Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Went to the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) Conference in Cambridge, UK (Friday and Saturday, Oct 26 and 27). Initiated and co-organized by Dorothy Wang. The theme of the conference was, aptly, "Legacies of Colonialism." Priyamvada Gopal was most incisive and insightful about the possibility and meaning of "decolonizing Cambridge." I also learned from Walt Hunter's paper ‘Riot of Sound: Claudia Jones’s Carceral Poetics’ and Chinelo Ezenwa's paper ‘Stifling Indigenous Agency through Translation: the Igbo Psalms and a Poetics of Decolonization’. Dorothy was at her polemic best in her presentation 'Whither Poetry Studies?' There were poetry readings during both evenings of the conference. The first night showcased four experimental and performance poets. The second night, which I liked better, showcased three page poets, among whom Will Harris and Mary Jean Chan stood out, for me.

PN Review 42:2 November - December 2015 From Yves Bonnefoy's essay "The Tombs of Ravenna," translated by John Naughton: If nothing is less real than the concept, nothing is more real than this alliance between form and stone, between the exemplary and a body: nothing is more real than the Idea that is risked .  Ornamentation belongs to that category of beings that joins together in its profound purity the universal and the particular. It is the Idea made presence, and in the joy it awakens in us, I tasted the savor of a true eternity.  *  The universal is not a law that is everywhere the same and so never worth anything anywhere. The universal has its locale. In every place, the universal exists in the way it is looked at, in the way it is used.   *  Poetry and journey are of the same substance, the same blood - I am repeating what Baudelaire has said - and of all the actions that are available to man, these are perhaps the only useful ones, t...

"What must or might be said now about poetry?" I might have said something to the Progressive Poetics project, initiated and organized by H. L. Hix. The Progressive Poetics project asks each contributor to respond, in light of something she or he has already said in print, to this question:  “Poetry makes nothing happen.” (W. H. Auden, 1939)  “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” (Theodor Adorno, 1949)  Though often cited as timeless, authoritative truths about poetry, those two pronouncements were made at particular historical moments, in particular cultural contexts, and from particular subject positions. But we (choose any “we” from those of us alive now) occupy various subject positions, live in various circumstances, and stand nearer the mid-twenty-first century than the mid-twentieth. It is not self-evident that we should (continue to) defer to Auden and Adorno, so:  What must or might be said now about poetry?

from an interview Philip Roth gave to Daniel Sandstrom, the cultural editor at Svenska Dagbladet, for publication in Swedish translation in that newspaper and in its original English in the NYT Book Review: Whoever looks for the writer's thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer's "thoughts" violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.  The thought of a novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters, and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make--their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.  The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an asp...

from Marc Robinson's review of The Long Voyage: Selected letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915 - 1987 , edited by Hans Bak: After reading Malcolm Cowley's first collection of verse, Blue Juniata (1929), Conrad Aiken asked: "What do you think or feel which is secretly you? Shamefully you? Intoxicatingly you? Drunkenly or soberly or lyrically you?" In the poems, to Aiken's eye, "this doesn't come out", their creator having "avoided the final business of self-betrayal".  *  "[Malcolm Cowley:] It's really easier to give your life to a cause than to hold out for a particular sentence that embodies your way of looking at life -- yet if you surrender on the wording of a sentence, and another sentence, pretty soon you find yourself living for the opposite cause to the one you had intended to die for." As a description of "self-betrayals" possible in style alone, this can hardly be bettered.

TLS September 20, 2013 from "Dreams of displaced men" by Leslie Chamberlain: The flexible way with truth and personal identity that Jakobson learnt seemed to have entered his work both indrectly, in his treatment of encoded meanings in poetry, and indirectly, in his praise for the poetic lie. His essays of the 1920s and 30s celebrated the emotional lie that sustained the hear, and the literary forgery that sustained the nation. Poets, he felt, lived in their personal myth, which was a special kind of truth. . . . In his poetics he cherished the freedom of the word always to mean something else. As he puts it in "What is Poetry" (1933), "Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not as a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality".  ...  If ...

TLS July 26 2013 from Adam Thorpe's review of The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment by Peter H. Hansen: Two essential elements of modernity are the foundation myth and the assertion of solitary will: both illustrated by Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. Interrupting his admiration of the view by opening St. Augustine's Confessions at random, Petrarch fell on a stern admonition: "And men go to admire the high mountains . . . and pass themselves by". He hurried back down in silence, convinced of the vaster landscape of contemplation. Five hundred years later, Jacob Burckhardt identified this moment in Provence as the arrival of the inward-looking "modern man", the beginning of the modern age.  This need for firsts, is, of course, in itself modern; and, as Hansen points out, the assignment of Petrarch's ascent as a boundary moment coincided with the rise of modern mountaineering. Peaks are, as he claims early ...

TLS October 19 2012 from Llewelyn Morgan's review of Stephen Halliwell's Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek poetics from Homer to Longinus : Homer's works were already, alongside everything else, a meditation on poetry's power to transform the pain and impermannence of mortal existence into kosmos , a lasting order or design. An overarching theme of Halliwell's discussions is the tension repeatedly diagnosed by Greek thinkers between poetry's capacity to transport its audience to another psychological place and its claim to offer insight into the truths of this existence, the "ecstasy and truth" of his title. Homer himself fails, ultimately, to square these two principles, and Halliwell arrestingly ties Homeric poetics to the figure of the Muse, an embodiment of poetry transcendent and beautiful, but representing a resolution only truly achievable on a divine plane, and only glimpsed by mortals.  *  However we choose to th...