The Rrrrrandom Rrroundup

Thank you 

to Clive for a fresh post on Thaliad.

Not a bit surprised

Ted and Sylvia invoke spirits:

"Mention Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the average poetry fan, and the first thing that comes to mind (other than the poetry, of course) is likely to be images of doomed romance, suicide, or love gone sour. Less well known are the pair’s experiments with the Ouija board. According to Hughes, in a note to his wife’s poem, Ouija, Plath “occasionally amused herself, with one or two others, by holding her finger on an upturned glass, in a ring of letters laid out on a smooth table, and questioning the ‘spirits’.”

The article goes on to talk about other interesting things such as Coleridge and the anima mundi....

Scott G. F. Bailey is baffled at Six Words for a Hat 

"I pause yet again to consider the state of American publishing. I confess myself baffled by it. It's rare when a new novel comes out that excites me, and when I look at the catalogues of independent presses I feel a definite estrangement from the books they're putting out. Everyone claims to be transgressive or experimental, but to me it's just a lot of formal gameplaying to hide, I strongly suspect, some pretty pedestrian ideas and inelegant writing. One is not supposed to say that aloud, if one is a writer, but there it is. I am aware that every novelist who can't get a book deal says the same thing. I am unable to critically evaluate my own novels, of course, as every novelist is unable to critically evaluate his own novels. So I can't even claim, honestly, that I write good books. I can only claim that I write books, that I have written eight of them. The most recent book I've written is called, for now, The Hanging Man, and I wrote the final sentence of the first draft around 1:00 PM, PST, today."

@tedgioia tweets

"I was especially impressed by [the late Arthur] Danto's claim that the future of art wouldn't be the pursuit of 'progress' but a return to serving human needs."

Dear journalists,

And yet another thing you're neglecting...

Could we spend slightly less time on the latest fracas du jour and a little more time on the plight of the honey bee? You gave the bee its moment and then moved on. We really need those little gold-dusted creatures. (Sylvia, bee poet, you should have stuck around and helped the honey bee!)

Winter gratitudes

Freezing dusk is closing
   Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
   That can no longer feel.
     But the carp is in its dept
        Like a planet in its heaven
     And the badger in its bedding
        Like a loaf in the oven.
     And the butterfly in its mummy
        Like a viol in its case.
      And the owl in its feathers
        Like a doll in its lace.
                --Ted Hughes, from "The Warm and the Cold" (Collected Poems, p. 343)

It's -15 at a little after nine in the morning; when I woke, I found the pipes were frozen, so it has been a morning of rousting children to help while getting another child off to school. I seldom bother to use a dryer on my hair, but they're quite handy with pipes. Water is again flowing, and I am feeling glad and grateful not to have a houseful of plumbers this morning. And I also see that, after more than two weeks of that scourge, the flu, I really am going to get well. And for that I am even more grateful. Yankee winters are a bit of a trial if you're not raised to them, and so I shall stay home longer and write and do some cleaning (because an old house with five residents takes a lot of ordering and scrubbing) and let the world tick on without me. Outside a flock of birds is settled in a ravel of rose canes, one or two or three darting out to the feeder and then flitting back, fleeing deep in the canes to hide from the kestrel who regards our yard as territory. So it goes on planet Earth on a wintry morning. Good cheer to you, world!

Thanks to all the people who wrote notes or left comments on the prior post or elsewhere about the poem in answer to an inaugural challenge. To write such a thing is to reply to a very particular sort of dare, with demands set by the form, but also mediated by one's concerns about the country--in my case, I was thinking of a particular distress I feel for the chasm that has now been set between the two major parties and their adherents, so that there is a lot of voiced hatred and scorn for "the other." So it's a curious task.

Wroth Redux, with chickens--

Cockerel courtesy of sxc.hu
and Philip MacKenzie of London

Approximately one year ago I (the mild-mannered, the peaceable, the tactful) committed a fulmination, a fume, and a fuss entitled Wroth, Wroth with Ted Hughes. It had to do with chickens and old ladies and lovelessness. You may want to rush over and read it all over again (because naturally you have read it once, being all up on matters of chickens and old ladies--and you want love. Don't we all!)

Anyway that little fuse of a post kept burning until it ignited a little bonfire. Jeremiah Douglas has written a very interesting response called "An Unfortunately Collected Poem by Ted Hughes." Whereas I dashed off an impetuous and perhaps feather-brained response, he has connected my little fluster to issues of ethics, good and evil, and good and bad poetry. And in doing so, he has said some very interesting things, and not just about Ted Hughes and chickens.

Wroth, wroth with Ted Hughes

Dear, dead, evidently-irresistible Ted Hughes, there I was sailing along, enjoying your unscabbarded lines, the force of your word-twisting, your leaps like a salmon who tosses up rainbows. And you broke it! You broke my reading! Why on earth did you write that poem? No, no, I know why. Not a good reason. But why did you keep it?

With luck, I shall be an old woman in the future. Ideally, I shall be a spry, creative, generous, and busy woman like my mother, who is almost 83 and just bought a new 4-harness loom. She is spunky and creative and beautiful, my mother.

And what did you go and do? You made up a horrible, silly pastor and had him preach nonsense to group of old ladies: "to the old women's faces / That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens' asses." Even aside from the fact that you had to point out that a plucked hens' ass would be a dead hen (yes, I could see that, dear sir), I am ticked. Well ticked. I know no old woman in the universe who deserves for her face to be compared to a plucked (dead--you liked to pluck them living, did you?) hen. I resent your poem and your preacher and your old women.

Hey, I even resent it on the behalf of poets. This is not satire; it is just mean-spirited. You are supposed to love the world, you poets! Love it. Cherish it, even when it is buffalo-headed and obtuse. Do your best by it. Don't turn a bunch of old ladies into a pack of hen butts because of some idiot pastor that you make up when you have an axe that needs grinding! Don't grind axes! Don't even turn old ladies into hen butts if you didn't make the poor man up! Leave him and them some dratted humanity, will you? Love them, love them, love them: be a Flannery O'Connor if you have to and show their inner freak before you give them the sword of your illumination. But love them!

I think I will have to wait until tomorrow to read any more of your poems. Or at least a few hours. Did I tell you that I like a lot of your poems? Maybe I will just reread this little one called "Welcombe."

But don't tick off a future old lady by lovelessness!

There is more.

I also resent this on behalf of the chickens. Chickens and I go way back. I am fond of chickens. I have a chicken pact with Howard Bahr (although I'm afraid I may have broken it now and then.) The chickens do not want their plucked-naked butts stuck up on old ladies' shoulders as faces. (They are said to dislike surrealism. I believe this is true.) They do not! I speak for the chickens!
There, you see? The future old woman speaks.

She's a little strange, but she knows whereof she speaks.

I think maybe she will have to go work out some energy in a poem now. Good-by.

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Photographs courtesy of sxc.hu. 5 chickens and a cat by Tijmen van Dobbenburgh of the Netherlands. Convocation of Bantams by Loretta Humble of Malakoff, Texas. The chickens were from Tennessee.

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