Poor Phil Schaap. So knowledgeable and apparently well spoken. Yet he manages to talk without moving from the realm of the obvious and the anecdotal for half hour stretches. What makes Bird great? He doesn't say. He proposed that in the last few years of his life Charlie Parker was moving in a different direction. Ok. But how about telling us what that direction is? I had to go home from my office before I found out. We had to be told first that in Western music there is harmony, melody, and rhythm.

For me it's, a kind of uncanny quality that is also present in Lester Young. It's not speed per se, but a rhythmic quality of elasticity, an ability to dilate or compress time itself at will. The ability to play very fast is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve this quality, obviously. (In fact it is present at slower tempos with as much, or more, intensity.) Time can stand almost still at a breakneck tempo, yet speed up at a very slow tempo. The subtlety and taste of his phrasing is unmatched.

This is what fascinated Julio Cortázar who wrote a long short story called "El perseguidor" about Parker. (The "Johnny" in JC's story is very obviously Bird.)

There are many musicians I admire who don't at all have this "uncanny" quality. It is in Bud Powell, but not in Art Blakey. Tatum had it.

Vallejo refers to himself in one of the aphorisms as weighing 44 kilos! I don't think naturally in terms of kilos but isn't that less than 100 lbs?

(105)

*Joseph Ceravolo. Spring in this World of Poor Mutts. 1968, 85 pp.

It's as though I had never really read this book before. I feel that to really read it I would need to write about, that is, frame my reading in terms of the some theory of what this book is really about. For example, how does immanence work in Ceravolo's poetry? With whom is he in dialogue. Is the poetry is simple as it seems?

i'm trying this idea of writing an "ur-document." For the introduction to Spanish verse, mentioned below, I am writing for one hour on ten separate days. I'll end up with a document of more than twenty pages to which I can return whenever I get stuck with the actual writing of the book. An hour is a long time just to brainstorm, generate ideas and plan strategies. It might not be a long time to produce finished prose, but that's not the point here.

I don't know whether it is even a viable project yet. The ur-text should tell me whether it is or not.

(104)

César Vallejo. Aphorisms. Trans. Kessler. 2002. 83 pp.

These are kind of strange notebook entries by Vallejo. Not really aphorisms, most of them.

Yo amo a las plantas por la raíz y no por la flor.

That one is. My translation, superior to Kessler's, is "I love plants at the root and not at the flower."

I've sometimes thought of writing a book along the lines of Jacques Barzun's An Essay on French Verse / for Readers of English Poetry (New Directions, 1981). It would be an introduction to poetry in Spanish for readers of poetry in English. Very different from Barzun's book in that Spanish is not French, and I am far from being Jacques Barzun. But a book with an equivalent function, covering both Spain and Spanish America. Perhaps the writing of the Princeton Encyclopedia article on Spanish poetry, which I will do shortly, will help clarify things a bit. Certainly it would be a natural extension from my book on Lorca. I like Barzun's brevity--126 pp plus a translation of a Victor Hugo poem, and his clear-headed explanations of prosody. I must have read this book in the 80s at some point. I've recommended it to people since, and am now re-reading it to see whether it provides a model. Probably not in any literal sense, but James Laughlin must have known what he was doing to publish it.

Top Misconceptions about Spanish Poetry:

1) The verso libre of Lorca and Neruda is comparable to "free verse" in the American tradition.

2) Spanish and Latin American poetry of the twentieth century is mostly surrealist.

3) The Spanish romance is a "ballad."

4) Translations into English of 20th century Spanish are mostly pretty good or adequate.

5) What we really need are more translations of Lorca, Miguel Hernández, and Neruda.

[Udpate: dude is still alive. Wow. He was born in 1907.]

I'm listening to the WKCR Lester Young birthday broadcast. Although I've heard most of the tracks before I'm sure there will be surprises.

It's interesting to here three distinctive flavors in the piano backups. Teddy Wilson, Nat King Cole, and Oscar Peterson. Cole is one of my favorite piano players of mid-century, and seems to complement Lester perfectly. With Buddy Rich on the drums to boot. Teddy plays with the perfect flavor of the 30s. OP comes out of Cole's style, to some extent.

The interesting thing is to hear a phrase you've heard before--but on a track that you've never heard. There's that eerie familiarity / strangeness.

(103)

*David Shapiro. House (Blown Apart). 1988. 89 pp.

Here's a dark and mysterious book of poems. I don't quite get the architect's cup; some of the dream material is only half understood by the poetic speaker himself, so the reader is struggling too. A nice long blurb by Harold Bloom on the back.

(102)

Francisco Brines. La última costa. 1995. 102 pp.

Very typical late Brines. There are a few memorable poems, but most of them tend to blend in with each other in my memory of them. The unitary effect of the book is an effect of essentially writing the same poem over and over again. Also, a very restricted linguistic register.

Improvisation is a troubled category.

We improvise when the phone rings and we have to respond to that situation in the moment. There is no script. All conversation is improvised. When a student asks a question that is unique (for which a prescripted answer does not exist) the answer has to be improvised.

An exam answer has to be improvised, if the question is a unique one, not prepared in advance in exactly this form. The opposite of improvisation is not preparation: we are prepared, presumably, for the exam. Improvisation is competence in the forms of conversation, whether written or oral.

Is the opposite of improvisation revision? The improvisation is a performance, it happens in real time. So going back later is a different thing. Improvisation, then, would be more like writing something the right way first, rather than thinking: oh, it doesn't matter how I write it now, since there will always be time to re-write it later. We can always fix it with pro-tools later. Improvisation in writing, then, would be more disciplined, not less.

If reading is about the formation of identities, subjectivities...

Where does the sub come in to subjectivity? What are we beneath, so to speak? What are we subjected to? We think of the subject as the one under control but obviously in the French theory tradition, if I can speak of it shorthand, the subject is the one subjected, formed by other discourses.

There is a kind of compulsion here: I couldn't any more give up my Creeley than give up my Coltrane. The grooves are strong and deep, the scarring is permanent. We speak of "déformation professionelle." My graduate students use the concept of "agency" as a counteracting force to this compulsion: the subject is autonomous and can speak for itself.

For graduate students, the process is double: there is a subjection to the norms of the "profession." And a subjection to the literature itself. To say there is a tension between these two things is the understatement of the century. At best there is a tension, at worst the second subjection simply fails to take place.

But how to conceive of this tension? One view is that the subjection to poetry is purer and less conditioned, but poetry is also an institution, or rather, it is inseparable from its various institutions, its concrete instantiations on this earth. (Any particular way that it exists materially.) So then it becomes a question of which institutions matter and who is in control of them, not of finding a space outside of institutions. The way Silliman, for example, insists that other institutions outside of academia should be the true legitimators. But he is no less invested in there being a legitimating mechanism.

All arguments about poetry are about this.

Questions on "Interview with Steve Evans".

1. Why is it important that we are analyzing this as an audio file rather than a written text? Was it more or less difficult to process the material in this way? What was the main difficulty?

2. What does Steve (the second speaker) mean when he faults his own use of sound files of poetry as being "illustrative." What would be a use that would not be merely illustrative look like? Discuss "dejection" and "euphoria."

3. What information does the voice give that the written text does not? What are the typical reactions of students to hearing sound files? What are the "traps" that are anticipated or experienced most often in the use of these files?

4. What is meant by "left liberal pedagogy" [toward the end of the interview]? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this pedagogy, according to the two men speaking?

5. How much of an obstacle was it for you that the context given was poetry as taught in departments of English (as opposed to Spanish)? In other words, how "translatable" are the concerns given here? How distracting was the discussion of poets you probably have never heard of (Rod Smith)? [middle section of discussion] Discuss the discussion of audience, "room," "tone," etc...

6. What are the suggestions for using the expertise of the students in the classroom? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the undergraduate students discussed. What does Proust have to do with it?

7. What questions would you ask Steve Evans?

8. You are graduate students, which means you occupy at least four positions: students, teachers (mostly, for now, of Spanish language), scholars-in-training, and future teachers of literature. How does this interview help you to reflect on your own development in any of these four areas? Why is graduate course-work oriented mostly toward the "scholars-in-training" function?

9. Write down five sentences or phrases from anywhere in the interview that you think are particuarly discussion provoking.

(101)

*Jean Valentine. The Cradle of the Real Life. 2000. 75 pp.

I'd forgotten how good this book was--but something told me to bring it home today. It's rare to find a book with so little overwriting.

(100)

Julio Llamazares. La lentitud de los bueyes. 1979. 48 pp.

This book made an impact in its day, though Llamazares is now better known for his novels. When I first read it, it hadn't yet read Gamoneda, so in some sense my perspective was distorted. Not that it's an exact copy of Gamoneda, but I believe that's the context in which it should be read.

The book itself holds up fine.