Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

I read this with interest, thinking of the other modern version. I note:

* Pound's looks like a free translation - he doesn't seem to have scrupled so much about replicating each line.

* He has retained, or used, some kennings: hail-scur, mead-drink, mood-lofty, sea-fare, mere-flood, whale-path, earth-weal, life's-blast.

* He has sometimes used archaisms that may not stand up so well now: for instance: 'Nathless there knocketh now'.

* I think he has made it somewhat more coherent - bringing together the DISLIKE of seafaring and the LOVE of seafaring in the poem and making them, not a puzzling contradiction but more an acceptable paradox; as in 'Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water'. 'Yet' is an important turn here.

* He has sometimes expressed a lot in short terms, for instance using the term 'Burgher' (doesn't this suggest something later, more like Renaissance Germany?): 'Burgher knows not' what seafaring is like.

* On the whole I think he did a fine job, c.1912, of rendering something very old (c.800) modern English; keeping it accessible, emotional; bringing in a tone that was, I think, unusual in the English poetry of the time. (But one would, as usual, need to look carefully and sceptically at that. Every student of English would have focused a good deal on Old English then, after all.)

One could, I'm sure, go a lot further and into detail with comparisons of the original and of multiple translations of this poem.

Thanks Dow, I'm very glad to hear that I've reminded you of this fascinating little book. I mean to read the Heaney BEOWFULF too.

this friendless man,
seeth before him fallow waves,

Some lovers in this world
live dear to each other, lie warm together
at day's beginning; I go by myself
about these earth caves under the oak tree.

It's funny, Paul McCartney's lyrics with commentary by Muldoon seems like a book I'd much rather never see the light of day lol. (I hate McCartney and Muldoon almost equally).

Glad the Cooper is going well, Brad. The deeper into the cycle you get, the weirder and more interesting it becomes, imho.

I began poet Laura Elrick What This Breathing last night— have always enjoyed her books, this is no different!

xpost prob shouldn't have taken those lines of context, but they struck me right way---can imagine Sandy Denny singing the ones about some lovers etc.

True! I have just been listening to her LP RENDEZVOUS.

Thanks for the reminder, haven't listened to that one.

I finished Donald Davie's ARTICULATE ENERGY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH POETRY (1955). This is an informal sequel to PURITY OF DICTION IN ENGLISH VERSE (1952), whose first half I read previously. All this was quite an effort, took a little while: about 270 pages of sustained critical prose.

What is Davie saying in ARTICULATE ENERGY? Its topic is, indeed, the syntax of English poetry. It is genuinely an 'inquiry': somewhat open-minded, trying out different critical perspectives, testing his arguments. Engagingly, he says things like 'This statement from Ernest Fenollosa helps my argument', or 'But this argument about Wordsworth, though it supports my case, is in the end tangential'.

You could say that he 'shows the workings': makes his argument open to a reader to intervene and say, in effect: I disagree from this point and therefore I don't follow it from here; I'd reconstruct the argument this way. I think that this is quite a good way for a critic, or any non-fictional writer, to proceed.

He writes in quite a plain style, using colloquial phrases: 'Here Hulme gives away the whole show'. He is forthright: 'Every reader must decide for himself whether he can make this act of faith. I confess for my part I cannot, and it seems to me that after scrapping the contracts traditionally observed between poet and reader, a poet like Pound substitutes a contract unjustly weighted against a reader'. He seeks clarity and simplicity: 'What matters, surely, is that this construction is ugly, inelegant. Ideas of beauty differ, no doubt; but mine are not therefore any less real, for me and perhaps for others'.

He proposes that syntax is important in (English) poetry, and that criticism of it should bear it more in mind. He notes that syntax has various kinds, and he works through arguments that poetry is 'like music', so that the syntax is 'pseudo-syntax', not really saying what it appears to say. He respects a range of kinds of poetry and syntax, including for instance that of Eliot, which ('Ash Wednesday', 'Little Gidding' are good examples) he sees as thoroughly post-Symbolist and 'musical'. But he has a preference for declarative syntax; poems that say something, and try to do it clearly (but not necessarily simplistically) in grammatically correct forms. Something like Pope would probably be the most obvious model. This isn't the most fashionable model for poetry now (or since about 1917), as Davie admits. To some extent he is trying to re-balance, to reinstate the claims of this 'rational' poetry of statement, as against (or alongside) a poetry that, for instance, shuns or breaks form to (perhaps) mime mental impressions.

This rather stereotypes Davie's case. What makes his book harder to parse is that there isn't really a hard distinction between Pope / classical poetry (proper syntax) and Pound's later Cantos (lack of syntax) - those are merely the extremes. But what about the vast middle ground of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Tennyson - surely they're all just as syntactically proper as Pope? So I think the distinction is something else: not so much about having syntax but about the role it plays in generating meaning and feeling.

In a fascinating late chapter, 'What is Modern Poetry?', Davie sums up part of his case:

If the foregoing pages have tended to any one conclusion it is this: the break with the past is at bottom a change of attitude towards poetic syntax. It is from that point of view, in respect of syntax, that modern poetry, so diverse in all other ways, is seen as one. And we can define it thus: What is common to all modern poetry is the assertion or the assumption (most often the latter) that syntax in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians. When the poet retains syntactical forms acceptable to the grammarian, this is merely a convention which he chooses to observe. We may acknowledge that such emptied forms are to be found (and frequently too) in Shakespeare and in Milton. But never before the modern period has it been taken for granted that all poetic syntax is necessarily of this sort.

I think Davie wants to say that this modern orthodoxy should be questioned, and that syntax in poetry need not be distinct from syntax in other uses of language: prose, everyday speech. Elsewhere he proposes that those lines of poetry that have gone into 'folk wisdom' should not be disregarded; this could be an index of the continuity of poetry and ordinary language. He argues against those who think it is an error to think that 'the poet means just what he says, that the poetic statement he makes is not wholly different from the statements they make themselves, and that the syntax of his statement is not wholly different in function from the syntax they are used to elsewhere'.

For Davie, therefore, it *is* at least possible that the poet means just what he says; that the poetic statement is somewhat similar to ordinary statements; and that poetry can share syntax with other kinds of language.

Along the way, in this quite open-minded (but admittedly opinionated) and wide-ranging inquiry, Davie compares English and French syntax (but here he seems mainly just to rely on stereotypes of what French is like; he hardly quotes any French); writes on Berkeley and Yeats (he approves of Yeatsian syntax); and provides what seems to me an excellent, lucid summary of the thought of Ernest Fenollosa. You might think, maybe I thought, that Fenollosa was a 'modernist', but Davie likes him a lot, sees him more like an 18th-century thinker. His account of Chinese characters, according to Davie, posits a syntax between and across such characters, and proposes that these characters have a vividness and immediacy that is lost by English abstractions. Davie takes from him an emphasis on strong, distinctive, active verbs.

I liked reading ARTICULATE ENERGY; I'm not sure that I did fully construe its argument; but I'd like to think that I learned something from it. I'm afraid that many critics now wouldn't even bother engaging with its arguments on their own terms - which they mostly deserve, even if one wants to contest them. I think that many critics could learn more from reading older criticism like this than from reading more recent work, which often has less to do with literature and draws on a much shallower knowledge of the history of literature; especially the history of poetry, which I suspect is less well known now than it was when Davie wrote this in 1955.

he works through arguments that poetry is 'like music', so that the syntax is 'pseudo-syntax', not really saying what it appears to say.

Music is aural and tonal, while poetry is aural and linguistic. They both contain a sub-articulate component that appeals to the inarticulate parts of the mind, but that component is overwhelmingly present in music, while it is often so disregarded by poets that it is many cases an unused or even rejected tool. In those cases poetry may still be 'like music', but only if nearly-accidental assemblages of sounds can be considered as music.

I started rereading E. Nesbit's THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET (1904) after decades. But I must admit that after 20 pages of it, I don't feel enthused for the remaining 230. Maybe I'm not an adult who really wants to read children's books, despite my fondness for the idea of them.

I reflect that maybe this is what reading Harry Potter books is like. That's something I still hope to avoid.

I've begun reading A Journey Round My Skull, by Frigyes Karinthy. It describes his experiences with a brain tumor.

The author was a Hungarian intellectual between the world wars. In typical middle european style this meant he was a "author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator" according to wikipedia. In the early part of the book this shows up as a helter-skelter playfulness and fecundity of half-absurd and half-serious ideas. As the existence of the tumor becomes increasingly felt and finally discovered, the tone becomes more direct and pragmatic by degrees.

i ran across this story while farting around twitter. i have a hard time sticking with anything these days but i read it all the way through. all i can say is that i enjoyed it and it was a welcome distraction on a friday. it's about queer outlaws and black magic, and it has a happy ending.

https://uncannymagazine.com/article/femme-and-sundance/

If you want to read only one Nesbit, I recommend The Enchanted Castle. Phoenix and the Carpet is just okay Nesbit imo. Bear in mind that it is still very episodic and that the atmosphere builds gradually over the course of the book; it starts out very casual and goofy and then gets more and more uncanny until it's just barely skirting the edges of pure horror.

By "it" I mean The Enchanted Castle, not Phoenix.

Just finished 'Bleak House'! The way the narration switches between the 2 narrators took a little getting used to, and I got a little lost in the middle at points but overall an amazing read.

I've started reading Herman Melville's 'Bartleby'. I reflect that it's a comedy about work written from the point of view of the employer. The colleagues who can only work effectively in the morning and afternoon respectively - that's before Bartleby even enters. The tone, thus far, is lighter than I might have expected.

You never read it until now?

I'm afraid not.

I finished 'Bartleby'. Not fantastically interesting or appealing, but I can see why the figure has become - an archetype? a reference point? The idea of refusal, of being able to refuse a request or instruction, and simply withdraw to one's one domain: I can see how this interests people. It's also about work, but I can't feel that sympathetic to this figure who's taken on to do a job then refuses to do it, or to leave. (The preposterous introduction to the edition I read compares Bartleby to Jesus Christ, which has no basis in the text.) I think what most strikes me is how it feels more modern than 1853 (though Madame Bovary was about 1857) - a harbinger of Kafka and Beckett as much as a contemporary of Thackeray.

i identify inordinately with bartleby

Great story.

Feels very modern almost like he’s taken internet psych advice to go “gray rock”, “I’m sorry that won’t be possible”, “no is a complete sentence”, etc.

My sis got me Melville's collective poems for Xmas. Rough going. Best to open it at random, read a few stanzas from his 6000-page epic on a white dude on a Middle Eastern pilgrimage, put it down.

On Thursday I finished Scott Eyman's just marvelous Cary Grant bio. It offers contrarian tacks, fights conventional wisdom, and does the reporting too.

Melville's poetry has its fans, but I'm not one of them. They are composed in poetic form, but the form adds nothing vital.

Finished the Elrick, read S*an D. Henry-Smith's 'Wild Peach,' and began DS Marriott's 'Hoodoo Voodoo's this afternoon before taking an unexpectedly long hike in the woods.

I finished Code of the Woosters which served as my introduction to Wodehouse. I feel like the Wodehousian(?) tone has become such a paradigm of comic writing that it's almost like I had read him before. Certainly I've read many knockoffs. It is a stylish, funny and diverting work. I have no idea how true it is to the upper-class British milieu it depicts. It is almost certainly more utopian in its utter inconsequentialness than any real society that has existed on this earthly plane. Now I'm reading Going to the City by Robert Christgau.

Kehinde Andrews The New Age of Empire
Been hearing talks by him recently that seem very articulate so plunked for the book. Though glad I got it intact, odd situation with postal delivery meaning it either got delivered on an odd day or stuck out of the letterbox overnight.

Seems really good so far.
But only read intro and part of first chapter.

Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket
Vol 1 Origins.
So far got through him describing how the 4 volumes will break down. & the situation that punk came out of and some influences. Though he's also shown why he doesn't think the Stooges are as all pervasive as suggested. I've disagreed with him on some points so far. Will persevere though but have been reminded of the Ugly Things acolyte who dismissed Fugazi's right to be considered punk since they'd always been math rock which still perturbs me since I like to think of that as a worthwhile mag. Might have thought it par for the course for Shindig.
But still, interesting book so far.

Cannot imagine being someone who didn't like Bartleby, so strange

I also came to Bartleby late in the day, and though I liked it, I guess I was also a little underwhelmed, no doubt because I'd read a billion references to it before coming to the actual thing.

Yes, I very much share Zelda Zonk's feeling.

What's great about 'Bartleby'?

Have finished:

Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph
Beam, Broken Glass
Toker, Fallingwater Rising

Gist of the distillation (like urine stones collected in passway): Feels very modern almost like he’s taken internet psych advice to go “gray rock”, “I’m sorry that won’t be possible”, “no is a complete sentence”, etc. (Frequently catching up: identify inordinately with bartleby

Last night I got about halfway through Five T'ang Poets, as selected and translated by David Young. The five are: Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, and Li Shang-Yin. So far I wouldn't call these translations exciting, but they are usually suggestive/evocative enough to succeed as poems in English.

just finished frisk. these dennis cooper novels are fucked up

that’s for sure. read that one a few years ago and honestly kind of regretted reading it.

i loved it but i can see that. i certainly can't unread it

anyway moving right into the third novel in the george miles cycle, try

the cycle revealed more of itself to me during frisk as well, like up close it is like an anti-love story, a document of extremely unpleasant and empty people having sex that is attached their ultimate fantasies of dismembering someone during sex.... but telescope out a bit and it is about how having sex with infinite variations of the same person (george miles) is a reflection of how much the... narrator/omniscient voice/some of the individual characters/fictional dennis cooper and/or irl dennis cooper are in love with him

that is probably incomprehensible lol

i guess what i mean is it may seem to be all blood, guts, and gaping assholes, but in the margin beyond that it is almost entirely about... transcendent love. i think

^^^ You've got it

Frisk is my fave of the cycle, btw

I finished DS Marriott's Hoodoo Voodoo, then read the Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse reprint of NH Pritchard's The Matrix, now I'm onto Tom Mandel and Daniel Davidson's collaborative long poem, Absence Sensorium. It's really something, I think sometimes about how Davidson died much too young, age of 40, and how we would be better off if he were still alive and still writing this weird and provocative work.

Hi, I'm fairly new to the world of literary-fiction (and also, literary non-fiction) and totally new to this thread (and also, talking about books in general).

I just finished Swimming Home by Deborah Levy - it's kind of straightforward and elusive in equal measure, in a way I'm not sure I "got." It's hard to say what it was, but something about it was just less than satisfying. I welcome suggestions on her other books.
I am now reading Cleanness by Garth Greenwell. I'm 2 of 7 chapters in and there's also been blood and assholes (not gaping as much as clenched tho') and, arguably, traces of transcendent love (maybe not love but desire?).

Hi. I don't have any suggestions since I haven't read those books you mention, but welcome!

I thought Cleanness was great!

I mostly lurk but popping my head up to say if you enjoy Deborah Levy's style but found Swimming Home somehow unsatisfying (I felt similarly) then her "living memoirs", Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, are well worth your time. They're elegant and weird and brutal, and they don't miss their mark.
They're also more moving.

I sometimes find her fiction more exciting and interesting to hear her describe than to read. Her voice is so strong it almost doesn't suit being stuffed into a story, like someone wearing clothes much too small for them.

I mostly lurk but popping my head up to say...

Bravo! Encore!

Confessions of a Fox - Jordy Rosenberg. The one littered with critical praise often with the words 'romp' and 'rollicking' in, hence it being about a year since I bought it to reading it. I'm *just about* persisting despite it being yet another example of a version of 18th century style - you know the Sort, all Capital Letters and Rhetorick with a k and an entire slang dictionary slathered onto the pages to produce Effcts both Comical and Tragicke. I only know of one decent version of this mode, and that's Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.

There's also an unreliable academic narrator who communicates mainly through footnotes, in a facetious and grating tone.

it's very much a first novel.

there are aspects which deserve longer scrutiny, trans erotica and an attempt to dramatize gender fluidity in the language of the time, but it comes across as current thought cloaked in an ersatz version of the language of the time*. After all 18th century english was how serious people communicated seriously in the 18th century. it's not a joke or cartoon.

I'm thinking of giving up persisting soon, but will keep going for the moment.

* I should add that by this i very much do not mean 'oh god woke 18th century,' - gender fluidity and frameworks of gender representation in that period are a real discipline, and the other is a real academic of them. but there's a lack of the sense of the cadence of thinking and representation of thought from the 18th century doing the work, it's more like current frameworks with 18th century argot.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. Collection of short stories. Good, I think. Interior monologues in domestic spaces, with a careful awareness of the mechanics of interiority, the circling round a thing, the unusual snags of feeling and recognition by which thought progresses or insight is gained. The elliptical and non-cliched nature of thinking and feeling. Someone said that she was similar to Jen Calleja, but i don't get that at all tbh, in fact Pond reminds me more in some ways of Gerald Murnane, an understanding of how to get to the profound from the repeated mundane and quotidian, and how the unusual or genuinely strange is actually part of that fabric.

The effect to me is a little like trying to catch an elusive thought that seems to have whisked away just before the moment you were aware of it, but which you feel has insight. Sometimes you find it and can look at it, most of the time it flits away without any sense of what meaning or importance it may have had. CLB is adept at catching them.