Preoccupations

Cerebrotonic

No sooner do I post about Auden and include 'The Fall of Rome' ('Cerebrotonic Cato may / Extol the Ancient Disciplines'), than up pops 'cerebrotonic' in another blog post.

'Cerebrotonic' sounds like an Auden coinage, but isn't. Here's the OED:

A. adj. Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ECTOMORPHIC physique. B. n. One having this type of personality. So cerebrotonia (-tn), cerebrotonic personality or characteristics.

1937 A. HUXLEY Ends & Means xi. 165 Dr. William Sheldon, whose classification [of types of human beings] in terms of somatotonic, viscerotonic and cerebrotonic I shall use. Ibid. xii. 193 The cerebrotonic is not such a ‘good mixer’ as the viscerotonic. 1940 W. H. SHELDON Var. Human Physique 8 In the economy of the cerebrotonic individual the sensory and central nervous systems appear to play dominant roles. 1945 A. HUXLEY Let. 2 Apr. (1969) 517 There was just enough of the somatotonic in his..cerebrotonic make-up to make him regret his cerebrotonia. 1950 Themes & Var. i. 121 Too secretively the introvert, too inhibitedly cerebrotonic, to be willing to take the risk of ‘giving himself away’. 1951 AUDEN Nones (1952) 28 Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines. 1954 R. FULLER Fantasy & Fugue iv. 75 You..unfortunately incline to the cerebrotonic ectomorphyou worry too much, you're too good looking, and you can't abandon yourself happily to booze.

The other blog post? Momus' Celebrating diversity means measuring difference. Momus writes about William Sheldon:

I discovered his writings when I was 20, and trying to understand my own problems and potentialities better. Sheldon proposed what seems at first like a very simple way to measure body types. He isolates three basic components: fatness, muscularity and thinness, which he calls endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. … "Ectomorphy means linearity, fragility, flatness of the chest, and delicacy throughout the body," he wrote. "We find a relatively scant development of both the visceral and the somatic structures. The ectomorph has long, slender, poorly muscled extremities with delicate pipe-stem bones, and he has, relative to his mass, the greatest surface area and therefore the greatest sensory exposure to the outside world. He is thus in one sense overly exposed and naked to the world." …

I'm a classic ectomorph, which means that by temperament I'm a cerebrotonic. In ectomorph-cerebrotonics, "the sensory-receptor properties are well developed. As a consequence however the central nervous system (CNS) is soon overloaded and rapidly tires. The cerebrotonic has the gift of concentrating his attention on the external world as well as on his internal world. His vigilance and autonomic reactivity make him behave in an inhibited and uncertain way: introverted behaviour. He has problems with expressing his feelings and with establishing social relationships, and can very well bear to be alone. The elementary strategies of coping with life are perception, reconnaissance and vigilance, cognition and anticipation, and a certain amount of privacy." …

Personally, I like people who structure the world boldly, especially if their structurations ring true. I don't take any structuration as holy writ, though -- I like to play with them, snap them together and pull them apart. But I also like it when structurations make for lovely poetry. The way Sheldon describes the ectomorph has a behaviourist beauty, a 1940s severity. He has "a relative predominance of skin and its appendages, which includes the nervous system; lean, fragile, delicate body; small delicate bones; droopy shoulders; small face, sharp nose, fine hair; relatively little body mass and relatively great surface area".

"The cerebrotonic may be literate or illiterate," says Sheldon, "may be trained or untrained in the conventional intellectual exercises of his milieu, may be an avid reader or may never read a book, may be a scholastic genius or may have failed in every sort of schooling. He may be a dreamer, a poet, philosopher, recluse, or builder of utopias and of abstract psychologies. He may be a schizoid personality, a religious fanatic, an ascetic, a patient martyr, or a contentious crusader. All these things depend upon the intermixture of other components, upon other variables in the symphony, and also upon the environmental pressures to which the personality has been exposed. The essential characteristic of the cerebrotonic is his acuteness of attention. The other two major functions, the direct visceral and the direct somatic functions, are subjugated, held in check, and rendered secondary. The cerebrotonic eats and exercises to attend."

I know next to nothing about Sheldon and need to go back to Momus and read it all again. John Fuller, in his W H Auden: A Commentary, says only this apropos 'The Fall of Rome' and 'cerebrotonic':

Stanza 4: Auden was inclined to prefer the endomorphic type to either the ectomorphic ('Cerebrotonic Cato') or the mesomorphic ('muscle-bound Marines'). The typology is from W H Sheldon.

Momus, quoting Sheldon on endomorphs and mesomorphs:

For comparison, in endomorphs "The body is rounded and exhibits a central concentration of mass. The trunk predominates over the limbs, the abdomen over the thorax, and the proximal segments of the limbs predominate over the distal segments. The bones are gracile and the muscle system is poorly developed. Muscle relief and bone projections are absent. The body displays a smoothness of contour owing to subcutaneous padding. The head is large and spherical, the face is wide with full cheeks. The neck is frequently short and forms in side view an obtuse angle with the chin. The shoulders are high and rounded. The trunk is relatively long and straight, the chest is wide at the base. The limbs are comparatively short and tapering with small hands and feet."

"When mesomorphy predominates, the body is sturdy, hard and firm. The bones are large and heavy, the muscles well-developed, massive and prominent. The heavily muscled thorax predominates over the abdomen. The proximal and distal segments of the limbs are evenly proportioned. The bones of the head are heavy. The face is large in relation to the cranial part of the head. Massive cheekbones and square jaws are the rule. The arms and legs are uniformly massive and muscular, strongly built knees, massive wrists."

Ah, classificatory schema: they have their own fascination …

Oh, and one other gem from Momus:

Interestingly, Sheldon met and befriended Aldous Huxley during a residence at a writers and artists' refuge at Dartington Hall in Devon, England. Huxley also recognized himself as an ectomorph and cerebrotonic, and saw it as a limitation …

(Have another look at the clip from the OED above. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could overlay the OED with transfers of social and intellectual relationships? … Hey OUP, open up the OED!) You'll have to click through to iMomus to hear what Huxley had to say.

Technorati tags: William Sheldon, Shedlon, Momus, iMomus, Auden, W H Auden

Poetry, ubicomp and the irreducible, various messiness of the world

From Tom Hume's notes on Fabien Girardin's LIFT07 talk:

The world is messy. … "Seamful design" seeks to reveal the limits, boundaries and uncertainties of ubicomp: reveals the seams. … Seamlessness is the exception: messiness can't be ignored, we need to design technologies with this in mind. Do we really want to live in a calm world?

Jan Chipchase's Future Perfect is amongst my most preferred blogs and I have seen students interested in design light up when they are introduced to it. As Adam Greenfield puts it:

Jan Chipchase’s work is all about surprise. Every time I visit his site I feel that anew, tripped up and humbled by humanity, in all its ingenuity, adaptability and ungovernable particularity.

All of which put into my mind another poet whose centenary falls this year (12 September), Louis MacNeice. Close friend of Auden and, as Grey Gowrie put it on Wednesday, 'lover of women and Donegal', MacNeice died at just 56.

The poem that I am thinking of is, of course, 'Snow' (January, 1935):

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Technorati tags: messiness, ubicomp, everyware, Louis MacNeice

Hug a shady wet nun

Auden: 'unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day, I feel ill' 

Wednesday night I was at the British Library (Shaw Theatre) for the W H Auden centenary reading on the anniversary of his birth. Among the poets, indeed — a good evening. The running order:

• John Fuller: 'Get There If You Can' (1930); 'The Sphinx' (1938); Miranda's Song (from The Sea and the Mirror) (1942–44). 
• Peter Porter: 'At Last the Secret Is Out' (1936); 'Lady, Weeping at the Crossroads' (1940); 'Now the Leaves Are Falling Fast' (1936); 'Under Sirius' (1949). 
• James Fenton: 'Night Covers Up the Rigid Land' (1936); 'Death's Echo' (1936); 'September 1, 1939' (1939). 
• Sean O'Brien: 'The Composer' (1938); 'The Fall of Rome' (1947); 'The Shield of Achilles' (1952). 
• Richard Howard: 'On the Circuit' (1963); 'Auden in Milwaukee' (by Stephen Spender) (1940); 'A Walk After Dark' (1948). 
• Grey Gowrie: 'Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly' (1948); 'In Praise of Limestone' (1948). 
• Andrew Motion: 'O Love, the Interest Itself in Thoughtless Heaven' (1932); Preface: The Stage Manager to the Critics (from The Sea and the Mirror) (1942–4); 'Lullaby' (1937).

Twenty poems by Auden, then, and of these ten are from the 1930s. Five come from Nones (1951), Auden's first post-war collection of shorter poems ('Under Sirius', 'The Fall of Rome', 'A Walk After Dark', 'Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly' and 'In Praise of Limestone'), and just two, I think ('The Shield of Achilles' and 'On the Circuit'), from the last six collections (omitting Academic Graffiti) — The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), City Without Walls (1969), Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the posthumous Thank You, Fog (1974). The status of the later poetry is, of course, much discussed, and it is probably the case that we have been too close to it to judge it well. Now, though, a new phase in the interpretation and appreciation of Auden may be beginning. Adam Kirsch wrote a good piece in the NY Sun (via 3quarksdaily), part of which touches on this:

Starting in the early 1940s … Auden developed a very different conception of poetry and its purpose. He began to write about the personal, instead of the public; the spiritual, instead of the political. In style, too, he changed drastically. In place of the elliptical shocks of the early poems, he cultivated a new style, one that combined the hyper-articulate and the campily laid-back. … In place of the private mythos of the early work, Auden now turns to the well-worn figures of Greek and Roman myth. And his tone of voice, even when he is not half-joking as he is here, often comes across as not quite serious, as though all his eloquence were just an ultracivilized game.

So great were these changes that it became necessary to talk about Auden as though he were two poets. … Such striking changes led many of Auden's early admirers to see the evolution of his work as a mere decline. … If the Auden centenary sees any major change in the poet's reputation, it is that such a dismissal of the later, American Auden now looks definitely mistaken. It is still tempting, reading Auden's work chronologically, to regret some of the changes that came in the train of his emigration, and to wonder what poems he might have written if he had stayed in England during World War II. The later Auden will never be as mesmerizing as the early Auden. But it is now clear that he was not, like Wordsworth, a poet who wrote himself out early but still kept on publishing. Rather, Auden's breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist vision — with its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrifice — was no longer sustainable. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language.

James Fenton read particularly well (his Guardian tribute to Auden can be read here and there are four paragraphs by him here that are worth reading): 'Death's Echo' is a fine poem and 'September 1, 1939', which might have worked so awkwardly given both all that has been written or said about it and how it has been used, was luminous and, to my mind, unquestionably compelling. Sean O'Brien introduced 'The Fall of Rome' as the most influential poem of the later twentieth century — measured, that is, by the number of attempts poets have made to re-write it.

The last poem of the evening, 'Lullaby' ('Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm'), moved me to tears: a popular poem, but I've never heard it read in public before and it is the poem I could not get out of my mind at the end of the week when my father was dying in September, 2004. He looked dreadful and, as I stared at his wasted face (we had never been closer: he had lost all power of speech but we had never communicated so well as in those last few days together), all I could hear in my head was, 'Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful'. To be moved like this, and to be so surprised, was as powerful and personal a reminder as I could imagine of how deeply affecting Auden's poetry can be.

Charles Madge, founder of Mass Observation and a poet, too, wrote in 'Letter to the Intelligentsia' (1933; quoted here):

But there waited for me in the summer morning,
Auden, fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew
And all the world’s stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions. 

***

Why 'hug a shady wet nun'? (Why? Why?) Here's the answer in the Guardian leader for 21 February, In Praise of … W H Auden:

… as he gleefully pointed out, his name was an anagram of "hug a shady wet nun" …

***

Free copies of the TLS for 9 February were available in the Shaw Theatre and Nicholas Jenkins' long essay on Auden covers a lot of ground. (He devotes a sizeable chunk of his essay to the background of 'Lay your sleeping head, my love'. Michael Yates was the 13 year-old schoolboy with whom the 26 year-old Auden fell in love in 1933, and the role W B Yeats' poem, 'A Prayer for My Son', plays in Auden's poem is teased out by Jenkins: 'The identity of the sleeper in Auden's poem had to remain veiled; but the love that dared not speak its beloved's name in 1937 could at last whisper it through the language of parallelism and allusion'. Yeats' poem is addressed to his son, Michael.)

Auden's was a colossal talent: his poetry apart, the prose writings continue to command our attention — he is a great critic and a polymath in scope — and then there is his work as a librettist and translator. Wikipedia (this is the archived page the W H Auden Society prefers): 

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged the pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had".

Nicholas Jenkins' essay is wary of any easy, panoptic view of Auden, but in surveying the range of Auden's work Jenkins stirs up much to go on thinking about. This is a typically careful couple of sentences about Auden's prose writing: 'The prose as a whole is remarkable, full of fresh ideas and commanding yet eccentric speculations and intuitions. When it becomes readily accessible in its full extent, it will surely alter preconceptions about Auden'. I liked this quotation from a letter Auden wrote to his father in 1939 (his father had written to say that he preferred Wystan's old poems to the new): 'The writer's problem is that of everyone: how to go on growing the whole of his life, because to stop growing is to die'; and this, to a New York audience in 1946 (talking about Shakespeare): 'a major poet is always willing to risk failure, to look for a new rhetoric'. Jenkins is also good on Auden 'the poet of a deliberately willed uprootedness; he turned himself into the first great poet of that most symptomatic of all social groups in the modern world: those who will not or cannot go home'. 'He made twenty-nine separate journeys that lasted more than two months; twenty-six of those lasted more than five months, blurring the meaning, especially in his later years, of home and abroad, domestic and foreign, here and there. In addition, Auden's homosexuality helped to enforce the social mobility and unpredictability which he thought essential to his freedom as a writer.'

To end on, 'The Fall of Rome':

The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend.   Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city.  Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

Technorati tags: W H Auden, Auden

W H Auden

This month sees the centenary of Auden's birth (21 February). Here's the conclusion to a piece by James Fenton in today's Guardian:

That he was a great public poet, despite his misgivings about the role, has always been acknowledged. But he was also a great lyrical poet, his achievement in love poetry being without equal in the century.

He worked through every poetic form he could find, rejecting only a few he found too trivial. He tried counting syllables. He tried counting the number of words in the line. He invented (as far as English was concerned) a discursive style that could accommodate the language of prose and the concern of science. He wrote many song lyrics. He always bounced off poetic influences, and he felt wretched when he couldn't find the next influence. In 1968, for instance, he was listening to the Beatles (he liked "She's Leaving Home", or was it "Eleanor Rigby"?) in search of something to be influenced by. 

He appears to have felt (he says something to this effect), on completing a poem, that he would never be able to write another. And that must have been a nightmare to him, since he was always moving on to the next task, suffering failure sometimes, and aware of a widespread rejection of his later work, knowing himself often attacked, and unwilling to speak up in his own defence. He had a private, even secret, generosity to match the public generosity, the copiousness of his achievement. An enviable gift, then, although not always an enviable life - unless we say that in some cases the gift is indeed the life, and that the suffering is all part of the gift.

The W H Auden Society has a listing of events scheduled to mark the centenary (here) and links from its main page to Wikipedia: 

A highly accurate, thoroughly revised version of the Wikipedia.org entry on Auden was posted in 2007. This site strongly recommends that online researchers make reference to this specific archived version of the page rather than to current versions, which may be less accurate or may be subject to vandalism.

(The non-archived Wikipedia Auden page is here!) 

Back in October last year, the Independent reported on the failure to prepare properly for this anniversary. It's great, then, to see that Melvyn Bragg is remembering the writer on The South Bank Show (11 now 18 February, ITV, 11.10pm): 

It's been suggested that the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden is in danger of passing without notice but not as far as the South Bank Show is concerned. Melvyn Bragg visits Hadrian's Wall, the northern boundary of the land betweenSwaledale and Northumberland, which Auden wrote of as his "great good place." He will examine the paradox of the Auden who fled to America in 1939 saying "No God willing I never want to see England again" and the ‘English Auden' who was never able to sever himself from his roots. Auden's words continue to reverberate around us from the Stop the Clocks sequence in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the way his September 1st 1939 became the mourning song of New York after the terrorist attacks in 2001. 

Contributors include: Alan Bennett, Shirley Williams and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, with Auden's verse read by John Woodvine.

And I'm delighted to find that the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and the British Library are holding 'An evening of poetry with James Fenton, John Fuller, Grey Gowrie, Richard Howard, Andrew Motion, Sean O'Brien and Peter Porter' to celebrate the centenary: 

Wednesday 21 February 2007 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Wystan Hugh Auden, one of the most significant — and prolific — poets and writers of the twentieth century. The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and the British Library celebrate Auden's centenary with an evening of poetry readings that reflect the enormous breadth and wonderful technical variety of Auden's published output, including poems from the 1930s that chart 'a low dishonest decade', and his later work published while resident in the United States. 

Natasha Spender writes:
This tribute to Auden on the anniversary of his birth is offered by younger poets whom he encouraged and who became his lifelong friends: Andrew Motion, the present Poet Laureate, who as an Oxford undergraduate knew him; the American Richard Howard, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize by him; Grey Gowrie, who knew him through Auden's niece, Anita; and Peter Porter, John Fuller and James Fenton, who saw him on his annual London visits for Poetry International. Only Sean O'Brien, 20 when Auden died in 1973, did not know him. 

He used to stay with us or his brother John, and to all the children — Anita and Rita Auden, Matthew and Lizzie Spender — he was a beloved bachelor uncle who invented games and shared their passions for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, introducing a benevolent bossiness into our liberal households.

There are other events going on (see the Auden Society page), but it's not at all what should have been done for Auden. Essentially, this looks like a rescue job by friends and (close) admirers.

 

Technorati tags: Auden, W H Auden

Don Paterson, Rilke and attention

Good interview with Don Paterson in yesterday's Guardian, by Nicholas Wroe. Paterson's 'versions' of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus were published recently, Orpheus — on my list of books to read this coming holiday. I first discovered Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus in my late teens in the J B Leishman and Stephen Spender (now very dated) translation. The sonnet sequence featured in a booklet on originality, in the Oxford Biology Readers series, that my Biology teacher pushed my way. I wish I could lay my hands on that booklet now: all these years later, I can remember it talked about Rilke, and the extraordinary story of the creation of these sonnets, and Kekulé's dream about the structure of benzene (Wikipedia: 'He wrote that he discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake seizing its own tail, a common symbol in many ancient cultures known as the Ouroboros. This dream came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.'). I didn't understand then, but that booklet was feeding right into my interest in cross-disciplinary studies and human psychology (something that's now so much easier to enjoy as the barriers between disciplines are being broken down more and more, not least because of the way the web is opening up knowledge to all-comers and allowing people to research and publish outside the formal constraints of faculties, research grant applications, etc).

Here's Paterson talking about his first encounter with these sonnets:

… it is a very strange piece of work and for a long time I knew something just wasn't coming through to me. It deals with some pretty fundamental things which I didn't really understand until I had had the right experiences in my own life and I became more able to ask the right questions of it.

And on jazz (Paterson has long loved music):

I knew there was something in there but I couldn't quite get at it. And then one day I realised that they were speaking to each other and I was overhearing the most remarkable conversations. It was like those 3-D pictures you stare at for hours and suddenly you see the zebra. I was listening to the John Abercrombie Quartet and suddenly I was eavesdropping on something incredibly articulate and deep.

How's that for humble attentiveness, a waiting game and some, from someone who's won accolade after accolade for his own creative work?  The same note of alert attentiveness is struck when he talks about first encountering Borges:

I remember reading Borges for the first time and falling back into my chair. This had never happened to me before. I could barely stand up. It was vertiginous. He introduced ideas that the language shouldn't really be able to accommodate.

I was also much taken with what Paterson had to say about the net and music. 'He is not professionally active as a player at the moment - although he still occasionally records with friends - but still saturates himself in music, mostly electronica and is delighted by the democratising effect of improved and cheaper technology':

The net is a remarkable resource. I came across this astonishing laptop musician from Georgia recently. Of course there's still an awful lot of crap around, but there's also some tremendous stuff.

Mark Doty reviewed Orpheus earlier this month in the Guardian. For those who don't know Rilke's poems, it pays to read what Mark says in his review:

Sonnets to Orpheus, the late sequence that came tumbling out, in a kind of manic trance, over a period of 13 days in 1922, an epic bout of inspiration that Rilke referred to as "dictation" … the marvel of these sonnets, that the nearly unsayable is given a spoken solidity, words that can point towards if not encompass the peculiar flowing fact of human presence. All nerves exposed, Rilke himself becomes the "pure receiver" of experience he calls for his readers to be. Being and becoming, those are his subjects. It is almost a poetry without the trappings of engagement in the particular messy chaos and circumstances of living - and yet somehow, miraculously, as alive as any poetry of the last century.

And of these new versions:

Paterson gives the sonnets, perhaps for the first time in English, a true sense of an inhabited skin, a pulsing body responding to the life of the senses … Paterson's translation restores to the Sonnets to Orpheus their unsettling, destabilising force, reminding us of the pure strangeness of us, the unlikely, thrilling event that human subjectivity is.

One poem:

Dancer

You were still half a child. You came and went.
But you mapped the dancer, in that moment’s chance
to the empty constellation of the dance:
that dance in which we fitfully transcend

Nature’s dumb order. Only Orpheus
could stir you to the deepest listening:
you were the one still moved from that first song,
and still surprised if a tree took long to choose

whether or not to go along with you.
You knew the old still centre, that clear space
where the lyre was first raised up and rang out true.

For this you tried to shape the ceremony,
to fit the perfect steps that might one day
turn his own around, might turn his face.

Don Paterson's website is under development but will be here.

Adam Philips reviewed Orpheus in the Observer and wrote:

In three weeks, in 1922, while working on his Duino Elegies, Rilke wrote these 55 sonnets. 'They are,' he wrote later, 'perhaps most mysterious even to me, in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me - the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.'

13 days … 3 weeks … My copy of the Leishman/Spender translation says in the Introduction (Leishman's work), 'between the 2nd and the 20th of February the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus, which came as a complete surprise'. 13, 19, 21 days … miraculous.

Technorati tags: Don Paterson, Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus, Sonnets to Orpheus, Borges, attention

Practise reading

Zadie Smith, as reported at Orange Crate Art, from a podcast here:

… the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.

In today's Observer, Peter Conrad reviews Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures:

Poems, if they are good, need never end. A poem, as Auden said when explaining how one was written, cannot be finished: it is simply abandoned by a poet who can add no more to it. The reader then takes over and, with luck, discovers another kind of endlessness: reading leads to rereading, as the words are coaxed into releasing subtler, richer meanings, dilating into ever ampler contexts. Unlike many of his predecessors, Muldoon chooses not to generalise about poetry. Instead, he explicates individual poems, one per lecture. The procedure demands close attention, but the results are revelatory. Reading here is a collaborative recreation and, at their best, Muldoon's interpretations - sometimes whimsically tenuous, often breathtaking in their intellectual boldness - are like improvised, free associating poems. … Two-thirds of the way through each lecture, he reassuringly announces that he is about to reach a conclusion. He never does; the end comes only when the hour is up, because he has demonstrated the inexhaustibility of these poems.

Technorati tags: reading, readers, poems, Zadie Smith, Paul Muldoon, Auden

A remembered future

Sometimes, posts just seem … right. This is Morgan Meis (3 Quarks Daily):

The twentieth century was insane. We forget to remember that. … Through it all, the challenge to the coherence and sustainability of human experience was relentless. If tradition was disrupted and broken down here and there in the 19th century, it was upended completely, remade from the insight (inside ?) out, and sometimes obliterated during the 20th. …

Czeslaw Milosz was as sensitive to these issues as anyone. This is a man who picked his way through the rubble of Warsaw when its ruins were still steaming, when the place was just an open wound. That experience, and the knowledge gained from it, is shot through everything that Milosz ever wrote. For Milosz, man is guaranteed nothing. That’s it. Nothing. And man can be reduced, or reduce himself, to nothing, at any moment. …

Gombrowicz too experienced such things. … But Gombrowicz chose flight, literally and metaphorically. … That is his particular freedom. It is the freedom of Socrates as Kierkegaard describes him in The Concept of Irony, the freedom that escapes from every possible determination.

Truth be told, this version of freedom annoys Milosz. Because for Milosz, the possibility of meaning in human affairs is dependent on commitment. If nothing else, it is founded on the capacity for human beings to hold experience together even as forces from within and without work to tear it apart. How one does this is not entirely clear but Milosz’s entire oeuvre is the sustained attempt to do so even as he lacks a blueprint. That is a pretty brave literary task to set in front of oneself. From Milosz’s standpoint, Gombrowicz has retreated into his own consciousness instead of forcing himself constantly to confront the problems of the world as it is encountered. …

But then the two come together again, in Milosz’s mind, because Gombrowicz never falls into the trap of those intellectuals who have lost track of the root problems of experience, actual experience, that have been thrown up by the 20th century. Milosz writes that, “A comparison of Gombrowicz with western writers, with Sartre, for example, would reveal, in the case of the latter, a deficiency of a certain type of experience connected with history and specific cultural traditions, a deficiency that is compensated for by theory.”

I think we’re still working this stuff through. And I’ll make one more rash claim. The future right now is in the past. Sometimes it is in the past, the immediate past, where things get clear again. For those of us whose lives stretch from the era of the 20th century into the next one, the most important thing for taking the future seriously is doing work on the things that have recently past. Only now is it becoming even vaguely possible to understand how important are the tentative thoughts put forward by people like Milosz and Gombrowicz. And there are others, back there, waiting for us. We simply have to take seriously the idea that turning our backs on the future is a way of renewing it.

We are, beyond question, 'still working this stuff through'. Spot on.

'A remembered future'? In July of last year, I wrote:

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995).

For me, reading Milosz is to remember the future.

Technorati tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz, Gombrowicz

Sharon Olds

Getting ready to leave one job and to start another seems inevitably to mean you're caught up in strong currents, old and new, working hard to finish the present job properly and to extend and ready yourself for the new. Anyway, that's my excuse for a few days of silence. Plus, I've been reading a lot.

Tomorrow, Sharon Olds comes to Radley to run a couple of workshops and read her poetry. Then it's QI in the evening for her only Oxford reading of this UK tour. From the QI events calendar for October:

Tuesday 31 October - SHARON OLDS Poetry Night Club Rooms 7.30pm
John Mitchinson writes: ’Hot on the heels of another American legend, Richard Ford, we are thrilled to introduce our second QI exclusive. Sharon Olds is one of America’s most powerful, courageous and controversial poets, a Californian but until recently the Poet Laureate of New York State. She writes about sex, domesticity, family disharmony and violence with a directness and an intensity that shock and move simultaneously. Like Richard Ford, she does so in a way that is never squeamish or obscure. All you need is a pair of ears and an open mind. She is a brilliant reader of her own work. Expect to be changed by the evening. She visits the UK very rarely. This is her only Oxford gig. PLEASE DON’T MISS HER.' Tickets will be allocated on a first come first served basis, so to reserve seats please contact Victoria on either vdw@qi.com or 01865 261 501. Tickets £5 members and £7 non members.

Links …

• Modern American Poetry: Sharon Olds (1942–), About Sharon Olds, Online Interviews with Sharon Olds
• The Literary Encyclopedia
• New York State Writers Institute
• The Academy of American Poets
• The Nation — Open Letter to Laura Bush:

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

And one poem:

I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell)

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it—she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Technorati tags: Sharon Olds, QI

Frank Kermode

John Sutherland interviews Frank Kermode in today's Guardian:

Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode's words are unminced. Universities, he says, "are being driven by madmen". And education in general "is being run by lunatics". The recent A-level and GCSE statistics, I point out, would indicate that at one level, at least, his subject is increasingly popular. "Well," he replies, "I don't know what they call 'English' now. I can understand the attractiveness of it. But I don't hold the view that reading English is a soft option, or at least it shouldn't be. It should be a severe option, restricted to those people who are qualified to do it." … Is he suggesting that English should be re-engineered to be more in line with currently unpopular "hard" subjects - like physics? "Yes. I discovered just today, for example, that it's no longer compulsory at GCSE to take a foreign language. This seems to me to be a monstrous decision." I remind him of a staff meeting at UCL where, gloomily, he acquiesced to the administration's instruction that O-level Latin be dropped as a requisite for incoming students. "We had no choice. Latin has been getting abolished now for two generations."

In one of his recent LRB pieces he recollects a period in the 1950s when studying English literature was not just regarded as important, but as the most valuable intellectual and moral activity a civilised man or woman could pursue. What went wrong? Does he feel any personal responsibility? "I don't suppose I could claim either credit or blame for the collapse of my subject. It's partly the extinction - no, that's too strong a word - the fading of the influence of figures such as FR Leavis [the Cambridge critic]. The notion that the study of English had powerful ethical implications, powerful social implications, has gone. We just don't have it any more.

"Looking back at the study of English in universities over the years the first thing that occurs to me is how very important the subject once seemed. In America the New Criticism - a school led by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren - argued that the close study of poetry was a supremely valuable thing. This was a view that was then accepted generally. And the leading academic literary critics were, in those days, very famous people. Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye's is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige associated any longer with being a good critic. There are people writing now who seem to me likely to be as good as those critics I've been mentioning but they won't be as famous nor as influential. There's some very good scholarship in the subject still going on. There's also an immense amount of rubbish. …

"[Theory] attracted quite a lot of opprobrium. I never thought it should be taught to undergraduates. In those days teaching graduates what was then essentially French theory was exciting, as long as you were in control of what you were doing. I'm reminded of what Wayne C Booth (another of those once-famous critics) said: 'The really difficult thing is to understand why one has to work so hard to understand something that you do every day without the slightest difficulty' - reading a book, that is.

"I don't at all think that the time we spent on Theory was wasted. One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things. You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering".

Technorati tags: Frank Kermode, English Literature, universities, criticism, critics

Rhymes with …

Excellent article in today's Guardian by Ruth Padel on poetic form: 'Italian poets invented the sonnet, but their counterparts today do not get protested at as, last month at Ledbury, Jo Shapcott, Sean O'Brien and I did (the Poetry Society's president, vice-president and chair, respectively), on the grounds that the society supports the wrong sort of poetry: poetry that does not rhyme.'

… the real rallying flag for the rhyme police is end rhyme in a rhyming scheme. This battle, though, was fought over 400 years ago by cutting-edge practitioners whose blank verse (begun in English around 1540 following Italy's versi sciolti da rima, "verse freed from rhyme", developed roughly 1530) was blazing out of the language.

In 1602, Thomas Campion attacked "the unaptnesse of Rime in Poesie". Bad poets, he said, "rime a man to death". The "popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot summer flies". Rhyme should be used "sparingly, lest it offend the eare with tedious affectation".

Samuel Daniel wrote furiously back "proving", he said, "that Rhyme is the fittest harmonie of words that comportes with our Language". Campion, this traitor to rhyme, has called "our measures grosse, vulgare, barbarous". If it be so, Daniel snarled sarcastically, "we have lost much labour to no purpose". Ben Jonson weighed in with a satirical poem, "A Fit of Rime against Rime", accusing rhyme of "Wresting words from their true calling, / Propping verse for fear of falling"; of "Jointing syllables, drowning letters, / Fastening vowels as with fetters".

The nub of Campion's protest was laziness and banality. It is fatally easy to rhyme badly. If you rhyme, it had better be fresh, better be good. Otherwise it doesn't just spoil your poem, it betrays rhyme itself.

Milton was against it. Rhyme acts on poets as "a constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have exprest them". Paradise Lost does not end-rhyme, nor much Tennyson, Wordsworth's Prelude and Excursion, or most of Shakespeare's plays. "As soon as lazy thou" (Jonson says to "rime") "wert known / All good poetry hence was flown."

It was an important quarrel, then, which TS Eliot said produced some of England's greatest poetry.

Additional reason for reading her whole article: what connects John Masefield, Thomas Traherne (probably), Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, John Drinkwater, Eleanor Farjeon, W H Auden and Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika? Ledbury.

Technorati tags: poetic form, rhyme, blank verse, tradition, innovation

A bit of a gap

At my school, the last three weeks or so of the term that's just died are dominated by mock exams for the final year GCSE and A Level groups — and therefore, for us, the teachers, by marking. Hence, in part, my silence. This last week (the start of our holiday), I have been absorbed in things literary: John Burnside came and read for us a few weeks back, and then I wanted to finish his new book, the memoir about his father, A Lie About My Father, before he read from the book at the end of the Oxford Literary Festival (event 136, yesterday).

This is a great book and one that exhausted me: for all the difference between our backgrounds, there is enough in common between my father and John's for the effect to be both illuminating and draining. Blake Morrison reviewed John's book well in the Guardian, but it's to Hilary Mantel in the LRB that I keep going back:

The book ends as it begins, with Halloween, or rather in the light of the day following, as the writer leads his small son along the quay of a small Scottish fishing town on the east coast. We see that this is the child for whom the phantom of fatherhood must be raised. The writer leaves us with a final sharp picture of the man of lies whom the book has transfigured into truth. He sees him, on a distant night, standing on the edge of woodland; white shirt visible against the dark, a cigarette in his hand, he is captured in a moment which holds, on an indrawn breath, all the events and non-events of his life, all that happened and all that ever could. He did not want to die in public, but that was his unheroic fate: collapsing at the Silver Band Club, on his way to the cigarette machine. An ordinary man with an ordinary death, a nameless man with thoughts that few would care to name, he is now one of the ‘spirits’ who ‘feed our imaginations’. To move from the interiority of this memoir back to what passes for ordinary life is like surfacing from under the sea, reshaped by its strong and unforgiving currents. It is a book by a master of language, pushing language to do what it can. Fastidious, supple and unsparing, it is a book about lies that is more true than you can say.

It was a great pleasure to hear John and to have so many friends together: Tim, Colin and Molly, Olly and Ben, Karl, Mark and Georgie … Like that evening when John read at Radley, a couple of weeks back, this one wound up in the wee hours.

The day before, Karl and I had gone to hear Tim talk (event 97; capacity audience) about his latest book, What is the Point of Being a Christian?, and yesterday afternoon we'd taken in Tsotsi, a profoundly moving film — the book of which I'd read over two decades ago. (See also this Guardian piece.)

Tonight, I had the chance to read John's as yet unpublished sequence of poems centred on/inspired by Saint-Nazaire (which he read at Radley a few weeks back). My head is full of these beautiful, resonant poems — annunciation, tradition (Eliot!), the 'actually loved and known' …

On Molly's recommendation, I've just ordered Keeping Mum and am about to start on Memoir — and then news tonight that John McGahern has died. A bit of a gap.

Technorati tags: John Burnside, Molly McGrann, Timothy Radcliffe, Tsotsi, John McGahern

Culture catch-up

The last few days:

• To the Oxford Playhouse to see the ETT in Hamlet. It left me unmoved — a decent, clean and clear production with Ed Stoppard in the lead. A BBC page says of the ETT and this production: 'ETT is renowned for the clarity and style of its work … This new production of Hamlet will stay true to the company’s ethos of producing raw, direct and passionate theatre'. I agree with the clarity bit, but no, there was little that was 'raw' or 'passionate'. I couldn't find any review of the production last week (when I went), but Michael Billington panned it on Friday in The Guardian:

… the English Touring Theatre offer us a middle-of-the-road, Jacobean-costumed version that has nothing fresh to say about the play. I have no problem with the period setting; it is the failure to investigate either the human relationships or the political context that troubles me. … this is set-text Shakespeare shrouded in decent dullness. When you recall that ETT began 12 years ago with Alan Cumming's capriciously eccentric Hamlet you feel that the company has dwindled into respectability.

There was an interview with Ed Stoppard in The Independent (conducted prior to the production).

• I finally got around to watching the film of The Madness of George III, The Madness of King George. I always feel with Bennett that there are much greater dramatic depths to be plumbed than he permits himself to look into. I saw the original stage production and prefer that greatly for its tightness, focus and energy — the central performance of Nigel Hawthorne being allowed to occupy its proper place.
• Robert Crawford came to read at school on Wednesday evening and stayed the night. It was a good reading to which some of those present responded warmly. Robert opened with 'Chaps', of which the Literary Encyclopedia says:

In the militaristic-toned poem “Chaps”, Crawford uses repetition and language reminiscent of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman to convey a sense of how maleness has historically been perceived as both macho and a necessary element in the constitution of the British imperialistic project:

With his Bible, his Burns, his brose and his baps,
Colonel John Buchan is one of the chaps,
With his mother, his mowser, his mauser, his maps,
Winston S. Churchill is one of the chaps.

Even the rhyme scheme and parallelism in this poem seems to play into the requirements of an essentialized British Empire. The regimentation of language is one of the dangerous consequences of imperialism and one that denies voices from breaking through and interacting with others. The refrain that Crawford employs has a similar effect: “Chaps chaps chaps chaps/ Chaps chaps chaps chaps”.

The marching regularity is emphasized but so too is the gender. A “chap” is not just any old male, it is a male who has been shaped by a past that requires that he behave in a particular way and communicate his gender in a fashion that must reflect the superiority and power of the state.

A concern with language, communication and identity marks much of Robert's work.

Later that evening, we joined up with Jamie McKendrick for supper. Conversation naturally focused on poets and poetry, but Jamie and Robert are both interested in the visual arts. Jamie spoke of his admiration for Plath's drawing of Ted Hughes, recently sold by Bonhams.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Bonhams 1793 Ltd

• Friday saw some of us go to catch Seth Lakeman on tour (St Mary's Church, Marlborough). I'm not in to English folk music much, but Seth Lakeman came to prominence earlier this year when he was nominated for the Mercury Prize and we felt we should go and hear him. (He also hit the headlines last year when he launched his new album at Dartmoor Prison.) He is a fine musician, the solo pieces he played being exceptionally powerful. As a trio they worked very well together, with marked mutual understanding, and his drummer proved a great hit with our party — photos. If he's to gain more fame and following, his music will inevitably have to shift somewhat. Acoustic now, he is already being described on the web as 'folk-rock' and on his own website as 'indie-folk'. One to watch.

Dylan

Alas, I've been way too busy this week to watch the TV screening of Scorsese's Dylan documentary, No Direction Home — but it's available very soon from Amazon UK on DVD. Gratitude to Book World for bringing the extensive press coverage to my attention (it really has been a very busy week!):

• Definitive Dylan (Mick Brown), Daily Telegraph


• Voice of America (Simon Schama), Guardian


• And SEVEN pieces in The Independent:
  Behind the hits and the myths (Terence Blacker)
  His top twenty albums (Andy Gill) + Christopher Ricks on Like a Rolling Stone
  How I found the man who shouted 'Judas' (Andy Kershaw)
  The times they are still a-changin' (Clare Dwyer Hogg)
  Stories of the songs (Ed Caesar)
  A meeting of minds (David Hepworth)

Philip has a good post-Scorsese-watching piece here. Time for me to catch up and read Chronicles …

Red: subject as collage

Anne Carson, classicist (McGill University, Montreal; also Calgary, Princeton, Emory, Michigan, Berkeley …), poet and painter. Author of: Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay and Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (criticism); at least six collections of poetry — Glass, Irony and God, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, The Beauty of the Husband, Decreation: Essays, Poetry and Opera; Short Talks (chapbook); Fragments of Sappho and Electra (translations); The Mirror of Simple Souls (libretto) … My list is no doubt incomplete. Ian Rae in The Literary Encyclopedia (entry dated 2001) says: 'She lives alone in a rented apartment in Montreal where she continues to write, using one desk for her academic projects and one for her poetic endeavours. … Carson has also begun producing one-of-a-kind books consisting of photographs, paintings, and poems that she compiles by hand and distributes among friends'.

I've just finished Autobiography of Red, the first book of hers I've read. It is a long poem, wrapped around with mock-academic material which nevertheless is steeped in learning. At its heart lies the story of Geryon, 'a strange winged red monster who lived on an island called Erytheia', The Red Place, and whose story was once told, in a very long lyric poem, by the now largely forgotten and prolific author, Stesichoros (born c 650 BC): three-bodied Geryon and his cattle, the object of attention of Herakles' tenth labour. In the proem, Carson writes: 'If Stesichoros had been more of a conventional poet he might have taken the point of view of Herakles and framed an account of the victory of culture over monstrosity.' Barbarians outside the citadel: the Other. Instead, Stesichoros' poem tells the story 'from Geryon's own experience':

We see his red boy's life and his little dog. A scene of wild appeal from his mother, which breaks off. Interspersed shots of Herakles approaching over the sea. A flash of the gods in heaven pointing to Geryon's doom. The battle itself. The moment when everything goes suddenly slow and Herakles' arrow divides Geryon's skull. We see Herakles kill the little dog with His famous club.