I stared at myself and knew that this me was real
Rabbit, rabbit! For the new year, we seem to have gained upstairs neighbors. They are not yet fully in residence, but as of this afternoon could be seen and heard moving in. I still don't have a cardigan, but I can tell that I am officially middle-aged because they look so young that I have found myself saying to my parents that they must be college students because as far as I know high school students are not allowed to rent two-thirds of a house independently. Given that the contractors only quit the premises the day before yesterday, I am trying to talk myself down from the terror that I will never sleep again.
Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer: identified in notes as a photograph from Harriet Walter's Other People's Shoes: Thoughts on Acting (1999), "Edward and I swap props as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane."
A terrible op-ed about the death of poetry directly inspired one of the best reviews As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022) has so far garnered, by which I feel honored and for which I refuse to be grateful to the author of the op-ed because it really is that terrible. It is terrible on the level of "how is he published in the New York Times and I am still poor." His assertion that T.S. Eliot existentially destroyed English poetry by doing it better in the form he uniquely originated than anyone who could ever come after him renders itself a hard call between the author's ignorance of the last century of English poetry and his ignorance of English poetry before 1922. I assume some qualified person has already beaten him to a flapjack with Hope Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919), but just in case:
The ghost of Père Lachaise
Is walking the streets;
He is draped in a black curtain embroidered with the letter H,
He is hung with paper wreaths,
He is beautiful and horrible and the close friend of Rousseau, the official of the Douane.
The unities are smashed,
The stage is thick with corpses. . . .
Kind clever gaillards
Their eidola in hideous frames inset with the brass motto
MORT AU CHAMP D'HONNEUR;
And little widows moaning
Le pauvre grand!
Le pauvre grand!
And petites bourgeoises with tight lips and strident voices are counting out the change and saying Messieursetdames and their hearts are the ruined province of Picardie. . . .
They are not like us, who, ghoul-like, bury our friends a score of times before they're dead but—
Never never again will the Marne
Flow between happy banks.
(Eliot never included two staves of sheet music in any of his collages, did he?)
ETA: It is such a terrible op-ed that I found myself still ranting about it tospatch in the shower, whence this abbreviated reconstruction of my complaints. It is riddled with factual inaccuracies about the definition and practice of poetry which a person could spend all night swatting if they felt like self-harm, but its mere premise that the human spirit was ticking along in transcendent consonance with the natural world until modernity destroyed our relationship with nature and Eliot confirmed this state by destroying our relationship with poetry—assumed to have existed itself in some natural form on which artificial techniques like the quotation of pop culture were violently perpetrated—is exactly the kind of curdled conservative myth that gives nostalgia a bad name, presuming the existence of a golden age from which we have all been cast down to wander sadly in a post-lapsarian wilderness of allusions and blank verse. It's so sloppily Christian. O that we had never had that war to end all wars, would that we but lived in those Edwardian days of Eden, how happy and iambic we all should be. Take no notice of those Imagists behind the curtain. (To counter the claim that the default register of all poetry in the last hundred years is Eliot manqué, one could also flatten the author with H.D. The Norton Collected Poems 1912–1944 is decently phone-book-sized and would make a satisfying splat.) See also Cubism, Gertrude Stein. The Russian Futurists and Victory Over the Sun, which for God's sake was written in zaum, if the author considers a nine-syllable line of English to be rupturingly radical, please let me see his face when he tries to read a transrational language. Any of the cauldron of related movements in philosophy, the arts, and even the sciences in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century that all crashed as hard as Eliot personally into history with the shattering results of which he was one fragment and not the entire ruin, not to mention the movements that formed out of and did not survive World War One. (Pour one out for the Vorticists. We'll always have dazzle camouflage.) The author opens his op-ed with a sort of self-deprecating brag about his lack of formal education in English-language poetry. I too rate a near-autodidact in that department. All of my training in prosody, diction, genre and so forth was gained in Latin, Greek, and ephemerally Akkadian and I can still tell that his argument is a bunch of bushwah on toast. I have half-assed my rebuttal, but I am not sure it deserves more, certainly not of my brain at this hour. In conclusion, Eliot was enormously influential on me in that exposure to his collected juvenilia over the winter break of my freshman year of college was one of the factors that jumpstarted my adult writing of poetry, as far as I can tell because it reassured me that one could write a cornerstone of modern literature and have come to it by the hard road of sucking that much. I am going to bed.
Courtesy of
moon_custafer: identified in notes as a photograph from Harriet Walter's Other People's Shoes: Thoughts on Acting (1999), "Edward and I swap props as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane."A terrible op-ed about the death of poetry directly inspired one of the best reviews As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022) has so far garnered, by which I feel honored and for which I refuse to be grateful to the author of the op-ed because it really is that terrible. It is terrible on the level of "how is he published in the New York Times and I am still poor." His assertion that T.S. Eliot existentially destroyed English poetry by doing it better in the form he uniquely originated than anyone who could ever come after him renders itself a hard call between the author's ignorance of the last century of English poetry and his ignorance of English poetry before 1922. I assume some qualified person has already beaten him to a flapjack with Hope Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919), but just in case:
The ghost of Père Lachaise
Is walking the streets;
He is draped in a black curtain embroidered with the letter H,
He is hung with paper wreaths,
He is beautiful and horrible and the close friend of Rousseau, the official of the Douane.
The unities are smashed,
The stage is thick with corpses. . . .
Kind clever gaillards
Their eidola in hideous frames inset with the brass motto
MORT AU CHAMP D'HONNEUR;
And little widows moaning
Le pauvre grand!
Le pauvre grand!
And petites bourgeoises with tight lips and strident voices are counting out the change and saying Messieursetdames and their hearts are the ruined province of Picardie. . . .
They are not like us, who, ghoul-like, bury our friends a score of times before they're dead but—
Never never again will the Marne
Flow between happy banks.
(Eliot never included two staves of sheet music in any of his collages, did he?)
ETA: It is such a terrible op-ed that I found myself still ranting about it to
spatch in the shower, whence this abbreviated reconstruction of my complaints. It is riddled with factual inaccuracies about the definition and practice of poetry which a person could spend all night swatting if they felt like self-harm, but its mere premise that the human spirit was ticking along in transcendent consonance with the natural world until modernity destroyed our relationship with nature and Eliot confirmed this state by destroying our relationship with poetry—assumed to have existed itself in some natural form on which artificial techniques like the quotation of pop culture were violently perpetrated—is exactly the kind of curdled conservative myth that gives nostalgia a bad name, presuming the existence of a golden age from which we have all been cast down to wander sadly in a post-lapsarian wilderness of allusions and blank verse. It's so sloppily Christian. O that we had never had that war to end all wars, would that we but lived in those Edwardian days of Eden, how happy and iambic we all should be. Take no notice of those Imagists behind the curtain. (To counter the claim that the default register of all poetry in the last hundred years is Eliot manqué, one could also flatten the author with H.D. The Norton Collected Poems 1912–1944 is decently phone-book-sized and would make a satisfying splat.) See also Cubism, Gertrude Stein. The Russian Futurists and Victory Over the Sun, which for God's sake was written in zaum, if the author considers a nine-syllable line of English to be rupturingly radical, please let me see his face when he tries to read a transrational language. Any of the cauldron of related movements in philosophy, the arts, and even the sciences in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century that all crashed as hard as Eliot personally into history with the shattering results of which he was one fragment and not the entire ruin, not to mention the movements that formed out of and did not survive World War One. (Pour one out for the Vorticists. We'll always have dazzle camouflage.) The author opens his op-ed with a sort of self-deprecating brag about his lack of formal education in English-language poetry. I too rate a near-autodidact in that department. All of my training in prosody, diction, genre and so forth was gained in Latin, Greek, and ephemerally Akkadian and I can still tell that his argument is a bunch of bushwah on toast. I have half-assed my rebuttal, but I am not sure it deserves more, certainly not of my brain at this hour. In conclusion, Eliot was enormously influential on me in that exposure to his collected juvenilia over the winter break of my freshman year of college was one of the factors that jumpstarted my adult writing of poetry, as far as I can tell because it reassured me that one could write a cornerstone of modern literature and have come to it by the hard road of sucking that much. I am going to bed.
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That monocle is much admired and it should be.
(I don't remember the cricket scene! I saw the film maybe a year after it came out; I had just re-read the novel for the first time since childhood.)
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Off-topic comment is off-topic
https://waxjism.tumblr.com/post/704999653637242880
Slightly on-topic:
which for God's sake was written in zaum, if the author considers a nine-syllable line of English to be rupturingly radical, please let me see his face when he tries to read a transrational language.
You may be pleased to know that zaum was honoured in the naming of ZA/UM, the group of weird Estonian creatives who made Disco Elysium.
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Nicely ranted.
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"The kind of curdled conservative myth that gives nostalgia a bad name." JUST SO.
And such weird notions of poetic purity.
P.
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I did not read it originally, either, because Anna Tambour did not dignify it with a link, but then I became curious and then I became appalled.
Re: Off-topic comment is off-topic
Thank you! I love that portrait. I wonder if I can find the article, too.
You may be pleased to know that zaum was honoured in the naming of ZA/UM, the group of weird Estonian creatives who made Disco Elysium.
I am! A weird creative collective seems like exactly the right sort of people to make the homage.
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Thank you. (Argh!)
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It is ridiculous! It is the sort of potted pseudo-history of modern poetry that a person might produce if they did not actually read poetry but had just had their mind blown by The Waste Land and were leapfrogging to unsubstantiable conclusions. And some editor gave it column inches and presumably paid the author. I really am assuming he's been shredded up one side and down the other and up the first side again by people who actually have degrees in this stuff, but why even create the opportunity?
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Thank you. I liked the part where I got a good review.
JUST SO.
It actually took me a little while to notice because I was so distracted by shouting things like "William Blake! The soldier-poets of WWI! Robinson Jeffers! Stevie Smith! Less famous people sitting behind me on the shelf as we speak who published after 1922! Have you read any poetry published since 1922?"
And such weird notions of poetic purity.
Anyone who claims the existence of an actual binary division between traditional poetry about the transcendent natural world and modern experiments in sound and sense should be chased seven times around the walls of Troy with the complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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You're welcome. I read on my own time, which I am not sure the op-ed's author could be bothered to do.
One little thing that occurred to me is that this hundredth anniversary of the publication of "The Waste Land," which is what the op-ed commemorates, coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the writing of "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." This in and of itself suggests that poetry beyond Eliot was not exhausted in 1922.
That is an excellent point and one which I did not know myself.
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Thank you. It hadn't occurred to me; I don't think of it as something that I am qualified to charge people for, which I suppose I should think about. I am glad you find it valuable.
I read a large chunk of this aloud to Arthur, who has himself opined many times that opinion pieces in the NYT should be an entirely separate (ignored) publication from the news reporting paper.
Filed next to the National Enquirer.
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(also BRO, DO YOU EVEN ANNE SEXTON?)
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*hugs*
I support your hoodie. I bet you can get that sort of thing printed up.
(also BRO, DO YOU EVEN ANNE SEXTON?)
I DOUBT THE BRO ANNE SEXTONS THOUGH IT WOULD DO HIM GOOD.
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was
magnificent
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It's a nice trait to have! I had no prior experience of the author's other work, so I had no warning beyond the reaction I had read on Facebook.
(Which were your favorite bits to recite?)
But I enjoyed your rant! Thanks for the Mirrlees poem, which I in fact did not know - I would have beaten him over the head with Hopkins, it being the sort of poetry he had actually heard of.
Thank you! And you're welcome; I love Mirrlees even though all I've read of her is Paris and Lud-in-the-Mist.
Please feel free to go at the author with Hopkins. See reply to
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was
magnificent
Thank you.
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Thank you!
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(How are you finding Chanctonbury Rings?)
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Thank you! I bet you know more than that guy no matter what.
(How are you finding Chanctonbury Rings?)
(I love it! I am usually a hard sell on spoken word because it processes differently than music with or without sung lyrics, but I am trying to figure out how to order a copy of Hopper's Old Weird Albion.)
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Your rant, on the other hand, was very good, and I hadn't read the Mirrlees poem before.
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If you have low blood pressure, it's probably just what the doctor ordered.
Your rant, on the other hand, was very good, and I hadn't read the Mirrlees poem before.
Thank you, and I am glad to have introduced the poem to you.
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Good call!
But perhaps he doesn’t count Christopher Smart.
He doesn't seem to count a lot of people he really, really should.