Instead of writing against my predecessors, in the Bloomian sense, I want to write with them, to them.
Much of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition’s inability to perceive the value in the work of modern French philosophy is due to the fact that in the Anglo-American tradition, philosophy is meant to emulate science. Indeed much of what Anglo-American philosophers do is assist science in its thinking. Whereas in France, philosophy is much closer to literature than it is to science. How many great Anglo-American philosophers have also been creative writers? How many have been good writers at all? Whereas nearly all the the great modern French philosophers have also been creative writers, or at least seriously interested in and inspired by literature.
“…capitalism is coasting, happy to sell our anti-capitalism back to us.”
I have not see the show The White Lotus, but this review (or sociological analysis, rather) brilliantly examines a trend I have noticed in public entertainment since the first Matrix film:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/yacht-rocks-on-hbos-the-white-lotus-and-picturesque-dread/?mc_cid=0d92cccfc3&mc_eid=06a4e77501
It is interesting how the reputations of the novel and poetry have switched—the novel was once considered a niche genre of literature, the demesne of mostly women, who were thought to be disconnected from reality. Now women significantly outnumber men in poetry programs, and it is poetry that has become the niche genre. The common perception of the poet is of an overly sensitive person who occupies their own reality. Novels of course are the most popular genre of literature, and a novel is potentially more profitable than a book of poems could ever be.
My first job was shelving books at my local library. Whenever I move somewhere new, one of the first things I do is find the local library and look through its shelves. The main branch of the Chicago Public Library allowed me to learn much of what I know about literature, art, and music. Of course, I would love to own a copy of every book I read. But however much money I do or do not have at any time in my life, the books at the library are always free.
I have been tremendously fortunate to have access to the Berkeley Library since moving to the East Bay in 2015. It was only then that I really started reading contemporary poetry. Their literature section is bigger than the literature sections at the main branches of many city libraries. Whoever orders books for them is obviously very well informed about contemporary American poetry especially. They are also part of a linked library system that allows patrons to borrow books from many of the libraries throughout the state of California.
I have learned more about the possibilities of poetry since I began using the Berkeley Library than I did in all of my life before that. If not for the Berkeley Library, I would not be the poet I am.
Strange to think it is only the 60th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death. She was only thirty. She might still be alive, if she had not taken her own life.
We could ask what else she might have achieved if she had lived, just as with any other artist that died young, just as with any other artist that died at all, just as with anyone else at all. Even if Plath had never written another poem—which, for more than most other poets, I think would be an impossibility—she would still be alive.
I suppose the only practical purpose in wondering what she might have done is that it can inspire us to help those living now with mental health issues.
“I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.” —from Morning Song, by Sylvia Plath
‘It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever’
I can remember reading this, the beginning of W. S. Merwin’s “In The Winter Of My Thirty-Eighth Year”, for the first time when I was eighteen, and wondering what it would be like to be that age. And now it is the winter of my thirty-eighth year. While there are many goals of mine that seem distant, and there is sometimes a distance I feel from myself, I do feel, for the most part, closer to myself than ever.
Reading always seemed a luxurious activity to me. Even when I was reading a used copy of a book with faded pages.
After many years of having too little time to read, I now understand just how much of a luxury reading is. Through much of the history of the written word, reading was an activity of the leisure class. Even now, when there are more readers in the world than ever before, many of those who can read do not have the time or space or enough focus remaining after their workday to read. Perhaps they never had the chance to develop an interest in reading. Or have never had access to good books.
To be able to dedicate time to something I truly love, with no concern as I do it for capitalist productivity—that is a luxury.
I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten over my childhood pleasure with rhyme. Until I was twenty one, I wrote the majority of my poems in received forms. I used rhyme extensively. This has helped me be mindful of rhythm and the potential for rhyme in a way I don’t think would be as natural for someone who has written primarily in unrhymed free verse. I still write occasionally in received forms, especially the sonnet.
As rhyme is used less frequently in poetry, and in our culture in general, it becomes increasingly difficult to employ it successfully. What is a successful use of rhyme? One in which the rhyme seems to fall naturally in its place, and still give the pleasure of surprise. An unsuccessful use is when the lines are awkwardly arranged to agree with the rhyme scheme.
I have noticed some contemporary poets do moderately well with rhyme schemes until the final end rhyme, because there is suddenly no more room for enjambment. For myself, I would rather write a poem with internal or occasional rhyme, than adopt a form that causes the poem to have an awkward final line.
Both on a personal and national level, condemning the war in Ukraine does not mean supporting the Ukrainians with as many weapons as possible. Ukraine has turned into a testing ground for the US military. England is sending tanks. Germany has resolved to spend $100 billion to upgrade and expand its military—the first significant military action by Germany since the end of WWII. Even right-wing Poland is involved.
There has been such an enormous amount of support generated by the US against Putin and his actions. And rightfully so. But the idea that we must fight Russia’s forces with by supporting Ukraine’s military because this is the real world and that’s how it works is nonsense. This is a wonderful opportunity for US arms manufacturers. The US is and has been for decades the largest arms dealer in the world. The US military is experimenting with new gadgets by supplying them to Ukrainian forces.
There are diplomatic and economic means of pressuring Russia. Some of those economic means have been pursued—slowly. Biden eventually banned direct imports of petroleum from Russia. It took much of the EU till now to begin doing the same. But India is simply buying from Russia what the US/EU were formerly buying from Russia and selling it to the US/EU. This is only one example of how Russia has adapted to sanctions.
Putin is a malicious dictator. I agree absolutely that he should be countered as much as possible. I commend everything the Ukrainians have done to defend themselves. But US arms manufacturers should not be counting on long-term profits from a protracted land-war in Europe. If we care about the US cares about the Ukrainians then we should be making every effort to establish a cease-fire.
It was Rimbaud’s ideas, and the verse of the first generations influenced by his ideas, particularly those in France and Spain, which influenced me more than Rimbaud’s verse itself. I integrated into my aesthetic early on the belief in a ‘hallucination of the word’.
I do not see much of this influence among modern American poets. But whenever I do see it, I appreciate it immediately.
Even though American poetry is in an exciting place right now, it still seems remarkably insular. This insularity gives any poetry deriving from outside sources almost a sense of esotericism.
What is strange, to me, is how strange some other poets view my poetry.
I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you…I need you more and more…forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes…and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don’t let them see, will you Susie?—Letter of Emily Dickinson to Sue Gilbert, June 1852.
It has become common recently to portray Emily Dickinson as a closet homosexual. Reading her letters to her sister-in-law Sue from a 21st century perspective, such an assignation is easy to believe. There are also many indications that she had an unrequited love for a married man. Theories vary on who that man might be. Part of what allows TV shows and movies to be made about Dickinson is that there is little we can confirm about her interior life.
And what about Herman Melville, who in an anonymous review of Hawthorne’s work wrote, “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul…(he) expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”
Something we can ask is: how common was what now appears to us as homoeroticism in the letters of Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert, and those of Hermann Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the mid-19th century?
The terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were first used in 1868. Which was at least a decade and a half after Dickinson and Melville were writing their most homoerotic letters to Gilbert and Hawthorne. As Melville stated in one of his effusive letters to Hawthorne, “Ineffable socialities are in me.”
The most frustrating issue with the correspondence of Dickinson and Melville is that though letters by them survive, we have no idea how many other letters were lost or destroyed. Melville enjoyed a brief celebrity early on, and Dickinson exchanged letters with a number of mid-19th century intellectuals, yet both of them died in relative obscurity.
When Melville, the man who wrote what in my opinion is the greatest American novel, died in 1891, he had not published a novel in thirty-five years. There are 313 letters by Melville that are known to exist. Only eleven letters survive from the correspondence between Melville and Hawthorne—and ten of those are by Melville. Why would Melville not have kept every letter from Hawthorne, a man he repeatedly expressed love to, and to whom he dedicated his masterpiece, Moby Dick?
Of Dickinson’s letters, over a thousand survive. If this sounds like a vast amount, it is only because we have lost the art of letter-writing. Scholars estimate that the number of letters Dickinson composed in her lifetime was probably ten times that amount.
Among her closest friends and relatives, such as Sue and her two favorite nieces, there seems to have been something of a conspiracy regarding Emily’s life after her death. Sue alluded several times later in her own life to having always kept “Emily’s secret”. When Mary Loomis Todd attempted to collect Dickinson’s letters, after the first editions of Dickinson’s poems were published to great success, many of her friends and family refused to hand over the originals. They would copy out passages from the letters and only share those. Reading Dickinson’s letters, especially those from the 1860’s, we can find a number of times when she alludes, in notes to close friends, to other letters, enclosed with those notes, which she entrusted that friend to deliver to an unnamed person.
I wish I was more of an expert on the 19th century. The period fascinates me as a whole. I have read a number of biographies of writers from that period. From everything I’ve read, I believe people of that time had far less of a sense of a strict binary in human sexuality. Those boys and girls who were able to receive and education were educated in either all-boys or all-girls schools. If Byron had some sexual fun with a couple of boys he went to school with, which he almost certainly did, no one later made him feel any shame for it, despite all the other things people wanted him to be ashamed of.
It is also important to remember just how influential the Greeks and Romans remained to Western culture at the time. Latin was a language many could still speak because they learned it in childhood. Those with a higher education could read Homer in the original with ease. The Classical Greeks remained the ideal culture, as the Classical Romans remained the ideal civilization. And in both Classical Greece and Rome, sex with someone of the same gender was not considered abnormal. The Spartans, in fact, seemed to think of it, in men at least, as a stage in the growth to adulthood. Anyone who reads Plato will soon realize how often the men are flirting and lusting after each other. The Roman emperor Nero even officially married a man—a random man Nero saw in a crowd, while visiting Greece, who had the unfortunate luck to resemble Nero’s dead wife—the same wife he had beat to death.
Though sexuality could not be explicitly expressed in Victorian England and America, men and women tended in general to be much more affectionate to each other at that time than they are now. Though it was improper to mention sex, two people of the same sex who were friends would not have any hesitation in holding each other and expressing their love for each other.
I also think it is important to remember that both Dickinson and Melville were extraordinarily intense people. Given the image of Dickinson the recluse, it would be easy to imagine her as demure in conversation. In fact, when they met her in person, some of her associates, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, found her absolutely exhausting. Melville could entertain a group of people for days with his sea-adventures. They were both passionate and expressive.
Though some will go on producing “creative” biopics of them, and critics who wish to claim them will write books that argue what they were or were not, no one can definitively say what their sexuality may or may not have been.
The entry for ‘circumference’, one of Emily Dickinson’s favorite words, from the Emily Dickinson Lexicon:
circumference, n. [Fr. < L. circum, round, about + fer-re, to bear; loan translation of Gk. perifereia, rotundity, outer surface, periphery; see circle and circuit.] (webplay: carry, circle, round).
Perspective; view; vista; ability to protract an infinite number of concentric circles from one specific point; [fig.] greater understanding; elevated awareness; broader view; expanded perception of life.
Navigation; circuit; circular motion; journey in a circular pattern; going around in circles; [fig.] wandering; migration; flight of departure and returning.
Horizon; periphery; the girth of the world; the circle of the earth's globe; the whole circular surface of the earth including the sea and the land.
Zone; area; boundary; restriction; constraint; restraint; demarcation; delimitation; outer limit; the space included within a circle; [fig.] mortality; a lifetime; a succession of events; cycles of nature, mortality, and earth life.
Eternity; the ultimate reality; the life beyond; the all-encompassing circle of existence.
Edge of the sky; atmosphere which surrounds the earth; the sky as it encircles the globe; the cycles of air, wind, and clouds; the air currents which carry creatures in flight; the relationship of the earth to the sun.
Influence; sphere of action; [fig.] periphrasis; circumlocution; metaphorical extensions; lines of poetry; text in relation to context; connections that go beyond words; words as symbols for aspects of existence; meanings that lie within the limits of words; [fig.] polysemy; semantic connotations that go beyond the core meaning of a word (OED founder Richard Trench explains that synonyms are circles “with the same centre and the same circumference”); [metaphor] experience; reality; enlightenment; intelligence; revelation; inspiration; wisdom.
Perimeter; geometric line that bounds a circle; a single curved line that forms an encompassing boundary; the finite line that goes around in 360 degrees; the whole area enclosed by a circular line or spherical limit; the whole exterior surface of a round body; [fig.] experience; frontier; outlook.
Finitude; reality; exact dimensions of life; irrefutable aspects of reality; indisputable facts of existence; [paradox] infinitude; countless lines, planes, degrees, arcs, angles, diameters, projections, intersections, and repetitions of circles from a finite point.
Skull; round body; globe; spherical container.
Border; margin; diameter; [fig.] arc of space; projection linking separate entities; line connecting a single being to an experience in a certain place; [metaphor] memory; music beyond words; communication beyond eloquence.
Comprehension; understanding; [personification] wonderful companion; cause of respect, admiration, and amazement.
Circumspection; discretion; cautiousness; secret realm; hidden core; inner vision; center of being; different way of perceiving.
Regarding revision: would you revise a poem a hundred times, or more, if it meant the poem would be read in a hundred years? For me, the answer is yes.
John Berryman, on his meeting with Yeats, from The Paris Review, The Art Of Poetry, 16:
I went in and asked for Mr. Yeats. Very much like asking, “Is Mr. Ben Jonson here?” And he came down. He was much taller than I expected, and haggard. Big, though, big head, rather wonderful looking in a sort of a blunt, patrician kind of way, but there was something shrunken also. He told me he was just recovering from an illness. He was very courteous, and we went in to tea. At a certain point, I had a cigarette, and I asked him if he would like one. To my great surprise he said yes. So I gave him a Craven “A” and then lit it for him, and I thought, Immortality is mine! From now on it’s just a question of reaping the fruits of my effort. He did most of the talking. I asked him a few questions. He did not ask me any questions about myself, although he was extremely courteous and very kind. At one point he said, “I have reached the age when my daughter can beat me at croquet,” and I thought, Hurrah, he’s human! I made notes on the interview afterward, which I have probably lost. One comment in particular I remember. He said, “I never revise now”—you know how much he revised his stuff—“but in the interests of a more passionate syntax.” Now that struck me as a very good remark. I have no idea what it meant and still don’t know, but the longer I think about it, the better I like it.
Part of mastery must be the ability to constantly develop, which ironically comes from the willingness to constantly reenter a state of apprenticeship.
Is it neglect that knots
the fruit of old apple and pear trees,
studs sweetness with hard spots?
Or are the people who planted them,
stabbed them with grafts, still working
branches, warping them with windy hands,
so we’ll know how it is to age?
—From ‘Eyes Lifted’, by Rose Mclarney