what poetry are you reading

Yeah, the Sieburth selected Pound is solid: useful notes, shrewd choices.

So I spent Friday night reading about 100-ish poems by Paul Celan (tr. Michael Hamburger). Yeah, great way to spend a Friday night at my age.

I don't think you'd be able to derive too much of his autobiog from his poems (apart from Death Fugue most notably). I could see him in conversation with Russian poets from the early 20th century, esp. Osip Mandelstam (how many mentions of stones, with the word 'white' also around there, not too far behind) (also he translated his poetry into German). But at first you think 'ffs there is no music', as you go on you think, 'well maybe he is making the non-musicality' into another kind of music (but the whole anti-/NO/ thing is a thing you could state it and then think this is really banal). So much in here is about not being able to say anything, the futility of language, the shadow it casts. I need to read Heidegger. Fuck knows whether I'll ever bother to do that. Maybe Being and Time could be the next choice at the ILB reading club. Just a chapter or two ;-)

The fact I read almost all of it in a sitting (and I almost never do that with any single collection of a poet) is something.

I spent longer time reading the intro than the poems themselves. I didn't think the last poems were more 'difficult', or seeing whether they presented different challenges (as Hamburger says they did in the German speaking world). I'll follow his advice and let them be.

I hear a music in Celan, sometimes harsh, sometimes delicate, but I don't know if that's a function of not knowing German well enough to develop an ear for it, when I read Celan aloud I sound it out slowly and with difficulty. The Mandelstam comparison seems apt in terms of their emotional force and hermeneutic difficulty. Peter Joris has an interesting commentary on Celan's relationship with Heidegger (and particularly Heidegger's never-quite-disavowed Fascism) here: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/joris/todtnauberg.html

how do we feel about Lisa Robertson

one way street - thanks for the link.

I have started reading a compilation of Italian 20th century poetry on Faber. (Woof I will bring this to the FAP so you can have a look :-))

got an old paperback of christopher marlowe's poetry and translations. have only read the two extant cantos of "hero and leander," good stuff. dirty.

finally picked up berryman's sonnets! loving.

berryman's sonnets! YES!

Yeah, the sonnets are delightful--definitely my favorite work by Berryman next to the Dream Songs and "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet."

Finished a selection of D.H. Lawrence's poetry (ed. Keith Sagar). The last 50 or so pages were especially affecting (Pansies and The Last Poems).

The Faber Book of Italian 20th century Poems was rad, I need my own copy of it. Also in need of further selections by Ungaretti, Pavese (he seems really underrated) and Pasolini was surprisingly good (unlike a novel or two of his I tried). Lots of others here and there. Faber should def do a 20th century edition of French and Spanish poetry, maybe even Russian.

Songs of Kabir on NYRB. The translation has a lot of improvisation to it, certainly words (like Chromosome) are used and I liked the commentary.

Passion for Solitude
By Cesare Pavese

Translated By Geoffrey Brock

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining
among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

pansies & nettles, lawrence at his most compressed and splenetic. i do have a faber collection of 20th century french poetry from 2002 which is nice and wide ranging (part of the same series?)

this one: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview24

Marvellous - I'll hunt that down.

coming to feel Lisa Robertson actually v good, if anyone's counting

Ezra Pound - Poems & Translations. Started by reading some of his earlier poems but then jumped to the sections from The Cantos. Love a lot of Sieburth's annotations, a reasonable digest of what would've been hard to swallow, and actually conveys the ambitions and scale of the thing. I have to say I love when this thing goes to China, not sure why, just like a poet engaging with that. Although I'm sure many others have.

Fried my brain on the remainder of the excerpts from The Cantos. I found out there was an Italian fascist calendar last night.

rachel zucker. idk

Back to Brecht. Hadn't read his poems in years, but Hofmann's book of German verse reminded me.
Enjoyed this hofmann article on the new biography too. Very tempted to read it.

Trying a bit too hard huh?

I’m not really sure what the case against Brecht is. That he treated women and co-workers badly? That he played fast and loose with the intellectual property of others, but was litigiously possessive of his own? That he wrote no more hit shows after The Threepenny Opera? That he failed to crack America? That he wouldn’t denounce the Soviet Union? That he was drab and a killjoy? That he had it cushy after settling back in East Germany in 1949? That he was consumed with his own importance?

Yes to many of these things. Most of the people that complain about him are disgusting liberal types tho'.

His poetry is effortlessly great (one of the highlights of all the reading I've done this year) - be great to find a copy of the collected poems sometime.

Having trouble getting the sense of these lines (from the "Introduction" to Blake's Songs of Experience)

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past and Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew:
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen fallen light renew!

Actually "That might control / The starry pole" is obscure to me, too--can't tell if 'might' is the subject of 'control' (but then wouldn't it be 'Might'?), or if not, what the subject of 'might control' is.

recommend decent Pushkin translations (don't say Vlad the Nab)

xp If it is anything definite in the previous lines, it seems to me that "the voice of the Bard" would be the subject.

Hmmm, you could very well be right--that exclamation point was throwing me, making me imagine "The Holy Word" as the subject of all that follows

I think I'd lean towards 'holy word' as subject of 'might control', though I think there's a little ambiguity there. It's the parallel 'that' construction, plus the Word is more likely than the bard's voice to be able to reorder the poles/restore light.

recommend decent Pushkin translations (don't say Vlad the Nab)

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 14 December 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

According to Robert Chandler the decent ones are by James Falen and Stanley Mitchell (Onegin). Then there is Anthony Wood (The Bridgeroom). Listed in the Russian Short Stories on Penguin. Chandler has translated a few prose works by Pushkin and I'll be reading Queen of Spades shortly.

Hadn't read Miller Williams before these excerpts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/arts/miller-williams-laconic-arkansas-poet-dies-at-84.html?referrer&_r=2

August Kleinzahler ftw, and to beat the holiday malaise.

Wait that is Lucinda Williams's dad, right?

can someone help me gloss a bit of Milton's Il Penseroso? Feel I'm being a bit dim, but can't untangle it fully. He's talked about courting melancholy outside ('To behold the wandring Moon / Riding near her highest noon') and then has started saying how he courts Her when the weather's crap - first by the fireplace and then

'Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook:'

Most of that's fine, but it's the last three lines that I can't get right. Basically it's whether you read it as 1 'The immortal mind that hath forsook her mansion, in this fleshy nook' or 2 'The immortal mind that hath forsook, her mansion in this fleshy nook' (commas for pauses rather than gr sense).

I'm assuming the usual neo-platonic spheres:

Gloss 1: He wishes to know the Worlds/Regions that hold the general mind - these are the regions in the outer spheres, in which the mind has its 'mansion' (as in the astrological term rather than 'big house' obv), which the individual example of the mind has forsaken to be in the physical human.

Consequences: the individual mind partakes (presumably by the chain of being) of the general infinite mind, and in doing so is partly held there. this implies a sort of chipping off the ideal/infinite block to create the human.

OR

Gloss 2: That the mind's mansion is the fleshy nook, and that it forsakes by existing on in those celestial worlds/vast regions (presumably as a consequence of a dual nature - part of flesh, but also infinite.)

Consequences: the mind is part of the flesh, but partakes of the infinite - this is a specific-to-general process. As I say that suggests to me duality rather than a chain of being and makes it the less likely interpretation (especially with Hermes Trismegistus making his appearance there).

I'm crap at this sort of area, but am suspecting 1, with perhaps some tweaks, or 'you've got it completely rong u fule'.

Yeah, I'd lean towards (1). 'Mansion' and 'nook' are such contrastive terms that I doubt he's identifying them with each other.

yep, quite. cheers jmm. it's a really good set of lines in a not enormously appealing poem, and in order to really fulfil the power of those wonderful "vast regions", it's still a bit of a shit team tho. movement forward is superb, but sloppy stuff from Townsend and Rose, who both feel second rate, as well as the inevitable vertonghen. (yes I know he had a good match against Chelsea). feels like poch has worked wonders really.

er what the actual fuck! no idea how I managed to put that there.

meant to say

... it needs to reasoning to be clear

(1) seems closest to me.

I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous. The 'spirit of Plato' that is being unleashed I read here as the Platonic worldview, which Milton admires, but as a Christian can't fully endorse. What he can do is use Plato's sublimity to inspire his thinking toward contemplating the infinite mind of God, which is OK.

The use of 'forsook' implies the entire immortal mind left its mansion to inhabit human flesh. You may recall that Jesus is part of the trinity and therefore he is God/celestial intelligence/immortal mind personified in human flesh.

So, Milton seems to be saying, very ornately: I'd like to spend lots of time in the quiet hours of the night contemplating the vastness of God's intelligence, kind of like my buddy Plato did, and btw God is also Jesus Christ, who was flesh, like you and me, and doesn't that blow your mind.

finding this v tricky and don't have time but I am leaning slightly 2

fwiw i think mansion/nook non-contrastive - 'mansion' has a strong sense of 'dwelling place' at this point, with a particular sense of 'where the soul resides'. (cf Tyndale using it to translate 'skenos', 'tent' in 2 Corinthinans 5.1)

I want to write more but I have to watch The Way We Were right now. I'd really rather think about Milton.

So, Milton seems to be saying, very ornately: I'd like to spend lots of time in the quiet hours of the night contemplating the vastness of God's intelligence, kind of like my buddy Plato did, and btw God is also Jesus Christ, who was flesh, like you and me, and doesn't that blow your mind.

interesting aimless, thanks. In fact I was coming to this from Blake/Swedenborg so the physical nature of Christ was uppermost in my mind here.

hoping woof can tear himself away. "mansion" point interesting, and on that note have you all seen this?

OED in two minutes

I didn't know 'mansion' also had that astrological sense. If there's a double meaning intended there, then it's more straightforward on reading 1, where the mansion of the mind is identified with the celestial spheres. Reading 2 doesn't incorporate the double meaning quite as neatly. Maybe it gives the line a more ironic force.

I'm now leaning strongly 2. I need to check the texts but timaeus and phaedo have souls ascending to the spheres post flesh-life - ie he's calling back plato to get a report on those spheres.

Aimless's argument interesting but Milton's classical and christian heads a complicated fit, even at this age (early 20s I think?).

like I think it's not about the incarnation (despite M's interest in that) - it's a flirting-with-dark-arts thing about summoning dead classical souls (+ classical allusion) that fits with the following lines about daemons (and w/ this vision of the melancholiac).

agree it's the best set of lines in the poem - Yeats's ref to them in Phases of the Moon made me find them - I think that might have been the first time I read (or enjoyed) Milton.

I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous.

fwiw, imo, no way - primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'.

I should wind down now but I think the tenses point to 2 too - it's fuzzier to have the immortal mind simultaneously be held by the worlds/regions and have forsaken them (whereas it's all good if the soul has forsaken the body and is now held by the world/regions)

_I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous. _

fwiw, imo, no way - primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'.

yes absolutely. and no don't wind down if you're still feeling on it. found the argument to 2 interesting.

now need to read yeats's ph of the m obv.

primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'

Then, if Milton intends to unsphear Plato's spirit in order for it (him?) to get to work unfolding Worlds and whatnot, then a literal reading would require Milton to engage in a kind of Faustian calling up of Plato's ghost, which would seem to disqualify a literal reading. If you give it a metaphorical reading, then it reduces quickly to more of a vague invocation. Of course, Plato being pagan, he would not have made into Heaven, and Milton was not a catholic, so it would be something of a puzzle to pin down exactly where Milton thought Plato's spirit was residing.

UNSPH34R

ha yeah it does give me pause to say 'Milton is advocating necromancy'. I do think he wants that sense though, for a Faustian frisson - so dead literally it's something like "I'm going to stay up late reading Plato(*) and go deep into what he says happens to souls after death (ie good souls go to the stars in the spheres) and that is likely what happened to Plato's soul - the bit of him that wrote what I'm reading - after death, so I am 'calling him down from the spheres'"; but I think, yes, he wants a confusion between literal and metaphorical to hit a reader(**) - there's a moment when you think he's talking about actually summoning a ghost.

'Daemons' in the following lines play a similar game maybe - he's clearly using it in an Anc. Greek sense (and I don't see how that would fit with standard christianity - tho' it'd sort of be angels in neo-platonic christianity iirc?), but there's a flash of the unholy there too. I think it’s a sort of posturing by allusion or maybe a way of dramatising the Melancholic man - hints of a destructive darkness in the glamours of hidden knowledge.

Trismegistus is a similarly unsettling name to drop before he goes into this - that syncretic/hermetic/magical tradition isn't at home in mainstream christianity at this point. But I don’t think Milton is exactly a mainstream Christian, even this early (taking 1631/2 as most likely date) - he's already incredibly well-read, frustrated with Charles I's Anglican Church and obsessively interested in the Classical world, or his imagined version of it. Without question he’s a believer, and a devout one, but I think he’s figuring things out and trying things on still, finding different ways to put the classical and christian together - eg his poem on Christ's Nativity (where paganism is gorgeously banished by christ's arrival) or Lycidas (where the tension or confusion has its strongest or strangest effects). In this one (or two, since it's inseparable from L'Allegro), I think he’s basically relaxing - ‘I’m going to play with this classical stuff I love’. Little of it makes any sense in a christian way imo, it's all classical allusion/myth as playground or holodeck.

I don't know if that made sense and I should sleep.

*I think it is the Timaeus maybe? I've dug around and think it's 42b that's directly relevant here, "And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star" - the demons/elements in the next lines would fit too. This would definitely make the body a temporary mansion/stopping-place for the immortal soul. I'd never read the timaeus before. it's nuts.

**Who is this for? If early 1630s, M is still around Cambridge. I would guess someone like Charles Diodati would be the intended audience - trusted friend, comparably smart and learned, probably able to get that Milton isn’t a Necromancer while admiring his game. Basically I think he's showing off to his mates - he is a bit prone to that early on.

great posts, thanks woof. on the angels/dæmons thing, yes, I think they're angels for Milton tho i remember Empson takes Frances Yates to task about her glossing dæmons into angels and demons for the earlier periods she deals with.

coming late to the German 20th century poetry Faber volume, which is, as everyone's been saying, excellent.

coming to 'Of Poor B.B.' straight after Il Penseroso, while questions such as 'what is the nature of our mind?' and 'what is the nature of the place which it inhabits?' (or 'what is the nature of those 'vast plains') meant the first lines of that poem also spoke to me of the places we inhabit even when we are not there:

I, Bertolt Brech, came out of the black forests,
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.

The later verses, on the 'houses we held to be indestructible' get enriched and complicated by the reading that by houses he also means our fleshy bodies - I think the line 'We know we're only tennants, provisional ones' allows this interpretation, but doesn't require it. That reading does give a hell of a kick to the preceding line though!

'The house makes glad the eater: he clears it out'

Even leaving that reading to one side, it's a raw elemental poem - 'Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!' - the same wind, presumably, that passes through the black forests from which he came and which sits within him.

That complicated reading where, like those endless gifs, the outer is continually made into the inner is continually made into the outer, giving impermanence and permanence at the same time is encouraged perhaps by the poem A Cloud earlier in the Brecht, where the breaking up of a cloud in a moment where he holds his lover 'like a dream' is expressive of ephemerality in itself, the ephemerality of the experience within which its disintegration took place, but also the only thing he ultimately remembers of that fixed details of that day - a point of permanence. Perhaps also, although the cloud is white, of darkness within innocence being the permanent expression and memorial of that innocence.