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In which the English major rants about the Master letters

In which the English major rants about the Master letters published on No Comments on In which the English major rants about the Master letters

“Hey, so I finally finished my book!”

“Congrats! What’s it about?”

“Emily Dickinson’s letters.”

“Like the relationship between her letters and her poems? Or the letters she wrote to her sister-in-law? Or the letters she wrote to people asking weird questions like ‘Do you think my Verses are alive?’”

“Well, yeah, no. Actually about the Master letters.”

“Aw, neat – one of the great literary mysteries! So…any new background – theories – discoveries – secret insights?”

“Actually, that’s not really what the book is about.”

“How can you write a book about three incredibly intense and fragmentary literary texts and not go into any of that?”

“Okay, well, actually, I didn’t really write the book so much as I transcribed it.”

“Are you telling me that you transcribed the Master letters and tried to turn that text alone into a book under your very own name without including any sort of critical apparatus?”

“There is so some critical apparatus! I put in facsimiles as well as transcriptions that show the stages each letter went through.”

“So…then…what you’re saying is that I have to get your book to actually read the letters, but then, if I want any clue at all about their context or significance or, you know, anything else, I have to hit the library again? Dude – seriously – you can’t say you’ve written a book about something if all you did is reproduce the text. That’s like me claiming that I wrote a whole book about Shakespeare when all I did was transcribe a bad quarto. Cheater.”

The time has come to figure out what the hell Emily Dickinson was doing.

The time has come to figure out what the hell Emily Dickinson was doing. published on No Comments on The time has come to figure out what the hell Emily Dickinson was doing.

Because I can’t get it all from staring at her collected poems and trying to write my own [crappily] in the same form, I really need to look at her letters because they are extraordinary – just as intense, condensed, experimental, elliptical, and fascinating as her poems.

Okay then…so I need a general bio for context, after which I’m planning to focus on two of her most ambiguous, interesting, and charged correspondences. The first are to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson. The first are interesting because there’s an open question about what sort of relationship the two had. They were both writers, and Susan knew more than anyone about Dickinson’s poetry, having received 250+ poems over their 30+-year correspondence. For Dickinson, the relationship was at once intimate, cherished, world-opening, and contentious.

The second are three fragmentary texts known as the Master letters – i.e., after the addressee. They are very…charged. What the hell are those things – diary entries, poetry, draft letters, fair copies of sent letters, literary experiments? And the addressee – a real person, different real people, an imaginary person, different imaginary people, a personification, a deity, an abstraction, and/or several of the above? Here’s an overview of the Master letters, which, of course, assumes that they are all about SEX!!!! D: D: D:

I’m going to go with my favorite answer to questions like, “Are you x, y, or z?”:

“Yes.”

Pro tip: Depending on how sarcastic and/or generally devious the people in your head are, do not use this formulation when asking them questions because you’ll only get one answer instead of the three you expected. And, even if that single answer is the most accurate, it’s neither explicit, nor elaborate, nor ultimately satisfying.

“Right then. So is there any way at all of you answering my questions in a more useful fashion?”

“My answers are plenty useful. It’s just your perspective that’s unhelpful.”

“You’re unhelpful.”

“I’m very helpful. It ain’t my fault if you’re not ready to consider the truth of what I say.”

“So, in other words, you’re quoting the Gospel according to Mick: ‘Thou canst not always get what thou wantest, but, if thou tryest sometimes, thou just might find, thou gettest what thou needest?’“

“Well, the archaic conjugation kinda kills the meter, but the sentiment’s correct.”

Question by May Swenson

Question by May Swenson published on No Comments on Question by May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

Swenson does the best poetry of the body. I love the enjambment in "Body my good / bright dog is dead." It’s like the speaker loves life so much that she actually breaks off in the middle of the thought before getting to "dead" because she’s so stuck on the goodness and brightness of being an embodied being. I also like the phrase "wind for an eye" because it implicitly continues the house metaphor by subtly recalling the etymology of "window," from Old Norse "vindauga," or "wind’s eye."

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1491020.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.

I’m ignoring the title.

I’m ignoring the title. published on No Comments on I’m ignoring the title.

…which is A Christmas Tree, which I think somehow cheapens the whole thing by making it some trite, pallid God metaphor.

A Christmas Tree
by William Burford

Star,
if you are
A love compassionate,
You will walk with us this year.
We face a glacial distance, who are here
Huddld
At your feet.

I like the personification of the astronomical body, the begging of warmth across the chill of space, the abject genuflection of the insignificant people [who are so insignificant that they can’t buy another vowel for "Huddld"]. It’s a desperate and rather hopeless plea.

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1490895.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.

The one thing I like by D.H. Lawrence

The one thing I like by D.H. Lawrence published on No Comments on The one thing I like by D.H. Lawrence

The dude generally pisses me off with his fucking stupid misogyny and gender essentialism, not to mention racism, but I do love this poem:

Death Is Not Evil, Evil Is Mechanical

Only the human being, absolved from kissing and strife
goes on and on and on, without wandering
fixed upon the hub of the ego
going, yet never wandering, fixed, yet in motion,
the kind of hell that is real, grey and awful
sinless and stainless going round and round
the kind of hell grey Dante never saw
but of which he had a bit inside him.

Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.
But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:
a thing of kisses and strife
a lit-up shaft of rain
a calling column of blood
a rose tree bronzey with thorns
a mixture of love and hate
a wind that blows back and forth
a creature of beautiful peace, like a river
and a creature of conflict, like a cataract:
know thyself, in denial of all these things —

And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego
a grey void thing that goes without wandering
a machine that in itself is nothing
a centre of the evil world.

Frankly, I ignore the fact that someone’s been reading too much Freud and return to this poem for the middle part: the quintessence of glorious, vacillating humanity. "A calling column of blood" — what a perfect evocation of our physicality and our longing for emotional connection.

D.H. Lawrence really hates machines… He especially has it out for electric wheelchairs [ref. Clifford Chatterley]. Fuck off, D.H. Lawrence!

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1490624.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.

Apology by Richard Wilbur

Apology by Richard Wilbur published on No Comments on Apology by Richard Wilbur

A word sticks in the wind’s throat;
A wind-launch drifts in the wells of rye;
Sometimes, in broad silence,
The hanging apples distill their darkness.

You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair,
Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say
Softly, forgive me love if also I call you
Wind’s word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.

I love the language here, especially the "wind-launch," with its connotations of air caught in the depths of long grasses. And the apples, "distill[ing] their darkness" — what does that mean? I think of tangy fermentation, cider, fall, secrecy, something somber, witnessing and slightly menacing.

And that enjambment in the second stanze — "whose name I say / Softly " — wow! A word sticks in the speaker’s throat as a word sticks in the wind’s throat. It’s such a regretful poem, a melancholy evocation of thwarted feeling.

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1490396.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.

Le Poete et la Muse

Le Poete et la Muse published on No Comments on Le Poete et la Muse

Alfred de Musset’s La Nuit de Mai is an extended poetic dialog between the Poet and the Muse. The Muse urges the poet to sing/write in the efflorescence of spring. The Poet keeps moping, saying his sadness is too intense to be spoken. The Muse hits some seductive, sexual raptures, but the Poet, too busy immured in his melancholy, seems not to notice. Idiot.

In La Nuit d’Aout and La Nuit d’Octobre, the relationship between le Poete et la Muse continues with erotic charge, but I won’t go into those parts now. I’m just happy that I have rediscovered La Nuit de Mai, especially now that I’m thinking about Anneka and Will’s muses, who probably use de Musset’s Nuits cycle for their own devices.

I hate when that happens…

I hate when that happens… published on No Comments on I hate when that happens…
Here’s the least nonsensical haiku I could get from a generator that creates haikus from one’s blog entries. I hate it when the godly powers of something shove me out the window. :p

Haiku2 for blogofstench

bristles with gods powers
and borders leaving you to
work out the window

@
Created by Grahame

Body of Book by Rachel Hadas

Body of Book by Rachel Hadas published on No Comments on Body of Book by Rachel Hadas

A warm, dense poem, like going to sleep after reading, and then dreaming about oneself in another body. Smells like a villanelle, though it ain’t one. Gives new meaning to the term body language. Also, think of the bookbinding terms that take human metaphors, like “spine” and “jacket” and “joint” and “head” and “tail.”

my sharpened tongue

my sharpened tongue published on 1 Comment on my sharpened tongue

It’s hard to concentrate at work. [No, really??] Forthwith, some spew from the online Romantic selection of Magnetic Poetry [TM]. I like the sharpened tongue the best…it’s the little inhuman touches that are most effective… :p I notice that all of my fridge poetry appears to be about death, disturbance and violence. Or sex. Or several of the above. WOOOOO HOOOOOO!

when I open your laughing throat
warm blood soaks my sharpened tongue
I drink    I devour    I am drunk in this hour
oh a world of wild redness rushes through
my skin

 

tantamount to temerity

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I checked out a fridge poetry community, but all the entries were too serious and/or pretentious, so I left for Magnetic Poetry, which has a Web site where you can futz with some of the kits. I used the Genius edition, which is more like the Regular Vocabulary edition for me. I like “tinged with galling language” and “tantamount to temerity” the best. They just speak trippingly on the tongue, you know. Tantamount and temerity are good words to eject contemptuously and if you get them both together you just have a veritable mortar spray of plosives!

your vicissitudes were
tinged with galling language
secreted in veiled books
by a trenchant cunning woman
whose mellifluous opinions
are tantamount to temerity

giftless juice of a screaming symphony

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Figured out the peculiarity of Magnetic Poetry. With its preponderance of adjectives, it has no association with workaday language, so it all but requires a) endless concatenations of nouns and adjectives or b) strings of adjectives that you would not expect to go together. Case in point is today’s effort. Also I swear that I didn’t set out to write about cunnilingus. I just realized after that the last clause could be interpreted that way.

I recall repulsive
white love & the
giftless juice of a
screaming symphony
beneath the thousand
smooth tongues
of girls

to crush the delirious moon

to crush the delirious moon published on 1 Comment on to crush the delirious moon

…Continuing the tradition of complete and grammatically correct sentences created with Magnetic Poetry [TM]. Not particularly inspired by anything, except we had all the adjectives collected together, so fast, true and black were nearby.

your fast true black diamond
shot up to the lightless pole
to crush the delirious moon
& so I will sleep in honey

your likeness behind me shines & incubates purple shadows

your likeness behind me shines & incubates purple shadows published on 1 Comment on your likeness behind me shines & incubates purple shadows

We have long had magnetic alphabets on our fridge, but those have only so much entertainment value because we quickly reach the limit of 52 letters [2 alphabets]. When we moved into our new apartment, I bought some magnetic poetry. I enjoy using it, but then I want to preserve my stupid creations for all eternity, which prevents me from raping them for recombination. So I’ve decided to photograph the results of my magnetic maundering. As you can see, it’s all in character: long sentences that take unexpected turns as they tell fantastic stories burbling with unusual conflict.

First effort, early on in September… It was supposed to be “bitter iron cities,” but apparently the basic Magnetic Poetry set doesn’t have cities in it.

we love gorgeous winding road trips
under lazy pink mists
away from those bitter iron forests
& into the easy cool void of death

Second effort, same date of early in September. When you divorce words such as “breast” and “blood” and “wave” from context, you realize that they can all be nouns or verbs.

peach visions breast the
delicate winter waters

Effort from last night. Is it just me, or does everything sound erotically charged with this damn magnetic word game?
we are weak from these
luscious moments & drunk
on beauty together

Another effort from yesterday, probably someone straining desperately to have a rational reaction to a supernatural apparition. I suspect the sordid urges are winning. They usually do. They were originally “bloody urges,” but, combined with “flooding,” that left a menstrual impression that I didn’t want.

will you please elaborate
for your likeness behind me
shines & incubates purple shadows
flooding my will with sordid urges

 

 

 

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