Beginnings

[figure 1: A view of Lake Erie, from Hamburg's public beach. I took this photo on a chilly day this past November.]

Despite the chill in the air and the snow on the ground here in New York, spring semester always puts me in mind to think about beginnings. Spring reminds me that when it comes to my medieval interests, it all started in the spring – in this case, spring 2002. My first Old English class started seven years ago this past Wednesday – and every year, I’ve grown more certain that if the course caught my interest, it was largely because of how difficult it was. I’d never learned a language before, truth be told – French had been part of my growing up, present both in and out of school thanks to my mother’s background as former French professor. And anyone who’s been through the American school system knows that it’s a rare thing to really learn English grammar. I joke about it, but I think I really did learn modern English grammar in my Old English class – I wonder if others have had that experience? I certainly didn’t know the difference between a nominative and a genitive (in terms of what the words meant, at any rate), and I don’t think I’d ever heard of the dative before. It was like a revelation, really: modern English just made so much more sense after taking Old English, from the past tense of verbs to the use of apostrophes to indicate possession. Grammar rules had reasons – who knew?

So awhile back, Jeffrey invited us to talk about what we're teaching this semester -- and now, finally, I can make my contribution to that discussion. This semester is pretty exciting for me, as I’m beginning my career in teaching literature, after five semesters teaching freshman composition. If you're familiar with my academic preoccupations, the way I plan to begin the semester won’t surprise you.

Columbia’s English department has recently instituted a new course for graduate students to teach. It functions as a kind of introduction the English major. Essentially, we cover various genres of literature (the triad of poetry, drama, prose), and critical methodologies for understanding and interpreting them. It’s a wide ranging class, in which a professor lectures for an hour once a week, and then graduate students teach a section of seminar that meets for two hours, also once a week, and covers more material than the lectures do. It’s a big course, and looks scary from the outside, but it’s not meant to be an in-depth study of any one period or method – it’s just introductions, making acquaintances, and learning to engage with texts in ways that are meaningful to current critical discourses.

All that aside, I wanted to start with something that would put everyone on the same level. I can’t teach literature without finding some way to put something medieval, or even better Old English, into it. I couldn’t even teach writing without using medieval references to illustrate writing points (like the idea of “auctoritee,” borrowed happily from Chaucer). My opening class? I think I’m going to start with something I know intimately, but am utterly unable to understand (yes, one honors thesis, one masters thesis, and countless translations later, I still don’t understand this poem – I doubt I ever really will). The idea here is to start from a place where there is no background information, to look closely at what can be understood without a sense of the context of a piece. So I’ll start with the manuscript: what can we tell just from looking at this text, as it appears on the page? Then, I hand out a modern edition of the poem (in old English, of course). I’m assuming no one will be able to read it. But if you know that it’s an edition of the MS we’ve been looking at, then what can you say about the text now? With a little luck, I’ll be treated to a rousing chorus of “It’s poetry!” The fun part will be discussing why we can say that now, if we couldn’t tell before. It allows discussion of editorial practice, and will hopefully allow us to talk a bit about assumptions concerning how poetry “looks.” Also: a great moment to point out alliteration, caesurae and the like.

From there, we move to a translation (I’m still deciding which to use, so any suggestions would be appreciated!), and what becomes an exercise in close reading of what the poem says, and how we arrive at conclusions about the techniques it is using to do so. Of course, I’ll close the class with a mini-lecture on the cultural and historical context of the poem, and hopefully that will spur a few more minutes of discussion and questions about how we can understand the poem in its literary and historical contexts. Ideally, it’ll be a fun exercise to think about how we approach poems, what we bring to the table in analysis, and how to think about a poem without immediate reference to the author’s biography or even any historical context. Most of all, I’m hoping it will get everyone talking early on in the class, as they will presumably all be coming in at the same level of knowledge concerning the poem in question.

In a class about introductions, you see, I’m planning to introduce them to the poem I’ve spent far too much time reading, thinking, writing and talking about, on ITM, OENY and elsewhere. My first real literature class? I’m teaching The Wanderer.

cross posted at ITM.

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Leaving New York, Never Easy

Not much to report here at OENY -- it does, of course, appear that JJC is edging out the other human cobloggers in the polls at ITM (asking readers which co-blogger they most identify with), but that doesn't really matter, given that the Tiny Shriner has a lead that will be nigh impossible to overcome (despite certain well-intentioned threats).

Tomorrow morning -- well, actually, in a few hours now -- I'm heading to Penn Station, where I will catch the Carolinian, a train which will take me to Greensboro, NC, where my sister (the budding medievalist and UNCG honors college poster-child, rather than the one who just played Carnegie Hall with the National Wind Ensemble...) will pick me up, and take me home to Winston-Salem. Blogging has been light for me in the past month, for a variety of reasons, including Kalamazoo (which I really will eventually blog about), grading, travel, a plague (not THE plague, just a really evil cold), and the ever present dissertation chapter I'll be spending the summer revising. And those are just the ones that are worth mentioning on blog! Suffice it to say, I'm grateful for May's ending, I'm grateful for June's beginning, I'm grateful for the summer, and I'm grateful for travel. Travel opens horizons, even if it's a return. Perhaps especially when traveling is return.

With me on the train will be a newly bought copy of Andrew Zawacki's Anabranch, which I've mentioned on this blog before. I'm excited: I've read the whole thing twice now, but I'm hoping to write something about it. There's something very...well...Old English about it, that I don't quite know that I understand. It has to do with light -- and I think that's what the writing I do on this will end up being about. It's worth noting that at a poetry reading about two years ago, I heard Zawacki read with Mark Strand. Zawacki read a beautiful long poem that I'm not sure has been published yet, but one of the lines was "fidelity to a language faithful only to itself." I've been haunted by that line ever since I heard it -- it resonates in that way certain lines do which end up echoing in my mind long after I hear them. In fact, it's become a bit of a mantra for me. At any rate, I think that the time in transit -- between places I sometimes call home -- will be a good place to consider Anabranch.

I'm also bring work books (of course!): Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature by Stephen Harris, History and Narrative in Early Medieval Europe, and a few others I can't seem to remember offhand. And of course, the dissertation chapter. Some fragments, no doubt, will end up both here at at ITM.

In the meantime, I leave you with poetry from Zawacki -- and there are very few better ways to end a blog post.

from 'Viatica'

5 (Vertigo)

There are things I would settle
with myself. Why, for instance,
as autumn unravels, I cannot mortar

myself to myself, nothing but sunlight
littered from here to the sun. By I
I mean a window, redness grazing the lake

at dawn, or an echo winnowing out
along a wall, hard pressed to hide itself
and straining for the voice it vanished from.

I mean so many windows. So much red.

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Dreaming Language: Lytton Smith's Monster Theory

(I've been wanting to write about LJS's chapbook for about a month now -- a moment's rest in the rush of the end-of-semester madness made this finally possible. As some of you know, LJS is frequent commenter at In the Middle -- and I can't recommend his work highly enough. He's also a colleague of mine in the Columbia English department's Medieval contingent, and a fellow Anglo-Saxonist. That might be why it was a bit strange writing about him in the third person! I have to confess, I don't know how to write a poetry review...thoughts and comments welcome! The image is from national geographic, and illustrates another Loch Ness Monster theory. Seemed a good match.)

Reading Lytton Smith’s chapbook Monster Theory is a bit like stepping into a memory you’d forgotten. At first the reason seems obvious: in a book where so many poems take cues and even characters from the world long past, of course you’ll find something in it that is eerily familiar, whether a “Book of Encouragement and Consolation,” a “Charm Against the Loss of Crops,” or even a “Monster Theory.” However, on second approach, this strange familiarity becomes just that -- strange, but in the sense of the French étranger: foreign. If there is a memory here, it isn’t something entirely of the reader’s making. It’s at that moment, in the recognition of that which isn’t precisely recognizable, that the poet’s spell begins.The sense is that this book requires – demands – our complete attention, and moreover, demands to be re-read, even in absence. This little book of poems haunts the reader who lets its language speak to her.


Throughout the book, the poet asks for an gesture of imagination from his reader, and from the first a point of entry is established: “Bury your eyes in late barley,” opens the first poem, called “Scarecrow Work.” With this opening it becomes clear that there is a relationship forming, a world the poet constructs of language which, while it seems to be reveling more than revealing, will show the reader something that exists beyond the glittering surface of its words. Repetitions, particularly of verbs, seem important here, as in the last stanza of “Scarecrow Work”:

“…Your lesson: what will not scatter is safe, /
Is dove, is olive return.”

The existential status of that “which is” safe, isn’t merely safe, and the repetition of “is” – is dove, is olive return – suggests that, while each thing that does not scatter is safe, each thing that does not scatter will still scatter, if only in a proliferation of references.



The centrality of the poem “Monster Theory” to the chapbook which bears its name is well placed. A poem not unlike the patchwork [monster] it speaks, the work performed by each section of the piece stands in for a larger analysis of what the [monster] patterns, promises, reveals and conceals. Though the first section reminds us that “It is always at an outset a displacement—”, the bracketed [monster] moves quickly through that displacement and into a stunning soliloquy that closes the work. The poet writes of a village, a cartographer, a lost daughter, a gathering search for a monster which refuses restraint or removal (the almost playful lines of the fifth section enumerate the ways the [monster] thwarts any attempt to prevent his escape: “Cauldron of boiling water: stench, but not of burning flesh. /Buried alive: Why expect so much of wood and soil?”), and the rendering of the [monster] as myth (“two anxious and too young sentries posted at the cave entrance…” mark a particularly lovely line in the third section), until finally in the seventh section we see the [monster] speak. Though in dialogue with what we presume is the daughter he snatched away, the [monster’s] words are the only voice we are allowed to hear. We are confronted with a [monster] who seems to know his place, and this is where the poem’s provenance becomes strikingly clear. Inspired by the essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (the introduction to a volume of collected essays called Monster Theory), Smith has retained some key phrases from Cohen’s article, and this lends the [monster] an eerie prescience, a theoretical take on lives human and monstrous which approaches a kind of philosophy of monstrous purpose: “The monster exists as harbinger to crisis, / devil’s advocate to the identity.” It becomes clear, however, that when this [monster] is allowed to speak, another aspect of human identity is at stake, and with language, this focus lends light to other work being done by these poems:

‘You of all should know fear of the monster
is a kind of desire, a way of loving without
the difficulty of touch.’ ‘............
.......................................
………………………’ ‘If your hands grant
a life I could not have imagined, the amber
of electric through the body, I have seen
also your weeping after.'

This sense of the body -- human or not – which simultaneously gives voice to and is voiced by language, is what Smith seems most interested by in so much of his poetry. The intersection of language and body, his poetry tells us, can be painful and profound.

“Annuls the Space/Time Experience” is one of the moments where the intense pain that language can cause is brought out most beautifully in the text. “Is this the dream of language,” the poet asks, and then confronts the reader with the possibilities: “a trap with rusted hasp (suggests escape / but offers teeth)” The musical beauty of language is not forgotten either, and in another moment of the same poem, we are offered these lines:

…and Ben has left
a written note as if to say the lair

is love of lair, the lyre a stringed bereft
of am, the lure just that, another dream
of language much as fluid as adrift…

The progression from lair to lyre to lure is particularly musical, and its setting in a poetic meditation on language is particularly appropriate. And yet, in spite of (and perhaps because of) the beauty of such lyric lines, the poem concludes on this haunting note:

“…we’ve fallen for our absents
and this is then the dream of language,
of those who’ve left, and left us with their absence.”

Those who’ve left, and left us with their absence – returning to this line, repeatedly, the haunting beauty of that which isn’t present (and so must be represented in language) is what it seems Smith is most adept at rendering. And of course, it is where bodily presence is least possible that it becomes all the more pronounced.

In a particularly bold poetic move, the poet writes in the voice of Eva of Wilton, the intended recipient of Goscelin of St. Bertin’s Liber Confortatorius. In “The Book of Encouragement and Consolation,” this young anchoress, who is only known through a letter she may have never received, and the voice of a man, Goscelin, whose love for her may have been implicated in her removal from St Bertin to Wilton, is given her own chance to respond. The embodiedness of her language – “(tongue / composed, the restrained throat forgotten / as threshold)” – as represented in the text is striking, and we remember that silence is an absence which implies a presence, and so lasts “only until its next breaking.”

Despite the deep ambivalence that becomes clear in terms of what “dream of language” we might ultimately embrace, the poet implies that this isn’t the end. If, as in “A Manual for Weather,” we are reminded that “All that is left of weather / Is how it is written…” and if we might (as with a bracketed [monster]) exchange the word “weather” for other words, Smith’s poetry envisions this status as one of hope, not desperation. If language cannot be fixed, or static, therein lies its beauty, its hope – its ability to live beyond us. Lytton Smith creates a world in which words are more than simply memory, and he invites us to leave our preconceptions about language and its myriad uses at the door. At the end of “A Manual for Weather,” positioned as it is at the end of Monster Theory, we are granted the grace of an unexpected arrival:

Welcome, friend. Leave your instruments
at the entrance. We live between weather
and earthlight: there is no use for them

here, no music without weather. Pitch
nor oscillation, string nor wind nor voice.

The poem ends where we do – at the limit of what language can represent. The final line goes out almost like a prayer – and a remarkable chapbook ends with what peace a world of language might finally give:

Silence, and words folding into it, enough.


________

Lytton Smith's Monster Theory was the winner of the PSA chapbook award in 2008. His book of poems, The All Purpose Magical Tent will be published by Nightboat Books in 2009. Lytton blogs at: The All Purpose Magical Tent.

Cross posted at ITM.

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on poetry: Andrew Zawacki

Sitting on the sixth floor of the Wilson Wing in Wake Forest's ZSR Library, approaching page one hundred of Idea of the Vernacular (a fantastic edition of prologues edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans), I found myself haunted by a phrase. I'm cursed with a memory that picks up whole paragraphs from books I read, and endless scores from Disney movies play through my mind (product of a childhood spent reproducing them in the basement with my sisters) on any given day.

Back in March of 2006, I went to a poetry reading in NYC which featured two poets I'd list fairly high up on my list of poets I read in my spare time: Mark Strand, who was reading from Man and Camel, his newest collection, and Andrew Zawacki, who if I recall was reading something that was still in-progress. I've known Strand's work for awhile, but Zawacki was entirely new to me. The line running through my head today is his -- "fidelity to a language faithful only to itself." I've no idea if it's appeared anywhere in print yet, but I know I hope it does so, and soon, for with Geoffrey Hill's "not difference but strange likeness" (found by way of Christopher Jones' fantastic book that borrows its name from the line in "Mercian Hymns"), it's one of the few lines that sticks with me on a near-daily basis.

That said, a book I'm planning to read, and soon -- as soon as I can get my hands on it, in fact -- is Zawacki's Anabranch. Granted, two of my friends who happen to be poets recommended I read it...

an age ago. And of course, I was more than willing to entertain the suggestion and then go right back to the work I needed to get done more quickly, like reading for the exams that, ironically enough, I am still reading for today. Today, however, feeling haunted by that line and as though, perhaps, for all my Old English Verse Saints Lives I hadn't really been reading poetry these past few weeks, I ended up spending more time than I meant to looking up Zawacki's work.

I found out rather quickly, however, that for the moment, there will be no reading of Anabranch for me -- at least not immediately. Wake's library, though deep in terms of its collection of poetry, doesn't have it. I was disappointed, but not despondent -- after all, that's what they created interlibrary loan for! Unwilling to just let it go, however, I started looking online, to see what of his poetry I could find. My search did not go unrewarded, and hence my blog post today.

First: this page on UPNE's site for Anabranch. It features the poem "Credo," which I've heard friends mention but never read. I'm not sure I have words for this poem, and so perhaps it's best to let you discover it for yourselves, though I'd suggest you use this link to do so, as the other site loses the line breaks, which is a loss I can't tolerate. After all, a part of what makes this poem so beautiful is the fact that its lines follow one another in a manner both fluid and broken -- a manner that subtly reminds me of how tentative a thing belief (in anything) is.

"I believe / in the violence of not knowing" is the line that caught me. A hundred different timbres are possible in this line, and I can't read it the same way twice. Belief isn't necessarily comforting, nor is it necessarily meant to be so. Following on these lines: "I've seen a river lose its course / & join itself again, / watched it court / a stream & coax the stream / into its current, / & I have seen / rivers, not unlike / you, that failed to find / their way back." Again, it's only half as beautiful without the arrangement on the page -- but I think the sense is still there. There's a knowledge in these lines -- ostensibly of rivers -- but of rivers that are, in some sense, like whoever the "you" might refer to. The "you" is indistinct: but its presence (perhaps believed?) is part of the way in which the poem proceeds in its thinking. Weather and self and rivers and rain and "you" -- all of these are both connected and disconnected, distinct and whole entities that are the site of a kind of fracturing, an ending that is inscribed in the very belief that believes them. The final lines of the poem: "Let there be / no mistake: / I do not believe / things are reborn in fire. / They're consumed by fire / & fire has a life of its own."

Early meditations, but given that I'm going to be reading the whole of Anabranch as soon as it comes in -- I'm confident I'll have more to say about "Credo" once I've seen the entirety of the work it begins.

Edit: I always have more to say once I get home, but aside from the line of analysis I added above, I realized on the way home, this reminded me of the mystics. A kind of indistinct promise haunts this "Credo" -- it's like the line in deCerteau's The Mystic Fable - about Angelus Silesius, though this is clearly a completely different way of expressing the same conditionality -- perhaps not marked by mode or mood so much as tone:

In the middle of the seventeenth centuy, Angelus Silesius, whose poems aspired to the paternal word that would call him son used the conditional whenever he referred to that founding nomination, as if, by that suspensive modality, he were admitting that he already knew that what he awaited could no longer come and that he had nothing but the "consolation" of musical strophes repeating an aspiration while lulling a mourning to sleep.

That kind of belatedness isn't explicit in "Credo", but I think Zawacki's particular brand of the conditional -- the violence in not knowing, perhaps -- shares something with deCerteau's words. It goes beyond that both are beautiful -- but I'm still not sure I have words to articulate it. Anyone else want to give it a go? ---/end edit

The other thing I found on the internet was a review Zawacki wrote for the Boston Review of a book of poetry called Some Values of Landscape and Weather by Peter Gizzi. I thought the review by Zawacki was compelling, and the last lines highlighted what, for me, are two of the chief characteristics of a good writer. First: He has an ending that can take your breath away. Second: He is skilled in the art of juxtaposing words -- his own and others. So here's the last paragraph, for your perusal.

The fantasy of totality is foiled by “plural depth,” and the rival demands placed on ourselves should, whether leveled from outside or by ourselves, be acknowledged. “It’s good to not break in America,” Gizzi admits in his “Revival” for the late Gregory Corso, praising elsewhere what “might finally break us, and that is good.” According to Some Values of Landscape and Weather, we live generic yet singular, isolated yet shared lives that, though insufficient, somehow suffice nonetheless. That our days and nights constitute a fractured, finite, unfinished narrative running “upon a time / and goes like this” is not a new insight. Gizzi offers unique reasons, however, for putting the questions life poses into that other form of questioning known as the poem. Because “beauty walks this world.” Because “the earth is porous and we fall constantly.” Because “every thing is poetry here,” and “poetry can catch you in the headlights."

Consider me caught. Luckily, Gizzi's book is available -- along with Zawacki's earlier work, By Reason of Breakings -- in ZSR. Which means I have one more stop to make before I go home for the day, and a lovely evening of reading ahead.

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File this under: Coincidence?...

I think not.

This morning, I got an email from friend and colleague LJS that made reference to The Martyrology by bp Nichol. I opened the email to find this link to a site on Muppets, where I found out that apparently, bp Nichol wrote several episodes on one of my favorite TV shows growing up -- Fraggle Rock!.

I've mentioned bp Nichol in passing on the blog before, but for those who missed that installment (lackluster, really), Nichol was a Canadian poet. His poems tend to play with language and meaning, and in the Martyrologies, he tells the stories of Saints -- all of whose names derive from words beginning with "st". Thus storm becomes Saint Orm, and stand is canonized Saint And.

At any rate, I began reading Nichol because of David Clark's article in Monster Theory. The most intriguing questions raised by Clark's article concerned the way in which language becomes fragments in the fifth book of the martyrology, and how these pieces become monstrous, in a sense, because of the indeterminacy of the subject's status vis a vis the inherent threat of language in the poem. A particularly compelling quote: A large part of the Minotaur’s repulsiveness comes from its grossly indeterminate status, neither human nor inhuman, but both at once. What is so threateningly alien about one’s own poem that it can be thought of as similarly monstrous? What cruelty lurks at the heart of the labyrinth of language?

It's strange for me to find out, all these year after I watched a show about tiny 22-inch-high creatures who lived underground in a network of caves, that a poet whose work fascinates me so much was a writer for the series -- indeed, a writer who penned a number of episodes I'm almost completely certain I remember.

I'll end this post with an excerpt from the preface to the fifth book of Nichol's Martyrology, which takes the form of a letter -- a section of the text that haunts me still, both in thinking of the poem itself and in remembering Clark's brilliant commentary on it.

It was also weird to hear bits of The Martyrology that far back and I had a sudden image of your poetry capturing you like the Minotaur in the labyrinth - and started wondering what is the relationship of someone to the mythology they make up? Anyway.

Best, Matt.

__
Works cited in this post:

David L. Clark, “Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
bp Nichol, The Martyrology: Book 5 Coach House Books, 1999. (Web link: Coach House)

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Ah Yes, Now I Remember

Blogging on the road from Orlando, Florida (yes, the Hurley Family Vacation 2007 was to Disney World, more on that later), I connected to the internet, and saw on my bloglines this lovely post at University Diaries. I spent Bloomsday 2007 in perhaps the most anti-Joycean way possible, but reading this made me long for my bookcase in New York, and my well-worn copy of the book that captured my imagination at the age of 17, and gave the first (albeit short-lived) direction to my hopes for an academic career:

... The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Yes, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (quotation courtesy of University Diaries, as I'm too lazy to look it up myself). Maybe it's a bit cliche, but at 17, Joyce spoke to me in a way nothing else ever had, not even medieval literature. It's nice to remember, at a point in my career where I've chosen the critical over the creative, a moment when that choice hadn't been made yet, when I first thrilled at the possibility of language, molded and shaped into art. Not to suggest I've lost that intoxication with the power of words. I only write about poetry now -- but re-reading these lines from Joyce make me realize why so many of the colleagues who I am most grateful to have as interlocutors are poets and creative writers, professionally or not. It's a constant reminder that poetry isn't something only in the past -- it's something being continually reborn, like in cummings' Introduction to New Poems (something I really should blog about sometime) --

a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being

. And yet so much more than mere remembrance.

More upon my return to North Carolina, including some thoughts about visions of the future inspired by a return visit to EPCOT Center (a bit dark, I'm afraid, though the current post over at In the Middle by Eileen Joy has me rethinking a bit of what I'd initially thought...), and thoughts on finally being done with all the Augustine I'm reading before September.

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