Ephemera

Just to prove (to myself, at least) that I'm still (relatively) alive, I'm posting a few brief notes. 


***

For a while, the fiction bug got me again, and I was sure that I was done with poetry.  However, though I am fussing with a couple of stories, poetry has once again ensnared me.  At least, until the next round of rejections. 

I'm still enamored of fiction, though.  I love stories, and it's nice to just stretch out and write prose.  The trouble is that I'm averse to drama and conflict, which is a drawback when attempting to write fiction. 

***

I'm finally sending out the snail-mail component of my Big Fall Submission.  I've got a number of online submissions out there already.  All together, I will have about two dozen different poems out at a total of about two dozen different places.  At least I feel like I'm actually doing something when I send them out. 

***

I used to save my rejection slips.  Now they just go in the trash immediately. 

***

Maybe I will not give up on the PhD plan, after all.  Running my mouth off about Emerson and Melville and Whitman, in addition to creative writing and poetry in general, would not be a bad career.

Though I feel embarrassed asking for another set of recommendation letters. 

***

I finally had the nerve to get ahold of the student evaluations from the creative writing class I taught two years ago.  I liked teaching that class, and I didn't want to ruin my memory of it by reading the students' comments!

The results are mixed:  Overall, the responses were more favorable than I expected (though not as favorable as I would like).   But I discovered that, as it turns out, my favorite student evidently didn't like me very much.  Oh, well.  She's wrong; that was a good class.

(Note to any students--not just of mine, but in general--who might happen to read this: Your teachers can recognize your handwriting--even after two years!)

***

I've got ideas for my next manuscript of poems and for my poetry-writing style overall, as well as two short stories and a graphic novel in progress, in addition to an idea for a good academic essay that might help with the next round of PhD windmill tilting, and the beginning of a book about creative writing as spiritual practice. 

But on the other hand, I'm completely broke, unemployed with no prospects, and deeply in debt.  I might never recover financially from this past summer and its legacy.  So life could go either way at this point. 

***

I haven't done shit to help the Obama campaign, though I've gotten lots of e-mails about the need for volunteers.  I feel bad, but I just can't believe that making phone calls and knocking on doors can really sway anybody.  At any rate, when it comes right down to it, I can't respect these "undecided" voters.  How can you not know which side you're on?  I don't think I could veil my contempt for these people long enough to talk to them. 

***

I know what I want to do in life, but between that and where I am now, there's an enormous dark chasm of financial woe, and I just don't know how to make it over it, and sometimes I just don't think it's worth it.

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Ha

This made me sort-of-smile a little, inwardly.

Maybe McCain's the one who's Kennedy-esque

Embedded Video

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John McCain is even crazier than you think

I know my blog is nothing but links lately, but at least they're good links.

This made me sort of smile a little, which is no mean feat these days.

(Thanks to Julie for posting this on Facebook.)


What a foolish and dangerous choice by McCain. If the Democrats can't take this display of horrifically poor judgment and turn it into victory, then they don't deserve to be in the White House.

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The wind, one brilliant day, . . .

Here's a cool travel article that is also sort of about poetry--Antonio Machado's, to be specific.

Here's my favorite Machado poem:



The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for this jasmine odor,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; I have no flowers left now
in my garden . . . All are dead."

"Then I'll take the waters of the fountains,
and the yellow leaves and the dried-up petals."

The wind left. . . . I wept.  I said to my soul:
"What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?"


(trans. Robert Bly)

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Doing My Duty as a Member of the Poetry Community

Probably anyone reading this blog has already heard about this, but it can't hurt to post this anyway, I figure.

I wonder what the runner-up (who got published) thinks, if he/she has heard about this. That would be an odd position to be in, I would imagine. I'd think it would take the bloom off the rose, a bit, knowing that his/her book got published only as a result of this villainy.

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Something Worth Reading

This is pretty cool.

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Surprised by Nuanced Literalism

There's a book out in which the author, N.T. Wright, a notable Christian scholar and thinker, posits that the traditional Christian idea of Heaven is all wrong.  Heaven should not be imagined as the ultimate reward, an everlasting paradise in which one spends eternity with God. Rather, it's a temporary stop on the way to the actual physical resurrection of the body when Christ returns. 

Or something like that.  I haven't read the book, though I rather want to.  (If my ramblings here are based on a misunderstanding of what this author really says, I apologize.  But, even though I may not have time to get around to reading this for a while, it's on my mind right now.)

What fascinates me is that this author--a very intelligent, educated man--appears to actually believe that this is literally true. 

it seems to me that the reason many such literalistic Christians are literalistic Christians is that they want to live inside a myth.  That is, they want it to be true, and not "myth" at all.  This author seems to be a grade well above the Left Behind crew, in terms of intelligence.  And yet he thinks everyone will someday be physically resurrected. 

I'm somewhat ambivalent as to how to respond to this.  On the one hand, I find myself a lot more sympathetic to this sort of culture than are most of my literary/academic peers.  I am convinced that spirituality and religion are essential parts of human life.  I mean, truly essential, as in we really cannot live without them.  On the other hand, it may be that such literalism, by projecting spiritual reality "out there" instead of realizing it within, is really not much better, spiritually, than the spiritually-denatured secular post-humanism that it supposedly opposes.

I mean, watch Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth already, people.  Seriously.  If you didn't get it the first time, watch it again.

Still, I guess I finally come down more on the pro side than on the con.  Wright's is not the brutish, desperate literalism of mere fundamentalism.  I understand the appeal of living in a myth, even if I think it's ultimately spiritually dessicating to remain inside it.  "Hope" is all living inside a myth can offer, because one is forever hoping for the myth to be proven "true."  Better to see through it, so as to realize its wisdom right here and now.  Christianity remains a powerful symbol-system which can make possible powerful insights into one's own being and that of the universe, generally, if one takes a step outside of "belief." 

But it can be lonely and cold outside of a myth, especially if one loses contact with myth and archetype entirely, which is dangerously easy once one ceases to "believe."

Then one gets a job in a university English department and rambles about the signifier and the signified, or something, I suppose. 

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All the king's horses and all the king's men have not yet been able to put Michael back together again.

Obviously, my posts have dwindled since the golden age of May. Let's just say that June and July were truly nightmarish (and August appears to be just as bad, so far). Actually, most of my regular readers have some idea what's been going on. But I don't want this to be "that" kind of blog, so I'll just move on.

One important development is that, due to personal setbacks this summer, the PhD plan is either postponed or dashed completely, depending in part upon whether I can get myself back together again. So, I won't be going to Chicago this fall, after all. This might be the end of my student life forever, for all I know right now.

Occupying this weird liminal space, in which I don't know what either the future or the immediate present hold for me, has made me look hard at my life plans, to the extent that I have any. For a while I had planned to quit poetry completely, since the PhD commitment was really all that was connecting me to poetry. I feel quite alienated by much of contemporary poetry, not to mention by my difficulty in getting anything published. But I've had an idea for my next manuscript, which will likely be even more unpalatable to publishers than is Thrown, my current manuscript. The gist of it is something like "Fifty Ways to Imagine God," in which each poem is a different variety of imaginative poetic theology, which I mean as loosely and openly as possible. So, in theory, this will include a huge variety of forms and voices. I'm hoping this will allow me to jump around between all the different styles of vision and discourse that fill my reading life. The title will likely be Godsmithing, for which I am indebted to Melissa in the Spring 06 poetry workshop.

Overall, my motivation for writing is generally to participate in the culture; I write to be read. I agree completely with Sartre that literature, to exist, must include both writer and reader. But now I'm leaning towards writing more in terms of some kind of personal spiritual exploration. I have not used poetry in that way thus far; usually I use poems to report, and to celebrate, what I have already learned by other means. So now I'm reading touchy-feely writing-as-therapy sort of books. I wanted a new direction, and this certainly is one!

Other recent inner developments include a recognition that I have largely lost my way spiritually, so the vacation from the academy may allow me to return to my old practices. If I didn't have so many debts to deal with, I would go live at Zen Mountain Monastery, which I consider my spiritual home base. Maybe in the coming year I will finally achieve my old dream of being a formal student of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism. There is a Toledo Zen group, which I have never gotten around to connecting with, that is loosely affiliated with the monastery. And I've already taken the refuge and bodhisattva vows in the Tibetan Karma Kagyu tradition, so I hope to re-connect with them as well. (My "problem" has robbed me of much of my control of my life, so hoping is the best I can do these days.)

Of course, I really have no idea what's going to happen to me. For the first time in many years, I have no economic security of any kind. No job lined up, no loans on the way. So far, no prospects at all. I'm hoping that having two master's degrees will let me get a job other than working at Wal-Mart. I wonder how I would look in the blue vest with the smiley face.

"O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." -- Thomas Wolfe

I don't usually post this sort of thing . . .

. . . but this one sums up my feelings about the world right now.

Plus, I like kitties.

(The whole picture doesn't quite fit, but if you click on it, you can see the whole thing.)



more cat pictures

Michael rates the superhero movies . . .

. . . with brief commentary.

(I'm not writing about poetry. Fuck poetry. I quit poetry. I'd rather make a list of superhero movies.)

(This list includes only those films released since 2000, so the older Superman and Batman films are not included. Also, I'm only including superheroes that existed when I was a little kid, because I don't care so much about the other ones. Though I like Hellboy.)


1. X-Men (2000)
This still holds up really well, I think. It's well cast, well acted, has a good story, is often aesthetically striking, and has soul. The reconceptualization of the Rogue character is still brilliant and moving, and this Wolverine is also an improvement over the comics version. Also: Rebecca Romijn wearing little besides blue paint! What more do you want in a movie?

2. Batman Begins (2005)
This movie saved Batman's cinematic life. Well cast, well acted, and often ingenious in its subtle reinvention of the Batman character. Goes just far enough in making Batman quasi-realistic while maintaining the mythic quality. Christian Bale is just right as Batman, and I still think Katie Holmes is a better Rachel than Maggie Gyllenhaal. Yes, I like this better than its successor.

3. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Much more satisfying than its predecessor. Excellent script, with the use of the web as metaphor for the connectedness Peter has to embrace. A nice balance of action and pathos. Again, casting is key; Maguire again proves he's just right for this character. Raimi's direction is still too broad and hamfisted, but the script compensates nicely.

4. X2 (2003)
A bit too much video-game-style action for my taste, and just a bit too busy in general, but this is still a really good film. The story is good, as are the performances. For me, this one doesn't quite have the same soul-quality as the first one, and I don't think the look of it is quite as sharp as its predecessor's.

5. The Dark Knight (2008)
A very impressive film, but I think it goes too far in the realism direction, losing the mythic aspect of the Batman. Ledger is indeed brilliant, but the movie is just too grim and bleak. Also, I find the first film's psychological theme more interesting than this one's moral theme. And I didn't like Gyllenhaal as Rachel; her Rachel is kind of mean. I wasn't too sorry to see her go. (Though I like Gyllenhaal otherwise.) All in all, I can't say I really want to ever see this one again, even though it's number 5 on the list.

6. Spider-Man (2008)
This one is flawed: the special effects are often poor, the action scenes disappointing. Dafoe's performance is hammy and grating. But Maguire is perfectly cast, as is Dunst, and Raimi gets the basic emotions right. It's a fun movie, though it is eclipsed by its successor. Mainly, this is the one that brought Spidey to the big screen, so you've gotta love it for that reason.

7. Superman Returns (2006)
Routh is no Reeve, but he's watchable, and Bosworth is a big improvement over Kidder (though who wouldn't be?). There are three main flaws with this often poetic reboot of the Superman franchise. One, there's not enough Superman in it. Two, Spacey is suprisingly sucky as Luthor. Three, and most important, this movie features possibly the worst idea ever in the history of screenwriting: Superman has a little moppet-headed sitcom kid. Bad, bad, bad idea. Did anyone actually think, "You know, I like Superman, but he'd be even cooler if he were a dad"? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea. Still, I like the continuation of the Donner elements, and the part where Superman falls to earth after pushing the landmass into space is really good.

8. Hulk (2003)
Give Ang Lee a break. This is not nearly as bad as people say. It's actually an ingenious attempt to give the character some emotional weight, and it's often poetic. And it has Jennifer Connelly in it. To me, the big flaw is Nick Nolte. I guess I just don't like Nick Nolte.

9. X-Men 3: The Last Stand (2006)
It still saddens me that Singer abandoned this to do Superman Returns. It saddens me more that they let Brett Ratner direct in spite of protests by the fans. The worst part about this is the ridiculously short running time; presumably, that was done in order to squeeze one more showing into the schedule at the theater. Way too short, and totally lacking the emotion and poetry of the Singer films, this is, nevertheless, still the same cast, so it's not all bad. But wtf were they thinking to kill Cyclops and Professor X?

10. Spider-Man 3
This is what happens when Raimi doesn't have a good script to balance his hamfisted directing. Mediocre all the way through. But it still has Spider-Man in it, not to mention Kirsten Dunst, so it's worth watching. Once.

11. Fantastic Four (2005)
Tim Story makes Sam Raimi look like Ingmar friggin Bergman. How do you fuck up the Fantastic Four? Watch and learn. Chiklis is good as the Thing, but the rest of the actors are sadly miscast. I like looking at Jessica Alba just as much as the next guy, but she's not Sue Storm Richards, and the British guy from Horatio Hornblower is really miscast as Reed Richards. Mostly, it's just a bad script and hack directing.

12. Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)
As above, but more so.


I have not seen Iron Man or the new Hulk movie.

Now, if you want to see some genuinely pleasing filmmaking, here's an animated short called "The Cat Came Back." I used to really like this back in the day. Enjoy.

Good for me, good for you!

This may seem apropos of nothing, but this is the kind of stuff that helps me remember who I used to be underneath all this academic soot that covers me currently. It may only be a clip from an old tv show, but it's still the kind of stuff that used to mean a lot to me (and still does). So I'm inflicting it on you! So, welcome to a glimpse of my heart of hearts.

Paradise Procrastinated

I figure anyone reading this blog must be pretty desperate for something to read. So, even though I seem to have lost interest in my own thoughts recently, that's no reason you should go hungry. And since my own progress with Milton has been a little slow thus far, here's a link to a good article that just came out in The New Yorker. The very fact of such an article in 2008 kind of makes me happy. (Here's a sentence to whet your appetite: "The best-known portrait of his mature years makes Milton look like the dyspeptic brother of the man on the Quaker Oats box.")

This article comes along at a good time for me, because it helps me psych myself up for finishing (which is to say, reading about ¾ of it for the first time) Paradise Lost. I haven't even gotten to "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso". I'm just about to re-read Vendler's chapter on Milton from Coming of Age as a Poet, though.

I did, however, watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which is a poetic epic in its way. So I haven't been totally unproductive. (Plus, Nausicaä is way cooler than Adam.)

Also, I read a book about Freud and Einstein, so it may be that I'll be ranting about psychoanalytic theory instead of poetry when I get back on the blog-wagon. Can you feel the excitement?

Don't say you haven't been warned.

It turns out mystics really do still have a place in our culture

Did you know that there is a "Joan of Arc" brand of canned goods? I'm trying to imagine the mental process of the marketing whiz who came up with that brand name. It must have been something like

Virgin saint + visions of God + France vs. England + heresy + martyrdom = Beans!

Burned at the stake = good cookin'?

Beauty, truth, blah blah blah: Part II

In which the author resorts to the "undergrad term-paper interlude" that, in an earlier post, he promised to spare his readers.

***

So, since I don't really have any new thoughts today, I'm posting a more detailed version of my response to "Ode on a Grecian Urn" from last week. I guess I get a little pedantic when discussing this poem, but it's only because I care.

***

The ending to this poem is very famous, but these days the consensus seems to be that Keats dodges the questions he raises and is full of sh*t. This blows my mind. As far as I can see, Keats resolves his poem perfectly; he doesn't answer the original questions because they are quite simply the wrong questions. To put it oversimplistically (which is something I'm pretty good at), his "point" is that the truth conveyed by art, which may be the only truth that's really possible, is (at least experientially) nontemporal rather than temporal. Critics whose orientation is 100% social-historical miss this point, because they can't conceive of anything that doesn't exist in time.

The questions about what is happening in the urn's images cannot be answered. Such knowledge died with the urn's creators; such knowledge belongs to the mortal, temporal world, as does the plaintive speaker of the poem. Keats asks the questions in order to display the tragic fact of their unanswerability. He invites the reader to try to imagine these narrative, temporal details, so as to then pull the rug out from under the reader, forcing her/him to make the same shift the speaker makes. "We can't know those answers," he implies, "but maybe we can know something else." So the speaker turns to the kind of truth that art can and does communicate. Its "silent form . . . [teases] us out of thought," so that it is possible to apprehend something that has variously been called both beauty and truth. Art can't save us from death, but it can show us something that never dies.

Basically, this is just a variety of Platonism, which rubs some people the wrong way (or, perhaps, doesn't rub them at all). Some might say the ending is a false consolation; such critics would argue that the proper conclusion, once the speaker has realized the impossibility of truly knowing the temporal world, is to admit that there is no such thing as truth at all. For them, "heard melodies" are the only melodies there are. But Keats wants to redefine beauty and truth (or at least return them to a quasi-Platonic sense). This isn't the kind of beauty that has "ugly" (or anything else) as its opposite; this isn't the kind of truth that has "false" (or anything else) as its opposite. In other words, it's not about judging what is or isn't "beautiful" or "true"; the judging mind has no place here. It's about being struck between the eyes with a perception of reality so powerful and so fresh that it seems reality has been properly and genuinely communicated. It's a different order of experience. For Keats, art can provide this. An experience of seeming timelessness is available to consciousness, and Keats somewhat desperately seizes upon this option as a consolation for the pain of loss and time. But it's a legitimate consolation.

The great thing about Keats is that for him, beauty always resided smack dab in the midst of the most sensual experience. In his version of Platonism, one does not leave "this world" behind in favor of some de-sensualized intellectual dimension. Rather, one finds beauty here and now, and in so doing one somehow transcends temporality even while immersed within it. No ladder is necessary, because there's nowhere else to go—certainly nowhere better than here, as long as one has poetry to provide the unheard melodies.

I like to think of this poem in combination with a much more informal little poem called "This Living Hand":

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

I find this one especially haunting. It makes his search for timeless beauty and truth in "Grecian Urn" that much more poignant. The final truth of "Grecian Urn" is that one can partake of eternity through art, but one must be alive to do so. That beauty is truth is all we know and need to know on earth. For Keats, eternity is only for the living.

For God's sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.

I love that line.

Okay, so instead of reading Milton and Coleridge and the like, I've been watching Woody Allen movies. But those are classics, too. (Some of them, anyway.)

What I like most about Allen's best films is that they present such an idiosyncratically complete version of reality. Films such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors feel as if Allen somehow transferred his soul directly onto celluloid. (Whether or not they really do express the "real" Woody Allen is irrelevant; more important is that they seem to.) The women, the doomed relationships, the jokes, the jazz, the New York intellectuals, and just New York generally: these things all combine so perfectly that I just envy the hell out of Allen for being able to make art that way.

This is what makes an artist great: s/he (re)creates a reality that reflects the essence of his/her personality. This is as true for poetry as for film: When I read Blake, for instance, I am allowed to live in the world as Blake saw it. This is appealing because it's the reflection not of the everyday, confused, ordinary personality, but of an intensified, essentialized personality; it's the reflection of how it feels to be fully aware, fully focused, and fully alive. No doubt William Blake shuffled about in an ordinary, confused state most of the time, as do we all. But sometimes his personality coalesced so as to make possible the reality that we find in his poems and paintings. All that he thought and felt and obsessed over came together in the work. This appeals, I think, because we all want to tap into the equivalent intensification of our own selves. Once we know what this feels like from experiencing great art, we have a better chance of coalescing this way ourselves. And then one's whole experience of reality changes, if only temporarily, because the world we see is the world we are.

Also, I like the specific milieu of Allen's films. I like the humor, and I like the intellectually pretentious characters. I think I may be a Woody Allen character, or maybe I aspire to be one. He has a brilliant short story called "The Whore of Mensa," about a call-girl service that provides beautiful women who, instead of having sex with their customers, have conversations with them about stuff like Dostoevsky or Hegel or the symbolism in Moby-Dick, etc. If such a service were real, I would use it.

I guess part of my interest in Allen's work is a sort of nostalgia for that sort of intellectual culture, in which literature majors actually talked about literature instead of just theory. I'm nostalgic for it, even though I never experienced it when it really existed. I want to think about symbolism and meaning, not all this gender and class crap. I feel kind of betrayed by the current English-dept. climate. But I digress.

I'm still planning to delve deeply into English lit., and as I do so I will try to focus on how the poets in question manage to transfer their essential souls into the writing.

You're Goddamned Right Beauty Is Truth

I guess I missed yesterday's blog entry. Oh, well; calendars and schedules are for squares, anyway.

***


Today's blog entry is participatory! Here's a litmus test for your intellectual/spiritual orientation: What do you think of the ending to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? More specifically, do you agree with the ending, or is Keats full of it? Does this ending resolve the poem, or is Keats dodging the questions he raises?

In case you haven't memorized the poem, it goes like this:



ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
By John Keats

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.





I'm not going to drone on and on with my interpretation, because I don't want today's blog entry to degenerate into an undergrad term-paper interlude. Suffice to say, I can't believe everyone doesn't sigh with assent upon reading the ending of this poem. People usually either sigh with assent or scratch their heads, nonplussed. Which makes me scratch my head. While I'm sighing.

You make the call.

I Prefer Poems That Aren't Shaved Down There

I hadn't planned to start off with thoughts on Shakespeare, but what the hell.

One of the reasons I read poetry is to steal from other poets. But how does one steal from Shakespeare? I do think he (whoever he was, Stratford or Oxford) was a bona fide genius, but part of his allure also results from his placement in history. He wrote at a time of unusual opportunity, when the modern English language, our English, was just being born.

Here's a partial list of words he coined: compromise, dwindle, madcap, tranquil, lonely, submerge, undress, cold-blooded, champion, torture, swagger, and bloodstained. A longer list can be found here. And then there's the way he used the words . . .

The English language is always changing, always alive. However, our language is still basically the same language that Shakespeare and his contemporaries originated. Poets can still mess with language a great deal, but is it even possible for anyone today to write as freshly as Shakespeare? Even if someone of equal genius appeared today, I think he or she would might not be able to achieve equal results. I fear the language is just not molten and protean enough anymore. Has it cooled and hardened? It seems to let less in, at least without a fight. An author who uses neologisms these days often seems merely eccentric or, at best, "experimental."

And yet that's still just so tempting. There's a lot of pressure on poets now to use what Eliot called "the language of the tribe." God forbid anyone uses language that isn't familiar and contemporary. But that limitation dulls the English language, it seems to me. Even "experimental" poets often use very limited diction. How can poets write poetry as lexically lively as Shakespeare's without seeming merely eccentric? How can poets preserve the richness of the language without seeming quaintly anachronistic?

The last major poet who tried to keep the English language thick with non-ordinary vocabulary was Hart Crane. His approach to Modernism was to drop Elizabethan and Romantic language directly atop the phenomena of the modern world, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, willing them to co-exist. If only he had (fully) succeeded. Think of the possibilities that would be available if his version of modernism had taken. Instead, we got W.C. Williams and his goddamned wheel barrow. (Nothing depends on that f***ing wheel barrow! Nothing, I say!)

In an earlier post, I announced my preference for curvy language. To that, let me add my allegiance to furry language. Let me further say that current diction is often the equivalent of a woman who's shaved down there, and that, in literature as in life, I prefer the forest to the plain.

I think I shall be among the English poets

Unfortunately, in my case that means only that I hope to spend a good chunk of summer reading them. I mean the classics, baby.

Many, I am already familiar with; I'll be deepening my awareness of those poets. (You go, John Keats!) Others, I'm sad to admit, I have not read in sufficient depth. Usually, such poets are the ones I admire but don't exactly enjoy. (I'm looking at you, John Milton. I'll finish Paradise Lost this summer if it kills me. Though hopefully it won't kill me, seeing as that would interfere somewhat with my progress in the doctoral program. I do enjoy Milton in short bursts, actually, but I've never been able to get through that whole poem.)

I am one of those old fogeys who think poets should be very well read not only in contemporary poetry but in the canon, as well. Because I am not satisfied with my own experience in that area, I feel a need to dive head-first into the treasure house.

Strangely, some contemporary poets don't have much interest in the older stuff. I'm not just talking about the kids who say, "I don't read poetry; I just write it." I mean real, authentic, card-carrying poet-union members who never spend any time reading anything published before 1980. To each his/her own, but it's just strange to me. I would rather read "To Autumn" or "Tintern Abbey" or just about anything by Shakespeare than read about 90% of what gets published these days. (Not that the new stuff isn't good; it's just that some of the older stuff is even better.) At any rate, I like being aware of the history, however mythic, of my vocation.

(Also, the advantage of writing about older stuff is that I can say anything I want without the danger of running into the author at AWP or someplace!)

Since I've already pretty well spewed my whole kooky philosophy of everything here on the blog in the last 10 days or so, I have to come up with something else to write about. Thus, I'm hoping that blogging my thoughts on the elders will be both helpful to my project and at least a little bit interesting to any readers I might still have. Besides, if I promise to write about this stuff, I have to actually do the reading!

However, if I'm to maintain my interest, I'll probably have to abandon chronology and read whatever suits me at the moment. (Otherwise, I might never get past Shakespeare! I love Shakespeare, but there's just so much there.) Then again, I may get anal and proceed in strict chronological order.

(I am including the Americans, beginning with Whitman, whom I'll get to eventually. But I'll probably stick with the Brits at first.)

So, for a little while I shall speak of poetry instead of vague musings about gods and brains and the nature of matter. Delicious.

Doesn't This Guy Ever Think About Anything Else?

I'm told obsessiveness is a good quality in artists.

***

Gods live in the psyche. Even if initially sparked by survival stress, fear of death, or childhood trauma, the figures and occurrences of myth have evidently become permanent inhabitants of our bodies and minds. These phantoms, far exceeding their possible origins as delusional responses to the hardships of life, animate our whole experience of the world. As some children exceed their parents (quick: name Einstein's mother and father, or Da Vinci's), these figures are the stars, in every sense, of the imagination. The gods now imagine us.

They may not always appear as persons. Like the Biblical God, they may appear as natural symbols: fire, a whirlwind, darkness. They may appear as habitual thought-constellations: Ares within road rage or political partisanship, or Aphrodite lurking inside flirtiness or the delight in the lovely shapes of things.

I could go on and on, but you're better off just reading Jung and James Hillman.

However, aside from featuring mythic personages (which in this case is what I mean by "gods," including figures such as Orpheus, Odysseus, etc.), myths display processes. In all myths, the gods act. They do stuff. The story shifts from one to another and back again, then on to still another.

Narrative theory tells us that such stories are the way humans order and make sense of the world, which is not wrong. But what especially intrigues me about myths is the way they mirror psychic process, the way one thought merges into another and another and another. (And by thought, I mean any content of mind, whether intellectual or emotional.) And not just stories; lyric poems also have a progressive logic that is equivalent to that of story.

I have tried in the past (unsuccessfully) to find a way of representing this in language, switching between registers of diction and of feeling in order to parallel the shifts within the myths. Every myth is an interaction of multiple mythic figures in narrative-temporal sequence. What interests me is not just which archetypes are present, but how they interact, in the way that chemicals interact with each other. Two otherwise harmless chemicals, when combined, make a big boom. The same is true for gods.

This still seems to me a good basis for what I want to do in poems. I like to shift between various registers, and I'd like to somehow use myth (however loosely) as my template for how to best arrange these shifts, how to place them in relation to each other, how to let the various tonal sub-voices move throughout the poem.

Music also seems a promising model, but I don't really understand it well enough to use it (yet).

The project of reconciling active involvement with these myths while paying attention to the findings of the scientists is not easy. Lately, it is kicking my ass. The conclusion I keep coming to is that the needs of the psyche must be honored, whether or not they are found to be reducible to brain mechanics. So, this is how I preserve the gods. They remain the way the universe likes to imagine itself. What is necessary is not to believe, but rather to care. Without this care, we cannot imagine intensely. The best answer I have to the question of what to do with these myths: just sit back and behold them, participating when invited.