Crossword puzzle clue today (NY Times): "Georges who wrote 'La disparition.""

Mike Snider asks: Which is Tennyson and which is Swinburne?

That blush of fifty years ago, my dear,
Blooms in the Past, but close to me to-day
As this red rose, which on our terrace here
Glows in the blue of fifty miles away.

***

Asleep or waking is it? For her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly--fairer for a fleck.

I'd say the first is Tennyson, the second Swinburne. I could be wrong of course. The second is distinctly Keatsian in its diction, evoking the ending of "Ode to a Nightingale." Embarrassingly derivative! The first has an amost Thomas-Hardy like awkwardness which is not entirely displeasing.

Speech is naturally rhythmic. (I'm not talking about prose, but about oral speech.) That is, it tends to fall into intonational patterns, most simply: UUUUP dooooown, UP down... What is the status of metrical rules, or codifications of these intonational patterns? For example, the French Alexandrine (12 syllables line) breaks up into two symmetrical halves, in a call-and-response pattern. But the same intonational pattern would be there if you occasionally had half-lines of 5 or 7 or 8 syllables instead of the required 6. Conversely, you could have metrically correct verses of 12 syllables in which the intonational patterning was relatively weak. What doesn't work is to destroy both the metrical rule and the intonational pattern at the same time. In short lined, heavily enjambed free verse, the line is a spurious unit, in the sense that it obeys neither a metrical nor an intonational imperative:

"The alphabet of the trees // is fading in the song of the leaves"

(I forget exactly where WCW breaks these lines.)

The line could be either a unit of performance, or a purely visual effect. When I read this poem aloud, I observe the line-breaks, introducing a pause but not interrupting the intonational pattern.

As I said to my friend [up] // because I am always talking [level]
John, I sd [up]// which was not his name [level]
The darkness surrounds us [down]// what can we do against it [up]
Or else should we, and why not? [up]// buy a godamn big car, drive [down]
He sd for Christ's sake [up]// look out where you're going [exclamatory]

This is greatly simplified, of course. Your assigment: to translate the Creeley poem above into perfect, rhymed French Alexandrines, then compare the metrical and intonational patterns of the translation and the original text.

Here's an experiment. I will translate rapidly a brief poem from Jaime Saenz's "Immanent Visitor," without looking at the translation by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson. Then I will look at their translation and compare.

A BURNT-OUT MATCH

"A burnt-out match is simply a burnt-out match. The transcendent fact about the burnt out match is that it is burnt-out, and that, despite no longer being one, it is still called a match.

But that match that is there, on a piece of paper, is dead. That is what's important. Because what's important is that it is dead.

It is being, and we must see it, there, as substantial as the universe. As a thing integrated into the phases of nothingness." (Mayhew)

"A snuffed-out match is simply a snuffed match. The transcendence of a snuffed match lies in its being snuffed and in the fact that although it no longer exists, it is still called a match.

But that match there, on a sheet of paper, is dead. That is what matters. What really matters is that it be dead.

It is being, itself, and being there, it must be acknowledged to be as large as the universe. Like something that folds itself into the intervals of nothingness." KJ and FG.

I was uneasy in my translation with the word "fact." I felt it justified in my own American idiom, and was surprised that KJ and FG had used the same word, but in a different place. I hate words like "important" and "thing"; I forced myself to use them in the translation, though, because I read the poem as being written in a deliberately flat and insistent style. Almost a David Mamet style!

I won't review this book, because I don't want to be the translation police. I have very definite ideas about translation. I also see that I have misread the poem myself: "pese a que ya no es" I had read as "pese a que ya no lo es." I also missed the subjunctive force of "esté" the first time around.

In any case: buy this book. Latin American poetry should be better known--beyond Neruda, Vallejo, and Paz. I know little about Saenz myself and will be reading it with great interest.

I brought in a plastic bag full of books from home to revise my article on Celan and Valente. I have Joris' translations of Celan, some Blanchot, Heidegger, Lacoue-LaBarthes, Nancy. It is surely overkill. But my first and second versions left out many essential parts of the story I was trying to tell.

The idea of a God who had full access to my thoughts, who could judge me on a second-by-second basis, was psychologically intolerable to me when I was 8 years old. I would have to control my thoughts so strictly that in some sense they would no longer be mine. That was pretty much it for me and any form of religious belief. Also the beginning of a frightening degree of self-consciousness.

* Octopus Magazine * will publish the BAP face-off. While I was editing it I noticed it was 34 single-spaced pages, and almost 10,000 words--the equivalent of a couple of scholarly articles in length. How many words has Silliman written on his blog in a little more than a year?

What good is a new paradigm for the Humanities based on cognitive science if it leads us back to Tennysonian poetics? Nothing wrong with Tennyson, but it's hard to believe our brains are hard-wired to be Victorian--as opposed to Baroque, neo-classical, modernist, postmodernist, neo-ante-diluvian, or what have you.

***

The BAP face-off will appear in Octopus fairly soon.

"The Enchanted Loom" by Paul Lake has been praised by the usual suspects. Cognitive science is being used to debunk the avant-garde, as in S. Pinker. Of course, the article gets Derrida wrong, quoting a passage from him about the iterability of signs and, later on, making Derrida's exact point for him in a different way. The prestige of science is used to tell us what kind of literature we ought to prefer. It simply doesn't follow. I prefer Descartes to Swift myself, so I was turned off right from the beginning. It made me realize Swift can be used as model of anti-intellectualism.

Of course, it is language poetry that uses the entire brain, not just "left brain" decoding. Why was Mallarmé obsessed with rhythm? Does Gertrude really not care about the meaning of the words she uses in Tender Buttons? Has the author of this article ever read Clark Coolidge? Raymond Roussel? Paul Celan? Góngora? Borges? What profound ignorance!

I'd love to see a brain scan of myself reading an avant-garde text: I bet it would kick the butt of a brain scan of me grooving to Richard Wilbur.

***

One of those "man on the street" interviews yesterday, as I was walking down Mass. Ave in Lawrence. "What are you reading?" Of course, I said "The Best American Poetry, 2002."

I forgot to include Anne Carson in my list of the Best of the Best in Creeley's BAP. For some reason I hadn't put a big blue star next to her name in the table of contents.

When I post something late in the afternoon it's almost always a mistake. I feel punch-drunk from the BAP face-off. What did I learn from all this? I hate similes, except when I love them. They are like.... I don't care for obviousness or poems with cute premises. There are far too many prose-poems, too few poets like Ronald Johnson. I like "lean" poems more than "fat" poems.

"Hambone" and "The Hat" are the best avant journals. "The Boston Review," "New American Writing," "Pleiades," and "jubilat" are worthwhile as well. I'm sure "Skanky Possum" is as great as everybody says it is, but the poems Creeley chose from there were not at the top of my list. "Chicago Review" is good but I can live without "Ploughshares," "Poetry," and "APR." Why is there nothing from "Columbia Poetry Review"? No Barbara Guest or Kenward Elmslie (and so on....)

A note on "methodology": the alphabetical set up some fortuitous match-ups--much more interesting ones than I would have predicted. Over the course of 75 rounds, any unfairness due to method alone is evened out. A great poem might lose to an even greater poem, or a mediocre effort might prevail when the other editor lets his guard done.

I've found about 15 poems that are spectacularly good, others that are delightful in some way. There were several that I felt myself incapable of responding to, even when written by poets I admire.

Best of the Best:

Berrigan, Broughton, Coolidge, Gander, Johnson, Mac Low, Malmude, Manguso, Mathews, Rehm, Silliman, Warsh (Bob)

Anderson, Ashbery, Dickman, Higgins, Koch, Park, Smith, Warsh (Yusef)

Worst of the Best:

Glück, Olds (Bob)

Dennis, Hirsch, Nelson, Pinsky, Wilbur

Round 75

[drumroll]

Yusef: "Reading the Bones: a Black-Jack Moses Nightmare" by Ahmos Zu-Bolton II

Bob: "A Sheath of Pleasant Voices" by John Yau

Two good poems with which to end the game. Zu-Bolton's spooky nightmare about some kind of soothsayer interpreting a pattern of bones on the sidewalk, and Yau's pleasant, witty poem about a more obscure nightmare. I did like the lines:

I am one of the last
of the computer chain errors

to become illuminated

Yau's poem lacks conviction for me: I don't know why it was written, though I am willing to keep reading it until I figure it out. The last round has to be a tie. Final score, after 75 rounds.

Yusef: 20

Bob: 41

Tie: 13

With one round vacated.

Round 74

Yusef: "After the Opening, 1932 by Anna Ziegler

Bob: "Nostalgia II" by Charles Wright

Ziegler imagines Edward Hopper after a gallery opening in 1932. The reader's response will depend on how convincingly the scene is painted: Hopper's need for solitude, scorn for the Rockefellers, etc... The poem is more of a short-story, really. I feel a lack of verisimilitude, but maybe it's just me.

Wright's poem ends with a simile that has me scratching my head:

The future, like Dostoyevsky, poised
To read us the riot act

I've never "gotten" Wright's poetry, and this poem is no exception. I understand it semantically, not aesthetically. He has a certain feel for language, but the results obtained seem duller than we might expect. Is it a problem of tone?

This one is a tie.

After 74:

20-41-12