The Best American Poetry

"Our Abidance" [by Matthew Thorburn]

I want to kick off my stint here with a painting, a favorite poet, and a poem called “Poem.”

At the beginning of last year I paid a visit to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery for what felt like a belated Christmas gift. It was one of those January days in New York – cold but sunny, no snow, milder than a January day ought to be – when you half-forget it’s winter, and I had brought my wife along to check out a compact but wonderful show of pictures by Elizabeth Bishop. “Small paintings on paper,” the Times called them; a selection of her works in watercolors, gouache, ink and graphite.

Some I recognized from other places. Merida from the Roof you would know as the cover art of The Complete Poems 1927-1979, the salmon-colored paperback we all owned (and probably still have, because it’s so portable) before the Library of America edition and the one simply called Poems were published. And her painting of a tiny-looking Louise Crane kicked back on an enormous bed I’d seen reproduced in The New York Review of Books, in a piece celebrating her centennial.

The show also included an assortment of “Bishopiana” (the Times again) such as a pair of her binoculars (produced by Abercrombie and Fitch!), two of her desks from Brazil – heavy, rough-hewn, rustic-looking things – as well as some folk art sculptures from South America, a birdcage (I think it was a birdcage) and a couple of paintings. The desks didn’t thrill me the way I thought they might, though I did run a finger along the edge of one just to touch it.  

No, the moment of amazement came when I looked up from that desk and realized what else I was looking at, hanging a little off to one side. It really was “About the size of an old-style dollar bill”— or so I’d imagine, never having seen one. (I take it on faith, since EB said so.) 4 and 3/16 by 9 11/16 inches, oil on masonite, in an old wooden frame. A mini widescreen landscape: one-third sky, blue-gray and cloudy; one-third dark ground, with light and dark houses and barns; one-third water, vaguely (cloudily?) reflecting the sky and clouds. Poor painting, it didn’t even have a name – or a date. Untitled, nd, by George Hutchinson – “Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George.” 

It was the painting Bishop describes – and in describing, gradually arrives at a sort of definition of what a poem is for her – in the poem she called “Poem”:  

Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how we live, how touching in detail
– the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

I snapped a quick picture when I had the little room to myself, but it came out blurry. (You can click through a slideshow of all the pieces here; this painting is image #19.) And I thought – just for a minute, just to enjoy thinking it – what if I bought it, what if I could take this relic home and hang it over my desk? Because it seemed amazing to me that, all these years later, here it was: the actual painting. It existed. Because if it were in someone else's poem, it might not, but because it was in Bishop's, it did. And because this was a gallery, almost everything on show was also on sale. Though of course the thirty-something-thousand-dollar price tag was beyond me, and anyway I think it was already marked "sold."

But just to know it was still out there, that it might again hang over someone’s desk, or in their foyer (as it once did in Bishop's aunt's house), made me very very happy. There's a poem in this that I haven't written yet. And I'll have more to say this week about Bishop's poem and what it means to me.

A 70 Semester Break from Theocritus [by Raymond Sokolov]

My interest in classical poetry is not casual, but I haven’t let it take over my life either. In fact, I dropped out of a doctoral program in classical philology in 1965, with only a thesis between me and the Ph.D. Newsweek's Paris bureau was a better way to fund my life than grading paper’s and exams written by Harvard freshmen.

I fully intended to complete my dissertation on Theocritus's use of rare Homeric vocabulary (as a covert sign that by inserting these relics of the heroic into his poems of rustic and urban love he was signaling his departure from the Homeric mode.)

I did in fact read my way through the Theocritus scholarship, such as it was in 1965, at the Bibliothèque Nationale in wintry dark mornings before the Newsweek office came to life. Then I would take the Métro to my chic/shabby office in the Herald Tribune building, where I switched from Hellenistic Greek to mid-twentieth-century modern French.

Operating in a modern language was, for someone hitherto confined to Greek and Latin, a release into postclassical exuberance. For me, Racine was a blast from the present. Newspapers—I read seven a day—and magazines—30 a month—were artifacts of a Latinity gone mad over the millennium since Louis the Bald and his half brother  Louis the German swore mutual allegiance in 842 at Strasbourg, in Latin, Old High German and Proto-French, forming an alliance against their elder brother Lothair, the Holy Roman Emperor. The French text is the first known written example of any Romance language.

But for a classicist, the French language that had subsequently evolved, the language I was immersed in all day at my desk and on the low-fidelity phone and in interviews, felt viscerally like a supercharged adventure in linguistic time travel.

At the most mundane level, the syntax of French as spelled out in a standard grammar was pretty much a replay of Latin syntax, slightly streamlined. Even the noun genders were mostly the same (Latin neuters had become masculine). But even in the fairly tight historical process that had transformed Latin words into their obvious French descendants (historia> histoire), there were plenty of faux amis, false friends. These traps were somehow more acceptable when they involved English-French cognates that looked the same but weren’t (fastidieux was a boring, annoying fellow, not a guy with overly meticulous standards of grooming or behavior). But words that had evolved out of their Latin sense into some new and unexpected meaning in modern French were embarrassing ambushes and simply unfair.

A female colleague came into the office one morning after a date with a Frenchman. “He tried to kiss me goodnight,” she said, “but I told him: ‘Je ne baise pas tout le monde.’ And then he really threw himself at me. I nearly had to call for help.”

It would not have been useful to her if she had known that baiser came directly from Latin for kiss. Catullus, for example, wrote to his beloved: “Da mi basia mille.”

Give me a thousand kisses.

And in other poems, he used the verb for kissing, basiare,(quem basiabis, who will you kiss?)

Both words came into French, superficially intact, but the resulting verb, baiser, coarsened over time, lost its kiss signification. The noun stayed clean and unchanged (the Bond film “From Russia  with Love” played in France as “Bons Baisers de la Russie,” sweet kisses from Russia, echoing a thousand holiday postcard greetings. But the verb, by 1965, meant “fuck” and fuck alone. To say kiss me, nowadays, you have to co-opt embrasser, which can no longer mean hug. In 2002, facing forced early retirement after 19 years as the editor of the leisure and arts page of The Wall Street Journal, I remembered my long-abandoned thesis on Theocritus and his ironic intertexts pilfered from the Iliad and Odyssey. I still had my notes from almost 40 years back. Maybe I should finally write the thing.

I called Harvard. Did my graduate work still count? I thought I heard a yawn at the other end. “You want to reapply? We’ll send you the green form. But you know you owe $500 for each semester you haven’t registered.”

“We’re talking about a lot of money here. I’ve been away for 70 semesters.”

“Don’t worry, there’s a cap of a thousand dollars.”

So I filled out the single-page form, wrote the check—and waited for the university archives department to send me a paper copy, officially sealed, of my graduate school record (paid for by a $3 check), as well as a letter of recommendation from a member of the classics department. When I first noticed this apparently innocent requirement, I nearly abandoned the project. The professors I had known were either long gone from Cambridge or, in most cases, dead. Then I checked the departmental website, where I found a picture of Wendell V. Clausen, the expert on Hellenistic and Latin poetry who had been the original director of my dissertation, alive and emeritus.

He wrote the letter. I wrote the thesis and, as a white-bearded doctorandus, received my second Harvard degree on June 9, 2005.

Did this mean that in the lively world that now studies Theocritus and the other poets of 3d-century BC Alexandria, the few hundred unusual Homeric words I noticed lurking  in decidedly unHomeric contexts in Theocritus, are now universally read as tacit declarations of antiheroic intent? If so, no one has told me about it.

I would be lying if I said that I have been besieged with fan mail from awed Hellenists around the globe. Nor have I heard that my name is on everyone’s lips at the biennial Groningen Workshops on Hellenistic Poetry in the Netherlands. I’m in no rush for recognition. After all, Theocritus waited 2500 years for me to notice what he did to Homer.

On Gastronomical Authenticity [by Raymond Sokolov]

 When I blundered into the food world around 1964, my goal was to recreate the dishes I had eaten as a student tourist in Europe in the summers of 1960 and 1962 with my own hand in my own American kitchen. With Julia Child (vol. 1) in hand, I sought to cook the unadulterated, unabbreviated, unadapted real thing.

Later, following my mentors Ellen and John Schrecker and their Sichuanese cook, I tried to do the same thing with the spicy food of her home province. The Schreckers were aiming to write recipes that would bring the “true taste” of Sichuan food within the grasp of American cooks working in American conditions.

In both cases, like hundreds and thousands of other American home cooks of that era, I was searching for authenticity. My kitchen experiments were intended to reproduce as exactly as possible the traditional recipes of Paris and Chengdu. Underlying this project, which the success of the Child book inspired publishers to back a spate of ambitious avatars for the food of Italy, Morocco and other cultures admired for their cooking, was the unexamined and rarely mentioned notion of authenticity.

Like other important abstract principles, authenticity meant many things at once. Its vagueness and broadness made it hard to define and harder to attack. Not that anyone in those days that I ever met regarded “authenticity” as a problematic idea.  If you had asked me in 1972 when I was reviewing restaurants for The New York Times, what do you look for in a restaurant? I would without hesitation have responded that I was in search of authenticity. By which I meant that I wanted a French restaurant to duplicate the food I had eaten in France, as well as the atmosphere of restaurants I had been to there. If you had pressed me further, I would have argued that the authenticity I was promoting represented a culinary purity that had evolved over the ages, a lasting tradition preserved not only in thousands of kitchens but in Bibles of cuisine by Escoffier and by Julia Child’s unavowed bourgeois model, Madame Saint-Ange.

But in that same year, 1972, I went back to France and discovered a revolution in important kitchens run by Paul Bocuse and Michel Guerard.  As the spirit of this nouvelle cuisine percolated across France and then the entire world, it became difficult to continue to believe in the unchanging value of culinary authenticity. Where once a great chef had earned his reputation as a purveyor of the foods of the past, the young Turks of the profession increasingly won praise for their innovations.

In our current era of Top Chefs straining for originality before huge audiences on television, the very notion of authenticity as a plausible value may seem quaint. But it remains a watchword for many righteous authorities in the contemporary food world, especially lovers of the food of Italy, where the craze for change that has swept through nearly every other culture has had barely any effect on local foodways. Similarly, while the most advanced sector of the foodie universe has embraced the radical inventions of the science-based wizards of modernist cuisine, Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Catalonia or Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck outside London, a faction of traditionalists continue to mock this avant-garde.

As far as one can tell, these last-ditch defenders of traditional “authentic” cookery are offended by violations of the food heritage of the world, by hysterical dabblings with dishes that evolved over centuries and shouldn’t be meddled with.

The problem with this debate—between modernists and traditionalists—is that it rests on a false idea of primordial culinary traditions under vulgar contemporary attack. Authenticity in food, like similar notions of authenticity in ethnic makeup, or national character or culture, doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny as a historical principle. Even the most worshipped dishes of Italy were invented by someone not that long ago. Although the actual names of the cooks who first brought the tomato into Italian cooking some time after it arrived from the New World in the wake of Columbus are unknown, their recipes are roughly datable. Polenta, the cornmeal mush of the Italian north, brought a Mexican plant to a region of Europe sunk in poverty, where its adoption by peasants unfamiliar with its nutritional properties led to an epidemic of pellagra. Plentiful records show when this classic vitamin b3-deficiency disease swept over a population newly dependent on corn and ignorant of the need to process the grain in an alkaline medium to make its niacin available to human digestion.

Another way to undermine one’s faith in millennial culinary authenticity is simply to look at the French cookbook tradition and to observe the difference between dishes recorded over the decades between Careme, the father of modern French haute cuisine after the revolution to Escoffier, the last codifier of tradition in the early 20^th century.

Rural and bourgeois traditions also evolved over time. Hearty stews with potatoes were offputting novelties not so long ago.

And yet, the authenticists are not just whistling Dixie.  When you cook a coq au vin following an “authentic” recipe, you will end up with pretty much the same dish someone else will produce using a basically similar set of directions. It doesn’t really matter that almost no one today will be duplicating the “original” coq au vin, which would have been based on a rooster and probably would have included its blood as a thickener. That medieval civet is not the authentic dish anyone in our gastronomic era has in mind. Our authentic coq au vin is the one we ate in France in 1960 or cooked from a recipe of that period reliably written down by someone preoccupied with preserving the true taste of a widely admired dish of that moment.

For me, anyway, culinary authenticity reflects vernacular practice in a culturally coherent region at a particular time. Getting those recipes right is not, or at least wasn’t, a delusionary mission.  Julia’s cassoulet is an authentic version of a regional bean dish of southwest France, as it was cooked in Julia’s time. Does it continue to be a regular feature of vernacular gastronomic  life in the region today? Will it be bubbling away on farmhouse stoves in 2030? This is an authentically unanswerable question.

Just relying on some woolly presumption that authentic foods sprang from the soil of Burgundy or the Dordogne when Roland was fighting off the Saracens, and will always be the only legitimate foods of France, is a mistake. An intellectually inauthentic error.

On Literature and Food [by Raymond Sokolov]

Banquet Scene Nicias Painter (circa 420 BC

In our food-besotted culture, chefs and cookbook authors get far more respect, by and large, than poets or classical musicias or scholars ever did before post-modernism had undermined the prestige of the “high” arts. Even a poet as successful as W.H. Auden found it expedient to conceal his "profession" from strangers seated next to him on planes.

 

What did he “do”? Medieval history. He had found that telling the truth about himself aroused incredulity and dialogues of unbearable tedium. But at least Auden would have been treated with wondering respect.

Now we have the bewildering phenomenon of the star chef, a fast-talking prestidigitator of improbably conjoined ingredients, famous primarily for his performances on television, rather than for the food his restaurant kitchen serves to a more limited and traditionally discriminating audience of gastronomes.

Few equivalent stars of old-fashioned literature, music and art ever existed. And even Chopin or Picasso or Dickens never penetrated the world audience to the same extent as that lout Gordon Ramsay. Well, maybe Dickens dominated his potential audience as decisively as Ramsay, but it was a smaller audience.

Perhaps it will give comfort to fogey esthetes (I am one) to consider how low the status of cooking was across the pre-video millennia, especially in literature. Before the modern era, even within the culinary profession, only a few cookbooks achieved high status. And during the heydays of Careme (1784 –  1833) and his follower Escoffier (1846 –1935), not even their most devoted acolytes would have considered their written work part of literature.

Food does inevitably appear in works of high literature from the very beginning. Those “equal feasts” on the banks of the Scamander in the Iliad are serious events, as important to the unfolding of the epic poem as is the laundry expedition to the seashore that leads Nausicaa to the shipwrecked Odysseus. But such interruptions of the main heroic fighting and manly adventure are Homer’s way of giving extra shock value to his bellicose story by contrasting it with the charm and safety of everyday life. The similes, with their celebrated outward expansion from a pinpoint in the bloody foreground to a barely related full image of peace and beauty, are the most intense examples of this approach.

But Homer treats the humblest things with respect; his barbecues are dignified, religious in fact. But in the hands of other classical writers, food, when it does get mentioned, is usually either a joke or a symbol of gross appetite and carnality.

 Perhaps the earliest food poem is a culinary parody of the opening lines of the Odyssey, in which the much-traveled (polytropon) hero (andra)  is replaced by a copious (polytrophon) and metrically equivalent banquet (deipnon).

Aristophanes frequently uses food as a tool of mockery. The plot of The Acharnians hinges on the protagonist’s passion for the eels of Lake Copais in Boeotia, off limits to Athenian epicures because of the war with Sparta. Dicaeopolis solves this problem by declaring a unilateral peace.

The most important work of gastronomy from antiquity, really the only important work of gastronomy from antiquity, is the Deipnosophistae (The Feasting Philosophers) by the Greek-Egyptian anthologist Athenaeus (fl. 200 ad). A grab-bag of mostly food-related quotations from hundreds of authors, it would be dismissible as frivolous pedantry if it did not also preserve fragments from serious writers who would be lost to us if they had not happened to mention a turnip or a stew.

The most ambitious food poem that survives from the ancient world is Moretum, a versified recipe for what may be pesto, that is included with other minor poems in the so-called Pseudo-Vergilian Appendix. Most authorities do not believe that Vergil composed the 124-hexameter account of a peasant toiling at his mortar and pestle.

The best food poem in either Greek or Latin is a tongue-in-cheek invitation to a dinner where the host will not provide any food at all, just good cheer and revelry. Catullus couches his mock invitation in the most august language, of prayer and elegiac romance:

You’ll dine well at my place, Fabullus,

In a few days, if the gods favor you,

And if you remember to bring along a fine big meal,

As well as a lovely girl and wine and salt

And lots of laughs.

If, I stress, you bring all these things, beloved friend,

You’ll dine quite well: because the wallet of your Catullus is

Full of spiders.

But in return you will receive unadulterated love,

Or whatever there is as elegant or fine:

I’ll give you a lotion,

Which Venus and Cupid gave my girlfriend,

And when you smell it, you’ll beseech the gods, Fabullus,

To make you

All nose.

So far, I’ve left out the other main literary food genre, cannibalism, the mythographic dark side of the banquet. . For example, there is the dinner at which Thyestes is served his own sons, in a  horrific profanation of the ideal feast. Such scenes are, I suppose, food literature, but far from the positive, non-satirical treatment of cooking and eating that enters literature in modern times.

Perhaps there already exists a study of the rise in respectability of gastronomy in the novel. It would inevitably show how the kitchen and its products gradually lost their trappings of Rabelaisian and Falstaffian debauchery in an arc of embourgeoisement that eventually gave us Proust’s madeleine and Virginia Woolf’s nod to gourmet cookery in To The Lighthouse, the boeuf en daube.

Neither Mrs. Woolf nor her character Mrs. Ramsay seems to know much about the actual cooking of the dish, as the British chef Rowley Leigh has shown in a clever analysis. The Ramsays’ cook Marthe does the actual cooking, which may excuse the self-satisfied if faintly idiotic warnings from Mrs. R. about the need for scientific precision in making this extremely forgiving, long-simmering classic of  Provençe. Perhaps Woolf meant to satirize Mrs. Ramsay’s pretensions as an upper middle class non-cook dining out, as it were, on the skills of her domestic employee.

Today, the equivalent person wouldn’t be cooking either. She would either order takeout or make a reservation. But we may doubt that she would be able to supply Catullan wit or an odor more divine than what emanates from a eucalyptus-spearmint aromatherapy candle ordered from the gods of the internet.

Did Goethe Read Horace? [by Raymond Sokolov]

Portrayal of Horace by Giacomo Di Chirico

Goethe’s famous mountain lyric, “On every summit,” (see yesterday’s post) reminded me of a now even more famous  “poetic” encounter in the mountains of Crete during World War II  between a German general and his British guerrilla captor, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.  In a scene right out of Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, both men, thrown together on a wild crag, recall Horace’s ode 1.9 about Soracte, the limestone ridge 28 miles north of Rome now called Monte Soratte.

Similarly steeped in Latin, the general and the literary vagabond discover that they both can recite the poem from memory.

The Latin text can be found here.

Here is Dryden’s independently memorable translation:

Behold yon mountain's hoary height
Made higher with new mounts of snow:
Again behold the winter's weight
Oppress the labouring woods below'
And streams with icy fetters bound
Benumbed and cramped to solid ground.

With well-heaped logs dissolve the cold
And feed the genial hearth with fires;
Produce the wine that makes us bold,
And spritely wit and love inspires;
For what hereafter shall betide
God (if 'tis worth His care) provide.

Let Him alone with what  He made,
To toss and turn the world below;
At His command the storms invade,
The winds by His commission blow;
Till with a nod He bids them cease
And then the calm returns and all is peace.

Tomorrow and its works defy;
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by
To put them out of Fortune's power;
Nor love nor love's delights disdain –
Whate'er thou getts't today, is gain.

Secure those golden early joys
That youth unsoured with sorrow bears,
Ere with'ring time the taste destroys
With sickness and unwieldy years.
For active sports, for pleasing rest.
This is the time to be posesst;
The best is but in season best.

Th'appointed hour of promised bliss,
The pleasing whisper in the dark,
The half-unwilling willing kiss,
The laugh that guides thee to the mark,
When the kind nymph would coyness feign
And hides but to be found again –
These, these are joys the gods for youth ordain.

I don’t know if Goethe ever read Horace’s ode, but I would be very surprised to learn that he hadn’t, given his obvious debt to the tradition of lyric poetry in Latin and, perhaps even more, to the Greek lyric poets whose work Horace deliberately imitated. The Soracte ode, for example, is written in a stanzaic metrical scheme invented by, or at least named after, the poet  Alcaeus, a sixth-century B.C. native of Lesbos and possible lover of Sappho.

Wine and love were apparently frequent subjects for Alcaeus. He survives in quoted fragments and lucky survivals found in papyri preserved in Egyptian rubbish dumps of the later Roman empire.

At any rate, its fairly clear that the Soracte ode was meant to be read as a Latinization of traditional Greek motifs, gracefully shifting from winter cold to a celebration of domestic warmth, wine and the amorous pleasures of  the moment, indulged without guilt, before the inevitable winter of life blows in.

We can only guess as to whether Horace had a specific Greek poem in mind, but his decision to write the ode in alcaics was a definite homage to the poetic manner of Alcaus and Sappho, who used the same meter. It was also a technical stunt  to recreate the prosodically diverse lines of the Greek form in Latin.  

Two millennia later, Tennyson took up the challenge in his “Milton.” Its four alcaic stanzas offer a Victorian echo of this archaic mode:

O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
     God-gifted organ-voice of England,
          Milton, a name to resound for ages;

Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
     Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
          Rings to the roar of an angel onset—

Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
     And bloom profuse and cedar arches
          Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,

Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
     And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
          Whisper in odorous heights of even.

 

   Tennyson was deliberately showing off his skill with a metrical scheme entirely foreign to English lyric poetry. Goethe, on the other hand, made the intricate simplicity of Greek lyric poetry his own, unostentatiously. Germanizing its mix of technical sophistication, compression and simplicity of feeling.

 Most lyric poetry in English makes no such attempt to reflect the lyric poetry of antiquity. Ours is a freer, broader way of doing things, without exotic meters clogging the direct expression of feeling cloaked transparently in the native rhythms of iambic pentameter. Even Milton, who wrote plausible poems in Latin, wrote his epics in iambic pentameter, not in the dactylic hexameter of Homer and Vergil. Longfellow, unfortunately, could not resist the temptation to try his hand at the ancient meter in his cringemaking Evangeline:

This is the forest primeval.  The murmuring pines
        and hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct
        in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and pro-
        phetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their
        bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neigh-
        boring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail
        of the forest.

 Goethe, however, even in the emotionally somber, personal mood of his “Hiker’s Night Song II,”  fits naturally into the classical mode of lyric poetry, the tradition exemplified in its brevity and sharp emotional contrast by this short poem of Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC):

When you lie on a soft couch by the fire in winter,

Well-fed, drinking sweet wine and munching chickpeas,

Be sure you ask the man next to you:

What’s your name, Sir? Where are you from? How old?

Where were you, when the Mede came?

Food and wine and a fire are fine things, but don’t forget the horrors of the Persian invasion. Thirty-four words, a Goethean tension of peace and death in the smallest space.

Ironically, enough, this cameo survives not for its beauty and concision, or the way it shifts from elaborated mellowness to bluff, colloquial speech. No, it’s because of the chickpeas.

Xenophanes 18 has come down to us as part of a catalogue of fruits, berries and nuts in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, a vast compendium of lore about food and dining compiled in Roman Egypt. If it weren’t for the chickpeas (erebinthous), Athenaeus wouldn’t have been interested.

On Goethe in Translation [by Raymond Sokolov]

By any normal standard, Dorothea Röschmann’s lieder recital at Zankel Hall was a shining success. The German opera star performed  21 gems from the standard art-song repertory by Schubert, Liszt, Strauss and Hugo Wolf with grace, style and affecting attention to the texts, which were, of course, all in her native language.

The audience, which filled almost every one of the 599 seats in this relatively intimate space reclaimed from the bowels of Carnegie Hall just ten years ago, were paying studious attention to the poems in their programs, to judge from the rustling of pages between every number. But you had to wonder which side of the en face texts they were reading.

Very few Americans today know German. Instruction in the language was suppressed after our entry into World War I. Even German music was prohibited in concerts. Then Hitler and the Holocaust put a taint on German culture that has never really faded. Only 14 per cent of U.S. high schools teach German. And in colleges and universities, fewer than 100,000 pupils get a taste of the language of Goethe.

So it was a reasonable assumption that a preponderance of the cultivated music lovers in Zankel Hall that wintry night in January were reading the English translations of the lyrics and not the German originals. Did this matter?

I think it did. I can remember back to the Sixties, when an audience at an Elisabeth Schwarzkopf lieder recital was filled with German-speaking immigrants who were visibly responding to her expressive attention to individual words and poetic nuance. Many of them, one supposed, were aware of Schwarzkopf’s Nazi-sympathizing past but came to hear her anyway, out of loyalty to the high German culture they had imbibed in their youth, the last moment when German culture was the treasured property of every educated person in the West.

It was an unintended consequence of the Nazi plague that it killed off the non-German world’s interest in its German heritage almost as effectively as it liquidated millions of Jews and other non-Aryans. Who today reads Faust in the original? Or. For that matter, who reads it in English? And if they do, what can they possibly make of this monumental work, which once was routinely included with the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy as one of the greatest epic poems in all literature.

Goethe in translation is a radically diminished author. The late Charles Rosen insisted to me that it was impossible to “get” Goethe except in German. This problem was on full display at the Röschmann recital. Fourteen of the songs, fully two-thirds of the total, were set to short poems by Goethe, three of these elusive lyric masterpieces cropped up twice on the program.

Here is the translation provided by Carnegie Hall to Liszt’s setting of a 24-word poem which, by a dubious but attractive legend, Goethe wrote in pencil on the wooden wall of an alpine hut during the evening of September 6,1780:

Over every mountain-top
Lies peace.
In every tree-top
You scarcely feel
A breath of wind;
The little birds are hushed in the wood.
Wait, soon you too
Will be at peace.

This is a fairly accurate, if unnecessarily “poetic” rendering of Wandrers Nachtlied II (Hiker’s Nightsong II). At least, it captures the poignant repetition of “peace” and the haiku like turn on it in the last line: the “peace” of death as suggested by the peace of Nature. But if you were to read this as a self-standing English poem, I don’t think you would be tempted to set it to music. And Dorothea Röschmann would not be singing those words to 600 rapt concertgoers 233 years after you its author, seized by romantic inspiration, allegedly scribbled it on a board by your pallet bed on the slopes of the Kickelhahn.

Here is the actual poem, routinely acclaimed as the greatest achievement of German lyric poetry, which Liszt, as well as Schubert, Fanny Mendelssohn (sister of Felix) and Charles Ives set:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh.
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du

Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, Balde
Ruhest du auch.

Even if you think you cannot read a word of German, you can still get an idea of what is going on in the poem by looking at it carefully. It should be obvious from the spelling alone that this is rhyming verse with the scheme abab cddc. The poet is addressing someone he knows well (Du is the familiar form of the pronoun “you”) But he starts with what looks like a very simple description of a mountain scene: over all the summits is peace. Then his view moves from the distance closer in, like a panning camera, to the treetops. Note, too, the very distinctive rhyming pair, Gipfeln and Wipfeln, peaks and treetops. The rhyming and the syntax keep knitting an apparently simple effusion about nature into a complex, tightly woven verbal device.

With the first word of the fourth line (only the ninth word of the poem!) he introduces an anonymous addressee in a two-word line that also injects the first human note (the camera is now in closeup range), who links the idea of feeling not only in the physical present but also to the poet. Like him, the absent addressee would, if present also feel hardly a breeze.

This clause, which has the first verb in the poem, slides across two lines, joining the poem’s two quatrains and the two halves of its rhyme scheme, softening the structural formality. At the same time, Goethe’s attention has moved from the immense, physically inanimate images of mountain and treetops, to the living emotion he shares with a friend (lover?) and then to much smaller living creatures, little birds (Vöglein: lein is the diminutive, the umlauted o makes the word plural), who are silent  in the woods. And then we have the quietly dramatic shift, which transforms a delicate and intricate nature poem into a solemn reassurance of impending “peace.” Ruh reappears in the last line as a verb, ruhest, you will soon be at peace yourself, too. The verse expires like a whisper.

What I have been saying is pretty much a commonplace reading of the poem, a reaction any German-literate person would share. The simplicity and the sinewy artifice are stupendously apprehensible, working together in the service of deep feeling conveyed with masterful sobriety. The ideal concertgoer would know this and be ready to appreciate how Liszt or Schubert interpreted the text in sound, adding a layer of musical meaning with a repeated phrase or a rise, or a fall, a sudden diminuendo. The singer, meanwhile, repeats the poet’s words, in her own voice, with her own urgency and feeling, responding to the accompanist’s rendering of the composer’s notes and to the text that gave birth to the song.

Monsieur Hulot, Mademoiselle Heather, Au Revoir [by Simon Barraclough]

A couple of years ago, after reading some Eliot and watching some Jacques Tati, I thought it would be a smashing idea to write a parodic blend of the two and it started thus:

The Hulot Men

Mistah Hulot—lui mort.

We are the Hulot men

We are the French men

Smoking together

Pipe bowls filled with straw. 

but it didn't get much further, thankfully. But another entanglement of poetry and Tati has come together in this image of Monsieur Hulot's brother-in-law's swanky new car in Mon Oncle:

for the cover of Heather Phillipson's new book is inspired by this vehicle. Regardez-vous:

and this cover has already had an article devoted to it in Art Review (one of the perks of being a practising artist as well as a poet).

The reason I mention all this is that last night was the London launch of Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) at the Art Review Bar just off Old Street ('Silicone Roundabout' as almost nobody calls it) and the great and the good (although I prefer the term 'the out and the about') gathered to start up this gorgeously hued vehicle and drive it away.

The first words I heard out of Heather Phillipson's mouth, back in 2007, were:

The only men it's safe for me to love are dead –

O'Hara, Stevens, Berryman.

when I read with her at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden and I became a fan at that moment. These are the opening two lines from 'Devoted, Hopelessly', which appears in the book. By the way, the title refers to the type of glue used to bind the book. I could talk about how the title and some of the poems inside speak of the materiality of language as used by the poet. But I won't. 

What I will say is that this debut collection contains many hilarious, touching, surprising, and intriguing poems with wonderful titles like 'German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London', 'Red Slugs in Every Irrelevant Direction', You're an Architect and I Want to Make Dinner for You' and 'Actually I'm Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash'. 

I like a launch to be more of a party than a reading and Heather chose to read a single poem, pushing the needle of the 'launchometer' almost as far away from the 'reading' end of the 'party – reading' scale as it is possible to do. But she left us wanting more, which is always a good thing. 

Another good thing is that four of us peeled off to eat fish and chips at Kennedy's on Whitecross Street, which is worth a visit if you're ever out East.

So. As Monsieur Hulot departs at the end of Mon Oncle to allow his nephew to bond with his formerly stuffy father, Monsieur Arpel, so must I depart at the end of my week as guest blogger. It's been a pleasure and there were many other things I wanted to write about, like how can we get people to stop saying "x won the Internet"? but perhaps I will continue with these over at Mo' Worse Blues.

Au revoir. I leave you with an apposite poem from Heather Phillipson.

The Distance between England and America

Much could begin like this: a large man,

tie slackened, voice buoyed up by altitude.

My mind's elsewhere –

the air-conditioning. It's cold.

Above the Atlantic he bellows long vowels to me,

and I'm cabined, window-seated, polite.

With my English tone, I'm inadvertantly provocative –

No more salted pretzels for me, thanks Jeff.

 

At the sound of Charles Darwin's bassoon,

earthworms, apparently, writhed.

Jeff booms: Pittsburgh, golf clubs, his search for a wife.

I twist in my seat – suggest something,

in my movement, of all evolution.

His blanket folds back like an invitation

to navy shadows and polyester.

Heat and anything could happen under there.

 

Oh, take your loafers off, Jeff –

throw them in the aisle.

Your gusto can conquer my boredom, our bed can be the sky.

It's warming up. We won't be sleeping.

For almost nine hours beneath United Airlines covers

we'll share everything but thought.

In the morning, white bread rolls and Columbus, Ohio.

Women distribute plastic cutlery in the night. 

 

For more information on Heather, click here.

 

 

 

And – Which is More – You'll Beowulf, My Son! [by Simon Barraclough]

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" That is the question. Yes, Heidegger, that's a pretty good originary question. I might go further back and ask why is there matter at all? But an originary question one gets asked a lot is "What first got you into poetry?" and variations thereof.

I had two 'big bangs' or inflations, or 'mini-bangs'. One courtesy of Auden when I was about 13 but one much earlier, when I was about seven years old, courtesy of Miss Campbell and Beowulf.

Ah, Miss Campbell, exotic and intoxicating on so many levels: a substitute teacher (a fresh face), an energetically tousled redhead, a lover of poetry, and a Canadian. In Huddersfield, at the start of the 70s – man's footprints freshly planted on the Moon – Miss Campbell was a sign of futurity and opportunity for me.

When the time came for her to leave ahead of our seemingly endless six-week summer holidays, she chose to leave us with two things on that poignant Friday afternoon: proper fresh popcorn and Beowulf.

Having only eaten pre-packaged, sweet soggy cardboard like Butterkist, I'd never seen popcorn made like this. I didn't know you could make it. Actual, neutron star-dense kernels of real corn. Hot oil. A sealed pan. A hail storm within the pan, and then an overflow of bright white and yellow corn-novae. Miraculous. But more so after butter and salt were added. From that day on my tooth became a savoury tooth and has remained so.

And, as we munched, she turned herself into live cinema by reading a modern translation of Beowulf to us. Terrifying. Suspenseful. Gory. Electrifying. I've no idea which translation she read to us. Look at how many there are:

Annotated List of Beowulf Translations

but it made me realise how exciting, troubling, suspenseful and entertaining poetry could be. Not that it always is. And not that is should be or has to be. But it was a great start for a seven-year old.

Years later I relished Seamus Heaney's 1999 version, which translates "Hwæt!" as "So." which is exactly how my Irish aunties begin every new story: "So."

So, I'd like to mention that there is a brand new translation missing from the list above, by Meghan Purvis. It begins, as playfully and colloquially as Heaney, with:

Stop me

if you've heard this one before: the lands up north,

hoar-bent, frost-locked, need deeper plows

to dig them. Here is one.

I haven't ventured much further than this yet but I'm on my way, with my popcorn, and memories of Miss Campbell.

Beowulf by Meghan Purvis from Penned in the Margins, London

 

 

 

Maris, Pollitt, Rumens [by Simon Barraclough]

There's only one reason to go to Piccadilly Circus: to visit Waterstones' magnificent flagship store. Okay, the cocktails at The Criterion are good also. Plus the ICA is nearby. Oh, and it's not far from Cicchetti's either. But remember that this part of London recently replaced the Swiss Centre cinema with M&M's World. I don't really even know what that is. I know that the vicinity smells of sickly sweet chocolate and the edifice pummels the retina with primary colours but I tend to scurry on by.

Anyway, I went to Waterstones last night to see Kathryn Maris, Katha Pollitt and Carol Rumens read from their new and recent books published by Welsh publisher Seren (the editor in chief, Amy Wack, was in town to introduce the three).

It's an odd thing writing up a reading. You're tempted to switch to 'book review' mode but then you'd be kind of reviewing people, which, until Google Glass makes it the norm for us to give each other 'star-ratings' as we walk down the street, doesn't feel right to me.

Plus, compared to reading poems on the page, a live reading has so many additional variables. Like tone of voice, length of intros, particular words that are explained and over which the poet stumbles when they come around in the text; and perhaps one of the poets might knock over a glass of water just before reading a poem about a washer woman. I'm not saying these things happened last night, but they might have.

Anyway, the large and appreciative audience was treated to three readings of great style, wit, emotion and skill. I have all kinds of rules and pet peeves about poetry readings but two halves of ten minutes from each poet worked very well. Certain themes recurred, including ironic, not-entirely-ironic, and rather political takes on Bible stories and experiments with the linguistic style of the King James Bible. 

There were poignant reflections on age and youth and the changing relations and attitudes between both, often within the same body. There was also a palpable, creative, tension between American and UK tendencies, especially regarding form. The three poets almost described a smooth spectrum from Rumens's frequent use of form, to Maris's increasing use of form, to Pollitt's occasional use of form.

Some discussion followed about these technical matters in the Q&A but no firm conclusions were drawn. Needless to say, I wrote down many choice lines and phrases in my notebook but I'm not sure they will work that well out of context (a bit like the way lines from poems posted as tweets often don't work) but I can recommend the poets' respective books:

God Loves You by Kathryn Maris

The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens

I also learned that 'Seren' means 'star' in Welsh. I should have known that, but it was pleasant to learn. I will leave you with one complete poem, from God Loves You. A domani.

This is a Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters

anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote

that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be 

recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.

I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase

‘social polish’, as though she’d acquire it through repetition.

I took an overdose at a child’s 6^th birthday party.

I was born in a country which some have called

The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one

that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman

who has known me for years and yet never remembers

who I am – and now she’s involved in a public scandal.

I have been at parties where I was boring.

I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.

I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not

for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of

misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl

who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.

She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.

Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale

out of kindness – because guilt recognises guilt,

the way a mother can identify her own child.

I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’

in which the assignment was to complete this statement:

When one door closes, another opens.

I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,

making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.

I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive

suffering.  The girl tried to absolve me.

‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’

I know I should thank her if she’s alive,

but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

 

—Kathryn Maris

 

Bank Holidays, Bunking Off, Pasolini [by Simon Barraclough]

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK. This is a day we occasionally grant to our banks so that they can take a breather from refusing to lend to businesses, insisting on unnecessary payment protection schemes, finding ways to turn public bailout money into private bonuses, and so on. They need to replenish their batteries.

And the rest of us need to go have lunch in cafés attached to museums and galleries. For a freelancer, depending on one's success or commitment, either every day is a Bank Holiday or Bank Holidays remain something that only other people enjoy. I must confess, I bunked off and practised my F major scale.

I also had time to reflect on a recent event I organised for the BFI (British Film Institute). The BFI has a generous and welcoming attitude to poets and it enjoys exploring the links between poetry and cinema. Over the last few years I've been involved in their poetry/film crossover event 'O Dreamland', which invited poets to write about their digital archive (The Mediatheque); I launched my collaborative Hitchcock homage Psycho Poetica at the BFI in 2010; and last year Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and I premiered The Debris Field there.

This year I was asked to organise something for their recent epic Pasolini retrospective and I considered various approaches. I thought of poetically 're-staging' Theorem using six poets playing each of the main characters, and I also toyed with comparing the 'swinging Sixties' of Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertolucci.

But in the end I took my lead from Pier Paolo himself and his love of the literary portmanteau movie, so I suggested A New Decameron: ten films, ten poets, ten film clips, one evening of poetic and filmic enthusiasm. 

I asked nine other poets and writers to join me: Jane Draycott, Charles Lambert, Glyn Maxwell, John McCullough, Valeria Melchioretto, Luca Paci, Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Chrissy Williams. We were also lucky enough to have Rosa Mucignat of King's College London reading some of Pasolini's poetry in the Friulian language, with translations by Cristina Viti.

The sold-out show was funny, moving and powerful by turns and I wanted to give you a little taster by posting Chrissy Williams's poem and a film clip here. Chrissy freely admits to being obsessed with Pasolini's clownish muse, the great Ninetto Davoli. I'm currently talking to the BFI and the poets about getting all the work online in the near future.

First a small sample of the irrepressible Davoli from Chrissy's chosen film The Canterbury Tales.

 

And now her poem.

Ninarieddo

for Davoli in The Canterbury Tales

"col tuo sorriso, fulmineo e buffo" — Pasolini

"My only enemy is time" — Chaplin

 

I step to the screen

with your face so big, a kiss

with my arms reached up

would wrap around me whole.

Slip tongue, slip lip to the camera.

I fell in love with a face once

until it swallowed me.

 

And all him loved that looked upon his face

That each him loved who looked upon his face

No length of time or death may this deface

 

Step, nod to the screen and wink the bride.

You, happy as a goldfish in a glade.

You, little tramp with laughter for a face.

The bride winks back, slips back into a stolen moment.

Slip tongue to the world and hope for many moments.

 

and your face    is a song, fool

your eyes         light a dance, fool

lip-tight             on the laugh of language

                        on the laughter

 

Step hip to dance with shadows till it's time

and it's always time to dance with shadows.

We dance against the day the music slips.

We dance the laugh of lips in bandages.

 

Thy face is turned in a new array

Your face is mottled in a new array

 

No step is left behind,

just kicked in a new way.

Stories shift, dreamed high,

kicked about in an angel's face

which changes, because

everything is always changing

although it stays the same.

No story is left behind,

just slipped on in a new way.

 

and I'll see you here       again and again.

I'll love you here             again       again.

I'll fall and catch my heart         in your constant face.

 

I fell in love with a clown once,

with a fool. Now I am the new clown

of no good, who falls with a cane

as time rearranges the stories of your face.

 

Is the face enough?

Is any one face ever enough?

 

In all his face there was no drop of blood

With his face pale and with a heavy cheer

Now list you down with face all pale of hue

 

I fell in love with your face once,

with the face I found, and I will follow it, 

love, through all our familiar stories.

 

More about Chrissy Williams here.