Just now I have a few loosely interconnected thoughts, gleaned as usual from my reading over the past day or two. I think of these blog postings as fragmentary, mostly unfinished, to be reworked at some point. So the posts are mainly a gathering or the result of a gathering process -- of ruminations, readings, relationships -- to be brought into focus later. For the moment what follows is best viewed sidelong.
Here's the latest batch of fragments, whether connected apart from my general enthusiasm remains an open question. Nevertheless, the following:
Reading in PN Review 279 this morning, sitting in a public space at a local hotel, with coffee, I saw the following in an interview with Stanley Moss, who died recently and who is commemorated by the editor in that issue. Here is a longish quote from the interview, or rather 'conversation' (the piece is titled 'In Conversation with Neilson MacKay'). I've interpolated initials to identify the speakers:
SM: My father wrote books, taught history. He knew Greek and Latin. Later in life he told me: 'What I know of poetry I owe to you.' He explained that when I was two years old and he was studying for his principal's exam, he would recite passages from Shakespeare over my head as we walked. I replied that perhaps I owed my love of poetry to him.
NM: Interesting. Eliot – or was it Stevens – has that line about the way that authentic poetry communicates before it's understood.
SM: Yes, I think there's something to it. You mention Wallace Stevens. When I joined the Navy at seventeen, I used to wake up an hour before reveille to read, write poems. I had a copy of Harmonium.
NM: Was Stevens an early influence for you?
SM: Absolutely. I met him – first at Trinity College, I think, after a reading – and again with his daughter before he died, at the house of a very rich gallery owner. I remember sitting with them at the table (it was summer), and the host said, 'Oh, look at the garden, all the trees are white'. I looked at Stevens, and he looked back at me, and we both knew the guy was horribly mistaken.
NM: What impact did he have on your writing, exactly?
SM: Well, first of all, I don't think the word exactly explains anything.
NM: I regretted it as soon as I said it.
SM: The mystery of what makes poetry go, in the debate with William Carlos Williams, who I also knew quite well (after all, I put his books together for him in some ways), I was on Stevens's side. Ordinary speech was not my thing. I didn't write the poetry they speak on the street, like Allen Ginsberg for example. But I wrote about what they speak on the street that others didn't see, and that others didn't hear. One thing that's the case, my parents knew Ginsberg's parents. They taught in the same school in New Jersey. I think his mother's name was Naomi. My mother spoke of her in such a familiar way. I spoke with Allen at some event with whatshername... Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles's wife. You know, I practically rewrote The Sheltering Sky when I was at New Directions. There were full sentences written by me. I never got credit for that. And it was a bestseller.
I like this quite a bit -- the idea that poetry communicates before it is understood, with a real-life illustration in the remembrance of his father. (More at some other time apropos the anecdotes about Ginsberg and Bowles; the Ginsberg reference is maybe remotely relevant here, the Bowles reference not so much).
There's a little poem, translated by Louis McKee and collected into a little book called Marginalia, Poems from the Old Irish, that resonates cryptically here. Titled 'Apology', the poem says,
Don't be blaming the poets, man,
it's not their fault;
You will get no more from a pot,
than what's in it.
Looking elsewhere, this idea about 'authentic poetry' is reflected (and extended) in the epigraph that Thomas Meyers appends to his book, Essay Stanzas (The Song Cave, 2014), first glossing then quoting from Freud's essay On Dreams:
What is dreamt, it is proposed, has no more claim to sense and meaning than, for instance, the sounds which would be produced if "the ten fingers of someone who knows nothing about music were wandering over the keys of a piano."
Moss calibrates Freud's meaning for poetry and poets when he says, "But I wrote about what they speak on the street that others didn't see, and that others didn't hear." Presumably, Moss didn't have Freud in mind during this conversation, nor would Thomas Meyer have been in the picture for him at that time. By way of aside, the gist of this exchange may also be understood, I think, as obliquely suggesting that Freud was not a poet.
One more thing on this. I wonder whether there may be something in the following. In Philosophical Investigations (as translated by G.E.M. Anscombe), says Wittgenstein:
78. Compare knowing and saying:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is --
how the word "game" is used" --
how a clarinet sounds.
If you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.
Hmm-- "how a clarinet sounds"...
I want to conclude this peroration with just one more loosely related bit from my reading this morning, arising out of my continuing fascination with what I vaguely understand to be a tradition of 'walking poetry' in Japan. I first read about this in an essay by Gary Snyder, which I've not been able to locate or identify. I keep looking. Closer to hand are the travel diaries of Matsuo Bashō, though that is a separate and distinct tradition.
Closer to my purpose here, Earl Miner has an essay that was published in Pacific Coast Philology way back in 1968, titled 'The Traditions and Forms of the Japanese Poetic Diary', where he writes,
The significance of those two elements is such that without an appreciation of them we are unlikely to gain any adequate feel for Japanese diary literature. Compared with Western fiction, the diary is seemingly episodic and formless. Closely ordered plots are not to be found in the diaries -- or in other forms of earlier Japanese prose fiction, or in drama, or in most modern fiction. Japanese conceptions of form are in some important respects different from Western, and what the differences are can be understood in considerable measure from the diary. One of the significant differences between Western and Japanese prose fiction (as represented by the diary) is that the Japanese is formulated in close relationship to poetry, which both affects its principles of coherence and has meant that it did not need to go through the stage of the well-made novel or play before it could seek out freer forms. To attempt generalization of a larger number of works, the diaries combine or poise, two formal energies: the ceaseless pressure of time implied by the diary form itself and the enhancement of the moment, or related moments, usually demonstrated in poetry. It is the flow of time rather than the concatenation of events that is important, and it is the sudden glowing of poetic experience rather than the order of a well-lighted city that gives the diaries their sense of depth of experience.
'The sudden glowing of poetic experience'.
One more thing before closing. Echoing Stanley Moss in a perhaps indeterminate way, the following translation appears in the same issue of PNR. These poems are part of a series announced last year by the editors, and are offered by New Zealand poet John Gallas. The series is titled 'Mondo de Kvar Anguloj' (World of Four Corners), with the first entry titled 'Mondo de arboj'. The editors write:
In coming issues of PN Review, John Gallas will contribute to the 'Reports' pages five-poem anthologies of translations from many corners of the world. He is, after all, the author of The Song Atlas. Esperanto provides our titles going forward. The next five are proposed as:
2. Mondo de mašino
3. Mondo de dormo
4. Mondo de sunbrilo
5. Mondo de melankolio
6. Mondo de birdoj
The current gathering (Set 6) in the 'World of Four Corners' series is titled 'Mondo de Malverma', differing from the title previously announced as 'Mondo de birdoj'. Here's the concluding verse from one of the current set of poems:
Homesun Sands Grímur Thomsen (1820–1896)/Iceland
Yet Homesun Sands is desolate and sad.
No sound of man or woman echoes here:
Its solitary Things commune in tongues
That few can fathom, alien and drear.
Understanding come follow...