XD Department

Photograph courtesy of Mira Pavlakovic of Ozali, Croatia and sxc.hu

My husband raced on horseback (lost one race, won the other) to the pyramids at Giza today. Me? I cleaned house and ferried child no. 3.

Two anecdotes

Sunday evening

I laugh, reading an anecdote by the highly productive Professor William Ian Miller in his essay, "Losing It."

January 13, 2010: I am defending to a colleague the wisdom of the police rounding up the usual suspects.

Me: Claude Rains was being more than a mere cynic, which of course he was also being, when he said "round up the usual suspects" because the usual suspects were not innocent but the known criminals of whatever the city was, Tangiers, Marrakesh, I forget which.

Colleague: Casablanca.

Me: I am going to go shoot myself.

N, 14, looking up from doing his DBQ essay:  What?

Me: Just an anecdote about someone who is worrying about forgetting things as you get older... And oddly enough, it's about Casablanca, where your dad is right at this moment.

N: Casablanca? I thought he was in Morocco.

Me: Casablanca is in Morocco. Remember the African map you made for history a few weeks ago?

N: Oh. Yeah.

* * *

Dear Professor Miller,

You see, N. Miller, age 14 (no relation--you're not forgetting us) is just as forgetful as W. Miller, so don't worry. And you're so cheerful about the doom of decline. I like that. (And anyway, such a multi-pronged intellect who is tossing off a few books at 65 does not have too much to worry about when it comes to shrunken brains.) Good cheer above all--well, above much.

Yrs, with laughter all around--

M

Burrowing

Evidently tomorrow UPS will bring the "second pass" for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press, March 2012) to my doorstep. And that means I will need to start reading it again (again).  So this afternoon I shall be holing up to finish looking back over the manuscript of The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, tba), as I need to get the absolutely final version turned in... except when I am feeding child no. 3 (weedily growing and hungry) or admonishing cats and dog for waking me at six when I told the wisp-brained things so very clearly about the concept of Daylight Savings Time and how they should not wake me with their absurd bio-rhythms.

Good news: the slightly-missing husband surfaced in Casablanca. Trala, I am content. Happy, even. He'd better not have as many adventures as he had when volunteering in Vietnam!  Humming an ethereal Hopson tune that goes with a medieval poem, "There is no rose of such virtue." Resmiranda!

"Never attained by most"

Photograph of ink courtesy of  Ben Joosen of Brasschaat, Antwerp, Belgium and sxc.hu.

Here is Helen Vendler being penetrating and quotable in "Are These the Poems to Remember," a review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited and with an introduction by Rita Dove  in The New York Review of Books.  I imagine that the author found this review a bit uncomfortable, as it faults her for a number of things. Yet it sheds light on what an anthology ought to be.  It illuminates the fact that there is something more important in the world of poetry than poetic schools or racial makeup or gender.

***

Printing something in short lines doesn’t make the writer a poet; it only makes him a person with a book of short lines.

Why should the precious and ever-rare concern for words and for their imaginative alignment be abused as “the old Euro-American literary standards”?

We’re back to that “poetry establishment” again. The members (whoever they are) of this so-called “establishment” “entrench” themselves (as in a war) and, implicitly racist, appear “whitewashed” like the “whited sepulchres” denounced by Jesus.

Manifest Destiny as poetic conquest. This narrative of luster lost and echoes fading is simply not true of artistic succession; one might as well say that Shakespeare has faded to an echo and Faulkner has lost his luster.

Just because one describes a “hardscrabble Appalachia” doesn’t make one a hardscrabble Appalachian.

And there is nothing intrinsically poetic about being “West of the Hudson,” any more than it is intrinsically poetic to be East of the Hudson, then or now. Dove’s implication that rough diamonds in the West took over from effete Anglophiles in the East neglects the basic truth that all gifted poets are engaged in the very same task—making words come to the call of their vision.

Yeats, in “The Fisherman,” thought a poem should be “cold/And passionate as the dawn”—that it should embody, along with the rising passion of inception, the cold inquisition of detached self-critique. It is not a goal easily attained, and it is never attained by most of the poets of any century, in any country, of any race.

* * *

In this piece, Vendler has proper distance, proper common sense, and proper disregard for everything (class, race, gender, etc.) except the poem--she reminds me a little of the late Tom Disch in the first quote.