Poetic excellence is both more rare and more common than we know. It just kind of depends on your perspective. For example, if were going to choose the 1,000 most amazing poems I know, it would take a while. I'd be choosing from about 10,000 poems. Still, 1,000 or 10,000 is not much as a percentage of all poems existent, or even all poems I've read.

So rarity in abundance. This might be an example

De los álamos vengo, madre,
de ver cómo los menea el aire.

De los álamos de Sevilla,
de ver a mi linda amiga.

De los álamos vengo, madre,
de ver cómo los menea el aire.

So perfect, but so ordinary. There's a beautiful setting by Rodrigo.

Never been better.

Taste has always seemed a limited and limiting category. Things that are not to my taste, personally, might still be immensely rewarding. Taste is a little box you have to think yourself out of.

Are there two Kerouacs, the sociological one and the the real (literary) one? Discuss.

The purpose of teaching high modernism is to construct the students as high modernist subjects, to subject them to that. In other words, the benefits of the Humanities are largely those internal to the Humanities themselves, rather than those general feel-good notions about citizenship and open-mindedness. The habitus of the high modernist subject (as presently constituted) does, in fact, include a series of political beliefs, etc..., some ideas of not being ethnocentric. We are teaching that habitus along with the texts, though the texts themselves might not necessarily embody these ideals.

The contemporary university professor is not likely to be a high-modernist subject. Or rather, he or she is taught to view that part of hir / hes formation with suspicion. The professor is thus a divided subject, teaching the students to be divided too. To be suspicious of their own elite status.

Yet reading that literature changes you, writes its codes all over your soul. In fact, that's most of what reading literature does: it makes you over in its own languages / images. Do you speak high modernism? It is a language of complexity, nuance. It is completely useless outside its domain. Or maybe almost completely, because don't we then apply those habits of mind to everything else too? That is our professional deformation.

When the modernist professor studies Madonna, as he used to do in the 1980s early 90s, he does so as modernist professor, with a great self-consciousness of studying something else. There is a forced quality there.

I'm not sure quite where I'm going with this. I know what the right answers are in terms of the habitus of my field, but these right answers often feel wrong to me. At the same time, my answers seem baldly self-serving. Don't I just want to keep the world comfortable for people like me?

A new post at Arcade.

Arguments the Catholic Church Really Doesn't Want to Make (But Will Anyway)

1. It's the secularism. The secularism in society has such an influence that it makes the poor priests into molesters. The Pope has actually made this argument. I guess he himself was influenced by secularism when he ignored and covered up abuse. Bad Pope!

2. Not all priests are abusers / Only a small portion of priests are abusers, etc... It doesn't really matter what the exact percentage is. Even a few can do immense damage. Anyway, what would be an acceptable percentage, except for something as close as humanly possible to zero? Sending priests to other places where they can abuse again does not show a good faith effort to reduce the number of priests who abuse.

3. Not all child abusers are priests. True. But shouldn't priests be, you know, better than other people? Send your kid to the pool hall, maybe he will pick up some bad habits. Don't they want their churches to be better than a pool hall?

4. People criticizing the church on this front are motivated by anti-Catholicism, atheism, etc... True, in some cases, but the victims are Catholic. Shouldn't you care more if you believe that what was betrayed was something real?

5. We are a forgiving church. Therefore we have a duty to forgive the molesters and give them a second chance, and then a third. This is so cynical it doesn't merit a response.

6. At least it's not abortion.

7. The church is a human institution, therefore imperfect. This is cynical in the extreme. We're not talking about some minor failings, but a major pattern of corruption.

8. Nothing to see here. We had this problem in the past, but now we're taking steps to remedy it. That would be fine, except that the rhetoric is still one of making these cynical arguments.

I can't really do the" ten most influential books" meme, because I don't think primarily in terms of books but rather of authors. In terms of influence i think about influences on my poetry, my scholarship, and my thinking generally. I have no idea how to choose 10 books. I also don't want to choose the books that I wish had influenced me. I'm wary of how such lists could be aspirational. I'd rather list books that I have tried to memorize word for word at certain points of my life. If I've memorized a good portion of a book maybe you could say it was important to me.

Claudio Rodríguez. Don de la ebriedad; Casi una leyenda. Writing my dissertation on CR is memorized a lot of the first book. I found it convenient to work on poems in my head without having to have the text in front of me. Later, when the second came out, I memorized quite a bit of it. From other books by him too, I know quite a few poems still.

Shakespeare. The Sonnets. I've never memorized all the sonnets, but maybe a good third to half of them at one time or another. I could probably only recite you three or four today.

Lorca. Romancero gitano. Those poems are so easy to remember it's almost hard to forget them. Of the 18 poems in the book I've memorized at least half at one time or another. I can look at one and rememorize it quickly.

Salinas. La voz a ti debida. I had a manic idea of memorizing the 70 poems in this book at one time. I don't really know it today, but I could probably learn some of them again if I wanted to. Typically, I would memorize a poem simply by teaching it, and then move on to other poems that I wasn't even teaching. I don't know that I memorized the whole thing. I forget.

Hernández. Cancionero y romancero de ausencias. That's my next project. Very memorable material.

It's interesting that only one of these books is in English. I've memorized a lot of Keats, WCW and several other poets writing in English, but not whole books. I've memorized a few of Keats's Odes, but they aren't a book, are they?

I know there are memorizers and non-memorizers--among poets and students of poetry. I've always been in the former camp. That also means, of course, that I am a prodigious forgetter of poems. I'm pretty good at that. Memorization really shapes my view of the poem. The poem becomes a part of me. When I say it out loud it is as though I were speaking my own words, or as though the poets were speaking through me.

I have to respect the non-memorizers because they work without the advantage of having the poem in their head. They must feel very sure of themselves, without that crutch of having the poem accessible at all times in the memory--in case it is ever needed.

Someone (Joseph H.) asked a very, very good question in a comment on a previous post. If poetry is so close to music, then what do I do with translation? How do I explain the need for translation? Let me think out loud for a moment about this question and see if I get anywhere.

Music doesn't need to be translated. Can't be translated. You do have to know the particular musical language in which it is composed to really understand it, but it can't be translated into another language because there is no musical message detachable from that language. Bach would rewrite pieces for different instruments. You can arrange a piece for Tuba for string bass. So sonority (timbre) seems detachable (to some extent) from melody. Not totally, because the piece might not really work for its new instruments.

Vallejo said poetry is not translatable, because it depends on its tone. Robert Frost said poetry is what gets lost in translation. In other words, the elements we think of as poetic are exactly those elements lost in a translation: rhythm, tone, linguistic particularity. On the other hand, poetry does get translated; many people get enjoyment out of poetry in translation, including me.

It's absurd to say, though, that what you're getting out of translation is the poetry. You might be getting the poetry of the translator; that's what Pound did, but you're not getting the poetry of the original. You're getting the "literary" dimension of the poem, some visual imagery, some ideology maybe. You're not getting the organic whole. Imagine a plate with some salt on it in a small pile, next to a larger pile of flour; there's a glass of water standing by the plate, with some yeast fermenting in it. You wouldn't call this plate "a loaf of bread." I couldn't convince you it was a loaf of bread simply by saying that it has everything needed to bake a loaf of break. What's missing from my plate, I argue, but you just shake your head.

Imagine a reader for whom reading the original and the translation was basically the same experience. We'd conclude that this person is not really a reader of poetry at all. It would be like a person trained to read a musical score but who didn't know what music was. The person would be able to tell you what the notes of the musical score were, "that's an 8th-note rest followed by a b flat quarter note." This person can read musical notation but cannot read music.

Even very good translations can be very bad from the point of view of the poetry. Our standards of judgment are so low that we are content with very little.

I've been asked whether I only study poetry. "That's all you do?" My feeling is that there are plenty of people who study the novel. The novel doesn't really need me: it will sink or fall on its own. It outnumbers poetry by a huge margin. Poetry, however, does need me. I can make an actual difference here, even if on a very modest scale.

I read Catch-22, Robert P. Warren's The Cave, and The Lord of the Rings over and over again as a kid. I've read thousands of pages of Galdós. I have my prose loves too, like Forgetting Elena or At Swim-Two-Birds or Visions of Gerard. I've paid my prose dues. Show me the prose specialist who's read as much poetry as I've read prose, and then we'll talk.

I've been toying around for a while with the idea of a book that would put forward a certain vision of poetry, my own. It's never quite come together but now it's starting to.

What Lorca Knew: Poetry, Pedagogy, Performance

Preface
Introduction: Teaching Receptivity

Here I talk about my theory that what we should doing in the humanities: teaching a kind of receptivity, as I tried to outline in my recent post for.Arcade

.

Chapter II: The Grain of the Voice: Barthes, Lorca, and the Poetics of Performance

In this part I would develop a reading I did once of Barthes's essay of the same title and Lorca's duende essay.

Chapter III: What Claudio Knew

Here I would study the two most significant poets of the twentieth century, Lorca and Claudio Rodríguez, from the point of view of poetic knowledge. Their prosody, their deep involvement with music.

Chapter IV: ????

I don't know what this chapter is going to be about yet. It's got to have jazz in it somehow, though. The experience of listening to jazz as a poet? Something along these lines.

That's all I got for you. There could be other chapters. At least I have enough to think there might be a book here.

I just got my copy of The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. I actually paid for this book rather than trying to finagle a free copy. I'm sure this will be relevant to the line of inquiry I'm opening up here. I also got a copy of Kyle Gann's book about John Cage. No time to read them now I have to go upstairs to teach.

The project I'm developing will be called something like Poetry, Receptivity, and Performance. It will be a fun project like Apocryphal Lorca, not a boring scholarly work like my other three books.

From the idea that poetry is closer to music than it is to "literature" as conventionally defined, I draw four areas of study that might be fruitful. Maybe these areas will help clarify what I mean by this statement.

(1) Poetry can renegotiate its relation to literature. If poetry were the major subject, and the novel was seen as marginal, there would be a de-emphasis on longer narrative structures. The relation of literature to society would not be centered on the mimetic portrayal of society on the broad canvas, but on the social function of music and poetry.

(2) Poetry would renegotiate its relation to music as well. There would be a new interdisciplinary field called "song studies."

(3) Performative aspects would take center stage, as they do now in the study of theater.

(4) If music, why not visual art too? Or dance. Poetry would be one of the arts.

Tomorrow, I will break down each of these ideas.

My basis for making the assertion in the first place relies on

(1) Historic connections between poetry and music. Lyric poetry arises historically as the words to songs.

(2) Even after the great divorce between the music and the words, there are still songs with words. Words not meant to be set to music are still set to music. The poem can still aspire to be a song. Poets still think musically; there is no good poet I know who doesn't have a fairly deep interest in some genre of music. Hell, there's not even a bad poet I know who doesn't have a deep interest in music. Poets think musically. The more you think about this subject the righter you'll realize I am.

(3) Poetry and music are the only two things that have meter, and they have meter in analogous ways. Sure, a bouncing basketball has a rhythm, but poetry and music have a rhythm in a way that's closer to one another than either is to the bouncing ball or the movement of the tides.

(4) Sure, there are areas of poetry less connected to music. You can have those. In other words, I'll give you those and I'll keep the musical part. If you hesitate to make this bargain, then you know deep down I'm on to something here.

Poetry is closer to music than it is to "literature."