a fool in the forest

Verse Than Expected [w/ multiple Updates]

I have been hunting, thus far in vain, for the text of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, which was I think Very Terrible and which was delivered in that manner poets have -- 

of pronouncing Each.  Word.  Distinctly, but without.  Affect or.  Understanding 

-- that is calculated to drive audiences from the room and away from poetry altogether for generations.  Reverend Joseph Lowery's benediction which followed had more poetry in any random ten second passage than the official Poem mustered in its entire length.

Fortunately for us all, within moments of Ms. Alexander's conclusion, the eminent Dr. Boli posted a superior alternate version of The Inaugural Poem.

~~~

UPDATE [1159 PST]:

The New York Times has a text of the real poem.  This is only a transcription, i.e., not the text.  I strongly suspect that the line breaks in that version are all wrong. 

A commenter to this post at Entertainment Weekly attempts a transcription that likely comes closer to the actual lineation.  (See comments by "Doodle"  posted at 1:51 pm and 1:48 pm, EST.)  The EW post itself describes the poem oxymoronically as "a steady march of free verse iambic pentameter" and is all too taken with limp bromides such as "figuring it out at kitchen tables."  It presumably goes without saying that those tables are on Main Street, not Wall Street.  Urgh. 

The Times of London is not so easily fooled.

~~~

UPDATE 2 [1420 PST]:

Remarkable the number of visitors dropping by today through some variant on the search "inaugural poem terrible".

At The New Republic, Adam Kirsch critiques the inaugural poem as an example of "bureaucratic verse."  He includes excerpts from earlier Alexander poems that show her to be a poet fond of short lines, which reinforces my assumption that the available transcriptions are getting the line breaks wrong.

In fairness to the poet, and so that readers can judge the work for themselves, here is Elizabeth Alexander's own delivery of her poem earlier today:

~~~

UPDATE 3 [1631 PST]:

At last!  Newsweek offers up the true text of Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day," complete with proper line and stanza breaks, proper punctuation, a proper copyright notice, and the news that a chapbook edition Can Be Yours come February 6.

It fares somewhat better on the page and in the mind's ear than it did in performance in this morning's "sharp sparkle", but it is still not a particularly impressive poem.  I remain unaccountably but genuinely aggravated, for example, by the dangling preposition that concludes the commemoration of the hard-working dead who

                                                built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

That lonesome "of" might be set up to rhyme with "love" two stanzas later, but I doubt it.  There are no other rhymes in the poem, after all.  And what, pray tell, is "love with no need to pre-empt grievance"?

Let the last word on this come from the Los Angeles Times' David Ulin:

There is, of course, a cognitive disconnect to reading poetry to an audience numbering in the millions, as Alexander did.  Most poets never reach that many people in a lifetime, which may have something to do with the choice to keep her focus simple, her imagery direct.  Even so, the crowd began dispersing well before she was finished, as if her words were little more than an afterthought.

Partly, that has to do with her placement on the program, after the president; she had the misfortune of following the main event.  But even more, it suggests the tangential role of poetry in our national conversation, which is unlikely to change no matter how seriously this president, or any other, takes the written word.

We now return the new administration to the prosaic business of governance in difficult times.  Good luck to them.

~~~

Illustration: Inaugural Poem for Messrs. Lincoln and Johnson, 1865, via the Library of Congress.

~~~

Wystan Waxes Waggish on Wagner

Los Angeles Opera will launch Achim Freyer's staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in May next month, and this weblog can be expected to turn sporadically and spontaneously Wagnerian as the day approaches.  Let's begin with a bit of affectionate jeering at the Meister, shall we?

When I hunted up W. H. Auden's "New Year Letter" for incorporation in my recent New Year's post, I was only able to turn up an excerpt or two online.  Wanting to take a look at the whole thing, I swung by my local bibliotheque and checked out the Collected Poems. 

The "Letter" is a lengthy contraption in Swiftian couplets, written in the wake of the German aggressions of 1939.  While it begins naturally enough with a focus on the pall that has fallen over Europe, later segments of the poem focus on American concerns, and particularly on the self-absorbed brand of individualism that was and is an American hallmark, and for which Auden had little patience.  Near the end of the poem, we find this Tristan-inspired jab:

The genius of the loud Steam Age,
Loud Wagner, put it on the stage:
The mental hero who has swooned
With sensual pleasure at his wound,
His intellectual life fulfilled
In knowing that his doom is willed,
Exists to suffer; borne along
Upon a timeless tide of song,
The huge doll roars for death or mother,
Synonymous with one another;
And Woman, passive as in dreams,
Redeems, redeems, redeems, redeems.

All together: "It's funny because it's true." 

At least he likes the music.

To return to the LA Opera Ring: some intriguing hints of what this production will look like in performance can be seen in this video in which Placido Domingo, who will be singing Siegmund in Walküre, expresses his enthusiasm for what Herr Freyer has in store for we unsuspecting Angelenos.

Wintry Poetry Corner:A Man and a Woman, Both of Them Cold

Winter being upon us -- less messily here in cold and drizzly southern California than in many other parts of the country -- my thoughts turned to that other insurance lawyer with "Wallace" in his name, Wallace Stevens, and to his seasonally appropriate piece, "The Snow Man."  There is a version of the poem as recited by Stevens himself available on YouTube, but the accompanying video is such a poor and artifact-laden thing that I won't embed it here.  Questing about for an alternative, I found this:

«The Snow Man», de Wallace Stevens from blocsdelletres on Vimeo.

This is one of a series of poetry videos originating with the Catalan literary weblog, blocs de lletres.  The poems are presented in their original languages, with Catalan subtitles.  I have not explored the entire collection yet, but my initial survey turned up one more for sharing today: Christina Rossetti's "Song," which has more thematic connections to Stevens' poem than I might have expected.

«Song», de Christina Rossetti from blocsdelletres on Vimeo.

Stay warm and dry, wherever your winter wanderings may be taking you.

Livre Free or Die

A miscellany of recent more or less literary links:

• More on the July 4 passing of Thomas M. Disch (see below):

• James Sallis remembered Disch in this past Sunday's Los Angeles Times Book Review.  Although it went unmentioned, the LAT Book Review gave Disch a semi-regular spot reviewing poetry in the 1980s.  Much of the commentary ultimately collected in The Castle of Indolence first saw the light in the LATBR -- which, it must be noted, is not feeling so good itself these days

• Andrew McKie, writing for the Telegraph:

[H]e proclaimed himself God, and encouraged readers to set up shrines in their back gardens, so that their gardening tools would be tax-deductible.

• John Clute in a long appreciation/memorial in The Independent declares Disch "one of the very best second-rank poets of the later 20th century in America." 
  

• The McKie and Clute links both come via the recently reactivated m john harrison blog.  Harrison, who knew Disch from the "New Wave"/New Worlds era of the late '60s, provides his own view as well:

He was the best of us.

• Speaking of M. John Harrison, whose splendid Viriconium I just finished rereading: he reports that he has an essay/review on H.P. Lovecraft forthcoming in the Guardian, which should be worth a look.  Meanwhile he helpfully provides a link to a 1933 newsreel interview with Lovecraft.  It bears itself with an air of verisimilitude, but . . . .

• John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books, declares himself an "abject fan" of the Library of America, which is now up to its 177th volume:

I own, I find, ten of its volumes: three of Parkman, one each of Henry James, Adams, Baldwin, Frost and Stevens, the new [Edmund] Wilson, and an anthology of writing about baseball.  The books are lovely, lovely objects.  They are about the nicest books I have.  American books are in general printed to much higher standards than British books.  (Ask publishers about that, and they always say that it’s to do with economies of scale: five times as big an audience equals higher print runs equals lower costs equals the possibility to make nicer books.  So they say.)  The Library takes that tendency about as far as it will go: it’s hard not to take the volumes down from the shelves and stroke them, like a Bond villain fondling a cat.

Purrrrr.  I have maintained a subscription to the Library for years now.  Under Lanchester's influence, I counted my own LOA holdings up the other evening, and discovered that I have just recently topped 100 of them.  Oh, dear.  (And that is without even counting the dozen or so volumes I have accumulated from the Library's little sibling, the American Poets Project.)   If Lanchester is "abject," I've no idea what epithet is sufficient to convey my pathetic devotion to the series. 

• Strict grammarian and law firm disciplinarian Dan Hull of What About Clients? reports that he has been

busy debriefing and then terminating summer help that can't or won't proofread drafts of court documents and check cites because they 'didn't really believe' all along that that was their job, and that we were just joshing.

*Sigh*   While Dan is preoccupied with sacking summer associates and proffering proofreading advice, we caution him to beware the inexorable workings of . . . Muphry's Law:

Muphry's Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

[Via Radley Balko.]

Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008)

On Saturday, in my John Berryman post, I mentioned Thomas M. Disch's use of the suicidal Berryman's ghost as a character in one of his novels.  I had no idea at the time I posted it that Disch himself, sadly, had taken his own life the previous day.

I came by the news first through John Crowley's LiveJournal, where the commenters now include Disch's surviving family members and Philip K. Dick's third wife Anne.  Appreciations, and links to appreciations, can also be found at Crooked Timber, Hit & Run, and 2blowhards.

While he will deservedly be remembered as a very fine writer of science fiction and similarly fantastic fiction, he was also a (to my mind underrated) poet.  I purchased a copy of his first collection, The Right Way to Figure Plumbing, at Cody's bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in the late 70s; it ranks high on my list of books that have somehow got away from me and that I now miss having.  He continued to post his recent poetry among the entries on his own LiveJournal, Endzone.  Simply because it is an interesting poem, and not for the sake of trying to read any doomy foreshadowing into it, here is his entry from June 17:

Tears the Bullet Wept

We know that bullets sing.
Bret Harte transcribed their song.
But give them this: they weep as well,
And theirs are the most precious souvenirs
That venders hawk on the streets of hell.

What is so tragic as the lethal blast
Of thunderbolt or .38
That turns what had been present
Into past?  There he stood
And here he lies at last.
Will you not shed a single tear
For any such?  Is that too much to ask?

Here is a tear. Weigh it,
Please, Sir, on your scale--
And I will tell you the whole tale.
But only when your job is done.
Kill all the rest first.  I will wait.

I had also been trying to think of an excuse to link his "Write about Flowers" from February, just because I smiled over this passage:

Just before bed I'd been reading
Portrait of a Lady with special reference
to Pansy, James's nightmare of a rich, dumb
American girl. Flowers are about sex, about how
to get bees to rub up against your anthers.
Teenage girls are much the same.

Born on Groundhog Day, died on the Fourth of July.  He would have been able to make something of that.  Ave atque vale.

~~~

Some previous Disch references (there are others for those who would hunt them up) on a fool in the forest:

• Deep Disch Pizzazz
• Stuff, Meet Nonsense
• The Unbeatable Madness of Bears
  

Drive-In Saturday: John Berryman

It has been a video-heavy week here, what with this weblog's 5-year anniversary and the 4th of July and such, but that is no obstacle to another Saturday video post.  For today, the theme is the life, work, and death -- by suicide, jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis on January 7, 1972 -- of the great and troubled poet John Berryman.

Below are two excerpts from a 1967 BBC interview with Berryman, then at the height of his fame following the publication of the first 77 Dream Songs.  Berryman pretty much does all the talking.

In the weeks following Berryman's death, [Robert] Lowell was invited to come up to London for a BBC program remembering his friend.  The focus of the evening was the BBC interview between a very drunken Berryman and the critic, Tony Alvarez.  It had been shot five years earlier in Dublin, when the Berrymans were living in Ballsbridge, filmed half in Berryman's rented house and half in the local pub, which had served as Berryman's study.  'John, close-up, just off drunkenness,' Lowell wrote [Elizabeth] Hardwick that March, misreading Berryman's drunken brilliance for a kind of manic sobriety.  There was Berryman, larger than life, in dramatic black and white, mad beard wagging.  Like Henry [the protagonist of the Dream Songs], Berryman was 'mannered, booming, like an old fashioned star professor.  His worst.'

This first segment concludes with Berryman's rendition of the somewhat famous Dream Song 14: "Life, friends, is boring"

And from the same interview one of the best, Dream Song 29: "There sat down once a thing on Henry's heart"

For whatever reason, there was something of a vogue last year among indie bands for writing songs about, or at least referring to, John Berryman.  The most prominent was probably "Stuck Between Stations" by The Hold Steady, but because I don't much like the song or the band I'll not post that here. 

Much more interesting is the approach taken by Will Sheff and Okkervil River in "John Allyn Smyth Sails" on The Stage Names.  Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, but renamed as a child when his mother remarried following the suicide of his father.  The song is Berryman's envoi from beyond the grave, combining recollections of his father's death with thoughts on his own topped it off with, of all things, a despairing variant on the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B."  ["John B," get it?  Ah, youth!]  Here, a performance in Montreal:

Okkervil River - John Allyn Smith Sails

~~~

The oddly touching and rather heroic ghost of John Berryman, somewhat the worse for wear after his plummet from the bridge, plays a major supporting role Tom Disch's novel, The Businessman: A Tale of Terror.

Robert Lowell anecdote from Paul L. Mariani, God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry and the Ineffable, at p. 92.

Of related interest, previously on a fool in the forest:

• The Sorrows of the Poets [includes the text of Dream Song 29, for those who may wish to sing along with the video]
• My Packed Pages, or, O Berryman: Not on the Lone Prairie

Paper Puppets in Purgatorio Prequel!

D:    I was totally expecting to see demons, and bondage stuff . . .
V:    This is Hell, Dante, not your personal fantasy . . . .

Via LAist, I learn of what sounds like an interesting exhibition running through August 9 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "The Puppet Show."  The Museum provides this description:

International in scope, the exhibition brings together works by 28 contemporary artists who explore the imagery of puppets in sculpture, film, video, time-based media, animation, and 2D work. . . .

The Puppet Show takes as its historic point of departure a great work of European avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, which was originally conceived as a puppet show.  The despotic King, who strode on stage roaring the French scatological word 'merdre,' is the perfect source for all puppet allegories of grotesque government and acts of puppet transgression.  More recently, puppets have taken hold of popular consciousness.  They show up on stage, on television, in film, and even online, where assuming a fake identity to garner public opinion is called 'sock-puppeting.'  Seen in correspondence with these pop culture images, the works in The Puppet Show advance the question: why do puppets matter now?

The Museum's listing of exhibition-related events led me to the real find of the day: a new film adaptation of Dante's Inferno, which will be shown on July 19.  The filmmakers describe it thus:

DANTE’S INFERNO has been kicking around the cultural playground for over 700 years.  But it has never before been interpreted with exquisitely hand-drawn paper puppets, brought to life using purely hand-made special effects.  Until now.  Rediscover this literary classic, retold in a kind of apocalyptic graphic novel meets Victorian-era toy theater.  Dante’s Hell is brought to lurid 3-dimensional, high-definition life in a darkly comedic travelogue of the underworld — set against an all-too-familiar urban backdrop of used car lots, gated communities, strip malls, and the U.S. Capitol.  And populated with a contemporary cast of reprobates, including famous — and infamous — politicians, presidents, popes, pimps.  And the Prince of Darkness himself.

The film, directed by Sean Meredith, is based on the contemporizing adaptation of the Inferno created by California painter Sandow Birk in collaboration with Marcus Sanders -- the two actually tackled entire Divine Comedy -- with Dermot Mulroney voicing Dante and James Cromwell (Farmer Hoggett!  Inventor of the warp drive!) as Virgil.  Here is the trailer, which concludes with the bit of dialogue at the top of this post:

Did you spot Paulo and Francesca? 

Superior quality smallish and largish QuickTime versions of the trailer are available at the film's Official Site.  Dante's Inferno is scheduled for a DVD release on August 26.

When last we encountered Dante Alighieri at the cinema, he was traveling through the underworld in the first-ever (vintage 1911) feature-length Italian film, freshly restored with a new score by Tangerine Dream.  I hadn't yet mastered the gentle art of YouTube embedding back in 2005, so here is a belated repeat of the lengthy trailer for that rather more traditional version:

Memorial

The Wife of the Soldier
Bertolt Brecht

What did the wife of the soldier get
From the ancient city of Prague?
From Prague she got the linen shirt
It matched her skirt did the linen shirt
That she got from the city of Prague

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Brussels, the Belgian town?
From Brussels she got the delicate lace
Oh! the charm and the grace of the delicate lace
That she got from the Belgian town

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Paris, the city of light?
From Paris she got the silken dress
Oh! to possess the silken dress
That she got from the city of light

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Libya's desert sands?
From Libya the little charm
Around her arm she wore the charm
That she got from the desert sands

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Russia's distant steppes?
From Russia she got the widow's veil
And the end of the tale is the widow's veil
That she got from the distant steppes

~~~

Photo: South Boston War Memorial by Flickr! user Joe Dunckley, used under Creative Commons License.

~~~

Epithalamium Redux

The California Supreme Court is due to release its decision on gay marriage about an hour from now, which is as good an excuse as any to reprint my double dactyl cycle on the subject, first posted -- with more trepidation than now seems warranted -- in February 2004. 

The original occasion for the poem was San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's directive to the City's authorities to license and endorse same-sex marriages.  That policy was ordered stayed shortly thereafter, and the matter has been under review by the state Supreme Court until today.  What the Court will decide and where matters will go from there is as yet a mystery -- perhaps as much of a mystery as the intricacies of human affection.

I hadn't looked back at this for at least a year or two before returning to it today.  On reflection, it stands as one of the things I am most pleased with having posted here.  Please bear with me, then, as I repeat myself:

~~~

Epithalamium

I

Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Gay men and lesbians
Flock to the City Hall,
Follow their bliss,

Purchase their licenses,
Swear to their permanence,
Pose for the camera crews
Sharing a kiss.

II

Damned, sir?  They’re damned, you say?
Possibly, possibly:
Love has led millions to
Suffer a Fall.

That’s for the next world, sir;
Here with the living -- well,
What was it Chaucer said?
“Love conquers all.”

III

Poets, sir. Love poets.
Some of the best have been
Gay, sir.  Consider this
List I’ve compiled:

Wystan Hugh Auden and
C.P. Cavafy and
Sappho. James Merrill, Thom
Gunn, Oscar Wilde.

IV

Legally, legally,
Should an impediment
Rise to the marriage of
Minds that are true?

Sure as there’s only one
Race, sir -- the human race --
How would you feel if it
Happened to you?

V

Citizens, citizens,
Leave to your churches these
Questions of sanctity,
Tough and profound.

Secular governments
Ought to facilitate
Binding of lovers who
Yearn to be bound.

VI

Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Cleave to the one who’s your
Heart’s true companion, the
Thou to your I.

Now, when the times are so
Fearsome we all must, as
Auden says, “love one a-
nother or die.”

~~~

Illustration: "Sappho" from the Musei Capitolini, Rome, via Wikimedia Commons.

"I was pierced lazilyBy the lovers of the seaSucking mildly on the dumbfound horses"

• The Dylan Thomas Random Poem Generator

Your results may -- nay, will -- vary.

Via Contemporary Poetry Review via Thomas Disch, whose About the Size of It is reviewed in the current issue.

~~~