of the seas, who is seriously sick of having corpses rained upon him. Both would stop the deaths if they could.)
Even a poem like the one above has its moments. I'm struck by "the noise of tearing," for example. The second speaker (the coward) speaks into being a metaphorical veil that comes to have such material presence that it may tear, producing a noise, and it's the noise of tearing that the coward must avoid.
But aren't such subtleties rather steamrollered by "YOU LOVE ME?"
It's not sentimentalism exactly, but something like it continually punctures Black Riders. What a curious book.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Saying hey
Via Ben Friedlander on Twitter, I was recently treated to Anne Boyer's "Damnatio Memoriae." Please read it--it's short and brilliant.
As Miriam Posner points out, it's oddly moving, not in spite of its repetition of the hilariously banal phrase "saying hey," but because of it. It serves as a subversively anti-dramatic counterpoint to the question, "Can the subaltern speak?" After all, here they are, saying hey. Only they're saying hey across the centuries, across the continents, "across deep time." These mysteries of the low register are the genius of flarf and the reason it's poetry, even if it's irritating poetry. Why does lameness sometimes flare out in the form of awesomeness?
[Better than Storify? Worse? I sometimes think Twitter conversations amount to more than the sum of their parts, but it can be difficult to render them usefully on a blog.]
As Miriam Posner points out, it's oddly moving, not in spite of its repetition of the hilariously banal phrase "saying hey," but because of it. It serves as a subversively anti-dramatic counterpoint to the question, "Can the subaltern speak?" After all, here they are, saying hey. Only they're saying hey across the centuries, across the continents, "across deep time." These mysteries of the low register are the genius of flarf and the reason it's poetry, even if it's irritating poetry. Why does lameness sometimes flare out in the form of awesomeness?
[Better than Storify? Worse? I sometimes think Twitter conversations amount to more than the sum of their parts, but it can be difficult to render them usefully on a blog.]
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Poetry in the wild: Longfellow edition
I love these instances of poetry in the wild—moments when you see poetry being deployed to unlikely ends, or when you see the general public being called upon to recognize something that you're usually called a hopeless nerd for studying. A few weeks ago I took note of a Businessweek article that was briefly viral, whose most quotable and quoted line was
So I couldn't help being struck by the widespread mockery of Sarah Palin's mangling of the story of Paul Revere. It's not that she wasn't wrong--of course she was wrong, completely. It's that everyone knew with such certainty just how wrong she was, and that they had the goods on the truth about Paul Revere.
And why did everyone know the real story of Paul Revere?
Do I even have to ask? Because of Henry frickin' Wadsworth Longfellow. Everybody heard that poem in grade school and knows at least bits of it by heart.
Here's how Comedy Central blurbed Jon Stewart's June 6 segment on Palin. Note the direct quotation from Longfellow.
Stephen Colbert likewise quoted Longfellow in his segment on Palin. In fact, he comically bowdlerized the poem, and getting the joke depended on remembering the original:
Normally nobody cares at all (or even notices) if a politician messes up some history; in fact, outright misrepresentations and lies are pretty par for the course in politics. Yet this particular screw-up briefly had everyone in a lather, and I think it has everything to do with the poetry. Sarah Palin did fail a sort of knowledge-test, but it was more a test of national folklore than of history (even though of course the national folklore is being called history). It seems to be less offensive to most people that she got the history wrong (which of course she did) than that she didn't know Longfellow's poem. One if by land, two if by sea! What, were you raised by wolves?
From a historical perspective, the idea of Henry Wadsworth "I wrote The Song of Hiawatha" Longfellow as some kind of neutral, unimpeachable historical authority is pretty hilarious. And from a literary perspective, it's puzzling to be reminded how powerfully such a bad and, in some ways, marginal poem has lodged in the national consciousness, while poems we poetry critics might all think of as central—Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," for example—languish in relative obscurity. Who decides what poems (if any) get taught in elementary school, and for what reason? How many teachers have taught "Paul Revere's Ride" not as poetry (fair enough!) but as history? For how many people is this one of the few poems they learned in school--or even the only poem?
This is why poetry is so interesting to observe in the wild. You never know what it's going to do.
[UPDATE: Jill Lepore does it better.]
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."And then there is this gem, from a pharmacy in Rockridge:
So I couldn't help being struck by the widespread mockery of Sarah Palin's mangling of the story of Paul Revere. It's not that she wasn't wrong--of course she was wrong, completely. It's that everyone knew with such certainty just how wrong she was, and that they had the goods on the truth about Paul Revere.
And why did everyone know the real story of Paul Revere?
Do I even have to ask? Because of Henry frickin' Wadsworth Longfellow. Everybody heard that poem in grade school and knows at least bits of it by heart.
Here's how Comedy Central blurbed Jon Stewart's June 6 segment on Palin. Note the direct quotation from Longfellow.
Stephen Colbert likewise quoted Longfellow in his segment on Palin. In fact, he comically bowdlerized the poem, and getting the joke depended on remembering the original:
"It's just like we all learned in grade school.'One if by land, bells if by two, hey, British, you're warned, sailed the ocean blue.'"Both Stewart and Colbert take special note of Palin's language, a "folksy word salad," as the Stewart blurb calls it, "a random string of words," as Colbert puts it. The focus on the disorder of Palin's words seems to register some indignation at the departure from Longfellow's rhymed, aggressively accentual verse, which neither can help quoting.
Normally nobody cares at all (or even notices) if a politician messes up some history; in fact, outright misrepresentations and lies are pretty par for the course in politics. Yet this particular screw-up briefly had everyone in a lather, and I think it has everything to do with the poetry. Sarah Palin did fail a sort of knowledge-test, but it was more a test of national folklore than of history (even though of course the national folklore is being called history). It seems to be less offensive to most people that she got the history wrong (which of course she did) than that she didn't know Longfellow's poem. One if by land, two if by sea! What, were you raised by wolves?
From a historical perspective, the idea of Henry Wadsworth "I wrote The Song of Hiawatha" Longfellow as some kind of neutral, unimpeachable historical authority is pretty hilarious. And from a literary perspective, it's puzzling to be reminded how powerfully such a bad and, in some ways, marginal poem has lodged in the national consciousness, while poems we poetry critics might all think of as central—Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," for example—languish in relative obscurity. Who decides what poems (if any) get taught in elementary school, and for what reason? How many teachers have taught "Paul Revere's Ride" not as poetry (fair enough!) but as history? For how many people is this one of the few poems they learned in school--or even the only poem?
This is why poetry is so interesting to observe in the wild. You never know what it's going to do.
[UPDATE: Jill Lepore does it better.]
Friday, June 3, 2011
Apparently the semester is over
I've started many a blog post in the last few weeks, only to discard it, dissatisfied. I'm in a bit of a strange lull lately, despite having the usual gigantic heap of work on my hands. I submitted an essay relatively recently, but not the essay, and I'm on the fence about how deeply to revise the essay right now (versus after I hand it to some readers). Common sense tells me to cobble together something remotely worthy of a response and send it out for feedback, because I've been staring at the thing for too long. Reading the essay tells me to scrap the whole thing, go vegan for three weeks, maybe seek enlightenment, and then try again.
I'm hoping for some middle ground, since abandoning cheese just isn't going to happen.
I've meant to do some critical reflecting on the course I most recently taught, Didactic Modernism. I've actually written pages on the subject (scrapped). Partly those pages veered into reminiscences about books I've read, courses I've taken, things I wish I knew.
How you never really know what your students are thinking. How you, as a student, often only find out what you're thinking after the lapse of years. As a teacher, likewise.
How strange course evaluations are. How Alan Jacobs argues that course evaluations should be given at least a semester after the course has ended. How a student said that my expectations for the final exam made me "as pompous as Ezra Pound." How I chose to read this as evidence of the student's having learned that Ezra Pound expects you to know a lot, which is true. Also that Ezra Pound could be pretty pompous. Also true.
How another student said that Berkeley should give me tenure. How this saddened me for a variety of reasons.
In short, I seem to be too near to it still to do anything but ramble.
The essence of it is that it seems difficult to separate one's teaching methods from one's memories of being a student, even when you remember that you were by definition an atypical student. And I can't kick the belief that what makes a course a great learning experience is incredibly arbitrary and contingent. It is the lot of an English major to sit through many sub-par discussions. The trade off is that you've read Moby-Dick, and carefully. You forget the one, and remember the other, and return to it for the rest of your life.
How do you create the conditions for that? Well, you assign Moby-Dick, for one thing. But of course there's more to it. But what is that more, and for whom?
I was the kind of student who responded well to being set tasks. Given something hard to do, I rose to the occasion. I was a nerd; that's how I ended up in grad school! This is clearly not the case for all students. I've heard many students say that as soon as something is an assignment, they don't want to do it; it sucks out all their creativity and they stop trying. Also that if something isn't required, they won't do it.
This may be the first semester I've given an extra credit option. The option, in this case, was to do something slightly more onerous than a standard course blog post, in order to make up for missed blog posts of past weeks. Here was an interesting scenario. You couldn't lose credit, but you could gain it. There was no penalty for trying. (There is, some might point out, never any penalty for trying, insofar as getting no credit is always worse than getting a low grade. This seems to be beside the point when it comes to the psychology of grades.) Several students decided to do extra credit. Some really really needed it; some only sort of needed it. One asked if she could do it when she did not need it. There were easier and more difficult ways to do this extra credit, and some chose more difficult ways.
How can you rig a course so that it all seems like extra credit? Would it even be wise?
I once memorized "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" "for" a course, while studying for the final. The course was a pretext; I memorized it for the poem.
You never know when your students are doing that, or doing something like it for a different class--not that you necessarily want to know.
The pedagogical uses of grading continue to puzzle me. Clearly it functions differently for different people. In some ways it's a form of gamification, which some people find motivating and others find stressful and demoralizing. Grades certainly confuse the issue of learning.
These are, of course, questions I've been pondering precisely because my students this semester were so very excellent. It so clearly wasn't all about carrots and sticks for most of them. So then--what? Did I already do my bit by assigning Gertrude Stein? Will my students remember Tender Buttons forever?
On these matters my course evaluations are silent.
I'm hoping for some middle ground, since abandoning cheese just isn't going to happen.
I've meant to do some critical reflecting on the course I most recently taught, Didactic Modernism. I've actually written pages on the subject (scrapped). Partly those pages veered into reminiscences about books I've read, courses I've taken, things I wish I knew.
How you never really know what your students are thinking. How you, as a student, often only find out what you're thinking after the lapse of years. As a teacher, likewise.
How strange course evaluations are. How Alan Jacobs argues that course evaluations should be given at least a semester after the course has ended. How a student said that my expectations for the final exam made me "as pompous as Ezra Pound." How I chose to read this as evidence of the student's having learned that Ezra Pound expects you to know a lot, which is true. Also that Ezra Pound could be pretty pompous. Also true.
How another student said that Berkeley should give me tenure. How this saddened me for a variety of reasons.
In short, I seem to be too near to it still to do anything but ramble.
The essence of it is that it seems difficult to separate one's teaching methods from one's memories of being a student, even when you remember that you were by definition an atypical student. And I can't kick the belief that what makes a course a great learning experience is incredibly arbitrary and contingent. It is the lot of an English major to sit through many sub-par discussions. The trade off is that you've read Moby-Dick, and carefully. You forget the one, and remember the other, and return to it for the rest of your life.
How do you create the conditions for that? Well, you assign Moby-Dick, for one thing. But of course there's more to it. But what is that more, and for whom?
I was the kind of student who responded well to being set tasks. Given something hard to do, I rose to the occasion. I was a nerd; that's how I ended up in grad school! This is clearly not the case for all students. I've heard many students say that as soon as something is an assignment, they don't want to do it; it sucks out all their creativity and they stop trying. Also that if something isn't required, they won't do it.
This may be the first semester I've given an extra credit option. The option, in this case, was to do something slightly more onerous than a standard course blog post, in order to make up for missed blog posts of past weeks. Here was an interesting scenario. You couldn't lose credit, but you could gain it. There was no penalty for trying. (There is, some might point out, never any penalty for trying, insofar as getting no credit is always worse than getting a low grade. This seems to be beside the point when it comes to the psychology of grades.) Several students decided to do extra credit. Some really really needed it; some only sort of needed it. One asked if she could do it when she did not need it. There were easier and more difficult ways to do this extra credit, and some chose more difficult ways.
How can you rig a course so that it all seems like extra credit? Would it even be wise?
I once memorized "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" "for" a course, while studying for the final. The course was a pretext; I memorized it for the poem.
You never know when your students are doing that, or doing something like it for a different class--not that you necessarily want to know.
The pedagogical uses of grading continue to puzzle me. Clearly it functions differently for different people. In some ways it's a form of gamification, which some people find motivating and others find stressful and demoralizing. Grades certainly confuse the issue of learning.
These are, of course, questions I've been pondering precisely because my students this semester were so very excellent. It so clearly wasn't all about carrots and sticks for most of them. So then--what? Did I already do my bit by assigning Gertrude Stein? Will my students remember Tender Buttons forever?
On these matters my course evaluations are silent.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Best minds
I've seen this Businessweek article circulated a lot recently. The quotable quotation with which it's inevitably accompanied is the following:
What, indeed, are the best minds of my generation up to? Implicit in the very question is a nostalgia for a time when they read poetry.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."It seems to me that there's something significant about the fact that it's a citation of Ginsberg. There's an implicit juxtaposition of the two fates, thinking about how to make people click ads and being destroyed by madness, that manages to draw power from the unlikeness of the two terms, while at the same time suggesting a certain commensurability: there is a certain madness to spending all your time trying to get people to click ads. This is not a poetic Howl; it's a Businessweek article--not a howl, in short, but a tweet. The many retweets, however, seem to suggest that it's what we've got.
What, indeed, are the best minds of my generation up to? Implicit in the very question is a nostalgia for a time when they read poetry.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Holloway Sampler: Environment, Domestic Labor, and Poetic Form (4/26)
Natalia Cecire, “Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Nest”
Brendan M. Prawdzik, “Needlework, Gardening, & the Eco-Historical Imagination of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House”
Jessica Fisher, Poems from her forthcoming book, Inmost
Should be a good time. Plus, free food.
Friday, March 18, 2011
At a conference in Orono, in 1996, I heard Robert Von Hallberg disagree with Ann Charters about Langston Hughes' poems, arguing that Hughes' poetic achievement may be overstated. Her response: "The poems weren't written for you." In other words, the audience Hughes imagined did not include white literature professors, but a largely uneducated urban black one. In other words, poems written for such an audience can't be compared to those written for an audience imagined by, say, T.S. Eliot, according to the same critical criteria. Von Hallberg was right to counter: "That's not a defensible intellectual position." In other words, you can't promote the aesthetic value of one work over another based on exceptional reasoning; for one thing, it's condescending to the poet and the poems. Yet she wasn't wrong: people value the poems, regardless. The poems make their impact outside the arena of responsible evaluative criticism.
--Joshua Weiner
Many poets and critics have responded to Claudia Rankine's call for statements on poetry and race. Highly recommended. Read them here.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Am I the meanest teacher? Maybe. I think I'm about to get a really terrible song stuck in my students' heads. But it's for Learning!
Friday, February 18, 2011
We all saw the numbers put out by VIDA recently. (A propos, here's Pollitt pointedly noticing something about a position I happen to hold.) I would just like to add that Jim Behrle's recent series of profanity-laced attacks on the VIDA-named pubs is hilarious. That is all.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Quiz
Name: ________________________________________ 2/17/2011
1. The author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is:
(a) T. S. Elliot
(b) T. S. Elliott
(c) T. S. Eliot
(d) I. A. Richards
2. His famous 1922 poem is titled
(a) The Wasteland
(b) The Waste Land
(c) “The Wasteland”
(d) “The Waste-Land”
3. April is:
(a) the coldest month
(b) a delicious cruller
(c) the cruelest month
(d) the cruellest month
4. The moral of this quiz is:
(a) It’s important to notice details.
(b) Your instructor is just a little compulsive.
(c) If you misspell a work’s title, or the name of its author, readers are unlikely to take you seriously.
(d) All of the above.
1. The author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is:
(a) T. S. Elliot
(b) T. S. Elliott
(c) T. S. Eliot
(d) I. A. Richards
2. His famous 1922 poem is titled
(a) The Wasteland
(b) The Waste Land
(c) “The Wasteland”
(d) “The Waste-Land”
3. April is:
(a) the coldest month
(b) a delicious cruller
(c) the cruelest month
(d) the cruellest month
4. The moral of this quiz is:
(a) It’s important to notice details.
(b) Your instructor is just a little compulsive.
(c) If you misspell a work’s title, or the name of its author, readers are unlikely to take you seriously.
(d) All of the above.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Tonight: Robert Duncan: The H. D. Book
The Holloway Series in Poetry Celebrates
Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book (newly out from University of California Press)
7:00PM-8:30PM
Thursday, January 20
315 Wheeler Hall (the Maude Fife Room)
*Reception to follow*
This legendary meditation on poetics, a central text of the San Francisco Renaissance
and of the New American Poetics has been buried in fugitive literary magazines and
literary archives for several decades and is now appearing for the first time in its
entirety in book form from the University of California Press.
Featured Readers
Michael Davidson
Michael Palmer
Brenda Hillman
Cecil Giscombe
Aaron Shurin
Giovanni Singleton
Susan Thackery
Jane Gregory
Gillian Osborne
Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book (newly out from University of California Press)
7:00PM-8:30PM
Thursday, January 20
315 Wheeler Hall (the Maude Fife Room)
*Reception to follow*
This legendary meditation on poetics, a central text of the San Francisco Renaissance
and of the New American Poetics has been buried in fugitive literary magazines and
literary archives for several decades and is now appearing for the first time in its
entirety in book form from the University of California Press.
Featured Readers
Michael Davidson
Michael Palmer
Brenda Hillman
Cecil Giscombe
Aaron Shurin
Giovanni Singleton
Susan Thackery
Jane Gregory
Gillian Osborne
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