Other People's Epics

If you're here regarding Leah's Turing Test, you almost certainly want to take a look at this post about choosing the best genre for your beliefs as well as this one. It's the one she gets her question from. Don't worry: it's much shorter.

One of my recurrent pastimes is to imagine what another person's epic might look like.

As far as genres go, the epic is one of my favourites to think about. No individual epic counts among my favourite books (though, you know, Paradise Lost is pretty great). The reason I like thinking about them is that, at least in the English tradition, they have become a kind of formal game, thanks to the humanists of early modern England. (Note to readers: "early modern" is the new PC term for "Renaissance;" in England the early modern period spans the 1500s and 1600s, but it got started earlier in Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, etc.). Let's dive into a bit of history, shall we?

In early modern Europe, there was this group of artists and scholars called the humanists (who are different from the existing group of people who call themselves humanists). They believed in lots of things which were revolutionary for the time, like the idea that people's talents were formed through education rather than inheritance, and that the arts were crucial to intellectual and moral education. They were also pretty keen on the Classics, especially the newly-rediscovered Aristotle. (Or, at least, newly rediscovered in Europe; in Baghdad Aristotle was well-known.) Emulation (mimesis) and variation-on-a-theme/pattern were central to their pedagogy. Thus they emulated the ancient Greek and Roman writers.* One of the genres they embraced was the epic. In the Greco-Roman tradition, famous examples are Homer's Odyssey and Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses, though many humanists (most notably Edmund Spenser) patterned their careers on Virgil's. Dante was the first early modern poet to write a successful epic--The Divine Comedy--and Spenser introduced the form to the English language much later in The Faerie Queene.

The humanists liked classifying and defining poetic genres, and we have them to thank for a lot of the very rigid forms, like sonnets. So when they wrote epics, they codified conventions that their Classical predecessors included somewhat more haphazardly. For instance, early modern epics are usually divided into twelve books, because that's what Virgil did. Some of these conventions have become part of a formal definition for epics as you'd read in a dictionary of literary terms: they must include a katabasis (a descent to the underworld); they must include divine intervention of some kind; they are broad in scope, covering the known world, both geographically and intellectually (they almost always include references to recent scientific discoveries and inventions, reference to historical events, literary allusion, and so on); the protagonist must be aristocratic and must embody the virtues held in high esteem by the audience/author; it must begin in media res; it must describe an event that is of great historical or mythological importance to the community in which the epic was written. However, other traits became just as conventional, and just as necessary, in early modern Europe (or England, anyway). A professor I once had said that any poet who wanted to be somebody had to include in their epic a description of the dawn which beat out Homer's rosy-fingered dawn (or at least beat out their contemporaries' descriptions). Other necessities were a half-snake half-woman creature, a talking tree, catalogues of objects, and ekphrasis (a description of a work of art); all of these were drawn from Homer, Virgil, or Ovid. EDIT 24 July 2013: Another crucial convention is the digression. Epics almost always have long asides--sometimes these are flashbacks (pairing with the convention of in media res), sometimes these are history lessons, sometimes these are even premonitions of what is to come (oracles and prophecies are also epic conventions), but often the digressions are bits of plot that wander off from the main goal. Characters might get lost, or separated from their companions, or get kidnapped or imprisoned. They may have dalliances with seductresses or get distracted by red herrings. The coarse of a true epic never does run smooth. /EDIT

Early modern epics were almost always in verse, usually in heroic couplets. (A common way of organizing them was twelve Books divided into cantos, which were themselves divided into stanzas, which were themselves in couplets...but not all epics were like this.) In fact, strict definitions often insist that epics are written in verse, but many people allow for prose epics, and I'd argue that prose epics are still being written. Paradise Lost was the last great verse epic, as Milton himself declared; after this, most verse epics were mock epics. The Dunciad is perhaps the most famous of the mock epics, but I did once know someone who was working on a mock epic detailing the colonization of Trinidad.

(History lesson over)

Looking over the list of requirements, it should be clear that epics of this kind** are especially well suited to expressing their author's ideology. Of course all texts contain ideology, but epics do so very explicitly. The topic must be formative to the community and the protagonist must be exemplary of the community's values. The presence of the Underworld and the gods means that the religious and mythic sensibilities of the group are involved. The scope means that the epic gives a shape of the physical and intellectual world of the community. Epics are often nationalist. Thus Spencer was deliberately writing an English epic. Sometimes, however, epics are more religious than nationalist; Milton, who thought that England's climate made English culture tepid and generally worthless, avoided the national epic and instead wrote a Christian epic. But whatever group they represent, they do it explicitly and obviously. This makes them very good places to examine a particular worldview. Bakhtin (who I've mentioned before) says that epics have a single viewpoint; they are monoglossic, one-voiced. And as much as I've been talking about early modern epics, I think more contemporary epics exist: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and lots of other fantasy obviously fit most of the criteria (Tolkien was writing a saga, not an epic, but the two are similar and it seems clear that he was incorporating early modern epic conventions, too; while the Narniad did not start as an epic for Lewis, it seems clear to me that, by The Magician's Nephew, or maybe even The Silver Chair, he knew that he was writing one). But I also think that Wade Davis' nonfictional/historical/semi-autobiographical One River is an ethnobotanical epic. I don't think for a second that Davis intended to make it an epic, but it actually fulfills every single requirement, right down to the snake-lady and the description of the dawn. (Also, The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are film epics if you let Will's father-become-part-of-the-ship count as a talking tree--Ovid's and Spenser's talking trees were usually people turned into trees. I don't know what worldview the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are showcasing, though. That's something to puzzle out.)

What makes the epic so amusing to me, then, is that as a genre the epic is almost like a fill-in-the-blanks for ideology. You have all these empty fields which you fill in with content; once you've filled in the fields, you have an epic. What's interesting, of course, is to see how the different features change based on what worldview is slotted in. For instance, in Paradise Lost, the katabasis is Satan's flight into Hell after losing the War in Heaven. In The Faerie Queene, the talking tree is a man who was seduced by a witch (who signified the Catholic Church) and was turned into a tree when he discovered who she was, but in The Lord of the Rings, written by an environmentalist, the talking trees were Ents, early eco-warriors. In The Faerie Queene the hero is a gentleman-knight; in Lord of the Rings he is a hobbit, an analogue for the simple rural men-at-arms in WWI's trenches; in One River the hero is a revolutionary ethnobotanist who has what Davis calls a taxonomic eye, the innate ability to identify taxonomy at a glance. Good epics of course are not really just highly stylized Mad Libs; a skilled epic poet or writer will make creative use of the genre's constraints rather than be a slave to them. So what I like to do is imagine what different kinds of epics would look like. What would an environmentalist epic look like? (Probably a lot like The Lord of the Rings.) What would a Canadian epic look like? What would an Anglican, or Catholic, or Mormon, or Muslim epic look like? What would a librarian's epic hero's virtues be, or an engineer's, or a home-maker's? What would be the Underworld in a Dutch-Canadian epic, an Asian-Canadian epic, an Inuit epic?

I also think about the sorts of world-views that make me uncomfortable. What would an Islamaphobic epic look like? A homophobic epic? A white supremist epic? An anti-feminist epic? This is less fun, but it might be a helpful exercise.

Ultimately, though, I realize that The Faerie Queene is not just an English epic; Spenser wrote it as a handbook on courtly behaviour. It is an English Anglican aristocratic humanist epic. Milton wanted to write a definitive Christian epic, but Paradise Lost is in fact an Arminian Copernican materialist Christian epic. Or, even more accurately, The Faerie Queene is Spenser's epic; Paradise Lost is Milton's. So as fun as it is to figure out what a feminist's epic would be, I really need to be thinking what a specific person's epic would be. What is my epic? What is, say, Stephen Harper's epic or David Suzuki's epic? What is your epic?

I wish people still wrote epics, because while imagining other people's epics is fun, being surprised to find out how another person used the snake-lady is even more fun. We must watch how we imagine other people's stories, because when we do so we run a terrible risk of reducing them. For this reason I would prefer to read them rather than imagine them, but since most people don't write epics, all I've got is the imagining.

---

*If all of this stuff about humanism sounds vaguely familiar and not especially noteworthy, it's because much of our culture is descended from humanism. It was radical at the time: the neo-Platonic monastic tradition was the real force in education and art prior to humanism's advent, along with a sense (among aristocrats) that high culture was exclusively aristocratic. To our eyes, the monastics come off as seeming rather silly (for instance, they believed that the names of objects were intrinsic to the object, while humanists believed that names were socially assigned to objects), but it's important to remember that in most circles the monastic tradition was taken as obviously true until the humanists showed up.
If you're thinking that it looks more familiar than just a vague permeation of our culture and instead sounds a lot like the ideas of the Inklings, or of W. H. Auden, or of T. S. Eliot, then you'd be correct; these writers are known as Christian humanists because of their affinity with Shakespeare, Sydney, Spenser, Wyatt, Marlowe, et al. Christian humanism is a lot bigger than neo-classicism, of course.

**I say "epics of this kind" because in a more anthropological or comparative-literature sense, the Greco-Roman and early modern European traditions of epics weren't the only ones. Lots of people count sagas and  puranas as epics; there's a whole system of designation between oral or primary epics and literate or secondary epics which includes lots of things that don't fit here. However, I'm focusing on the tradition I'm familiar with, that one epitomized by Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene.

7 Quick Takes (62)

1. I watched some movies last weekend: Splice and Eve and the Fire Horse.

Splice is a Canadian bio-horror movie about a pair of sceintists who make designer organisms for a living. They decide at one point to (illegally) experiment with human DNA and create a human-hybrid named Dren. As Dren grows up, maturing in ways completely unexpected, she becomes harder and harder to keep a secret . . . and harder and harder to manage.

It's a pretty good movie, especially considering that it's Canadian-made; it's creepy, and builds suspense without much violence or gore for most of the movie. But about two-thirds of the way through the movie it gets disturbing, fast. Let's just say that the characters who made Dren have some issues themselves. And let's just say that inter-species sex will always be uncomfortable at best. (And I just got myself some weird visitors from Google again.)

Eve and the Fire Horse is also Canadian-made, about two girls, Eve and Karena, who live with their parents in Vancouver in the 1960s. Their parents have immigrated from China, and Eve (the protagonist) and Karena live in a hodge-podge world of "Chinese superstition" (what an awful name for that religious tradition, by the way), Confucianism, Buddhism, and poorly-understood Catholicism. It's in the style of Big Fish in some ways, with flights of imagination unfolding before your eyes. I suppose you would call it magic realism? Anyway, it deals with racism, family dynamics, guilt and grief, and spiritual life. I might write a proper review of it some day.

2. At church, they played Disney songs for hymns. If this interests you, I wrote out the service at this post.

3. I discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins this week. Some of his poetry was assigned in the class I am a TA for. Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest, and his sonnets are beautiful, rich, and complex; they require a good dictionary, and are worth it. I encourage you to take a look at them.

"The Starlight Night"

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flame!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow-sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

4. I also discovered Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a celebrated botanist. His The Loves of the Plants is a poetic re-writing of Linnaeus' famous work in the reproduction of plants. Linnaeus analogized stamens and pistols as men and women having romantic liaisons, and Darwin followed suit in Loves. What Darwin did differently, however, was place agency on the female characters rather than do as Linnaeus did and put agency in the male characters. This work would be very very fruitful for gender studies on a number of levels, but one of the more immediately interesting is that female polyamory shows up time and time again:

Two brother swains, of COLLIN'S gentle name,
The same their features, and their forms the same,

With rival love for fair COLLINIA sigh,

Knit the dark brow, and roll the unsteady eye.

With sweet concern the pitying beauty mourns,

And sooths with smiles the jealous pair by turns.

[later]

With vain desires the pensive ALCEA burns,

And, like sad ELOISA, loves and mourns.

The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame,

And three unjealous husbands wed the dame.

An interesting formal note is that Darwin's footnotes, which explain the botany behind the poem, take up more space on the page then the poem itself.

5. I did a lot of picture-taking today, and I am exhausted from the walking. I really wanted to get the autumn colours in the Nitobe Gardens and on Wreck Beach. (Will upload shortly.)

For more 7 Quick Takes, visit the host of the carnival, Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary.

Poetry from the MoA

I am going to do something I will likely regret. Due to my continued absense from this blog, resulting in equal parts from overwork and procrastination, I feel the need to post something, even if it's not great. As such, I am going to present some shoddy poetry I wrote at the Museum of Anthropology. I thought it would be cool to go to the MOA and sit down in front of artifacts and just write free verse poetry on the objects I saw. And on this forum I am going to treat you to the poor poetry I wrote.


The Lion and the Owl (in the Koerner Ceramic Gallery of the MOA)
15 Oct 2010

Gold and baroque
--as baroque as a piped waltz--
the lion holds his shield and helm
which blends into his unruly chest
On the red shield is his little twin
rampant and roaring as silently as his larger self
Ornate golden lion, your glazed stare
plumbs the empty space before you

Smooth, blue, yellow, and white
--as plump as a jar--
the owl too looks wide-eyed into
the air, shining with the tinny chords
He comes to the lions shoulders,
his wings by his side hold no shield
His own flat plumes will do for his colours


Hamsalagamł (bumblebee masks) at the MOA
15 Oct 2010

Eight faces, eight dwarf cherub faces
their yellow seive-noses high between their eyes
cheeks sink down
and there is a man, a boy-man
looking at you across the room from an armchair
trying to see you with his poet's pen
seeing only your empty faces
But are your faces empty?
What history would those eyes dream
which looked through yours?
What do your eyes dance?


On Bill Reid's Haida Bear in the MOA
15 Oct 2010

the bear looks on
the canoe down whose length he stares is more polished than him,
worn with the grease of hands
but it is painted in the same colours, its prow the same red as his tongue
the man he sees through the arches is traced with the same black veins,
but these veins contain yellow and white,
unlike the bear's
the double serpent on the arch is the same weathered wood as the bear's long claws but they do not see that
the bear, from his corner, looks on


In the shadow on the chairs in the MOA
15 Oct 2010

there is a hummingbird
with a long beak
and folded wings still as wood
and it sits on a disc held by
seven stiff men who hold
their hands palms out against their many faces
--some faces shorn off--
and their small doll-feet hang suspended
above the eagle's cracked face
with a fissure running deeper than the frowns it cuts
past the pale end-less beak
over its chest and down its leg
into the claws that
clutch a disc sitting on
the heads of twelve men with unreadable expressive faces
and naked formless bodies and
who in their turn stand on
the head of a creature, human-like,
with no nose but a knotty hole
and the fault running through her eye
(she holds a child, damaged
in her sibilant asymmetrical arms)
and her knees turn together and that
crack still runs between them right down
to her crooked feet and vague toes
which hold the weight of them all.

"False Synecdoche"

In my discussion group I am going to do a close reading of the following poem with my students. The poem, like the readings every week, was assigned by the professor; we TAs merely teach what she decides. Of tomorrow's readings, I found this poem the most interesting, or at least the most interesting given the time restraints of 50 minutes for the close reading. I suppose I should give you all a language-alert. Anyway, without further ado, here is...

"Mary Magdalene's Left Foot"

I saw the picture in Newsweek or Time
and couldn't believe who was back in the news.
But there it sat, encased in antique gold
and pedestrian prose, apart from the rest
of her imaginably lush lost body,
which it recalls with false synecdoche.

The news is littered with the bodies of women
--whores, some--who have returned to minerals,
a pile of iron and zinc and calcium
that wouldn't even fill a shoe. We glimpse
of Mary Magdalene a golden whore
that never ached for flesh or grew hair coarse
enough to scrub mud from a traveler's foot.

But gold is meretricious flattery
for the whore who washed Christ's feet with tears,
who rubbed sweet oil into his sores, then kissed
each suppurating wound that swelled his flesh,
knowing that it was God's clear flesh beneath
its human dying. And that is more than you and I
will ever know of where we place our lips.

Andrew Hudgins, Saints and Strangers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

***

So, I wonder, what think you?

Cepaea nemoralis

or, The Grove Snail

You little nomads, keep your secrets banked
Inside your yellow Atlas-shoulder stores,
And hide within those rounds your patient lores,
Enclosed among your kind, disliked, unthanked.
Or pass between you glacial wisdom, slow-footed news.
At leafy caravanaries you trade
Among your gradual people, from gardens strayed;
To them reveal your gospel, them, in conch-like pews.
You are tucked, your puckered foot is bare.
I pluck you from my palm and you unfurl
Your body; prongs are, like the point, in air,
A question mark, your shell the inward-questing curl.
Why trust your tender self to me, one bred
In a speed-mad world from which all wisdom's fled?

I wrote this on Monday (the 15 of Feb), on the Winter Road between Fort Chipewyan and Fort McMurray. One of the things I miss about Ontario are the snails, especially the yellow ones, which from Wikipedia I gather are Cepaea nemoralis, or grove snails. I have written about the snail's wisdom before, but I decided to try the idea again. Actually, I like some of "Eulogy for the Garden," but not the whole thing. It needs a lot of work yet, and that's something I will some day give it. In the meantime, I'll expand the snail bit in a sonnet and not free verse. As the New Englander says in The Tommyknockers, "Real poims rhyme."

Re-written, so the line-breaks match the pauses:

You little nomads,
keep your secrets banked inside your yellow Atlas-shoulder stores,
and hide within those rounds your patient lores,
enclosed among your kind,
disliked, unthanked.
Or pass between you glacial wisdom,
slow-footed news;
At leafy caravanaries you trade among your gradual people, from gardens strayed;
to them reveal your gospel, them, in conch-like pews.
You are tucked, your puckered foot is bare.
I pluck you from my palm and you unfurl your body;
prongs are, like the point, in air, a question mark, your shell the inward-questing curl.
Why trust your tender self to me,
one bred in a speed-mad world from which all wisdom's fled?

Writing with a Goal

Of course I ought to be doing other things, like preparing for bedtime or working on grad school applications or not drinking caffeinated beverages, but instead of being responsible or something stupid like that I will write a blog post.

In writing text documents for the on-line exhibit I'm working on, I have stumbled upon a fact or few about writing itself. The fact-cluster is one which most of you already knew on some level, but I am going to augment your knowledge with fresh examples. I hope you find it useful.

1. Writing is usually done with a goal, or a purpose, or a win-scenerio in mind. A person does not simply write things willy-nilly. One writes toward something.

2. Different projects are written with different goals in mind. Take popular books. You can generally get a sense--but only an imperfect one--of the goals that authors wrote their novels towards in author interviews. The goal of a horror book is usually to scare the reader in a way that the reader finds enjoyable, though a bonus is to make the author think about things somewhat. Stephen King expresses this interest; mainly he's concerned with the story, but if you read On Writing you'll see he is nonetheless interested in what the story's "about." Science fiction's goal is often to explore ideas and, most importantly, possibilities--both in the sense of 'things we could do' and 'things that might happen if we don't wise up.' The goal of a romance book is, as far as I can tell, to provide a form of escape or distraction through titillation, sometimes outright arousal. Other books, those labelled "literature" by those who do such labelling, have some sort of critique or education as a goal, perhaps, though often it's a challenge.
The goal of an essay or argumentative book is different; the goal there is to persuade the reader. Perhaps they want to persuade the reader of a theoretical concept; perhaps they want to persuade the reader to a course of action; perhaps they want to persuade the reader (ie. grader) to give them a high mark. Sometimes it is to persuade the public to stop hating the reader so badly--this is a defence.
There is sometimes overlap here: a novel may be an attempt by the author to persuade the reader to respect the author. This would be "writing for fame."
Or, perhaps the writing is not reader- but self-directed. This is writing as celebration, writing as therapy, writing as discipline, writing as reasoning, writing as documenting. Or it is writing as exorcism, because the story burns to come out. Or it is writing for the sheer joy of wordsmithery.

3. Writing, when done well, is shaped by its goal. In English class they explain how, in a good story, each chapter, each scene, each sentence, each word somehow contributes to or drives the plot. This is only true if the goal is to move that plot along. As we have seen, this is not the only goal. A romance novel may include graphic sex scenes which move well past advancing the plot; they are obviously there for some reason all their own. This is because the plot is secondary to the response the author wants to elicit in the reader; usually, this is the same response the reader wants elicited in her, since she bought the romance knowing what would likely contain. (Or perhaps she does care more for the story and skips over these bits as silly. But at rate I think the author can expect that the reader will be buying the book at least to some extent for the sexy bits.) In a horror novel, a scary scene might be included not because it appreciably advances the plot but because it appreciably advances the suspense. In an 'idea' novel, a scene may be included not because it advances the plot but because it explores some new angle to or establishes some important groudwork for the ideas being analyzed. The goal shapes the story, in other words.
Essays are more obviously goal-driven. If you know this, I needn't explain it; if you don't know this, you likely don't want to.
Journals are shaped by their goals more nebulously; in this case it's how it serves the writer.

4. Writing which has no clear goal would be bizarre. Witness things written by children who do not yet have a sense of narrative flair. A friend of mine, for an assignment in our grade five class, wrote a story based on one of the pictures in the Chris Van Allsburg book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The picture dictated that the story have as a moment in it a house which was lifting off. The title was something like "The House on Maple Street." I read the story for him, as an editor, I suppose. I cleaned up some grammar and spelling errors, trying to persuade him that because SpellCheck approved, "The dog was baking," didn't make it correct. Anyway, even then I recognized that there were some serious structural problems with the story. Namely, the house-lifting-off part happened in the last page of a five-page story. That would have been fine, of course, if the preceding four pages hadn't been devoted to an account of the protagonist's dirt-biking. What happened, clearly, was that he had to write about the house on Maple Street, but really he was more interested in dirt biking, so he attached the house bit at the end. Which isn't to say that he didn't think a space-going house wasn't cool. It just wasn't as cool as dirt-biking. His story failed as a story because it's goal was unclear. The first part was writing for himself, but the last part was writing for the teacher. He'd have been better off writing for himself, and then going back and "editing like a mofo," as Kay once put it, so that the whole story worked for the teacher. But it was grade five.

So that's the system I have discovered.
1) We write towards a goal.
2) Different writing projects have different goals. (enlightenment, $$$, arousal, pleasurable fear)
3) Writing projects, when done well, are shaped by their goals.
4) Writing projects with muddled or no goals have unsatisfying structures.

Now why I am discussing this?

Well. As I said, I am working on the virtual exhibit. This involves writing "Storylines," or blocks of text and old-timey photographs and new-timey photographs of old-timey things strung out in a narrative fashion. The point of these storylines, according to my instructions, are to lead the virtual visitor through my exhibit and give them something coherent to follow. This is unhelpful, as a great number of things could do that. What we have to keep in mind is that the visitor is at the exhibit because they want to learn, probably as a form of entertainment. That at least is our ideal visitor; it is also possible that there are high school students who want to extract specific information as quickly, painlessly, and thoughtlessly as possible for an assignment, but they will have to deal with the fact that I am not writing for them alone.

Which means my goal is to provide an information dump of assorted trinket-like facts and anecdotes. It's like a rummage sale: I don't expect everyone to find each piece of information interesting, but I'll only include it if I think someone will.

And that leads of course to my list of points, namely #3: Writing, when done well, is shaped by its goal. What is the goal of a narrative (it has to be a narrative) that functions as an information-dump, meant to entertain and inform?
It is a narrative with lots of tangents and anecdotes that don't advance the 'plot' one bit. It's an interesting genre, one which I could do again, but I can tell you that I didn't find it easy. The best thing about it was the fact that I was allowed to include things for no other reason than that they're "cool" (and on topic).

(If you want to see what this 'genre' is like, read A Brief History of Nearly Everything or Rats or The Serpent and the Rainbow or another popular-audience non-persuasive non-analytical non-fiction book. (Of course all non-fiction has some sort of thesis, but some have more than others. My theses in the exhibit are largely 1) this topic is worth writing about, 2) the overarching structure/topic is in fact an authentic claim/category, and 3) we--that being the museum in general and me in particular--are not idiots. This also acts to shape the narrative.) This can be an excellent and enjoyable genre to read.)

Sonnets to My Jilted Lover (1)

So I started writing a sonnet sequence called, tentatively, Sonnets to My Jilted Lover. I took as an inspiration, of course, the Renaissance sonneteers, particularly Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and to a very peripheral extent Donne's Holy Sonnets. If you cannot tell from the title, this sequence inverts the sonnet convention; in this case, the speaker is the one who is spurning the lover.

While it would be all lies to say that this project did not occur to me as a result of a few different autobiographical events (eek--I dislike even mentioning the existence of such an autobiography on this blog), my impetus in writing it has very little do with excising wounds of any sort. I'll note that these most certainly are not written 'for' or 'to' any person in particular--or, at least not in the familiar sense. The energy I am using to write these sonnets is more philosophical, theological, or analytical than personal; perhaps that's why "sonnets" is less accurate than "sonnet-and-a-half." I haven't put much work into it, I'm afraid. Maybe the whole sonnet sequence thing isn't for me, or maybe I need to be truly lovesick (or guilt-ridden, as in this case) to produce something of this species.

But regardless! I am going to put up a (one) sonnet, for you to enjoy and critique. Seriously. I want feedback, even of the "I hate this. I hate poetry. I hate you." variety. Except obviously that's not true. If you write that, I won't allow it. But useful criticism will be just as or more welcome than carefully nice criticism.

OK, here we go.

Sonnetta numero 1:

1

I know you love me, dearest one of mine,
That you have set your heart out with the glass
Which sits upon the table, filled with wine,
And wait for me to drink instead of pass
As I have passed each day and night we tease.
I hear the ache inside your dancing words,
The whispered want contained by wild ease,
The innuendo penned like straining herds.
But while you knock my heartsick onto yours,
Although you promise all of what you are,
Despite my dreams of opening the doors
Into your house of houses, left ajar,
My heart is locked as sure as these dry lips
That will not take your champagne's sugared sips.

A New Poetic Form

For a piece of world-building I'm working on, I made up a poetic form called an "aubadina."

An aubade, in real life, is a morning poem, usually about lovers seperating. Think the morning scene in Romeo and Juliet. The aubadina, then, is always an aubade, but has a particular form. It has three stanzas of eight, six, and four lines. They rhyme abacdbdc eefggf hhii, though I will also allow ababcbcb ddbeeb fbfb or abacdbdc eefggf hihi or abacdbdc efegfg hhii or some other subtle variation.

A traditional aubade uses somewhat alliterative accentural meter. There are (usually) five accents per line with any number of syllables. They do not count in feet. Usually, accented syllables begin with the same letter, though this is not strictly followed. It is not iambic or trochaic or amphibrachic or what-have-you, though iambs and trochees may show up in some lines because we're included to hear meter in that way. (The sort of meter I described is common to Middle and Old English poetry.)

I'm here imagining that the aubadina was developed in the city of Aubade (on the river Aubade), where travellers often came and went, such that a poem about parting lovers is appropriate to the environs. This form was popularized and spread under the name aubadina by the afore-mentioned travellers. Among these travellers were a few groups of seasonal nomadic peoples, who adopted the aubadina and developed their own tradition with it. While a classical aubadina usually has one lover remaining in the city while the other must leave, the nomadic aubadina generally has both halves of the couple leaving in different directions, as they are parts of different nomadic groups which occasionally meet. Thus the lovers will meet again whenever their clans do--but that might not be for a while.

Of course, as in the case of sonnets, heroic couplets, etc., different poets will do different things with their aubadinas. Some write religious ones to saints or shrines that they made pilgrimage to and now must leave, others write bawdy ones (like "The Sailor's Farewell to His Lady of Wages"), and others, often scholars, write highly formalized ones in alliterative iambic pentameter. Sometimes they would be written in dialogues, where the lovers alternate lines until the final verse, where they each take one couplet.

You can't see if a form will work unless you've written one. This is, of course, the first aubadina ever written for real, and as such I've just established the conventions as I went along (though you can see I've stolen a lot of Renaissance sonnet ideas because I understand formalized poetry through the lens of Renaissance sonneteers). So conventions include mention of birdsong, reference to the astronomical and meterological phenomenon of dawn, the belief that the dawn dispells evil creatures, jealousy about what lovers are doing in towns, looking at the horizon, concerns of truth and fakeness, and complaining about the passage of time.

Here it is:

The dawn disperses the pale ghosts in the dark,
The purple sky, blushed by the hidden sun,
Weakens, whitens, and wakens the wild lark
Whose serenade stirs the city's new amours
To make those early delights last ‘til the rise
And rush they their rest with their kisses and fun
But we watch the time on the weakening skies
For when the day breaks, so does my road from yours.

The horizon’s rosy and the rooster’s head raises,
Now our tents are folded while the townie lad lazes.
Say that’s not the sun’s lip on the distant knoll,
Put our lips together while that sundog there hangs
A fool of a hound who sells us false pangs
That we feel split when we’re whole.

Say that’s not the green beam breaking the gloam
Hasting us thither to our far wandering homes.
That is not the halo that mimics the star;
That is the mean lark that sends mine afar.

Or, if you want me to mark the stresses for you...

The dawn disperses the pale ghosts in the dark,
The purple sky, blushed by the hidden sun,
Weakens, whitens, and wakens the wild lark
Whose serenade stirs the city's new amours
To make those early delights last ‘til the rise
And rush they their rest with their kisses and fun
But we watch the time on the weakening skies
For when the day breaks, so does my road from yours.

The horizon’s rosy and the rooster’s head raises,
Now our tents are folded while the townie lad lazes.
Say that’s not the sun’s lip on the distant knoll,
Put our lips together while that sundog there hangs
A fool of a hound who sells us false pangs
That we feel split when we’re whole.

Say that’s not the green beam breaking the gloam
Hasting us thither to our far wandering homes.
That is not the halo that mimics the star;
That is the mean lark that sends mine afar.

If I Were Teaching a Course...

...in Creative Writing, I would give (at least) these four assignments:

1) Write a sonnet with complete meter and a traditional rhyme scheme. Try to use some sonnet conventions.
2) Write a free-verse poem, with no rhyme, which is to some degree about a physical, existing location.
3) Write a short prose piece (at least three pages) including dialogue between 4+ characters.
4) Write a short prose piece that does not contain any dialogue or adverbs, and contains no more than one adjective per paragraph (average). Use perfectly formal language: no contractions, no fragments, no comma splices or run-on sentences.

I would also offer as an optional 'challenge' the writing of a sestina or a villianelle. Haiku sequences would also be a good idea.

I was thinking about this last night. Now, why would I assign these particular tasks?

Well...
I truly think that learning to write at least half-decent poetry is a major step toward writing excellent prose. You can write good prose without being able to write poetry, and you can likely get toward excellent without it, but I can assure you that being able to write poetry hugely improves your ability in prose. Hence two poetry assignments.
However, being able to write decent free-verse poetry (which most poets these days choose to write) requires, in my opinion, a stronger sense of form poetry. Sonnets are a good place to learn form, but I think haikus might give you certain skills as well. If you only write free-verse, I think you have a harder time learning rhythm. If you have something which forces a rhythm upon you (ie. metre), you get a sense of that rhythm better. It's a similar idea to learning the rules before you break them. So in order to write good free-verse, you need to be able to write at least half-decent form poetry. Or, at least, it helps.
Oh, and if free verse gets too abstract, it sucks majorly. So that's why it's about something concrete.
OK, the dialogue piece. Why? Well, most people struggle with dialogue. This will help with that. Also, you'll eventually need to learn how to manage multi-person conversations (as Jon can attest to), and this challenge should equip you for it.
Finally, the last prose. Why the ban on modifiers? Because modifiers are cheap ways of communicating. Verbs and nouns are more powerful, so use these whenever possible. Use adverbs when only an adverb can convey what you want to say. This is a rule most modern "literary" authors use. It does improve the elegance of your prose...and if you want to break this rule, you still have to know it. So write without adverbs and with few adjectives for a while, and once your communication skills have improved, you can let the modifiers back in.
Why the formal language? Again, you want to get a grip on structure and perfect communication. Once you've mastered this, then you can venture into breaking the rules.

Now, the caveats.

This is my own career. If you look at some of the stuff I was writing free-verse in my earlier university career, it lacks the structure, the pacing, and the design that the later free-verse has. This is because I hadn't sufficiently learned how to use this. Some of my improvement came from writing more formed verse. The thing is, though, that's not all that helped. Reading my peers' free-verse and reading 'professional' free verse. Also, Wayde Compton's 49th Parallel Psalm. That uses awesome line-breaks, which are crucial to writing poetry that doesn't suck badly. If you have a copy of Lake Effect 4, I'd say you should look at the free verse in that, and I'll particularly direct you to "south-end headphone seraphim" by Adam Wray, "black dog on repeat" by Anna Maxymiw, and "without consent" by Angela Hickman. Any will do, though. Look at their line breaks and rhythms. That is how one can write good free verse. I have also written some newer free verse of which I might be more inclined to brag; the earlier stuff is mediocre, as I said.

Other people, however, learned differently. Some started with free verse and have never ventured seriously into form, unless required to for an assignment. I think Anna Maxymiw took this course. Some began with prose and worked into poetry by force...and a good thing, too, because their poetry rocks (Sean Seal, in the anthology). But I still maintain that my assignments are good, because they work different muscle groups, and regardless of the order you prefer, I don't think anyone will argue that these skills don't reinforce each other.

That is all for now.

A Number of Things

1) I had planned on turning in a paper yesterday. I have an introductory paragraph written. Marvellous. I also know it won't be finished today, as I need to go to bed early. Why? See next entry.

2) I am going to both services at church tomorrow; Easter comes with baptisms at Bethel, and I have a Navs friend getting baptised in each service. So I'll be there for three and a half hours tomorrow morning, and I'll get the same service twice. This will be an opportunity to see if they remain consistent throughout. Mwahahahahahaha! Actually, it'll be an opportunity to support my friends and fellow Navigators.

3) As a going-away present, the Navigators staff have given me a book called Invitation to the Jesus Life: Experiments in Christlikeness. You know, these presses need to work on their titles. That's not a title that I would just pick off of a shelf. Anyway, the chapter I'm on is about attentive listening, and it comes with optional activities at the back of the book; you can pick and choose and see if you want to try some of them out. They include: "Chastity: Focus your eyes on someone you find attractive and ask God, What does this person need from you, O God, and how do you want to use me in his or her life? How might I bless him or her?"; "Secrecy: Instead of expressing your opinion about something just because the topic comes up, inquire further about what the other person thinks"; "Silence: When someone speaks to you, practice the situational discipline of silencing your mind. As the person speaks, don't think about what you want to reply"; "Submission: When listening to someone, look only at the person instead of looking around or behind the person. Enjoy keeping your gaze intent on the speaker"; "Submission: Listen to someone who is not interesting to you and pray for that person."
I've selected these to show and discuss for several reasons. The first, "Chastity," is one I just found funny. The juxtaposition of "Chastity" and "Focus your eyes on someone you find attractive" is quite amusing: so, in order to be chaste, you want me to check a girl out? Wow, being chaste is easier than I thought! If you know me, you'll also know that the "Secrecy" and "Silence" ones will be difficult for me. That not thinking about your reply thing will be especially difficult, considering that I train listening and formulating responses simultaneously in seminar all the time. And then the first "Submission" one. I don't intend to do it at all, ever. What the author is asking us to do is called "staring," and it freaks people out. This is not to say, look at the floor, but it's creepy to never break eye contact. At least, I freak out if other people never stop staring at me when I'm talking. I get really uncomfortable. And then the final submission. I actual do this from time to time anyway, but I could work better at visibly listening when I don't care. I usually am listening, but I suppose they can't tell that if I'm also playing with paperclips or staring at my computer screen.

4) I have noticed some interesting things working on my essay...
a) Mercutio is wonderfully anti-Petrarchan. Background: Petrarch was an Italian poet who invented the sonnet. Some guys, namely Wyatt and Surrey, translated Petrarch's sonnets into English and introduced the form into our language. Printers and an aristocrat named Sir Philip Sidney more strictly formalized the sonnet (since Italian doesn't have metre) into one of the forms we're familiar with today. Content-wise, these guys talked about how pretty and virtuous the girl is, how nice her hair is, her eyes, her lips and cheeks and teeth and forehead. They occasionally made forays down to her hands and her breast, though notice that they're more likely talking about the section of skin that would appear above a Renaissance lady's corset or whatever, and also her heart in her "breast." There was a different sense of the word. And then, in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio wonderfully explains what these sonneteers are actually about: "I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes, By her high forehead, and her scarlet lip, By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh, And the demesnes that there adjacent lie...My invocation Is fair and honest. In his mistress' name, I conjure only but to raise him up." Ostensibly Mercutio is talking about rousing--awakening--Romeo, but arousing Romeo is probably on the agenda as well. OF COURSE the sonneteers were thinking of things other than those--I was thinking lips, cheeks, hair, but those all have multiple meanings, don't they? Get your minds out of the gutter, people. OK, of course the sonneteers were thinking about things other than her eyes, and they were very appearance-focused, so I think Mercutio (and Shakespeare through Mercutio) is spot on in pointing out the transparency of their propriety. This is not to say that sonneteers have no place being proper, or that Astrophil doesn't quite legitimately think Stella has pretty eyes. I'm just saying that he also checked her out from behind when he got the chance, even if he didn't write about it.
b) Rosalind says in As You Like It, "If with myself I hold intelligence/ Or have acquaintance with mine own desires,/ If that I do not dream or be not frantic/ As I trust I am not..." Do you know what my mind went to? Comic books. And not just comic books that I have read. Oh, no. See, I have read very few comic books in my life. No, I thought about comic books I have read about. Isn't that excellent? Not only am I a nerd, I'm an atypical one at that.
c) On a theoretical level, I found this quotation from Sidney's Apology interesting: "Aristotle saith, those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles, unnatural monsters, are made in poetical imitation delightful." That's something to consider seriously. How well does moralizing work when the subject of your disgust becomes delightful in your representation of it?
d) I have written in the margins, "The murals in the Mac-Correy food court are pastoral. Huh." Under pastoral, I wrote "(idealized)"; under "court" I then wrote, "Haha. Punny."

5) I spent way too much time last night reading Penny Arcade back issues. Way too much time.

My Lady Mandeville

According to my prof, this is the best poem I've written yet. It's the one I read at the anthology launch, and has received positive feedback.*

Not sure if I'll be publishing this. If I do, I suppose I may need to take it down.

Anyway, here goes:
----------------------------------


My Lady Mandeville

a mountain slumbers on Silha
an island Mandeville found.
at the top is a pearly lake weighted
with jewels and stones
with yellow leeches and snakes
and cockodrills
the serpentine beasts with dead eyes.

if you rub yourself down with lemons
the natives said
you can enter the mountain pool
and take the pearls.
around the cliffs are wastelands
filled with white ox-heavy lions
two-headed geese
coiled russet dragons that feed on locals
yet not on strange men from strange lands.
the sea is tucked so high against the shore
that the peak appears to hang amoung the clouds.

I want my Lady Mandeville,
my sailor-mate, to break her prow on the rampart shore
to dare my looming sky
someone foreign to trek the barren gravel
some farmwife to untangle my crossed drakes
pluck them to their down
to calm my hydras with her strange hands
beat my leonine pride.
some intrepid to scale these bluffs
to lullaby the tugging asps
acidic enough to wilt the leeches
burn the moccasins
outstare my crook-toothed cockodrills
to slip into that reed-gagged pond
try for the bottom
pull out those oyster stones.






-------------------------
*Not to brag, but "positive feedback" has meant both that people have verbal told me it was a good job, and that when I looked up after reading and looked into my peers' eyes, I could see they were thinking, "Damn. That's good." Or maybe I was hallucinating it.

Also, it's my strong inclination to provide a reading for this poem. I want to tell you want each little bit is supposed to "mean." But I know I shouldn't, so I won't.

Here's a link, though, that provides one of my 'influences.'

A "Fib"

Fib:
this
form of
poem seems
to overvalue
mathematical precision.

(But I suppose you may say that of a haiku or an accumulative as well. I just don't see the point in this particular sequence of numbers. I have yet to determine what you can do with this structure.)

Why "Hermetic Poetry --> Hatred" Is True

Have you heard of hermetic poetry?
No?
Don't Google it. Not yet. I will give you an example, and then you may Google it.

For my American Literature class I have to read some of "Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein; this consists of three poems or poetry collections, all of which fall under the genre 'hermetic poetry,' according to the back cover.

Here is an excerpt:

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand (From ROASTBEEF, a section of "Food").

That is about the most coherent passage I've found in her poetry. Also witness:

Dirt and not copper makes a color darker. It makes the shape heavier and
makes no melody harder (From DIRT AND NOT COPPER, a section of "Objects").

Also, try to understand this:

A large box is handily made of what is necessary to replace any substance. Suppose an example is necessary, the plainer it is made the more reason there is for some outward recognition that there is a result. ¶ A box is made sometimes and them to see to see to it neatly and to have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper (From A BOX, a section of "Objects").

Do you notice the helpful punctuation? Yeah, neither do I. Also, the plainer what is made? To what result? If you will give me some sort of syntactical coherence, could you maybe give me content? Obviously not.
And it gets so-called better. I'll try to preserve form here.

"PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE.

      Rub her coke.

IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK.

      Black ink best wheel bale brown.
      Excellent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past pearl pearl goat.

THIS IS THE DRESS, AIDER.

      Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
      A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let."

That's how "Objects" ends. I wanted to throw the book down the balcony (I was in the library, on the balcony) and then go set it on fire.
If you haven't guessed yet, hermetic poetry is a genre which deliberately frustrates meaning. It comes from being hermetically sealed, in that no air can enter or escape the container. In the case of poetry, you can replace "air" with meaning and "container" with text. It apparently means something to the author and only to the author, who uses symbols only he or she understands. Excellent, eh? What an artistic, creative, avante-garde waste of my time. If a text is not to some degree communicative, then it serves no purpose.

I recognize that this text is serving to make me think about the role of text. Can something constitute a text if it refuses to be communicative? It's the whole "what is art" question, but framed with particular facets of the debate in mind.

Anyway, it seems to serve like a failure of a Rorschach test. Some of it's scary, because it seems to have meaning, or non-meaning, which finally allows to glimpse inside the head of the speaker--and what I saw was disturbing:

Book was there, it was there. Book was there. Stop it, stop it, it was a cleaner, a wet cleaner and it was not where it was wet, it was not high, it was directly placed back, not back again, back it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care (BOOK, a section in
"Objects").

"Stop it, stop it" made me think of Hollywood-style Multiple Personality Disorder. Then it made me think rape. Then it made me think a schizophrenic or OCD child rocking in a corner, asking her memories to stop it. Not one of those is a particularly fun image, really. I'm now thinking the whole thing's just about a misplaced book, but that's just it. You feel crazy trying to pin this down with meaning. "Jabberwocky" asks you to construct meaning, or elaborate on what shades of meaning are visible in the text. Building a narrative there is fun. "Book" is like a trying to make sense of a funhouse, only the doors in this funhouse can't be opened from the inside and the people in there with you haven't seen the outside world in a while. It's like trying to interpret an acid trip or measure the particles in Frank the Rabbit. It makes just enough sense that you see how messed up it is, and you can't understand, and it's scary.

I know people will read meanings into all of this. But that's just it: they'll be hallucinated readings. The meaning will not be there.

My feelings toward this style of poetry is a little strong, and it needs a strong word. I dislike the concept of hatred--I can smell brimstone when I use that word--so I don't really mean that I hate hermetic poetry. Obviously it fascinates me enough that I ranted about it. But I strongly think it's stupid.

Anthology II

Apparently I am to deal with some of the anthology business with confidentiality, so I will not be able to tell you many details about the publishing. Instead, I will maybe talk to you some more about editing others' work.

Editing

My peers have told me that sometimes they are afraid to receive essays I have edited for them, because of the intimidating amount of red ink. It has become common practice for me to draw pictures on these essays to lighten the mood and give them something to look forward to. You'll recall, maybe, a polar bear. Perhaps it is odd, or perhaps it isn't, but I'm often myself nervous when giving someone their edited paper. I am afraid they will be angry with me for something I have written. Perhaps they will take my criticism of their feminist argument as chauvinism; perhaps they will be upset that I did not like their word choices; perhaps my indication that their work did nothing for me will hurt them. One way or another, I worry that they will be wounded by what I say and react with ire. The thing is, I try to say things as nicely as possible, but sometimes the truth will be hurtful regardless of how you phrase it. Sometimes, too, an error they make is so offensive that I cannot but be stern with them; some of the feminist papers I have edited in the past have contained greivous attacks on all men, usually implying that men necessarily and irrepairably act in specific, stereotyped, sexist ways. This itself is evidentally a sexist argument, and I would be a poor editor if I did not point out how this undermines non-essentialist theses and alienates many readers. There have in the past been similar issues, not pertaining to sexism, as well.

Thus I have been afraid, sometimes, when editing work for the anthology. Not only am I being thorough, and thus more ruthless, but I am picking apart work that is much closer to people's hearts than essays usually are. I am combing through poetry and fiction that often contain large amounts of autobiography. A religious studies professor I had last semester said that we ought to be careful when critiquing people's religions, since a person's religion is part of their self-identity, and a critique on a religion will probably and quite reasonably be interpreted as an attack on the person. Similarly, a critique of the work of a poet may be felt by the poet as a personal attack. Say a person devoted to a particular dialect writes a poem sometimes employing that language; if I say, "I'd avoid this language, if I were you, as it undermines your authority and appears to be antagonist in this context," I could hurt them. Now, I'd not likely say something like that because I understand how dialect can relate to identity. But I don't always know what any given writer's identity consists of, and so I may inadvertently attack that self-identity through my critique of a personally meaningful piece.

I also know that my ability to be diplomatic in my criticism is hampered when I'm tired, which is inevitably the state I'm in when I write the critiques up for my peers. It always happens at the end of a long day.

So that's the bulk of the anxiety I feel about editing; I have been told that I'm a good editor, and that people appreciate my directness. This is good, but I still don't like to hurt people.

So, that covers my concerns about reception. What, though, is my philosophy of editing? How do I go about it? What methods do I bring to the table? I have recently begun to consider these questions, and have gathered the following 'answer':

Any given text includes the engagement of two different people or sets of people. The first is the author, and the second and final is the reader. The author assembles the words on the page, consciously choosing them to elicit meaning in the mind of a hypothetical reader. Scholars and artists argue about whether you can write something without a reader in mind, but I won't worry about that. The reader comes along afterwards, sees the words, formulates thoughts, and recovers meaning from the words. Perhaps the reader actually creates meaning out of the words. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that meaning results from a negotiation between the author and the reader, with the text as the medium.

[Theoretical aside, which you may skip if you aren't interested: This understanding of a text is preoccupied with meaning. I confess that this is how I automatically think of texts, as vehicles of meanings. There are other concerns, including aesthetic and affective considerations. I will clarify, then, that I understand 'meaning' to also refer to emotions and other mental, non-cognitive states. Words are meant to provoke brain-stuff. Just as 'text' is academese for 'words,' 'meaning' is just academese for 'brain-stuff.']

So we have writers, and we have readers. Do we also have editors? In some cases yes, but really not. An editor is someone who helps a writer understand how to influence a reader. An editor is like a textual shaman, negotiating the worlds of creation and reception.

I am an English major, which means practice literary analysis in school. A literary critic (and not the kind in newspapers who tells you whether a book is any good, but the kind who writes essays to explore what a text says on a less-than-surface level) is just a super-reader. A literary critic is a reader who understands how words make you think certain things, or more accurately, a reader who understands this better than most other readers. So I go to class, I read a text, I say, "This texts makes me think such-and-such about politics," and then I look at the words and figure out how. I also look at the words and see if there's anything in there that I wouldn't have noticed I'd read the first time. Sometimes we read meanings, internalize them, and not notice that we've done so. Many many people have been thinking and reading things about Aboriginal people without knowing it, and they start to believe this things without realizing it. For instance, I doubt anyone ever came out and said to you, "Native society has stayed basically the same way ever since they came over on the land bridge." No one says this, but I bet a lot of people believe it. That's because it's hidden in the things we read about Native people. Everything written about their culture talks about it as though it has gone on that way for all time. Natives are universals; they are like water and fire. This is completely untrue, of course. But so long as it's hidden in the text, assumed and taken in without anyone noticing, it's harder to articulate, harder to notice, and harder to disprove. A literary critic is someone trained to find these things and make them explicit, so we can decide whether it's something we want to believe or not. A literary critic is someone who knows how to read, and hopefully knows what to do with that skill.

I am also a writer. I write essays, rants, fiction, and sometimes poetry. I try to say assorted things to my readers. I have felt what it takes to create sentences, string words together, articulate signifieds through signifiers. I have experience in and investment in the poetic process. Word selection and ideology packaging are things I engage in.



As an editor, I try to employ the skills and perspectives afforded me by each skillset. I read a person's work and try to investigate it as I would a literary text. What does this say to me? Why does it say that? What in the structure, the word choice, etc. makes me uncover meaning the way I do? That's the reader part. Then, do I suspect that the writer wants this effect? If not, how would I, as a writer, avoid this meaning? What would I do to direct the reader toward the meaning I want (or, the meaning that I suspect the writer wants)? I report these findings and suggestions to the writer. I say, "This is what I got from your piece. This is why. If you are happy with this interpretation being possible, yay! If you are not, this is what I would do to remove that meaning from your text."

For instance, I read one piece in which a figure of speech existed as a set of similes and metaphors throughout the last stanza until the final two lines, where the conceit was revealed to have been literal, only in an unexpected way. I don't want to give away the actual piece, so for an example let's say a character frequently described as being "on fire" or "aflame," and there's an actual fire in the room. The poet is connecting the imagery of the fire with the character. And then, in the last two stanzas, we discover that the character is "flaming," slang for homosexual. This is not made apparent throughout. Alright. What this revision does is it forces the reader to rethink her previous understanding of the piece. This feels actually forcible on the reader's part. It is also powerful, and memorable. The impression the reader has is one of disruption. If you want to indicate that there is something disruptive going on in the character's situation, this technique would do it. However, if you're trying to demonstrate that there's something peaceful or calm about the character's situation, this revision will ruin the effect. Simultaneously, the moment of revision, the lines immediately surrounding the piece of information which necessitates that re-understanding, will stick in the reader's mind. The reader will remember that part quite well. So this would be the ideal place to put whatever you want the reader to get out of the story. Hit them with social justice issues, or with a particularly swashbuckling part, or a particularly raunchy part, or a particularly funny part (actual, this could create humour in itself), or a particularly scary part (again, this revision could create horror), or a particularly pretty part. Whatever you want your reader to walk away with, this would be a good place to do it, because it's memorable.

See how I did that? I took it as a reader takes it. I say, how does this make me feel? I then use my super-reader powers to determine why it does that. I then say, as a writer, would I want this in this piece? How could I use this to my advantage? How could I use this to communicate with my reader, either on a conscious or an unconscious level? That's what I do as an editor.

Wow, that's long winded. Sorry about that. Should I include pictures to make it less intimidating? Maybe I will.

Wanted: Dead and Alive

This is an assignment I just had returned from an American Literature class. I did well on it--better than I expected. I thought I'd share it here. Unfortunately, you may have needed to be in the class to fully participate in it... unless you've by chance read Emily Dickenson, Whitman's Song of Myself, Spofford's "Amber Gods" and "The Circumstance," Frederick Douglas' slave narrative, Edgar Alan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and "The Man Who Was Used Up," Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Edwar Taylor's Meditations, Hawthorne's "The Black Veil" and "Artist of the Beautiful," Emerson's "Experience," and other seminal or not-so-seminal American Literature.

Wanted: Dead and Alive

I was born upon the sea in a land under sweltering suns:
my tongue and every atom of my blood formed from this soil
this air, the grey sky, obscured by no deathly blot.
ghostlike we glide through nature
on every visage a black veil—
wild wartunes endow the living with tears you squander on the dead.
"O graft me in this Tree of Life within,"
again gurgles the mouth of my dying general,
knocked on the head.
with her voice ceased her existence yet she could not sing.
(I had as well be killed running as die standing
—the dead thing in my bosom rising and falling—
I in perfect health begin, hoping to cease not till death.)
forsaken songs rose from that frightful aerie
weeping wailing tunes that sob from age to age,
"gone, gone, sold and gone."
from the symbol beneath which I lived,
and die with overflowing grace doth killing,
cure the sinner, and kills sin right:
we do not play on graves
because these murtherous wretches went on,
burning and destroying all before them the golden dore of glory.
is the grave too sacred for us?
I do not desire to live to forget this,
in one sense it is the elixer of immortality
(posion with the falling dews)—
it cannot be that I shall live and die
a slave as scarcely loving my life, my health.
to be alive is power—omnipotence enough:
we could not but shout to the dead for help!
no man can understand the science of the grave,
look through the eyes of the dead,
feed on the spectres in books;
nature's practices extend to necromancy and the trades,
the notion of putting spirit into machinery.
the lords of life, the lords of life:
beautiful, beautiful, is it alive?
and in the wide arc of some eternal descent she was falling.
there really is no end to the march of invention.


Poet-scholar's statement:

In looking through the course material of the semester, I caught a common theme: the middling areas of life and death. Whether narratives come from the other side of the shade—or as good as do, in the case of the strangely returned Pym—or follow individuals who oddly survive their own death, such as Lackabreath and Wakefield, there is a sense that not only does poetry acheive immortality, it preserves the very act of immortalizing itself. Alternately, the texts may dwell on death—defying it like Rowlandson, lusting for it like Taylor, or philosophizing it like Emerson—and thereby underscore their own vitality by their current survival. Most question that fundamental boundary, or the obviousness of it, using such figures as ghost ships, speaking corpses, living machines, and assembled men. Each text's complexity only tangles in comparison with the others, and any discussion of the matter must exceed strictly academic discourse.

As such, I have constructed a poem about the intersection of these two realms, using lines torn from the texts. I have been liberal with punctuation, and some of the lines might not be entirely recognizable, pieced as they are from different sources. Nonetheless, I hope to have caught some of the sense life and death play in the varied works and, in the process, defamiliarized many of the original meanings.

Yeah, as with other academic work I've posted here, there's a lot of name-dropping. Sorry about that, if you're not of a background which presents to you all of those writers.

Poems about Insects

Emily Dickinson is a poet I have some difficulty with. She seems caught up in her own world of emotion and pain; the narrative voice intrudes in places where it oughtn't; the text is too overtly feminist for my tastes, not transcending gender as Virginia Woolf expects; these poems don't have the tight intricacy or cleverness of my favourites. However, she does right about insects, which gives her at least 100 extra points on my scale. Here are two:

Poem 96

Pigmy seraphs - gone astray -
Velvet people from Vevay -
Belles from some lost summer day -
Bees exclusive Coterie -

Paris could not lay the fold
Belted down with emerald -
Venice could not show a cheek
Of a tint so lustrous meek -
Never such an ambuscade
As of briar and leaf displayed
For my little damask maid -

I had rather wear her grace
Than an Earl's distinguised face -
I had rather dwell like her
Than be "Duke Exeter" -
Royalty enough for me
To subdue the Bumblebee.


Poem 1523

How soft a Caterpillar steps -
I find one on my Hand
From such a Velvet world it came -
Such plushes at command
It's soundless travels just arrest
My slow - terrestrial eye -
Intent opon it's own career -
What use has it for me -


How fitting to call bumblebees pygmy seraphs gone astray! It's one of those images that you feel you've always been looking for. And look at the caterpillar poem. Do you see how she uses dashes? In line 6 the dash, like the caterpillar, arersts your eye, slows it down, to match her eye in the narrative. How clever. And then the dash at the end (a common Dickinsonian technique) leaves the poem unfinished, with the caterpillar still on its 'plush' little march, like all caterpillars you see, crawling ever onward.

On Soundtracks

Nothing spears a movie-goer as well as a real and engaging score, one that resounds within the audience's physical bodies, fills the space so well that the hearer is no longer aware that that space exists, is fixated only by the sound and the screen.

The angle and pitch of the cinematography, the contrast of shadow and glare, the rasp of the hero's beard or the slope of a heroine's cheek--these are all strong incitements, do not get me wrong. The spartan poetry of a good script, the crimson stirring of a pre-battle speech--these are all rewarding. But one of the quickest, dirtiest, most relentless way of winning the audience is a soundtrack that does what it ought and does it without reserve.

I listen to soundtracks. They rarely have lyrics to get in the way, which I originally thought meant I could better study with them. This is not true. I cannot read for English courses with music in the background, because soundtracks are specifically designed to be overwhelming. The score buries the prose. If I try to write with music on, that music seeps into my writing; my writing cannot work without the music driving it; my writing cannot stand alone. (That being said, I wonder what you make of this writing, which must have been influenced by a few different songs. Maybe I'm wrong?)

I bring this up because I was scanning pages into my computer, reading a book about the music of writing, and how to be a good 'composer of words,' when a song from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End came on. I was immediately driven to anticipation. I could almost feel the sway of the ship, the tang of sea-salt air, the cool heat of a tropical coast, and the deep pulsing excitement of the exotic. I recalled first seeing that movie in theatres, the hysterical glee of first watching it, the rabid intensity with which I anticipated the second film. The success of those movies, I am sure, comes not just from the acting, the brilliantly convoluted script, the stunning visual effects, or the aesthetic supremacy of pirates, but the tidal power of the score. That soundtrack can pull your body into Tortuga, can release all of the pent-up desire for the sea, can deliver to you a taste of that exoticism which you will but only sample.

The score's power is evident in some of the biggest blockbusters we have today: Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Spider-Man (you may not be able to hum the music, but listen to it sometime; it's pretty good), Troy, Gladiator. Think also of the older collossi, such as Star Wars, James Bond, or Indiana Jones. Where would Vader be without his Imperial March? Indiana without his plucky theme? Bond without his suave swing?

Now, not-so-good movies can fail to profit from incredible music, such as the third installment of the Harry Potter films ("Hedwig's Theme" is Williams at perhaps his least characteristic, at yet it's one of his best later works, I think). Meanwhile, excellent films can falter thanks to an unremarkable score, such as The Golden Compass, which had only the Gypsy Theme to stand out--if they worked with and developed that strain more, I think they would have had more success. We can only see what they'll produce for The Subtle Knife, I suppose.

Computer games are getting on board, now (though maybe I'll want to save this for my other, neglected blog). They always have been, of course, but the hype and availability of computer game soundtracks is increasing. If you've ever heard the mercilessly epic music of World of Warcraft, you'll know what I mean. Fans of the classicly gritty Doom-clone Duke Nukem 3D will be able to attest to how the intro music to this gem could stir the blood. My favourite, though, is the introductory music of the under-appreciated RTS Majesty. I am sure the emotional charge that I get when I hear this music is fueled by the nostalgic quality of the game, but the sound itself is engaging. I'm going to see if I can link the music into my blog somewhere; if I can, listen to it and you'll see what I mean.

Now, I have no skill in music criticism. I know what a staff is; I get caesura to some extent, thanks to my giddiness about sonnets; I know the 'hold me' joke; I understand that jazz is different; I know that percussing on the counter-beat adds that extra edge. But music theory is something I haven't explored with any organization or direction. I'd like to, but, with linguistics, I have little external motivation and therefore can chicken out whenever it gets challenging--which it does immediately. All I can go on is my natural artistic abilities. So I can't tell you what makes a good soundtrack, but I can sure tell you how it makes you feel.

"True Love's First Kiss" from Shrek just came on Window's Media Player. This one is so beautiful. It builds, builds, explodes in majesty, and then lowers you with such delicacy, followed by gradually increasing and perfectly controlled swells, bringing you gently to rest at the end, with just a hint of more to come, ending on the paradox of satisfied anticipation... ah...

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I should go work now. I've been meaning to write this for a while, but just now was moved to do so by the resounding awesomeness of the Pirates soundtrack.

The God of the Physicians (A Glosa)

like one of those slow diseases
of the joint or the bone
that doctors diagnose in terms you recognize
as bigger words for dying.
“How It Will Happen,” Bronwen Wallace

I was reading a book on modernity,
and it told me that God wasn’t just dead;
He was justifiably executed by philosophy.
He’d been buried next to Santa Claus’ cenotaph
and the Easter bunny’s empty grave.
As a transcendental notion He eases
the Oedipal husk of childhood grudges
but in a healthy society religion haunts
old men’s minds; it warps and seizes
like one of those slow diseases.

I had to ask myself whether the author
of that book, who’s long exhaled his last,
realized that Descartes’ radical doubt
fell short of the mountainous monks who floated
beneath the frenzy of their ego-less thoughts.
Easy enough to say that author died alone,
joining no ancestral procession, but the geneticist
measures his spectres in levels of carbon
monoxide hallucination and the neural drone
of the joint or the bone.

Long dead is the mysterious world;
now answers tame as easily as early dogs.
Neurologists preach an epileptic Muhammad,
meditate on posterior superior parietal lobes,
and convert to transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Now Jesus Christ will anaesthetize
Lazarus with the suppressed proletariat,
and Donne’s holy agues are simply common
colds and pneumonia and I realize
that doctors diagnose in terms you recognize.

The homilies are now irrational
numbers, higher powers are exponents,
and thinkers on the problem of evil
suggest democracy and capitalism as cures.
Unsolved mysteries aren’t numinous
but symptoms of simply not trying,
and instead of nirvana or rapture
the modernists propose lack of brain
function, expiry, or flat-lining
as bigger words for dying.

Tomorrow's Villanelle

I seem to always hear, ‘My, how you’ve grown,’
when talking with parents’ friends, who repeat
until I feel my age is not my own

but instead memories I have on loan,
a ‘When I was as young as you’-like bleat
I seem to always hear as ‘how you’re grown

since I last saw you, taught you,’ in that tone
that writes my past back to my baby teeth
until I feel my age is not my own,

or with old friends I pretend to still know
I’ll reminisce and from their shifting feet
I seem to always hear, ‘My, how you’ve grown

away from us,’ where the stories have flown
to younger crowds, who play my former beat
until I feel my age is not my own.

Other birthdays come, and from each milestone,
in the under-thoughts when my brain’s voice greets,
I seem to always hear, ‘My, how you’ve grown,’
until I feel my age is not my own.

Poem in Conversation

Bermudas

Where the remote Bermudas ride
In th’ ocean’s bosom unespied,
From a small boat that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song:

“What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the wat’ry maze
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where He the huge sea monster wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs;
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storms, and prelate’s rage.
He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air;
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows;
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet;
But apples plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice;
With cedars, chosen by his hand
From Lebanon, he stores the land;
And makes the hollow seas that roar
Proclaim the ambergris on shore;
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The gospel’s pearl upon our coast,
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple, where to sound his name.
O let our voice his praise exalt
Till it arrive at heaven’s vault,
Which, thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.”

Thus sung they in the English boat
An holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
--Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678




The Ellice Swamp

In Perth county’s weedy puddle
from sagging barns, Rostock, Kuhryville,
a fleet of orange tractors grunts an unsung melody
and the manured wind does not care:

“How do we deserve this soil,
pulled from the water field by field,
archipelagos edged by culverts,
turned back to swamp with rain?
Here the water tastes like coliform
and the cows’ feet are wet
in the hollows from which our grandparents
took more than Europe’s family farms could afford.
Do we deserve this eternal well
which bubbles up among our crop
and invites the geese to rest when headed south,
once our plows have passed?
Yes, the fruit takes to this ground,
yellow pears come with yellow jackets,
hard sour crabs hang like tempting cherries,
the blinding corn is green and tall,
in autumn scarlet fires the beans,
pumpkins defy the garden and spread across the lawn,
and apples grow enough to spoil on the branch
and intoxicate the sparrows.
Yes, the cedars, maples, willows grow
and ample old woods dot the marsh,
but it all has the musk of pigs, cows,
chickens, workhorses, and sweating earth;
in the muddy ground are contained
those who first divided land from the water table.
Moserville’s headstones and the town names
mark those buried under St. Paul’s Lutheran care.
Do we deserve this earth that swallows
histories, hours, evenings, lives,
that sits beneath the horizon
and lets us earn each day?”

From the combines this song is not heard
between the farmers’ jokes and complaints
and continues for all time.