Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The subtitle delivers what it promises: a secret history of poetry and kitsch. We look at kitsch differently when we see it as originating from controversies and scandals about poetry during the rise of popular culture in the eighteenth century, and not just with reference to the visual arts and material culture in the twentieth century. We also look at poetry differently when we see how entangled with kitsch elite poetry was, and still is, despite Wordsworthian attempts to purify the language of tribe, and Modernist efforts to denounce kitsch and switch attention from diction to form. As a poet, I'm rather more interested in looking at poetry differently, and this volume casts new light on, finds a thread through many apparently different lots of poets: the renovators and falsifiers of the ballad revival in the eighteenth century, the Shenstone and the Walpole sets, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, the first and second generations of the New York School, and five twentieth-century American...

 So pleased to launch these new awards with the help of a major donor. Singapore Unbound, a NYC-based literary non-profit, is pleased to announce three awards of USD250.00 each for the best three undergraduate critical essays on topics in Singapore literature. The purpose of these awards is to encourage the teaching and study of Singapore literature at college level and the cultivation of general appreciation for the character and achievements of Singapore literature. Link for more information and submission guidelines.

In these lectures-turned-essays, Toni Morrison provides a very suggestive approach to the critical study of classic American literature. Arguing that literary whiteness is constituted against literary blackness—freedom against slavery, innocence against experience, civilization against savagery—she calls for the study of what she names as Africanism in literature produced by white writers. This is not so much for the purpose of critical subversion or ideological rallying as for the richer, more complex, and more nuanced study of American literature. She demonstrates this approach in brief analyses of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl , Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn , and Hemingway's novels. I wish she had more room, in either the lecture series or the book publication, to deploy the approach to the works of Thoreau and Henry James, both reckoned to be American masters. The comment on Melville's Moby Di...

Ian McKellen is luminous as the titular protagonist of Mr. Holmes (2015), directed by Bill Condon. Laura Linney, as his housekeeper, is good, and completely adorable is Milo Parker, the young fan who tries to get Holmes to work again, but McKellen could express so much with just one twitch in his hangdog face. American Wrestler: The Wizard (2016), directed by Alex Ranarivelo, is too much of a feel-good movie to be genuinely moving, let alone intellectually probing. The teenage boy, who escaped from Iran, does not question his compulsive desire to assimilate into America. He succeeds when he helps his struggling high-school wrestling team to win and when he gets the blonde. Still, when George Kosturos finally pulled off his baggy shirt and showed off his Greek body, all my criticisms expired eagerly. Kevin G. Schmidt, who plays his teammate, was also dishy. Read about Robert Penn Warren's long poem about Audubon in Literary Imagination Volume 20 Number 1 2018, in the essay ...

Visited Jacques Houis and his wife Shelly at their home in Millertown, two hours' train ride from Harlem. Shelly, a former movie producer, made a delicious lunch of shrimp salad and tomato-coconut milk soup. Jacques drove me to visit his friend Kush, who has an astonishing collection of books, recordings, and memorabilia associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. Kush recited Artaud and Whitman for us and showed me his bust of William Blake, which he kissed on the forehead. On the train back home I finished reading Cheryl A. Wall's a Very Short Introduction to The Harlem Renaissance . Very useful. At night I watched François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), one of the most famous films of the French New Wave. This is gritty Paris, where you have to walk down six flights of grimy stairs to take out the garbage every night. Constrained by unimaginative schooling and feckless parents, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) turns to petty crime, which leads him eventually to a ...

Finalized and posted my review of Tan Pin Pin's documentary In Time to Come on SP blog. Heard Eric Calatayud sing and Kenny play on the keyboard with their band in the common garden on 122nd Street. Jazz standards and Beatles songs. They were very good. Left early to hear Cheryl A. Wall speak about the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She was a good speaker, concise and perceptive. Her manner was stately. I asked her a question about Tea Cake slapping Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God . She referred me to Alice Walker's observation that Janie does not speak in that chapter although she does in all other chapters. The novel does, implicitly, criticize Tea Cake's action.

I've always wondered how to reconcile Nietzschean self-creation with liberal politics, and so it is with a tremendous sense of excitement, and relief, that I learn from Richard Rorty that it is not necessary to reconcile the two, that in fact it is a mistake to try for some kind of synthesis. One has to be contented with their separation, to be a liberal ironist, as Rorty calls it. The irony is directed at all final vocabularies, one's own as well as others', understanding that there is no final vocabulary that is not contingent and not formed by one's historical and social contingencies. Discourse and socialization goes all the way down, and the best one can hope for is to re-write a small part of one's inherited script. The geniuses among us re-write a bigger part. That is the self-creation advocated by Nietzsche. It retains his perspectivism but relinquishes his essentializing move of making "the will to power" a commonality in all human beings. "T...

Whatever happened to politics in Singapore's English-language poetry? An enlightening essay by the inimitable Gwee Li Sui, who discusses poems by Gilbert Koh, Felix Cheong, Boey Kim Cheng, Cyril Wong, Grace Chia, Aaron Lee, Yeow Kai Chai, and me. Here's the spoiler: politics has never gone away. Essay published as part of a Singapore issue, by Zurich University of the Arts.

Brian Bernards' Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature is an exciting study of the archipelagic trope and the activity of creolization in the context of postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Edouard Glissant, Bernards distinguishes the archipelagic imagination from the continental one, as the former prioritizes "contact, exchange, heterogeneity, and creolization instead of racial, ethnic, or linguistic uniformity and singularity." Drawing on Benedict Anderson, Thomas Eriksen, and the Cuban poet Nancy Morejon, Bernards distinguishes creolization from both hybridity and multiculturalism. Creolization "recognizes culture as an ongoing process that cannot be reduced to a singular outcome, offering neither a finished product (hybridity) nor a composite portrait of separate, immutable entities (multiculturalism)." Chapter 1 looks at "Modern Chinese Impr...

I read Rachel Urquhart's The Visionist over Christmas, an appropriate time for reading about the mysteries of faith, sin, and redemption. The Shaker settlement and the outside World of mid-19th century Massachusetts are both meticulously and convincingly brought to life. The novel is narrated through three points of view. Sister Charity of the City of Hope and Simon Pryor from the World both speak in the first person, as they struggle to understand the throes of events around them. Sister Charity, the self-deceiving innocent, bears much of the novel's psychological burden whereas Simon Pryor, the fire investigator, bears much of the narrative burden. The stroke of genius here is to narrate Polly Kimball's point of view through the third person. Polly, the outsider who becomes the insider on false pretenses, is thus seen with sympathetic detachment. The third-person becomes a delicate method of apprehending her trauma and her victory without inhabiting them. * TLS Octob...

In Ariel's Gift , Erica Wagner composes a running commentary on the poems in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters . The commentary calls on Sylvia Plath's fiction, journals and letters, and on Hughes' few public statements after Plath's death, in order to shine a light on the poems. Wagner is particularly good, I think, on Hughes's sense of fate in the making of his and Plath's poems, and in the events that overtook them. Critics of Hughes may see the avowals of ignorance and helplessness in the Birthday Letters poems as evidence of blame-shifting and self-justification, but the poems themselves convey the ignorance and helplessness in a very palpable way. To enter the poems at all, one must enter them, suspending one's judgment. Wagner tries to be very fair-minded but it becomes clear in the course of her book that she is more sympathetic toward Hughes. The last chapter shows the pain that the living (Hughes and the children, Plath's mother Aurelia) have t...

Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton University Press) Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is every where present, but seldom any where as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would scarcely be more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakspeare, (in their most important works at least), without making the author say something else, or something worse, than he does say.  *  And therefore is it the prime merit of genius and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence.  *  I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are suppose...

After reading Carl Phillips' collection of essays, Coin of the Realm , I see more clearly what draws me to his poetry. His poems aim at seduction of the reader, through beauty that comes from authority that, in turn, comes, from athletic thinking. There are fine essays here on individual poets, such as George Herbert and T. S. Eliot, and on individual poems, such as George Oppen's "Psalm," Gwendolyn Brooks's "A light and diplomatic bird," and Sylvia Plath's "Winter Trees." There is also a long substantial essay on the Psalms. These essays give a strong sense of the poetic qualities that Phillips value: besides beauty, a prayerful attitude akin to desire in its openness; an exquisite control. Fine as these essays are, I prefer the essays on poetics, which are illustrated by a wealth of examples from a wide range of poets. In defending the use of association in poetry, Phillips also points out its limits, of final clarity and ultimate patte...

Adam Kirsch discusses both ideas and literature in this enjoyable collection of essays. The first two essays examine the life of Charles Darwin and his legacy on the study of the arts, in particular, literature. The next two essays are on the end of history, seen in very different ways by Francis Fukuyama and a trio of European novelists, Houellebecq, Sebald and McEwan. Kirsch explains in an essay Hannah Arendt's antipathy toward the Jewish community. In the case of Walter Benjamin, he highlights how reading is for the German writer always a matter of interpretation. Kirsch is especially good on the multifarious ways in which a writer's Jewish identity may inflect his or her writing. The masterpiece in this mode is his essay on Susan Sontag. If the first part of the collection examines the impact of ideas on literature, the second looks at the reverse, how literature may shape and present ideas in its own fashion. Kirsch is a very astute critic of fiction. He argues, quite co...

As a poet, I'd be deeply grateful to any reader who reads my poetry as closely as Dorothy J. Wang does the writings of Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Pamela Lu. The quality of attention in Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry is strongly sympathetic, though never uncritical. Wang shows how the racialized formation of the poets' identity is, not a cause, but a determinant of the form and language of their poetry. To ignore such influence is to read them willfully with one eye closed. Whether the poet treats race thematically, as Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin and John Yau do, or through formal means and experimental strategies, as Wang argues for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Pamela Lu, he or she has to confront the realities of American racial politics. In her readings, Wang uncovers the complex deployment of the individual poet's dominant trope. She shows, for instance, that Li-Young Lee is...

In this work of philosophy, Danto wishes to define art, and to show why contemporary art, having attained self-consciousness, is asking the same questions as philosophy. His approach throughout the book is to compare artworks with what he calls mere real things, when both are indiscernibly alike. The two classes of things, as he argues, belong to different ontological realms, hence, the title of his book. The artist performs a transfiguration of the commonplace when he makes of his materials a work of art. Danto has been criticized for his belief in duality, underlined by the Christian or Catholic figure of transfiguration, and reiterated throughout the book in his references to the body and the soul. I am not sure if the two ontological realms are as separate as his tropes imply, for his argument proceeds by making nice distinctions between, first, a representation and an object, and, then, between a representation and an artistic representation. If the categories are finally differen...

QLRS has just published my essay on Goh Poh Seng's book-length poem Lines from Batu Ferringhi . Thanks, Hsien Min and Shu Hoong. (In the same issue also, my answers to Shu Hoong's Proust Questionnaire .) The essay will have done its work if it interests someone to re-issue this vital work of Singapore literature. Batu Ferringhi is a beach area in the north of Penang Island in Malaysia. In the 16th century, Portuguese traders from India stopped at Batu Ferringhi to replenish their water supplies, and their visits gave the place its name. "Batu Ferringhi" means "Foreigner's Rock". At this liminal space between land and sea, one seeks the foreign in one's familiar self. In the 1970s it was famous as a hippie's hangout, as a place where foreigners came to swim "in the nude at the freshwater pools" (according to Wong Chun Wai's 'Life's a beach in Penang'). Goh was not a hippie. He was a married man with children, a doc...

I read Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China mostly because I was interested in the world of Chinese author Li Yu. The historians Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang use the life of Li Yu as a lens to see the dynamism of the Ming-Qing period. They also show the reverse, how the social and cultural upheavals of the period shaped the course of this innovative playwright, author, intellectual and publisher. They argue: His first intellectual and professional pursuit, before the demise of the Ming, was his preparation for a career as a scholar-official. After the Manchu conquest, Li Yu became a professional writer, but he was never interested in the study of Neo-Confucian philosophy. Thus, the priority Li Yu placed on his intellectual and professional pursuits coincided with the intellectual and professional trends of his native region. Here again Li Yu becomes a microcosm of the Lan-chi-Chin-hua cultural and intellectual traditions. The theory under which the ...

I have to record this glorious passage from The Open Mind by J. Robert Oppenheimer, which I found quoted in American Prometheus , the biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin that I have been reading: The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is of course not unique in politics. It is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that...

Just read Thow Wei Xin's 2010 review of Reflecting on the Merlion: An Anthology of Poems , edited by Edwin Thumboo and Yeow Kai Chai. He made many just comments on individual poems, but what was more striking was the call for deeper exploration to establish who we are. Ultimately, Reflecting on the Merlion is perhaps the most useful for collecting the previously scattered poems on the Merlion in a single volume, thus serving as a guide to what has gone before, revealing which sentiments and expressions have become conventional and clichéd, and encouraging future poets to think more deeply and originally about issues of identity and how the Merlion—problematic, yet emblematic—can participate in such considerations.  Or, to borrow one last time from the Greeks: don't just be Penelope picking at a shroud. Be Telemachus: make your sacrifices, pour your libations to the everlasting gods, and set forth on deeper waters to establish who you are. He sent me a link to a personal...