Virility and grace

“For nimble thought can jump both sea and land.” A few short hours after I posted my apology for inadvertantly giving Néstor Amarilla a sex-change operation, I received this gracious email from Paraguay, under the subject line “Apologies Accepted”:

Señora Cynthia,

My U.S. representative just passed me the link to your blog and I read your apology, which wasn’t necessary, but thank you anyway for bringing back my virility.

Saludos desde Asunción.

Néstor Amarilla

The birthday boy

A few more hours to wish a very happy birthday to Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke,  de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke, born this day in 1554.

Patrick Kurp has a fine tribute to him at Anecdotal Evidence here:  “He was known not as a poet but as treasurer of the navy, chancellor of the exchequer and commissioner of the Treasury. Only in the twentieth century was his accomplishment as a writer of austerely passionate verse, the peer of Herbert, Donne and Shakespeare, truly weighed.”

Kurp credits the late Thom Gunn, who edited Selected Poems of Fulke Greville in 1968.  Not surprising, since Gunn was a student of Yvor Winters, and no one exalted the obscure poet Greville more than Winters,  who rated Greville more highly than Sidney and Spenser.  Said Winters:

“How great a poet Greville is. It is my opinion that he should be ranked with Jonson as one of the two great masters of the short poem in the Renaissance”
— Yvor Winters, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English, 1967

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky compared him with John Donne in imaginative power.  Here’s Pinsky in The Paris Review on the subject of Greville (and Winters):

Pinsky -- a Winters protégé (Photo: Steve Castillo)

PINSKY:  Winters claimed to have read every poem by every poet of any distinction who ever wrote in English; he challenged those of us who disagreed with him to do the same. He certainly seemed able to respond to anything anybody ever alluded to. Winters resurrected Fulke Greville,  a really great poet, I am convinced; and some of the poems he pointed to, like Herbert’s “Church Monuments” and Jonson’s “To Heaven,” were influential to many of us who studied with him, like Thom Gunn, Bob Hass, Donald Justice, Phil Levine, James McMichael, John Peck.

INTERVIEWER:  Some of Winters’s favorite poems seem to have found their way into your own work, as for instance your “Poem with Refrains,” with its gobbets of Fulke Greville.

PINSKY:  Yes, “Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace. / With them that walk against me is my sun.” That’s Greville,  and he is unsurpassed at lines of that kind. What Winters showed me about the English poets of that period gave me an inkling of the level of the art, the quality of seriousness, the principles of musical language that one might hope to attain. I feel that those couple of years when I read poetry intensely with him have served me well, and I’m grateful for that.

He gets the final word

Let’s give Winters the final word on the subject, then.  Try this, from “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” from Winters’s 1956 The Function of Criticism:

“The language of metaphysics from Plato onward is a concentration of the theoretical understanding of human experience; and that language as it was refined by the great theologians is even more obviously so. The writings of Aquinas have latent in them the most profound and intense experiences of our race. It is the command of scholastic thought, the realization in terms of experience and feeling of the meaning of scholastic language, that gives Shakespeare his peculiar power among dramatists and Fulke Greville his peculiar power among the English masters of the short poem. I do not mean that other writers of the period were ignorant of these matters, for they were not, and so far as the short poem is concerned there were a good many great poets, four or five of whom wrote one or more poems apiece as great as any by Greville; but the command in these two men is not merely knowledge, it is command, and it gives to three or four tragedies by Shakespeare, and to fifteen or twenty poems by Greville, a concentration of meaning, a kind of somber power, which one will scarcely find matched elsewhere at such great length in the respective forms.”

"Kill me, kill me"

Usually, however, I get to roll over and go back to sleep.  Stanford has yet to bag a Nobel in the humanities.  (Berkeley is ahead with 1 — Czesław Miłosz.)  Unless Tobias Wolff or Eavan Boland get lucky, I will only be suffering minorly from sleep deprivation.

My apologies, Señor Amarilla

The Literary Saloon, however, notes in its interesting discussion here:

“Zagajewski’s leap in popularity is obviously what jumps out here — but another eastern European-linked author (and yet another Polish poet)? Still, this is one of the biggest shifts in odds from one year to the next, and worth noting.”

An acquaintance of mine, a Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer, who has been, in my view, real botched up by Robert Bly (Laughter), once said that your attitude toward a translator sort of goes through three stages.  First you trust him, and he kills you.  The second time you don’t trust him and he kills you just the same.  The third kind of attitude involves certain masochistic traits in you.  (Laughter) You say ‘kill me, kill me, kill me …’ And he kills you. (Laughter) It’s not my joke… it’s a quiet Swedish joke.” (Laughter)

.

One of life’s unforgettable moments: a great poet hands you a typescript copy of an unpublished poem.  Its strike-outs and marginalia still mark the page.  It hasn’t found its readers yet, and there is no body of opinion about it to influence your own.

So, sitting in an immaculate Stanford condo on a balmy August afternoon, with the his forebears’ books and maritime paintings as a backdrop (the family goes back pretty much to the Conquest), I felt a quiet thrill when Robert Conquest handed me his latest poem, “Getting On,” which opens:

Into one’s ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain’s
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one’s dreamt, seen, felt, read,
Loathed, loved…
.              .              And on one’s dead.
-Which makes one’s World, one’s Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.

“Great poet and even greater historian" (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

It won’t be quite the same thrill for you, but you can now read the whole poem online — Dave Lull, patron saint of bloggers, tipped me off that it’s finally been published in the October 2nd edition of the British magazine Standpoint — here.  “I don’t think any poet has written as well about aging as he has,” said R. S. Gwynn, Bob Conquest‘s friend and fellow poet.

The 93-year-old poet is also the courageous historian who wrote  the landmark books that exposed Soviet Communism in the years when too many were defending it — The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrows.  He published his seventh collection of poems last year and a book of limericks this year. He and his absolutely charmer of a wife Liddie were fretting about the health of their close friend Christopher Hitchens when I dropped by; Hitchens had just been diagnosed with esophogeal cancer, and cancelled his usual visit in for Bob’s birthday on July 15.  Hitchens wrote in his new memoir, Hitch-22, that Conquest is “great poet and even greater historian.”

Bob finished his 200-line poetic summa about the same time he handed it to me.  I wrote then that this poem might prove to be among his greatest.  See if you agree (though I could have done without the Goldie Hawn reference.)

Not into great poems?  Try a few of his limericks here.

79-year-old perennial Nordic bridesmaid

Tomas Tranströmer is the odds-on favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Ladbrokes has spoken, putting his chances at 5 to 1.  However, Bill Coyle at the Contemporary Poetry Review states the problem this way:

Every year, as the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature approaches, partisans of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer hold a collective breath, hoping against hope. A win for their man is unlikely for a number of reasons. One is the residual fallout from 1974 when the Swedish Academy gave the prize to two of its own members, Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson. Both were fine writers, but the appearance of nepotism was impossible to avoid. No Swede—no Scandinavian—has won the prize since.

Reuters observes that “Poetry dominates the bookmakers’ list” and that “American writers set to be overlooked again” — unless, of course, you consider perennial American Nobel bridesmaid Joyce Carol Oates, ranked #12, or perennial groomsman Philip Roth, at #15.  Thomas Pynchon is #16.  Note that none of the Americans are poets.  At least not primarily.

Does Bjørg-the-Cyborg pick the winners?

“Tomas Transtromer must surely be in pole position,” said David Williams of Ladbrokes. “He’s long been mentioned for the prize and we feel his work finally deserves this recognition.”  Probably an indication he won’t get it.  (You can read a few of his poems at The Owls website here.)

There’s an obscure Paraguayan playright — Nestor Amarilla — rumored to be shortlisted.  No one’s ever heard of her, which would be in keeping with recent prizewinners.  Do I sense another wicked Ted Gioia parody coming?  Read his “Shocking Revelation: Nobel Lit Prize Has Been Picked by a Robot since 1994!”  (His slightly more sober “Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe” here.

The man in the #2 favorite spot leaves me with divided feelings — it would be nice to see Polish poet Adam Zagajewski bag the prize — but the award has a way of turning lives upside down. (Read An Invisible Rope for some firsthand stories about what it did to Czesław Miłosz in 1980.)  I remember Zagajewski kindly serving as my sherpa in literary Kraków — and, well, I’m selfish.  Which is to say, I would miss his friendship.

I reviewed his book for the San Francisco Chronicle (and no, I didn’t write the headline) — I’m chuffed that it inspired Kay Ryan to write to the newspaper:  “It was a thrill to read Cynthia Haven’s brilliant review the poet Adam Zagajewski’s book of essays, A Defense of Ardor, in this past Sunday’s Book Review. Almost never do I come across something about poetry that has the sting and bite of poetry in it.  Zagajewski comes straight through Haven’s elegant and deeply informed prose.  More of these brainy reviews please; more Cynthia Haven, please.”  I hope they published it.  I honestly can’t recall.  Oscar Villalon sent it to me.  God knows one gets enough slaps and punches.

I also profiled Adam for the Poetry Foundation magazine here — an article that still gets a lot of hits.

I remember meeting Adam for tea in Krakow’s main square, and being thrilled by the squadrons of pigeons.  Adam assured me loftily that they were very stupid creatures.  And, as a newcomer to his town, he showed me the Jagiellonian University,  as the light was fading…

"Only others save us..."

When I asked him about the future of poetry and poetry-lovers in the world of tweets and sound bites he said this (which didn’t make it into the final cut of the Poetry Foundation article):  “We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish — and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.”

I keep this on my desk:

Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.

— Adam Zagajewski, “In the Beauty Created by Others”

And now, the good news:  Borderland exceeded its fundraising goals, by $20!  Keeping track of the progress on my Apple, hour by hour, was a hair-raising process last night.  This morning brought a great finale to the story of Comics with a cause: “Borderland” warns kids about human trafficking:  $8020 from 157 backers will allow Dan Archer and Olga Trusova to distribute the comic — seven true stories by human trafficking survivors — in Eastern Europe.  Dan, a founder of Archcomix.com and a 2010 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow, and Olga, a Fulbright Fellow from Stanford University, are understandably jubilant.

“We are very grateful to everyone who contributed on Kickstarter! This makes it possible for us to print and distribute the comic in the U.S. and to also reach a wider audience with an interactive iPhone app in order to raise awareness about human trafficking in the West. The Ukrainian version of the book will also be distributed to 136 schools in Ukraine by the International Organization for Migration. Additionally, we are talking with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev about having an exhibit to showcase Borderland as a preventative educational material for youth.

Half of the jubilant team

In terms of fundraising, Dan and I have reached out to our respective communities of educators, journalists, artists, designers, NGOs, activists, students, etc. and it’s been great to see so many people come forth to support the project. Kickstarter placed us in the “Featured” section of the website, which also brought its core audience to learn about Borderland. Overall, we utilized a lot of social media tools and in-person events in our outreach campaign, and have especially seen an increase in support in the beginning and at the end of the pledge drive.”

See more about their story in yesterday’s post.