Thursday, December 29, 2011

Dan Beachy-Quick's Poetry Off the Shelf Podcast: On Memory, Originality, and Influence

          Poetry Off the Shelf had an interesting podcast the other week. Host Curtis Fox interviewed poet Dan Beachy-Quick about his proclivity for memorizing poems he admires. This topic alone is one I find intriguing. These days, I’m not aware of much poetry memorization that goes on outside of a classroom setting, and the podcast mentions a trend that I’ve also noticed and found interesting – how the process of memorization in general has gotten pushed to the margins in the age when so much information is easily accessible via the Internet. Thus just to hear a major contemporary poet speaking of his habit of memorizing poetry is reason enough to check out this podcast.
          But what really interested me most was when Beachy-Quick describes the reasons why he memorized poems. He describes a process of assimilation that takes place during the procedure, through which by setting the poems to memory, they become a part of him (hence the title of the podcast installment – “Inscribe the poem on yourself”). He likes having every little bit of these memorized poems incorporated inside him so that whenever he feels he needs some bit of the language or sentiment, it’s readily accessible. (Listen to the podcast and you’ll hear that Beachy-Quick does a much better job describing this process; my paraphrase is butchering it here.)
          One tangent my thoughts took after hearing this podcast was to musing about Harold Bloom’s influential and well-known 1973 poetic theory work, The Anxiety of Influence, one of the few theory works I actually remember by name. Before proceeding, be forewarned that I’ve never actually read the work in its entirety and only know the basic gist of it. But from what I understand, Bloom’s premise is that poets are inevitably influenced by the writings of their predecessors. Since their work is consequently derivative, the originality of their poetic visions are automatically compromised. Only the strongest poetic voices of each generation is able to survive and demonstrate a truly original poetic vision, and the rest becomes merely white noise. It’s an interesting theory, and the logic behind it does make some sense. I feel at some point in my life I’ll need to read Bloom’s book fully to learn the details and see to what extent I agree with him. . .
          At any rate, you can probably see now where I’m going with this. I think it’s interesting to compare Bloom’s theory side-by-side with Beachy-Quick’s comments. No matter how you feel about Bloom’s critical thoughts, most of us would probably think it’s safe to say that poets as a whole prefer to focus on their originality more than anything else. Thus, it’s refreshing to hear about a major poet speaking of willingly incorporating others’ works so thoroughly into his psyche, where he may, on occasion, pick up little snippets of influence to work into his own verse either intentionally or unintentionally.
          Of course, based on the few poems I’ve read by Beachy-Quick, it seems clear he’s a confident and original poet whose work does not, to my eye, risk falling headfirst into derivative imitations. Maybe it’s this confidence that allows him to so fully incorporate the thoughts of others into his subconscious without subsequent anxiety as to their influence encroaching upon his own originality. However, I prefer to think that he welcomes whatever influence may come. After all, poetry in many ways is an ongoing conversation, and if it is not building upon the past, then there is only so far originality can take us.
          Well, yet again, here’s another random post that doesn’t really bring us to anywhere in particular, but which nonetheless contains a few interesting thoughts that have popped into my head. I’d be interested to hear somebody else’s thoughts on the topic.
Finally, a brief side note to anyone in the area – Dan Beachy-Quick is scheduled to give a reading in Alabama this upcoming spring (in Tuscaloosa on April 5). I’m hoping I’ll be able to see it – we only have a few readings of that stature that take place in the area each year, so you have to take advantage when you can.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Grappling with Dylan Thomas

          You may have started to pick up on it in my post a couple weeks ago, but I was not overly enthusiastic about Dylan Thomas at the time. I’ve actually had this volume of his poems (New Directions' Collected Poems 1934-1952) for about 15 years or so, and I’ve tried a couple of times in the past to read it only to put it down after a few poems in frustration. I decided a few months ago to try again, and knowing what to expect this time, I was determined not to permit the unfinished book to continue hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles (as you can tell from the analogy, leaving books unfinished does not sit well with me). I’m happy to say I made it all the way through this time. I can also say that, as with most things, a little more familiarity did breed a fair bit more appreciation of the poems. And while I still can’t quite call myself a Dylan Thomas fan, I have at least come to the point where I can admit a grudging admiration for the man.
          A good portion of my way through the book, I actually decided to look up a little information about Thomas. Typically, I avoid doing this, preferring to let my first reading remain as unbiased by outside sources as possible, but I couldn’t help myself in this case. I consider myself a fairly good reader of poetry, and the frustration I felt reading Thomas was beginning to wear on me. Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to realize such a reaction is by no means uncommon. In fact, I ran across Elder Olson’s 1954 review of the Collected Poems (originally published in Poetry), which opens, “There is some evidence that even well-equipped readers have found the poetry of Dylan Thomas difficult; and one would be surprised, considering the nature of his work, if the case were otherwise.” Olson then spends the remainder of the lengthy opening paragraph explaining some of the various reasons for this difficulty. Suitably relieved to find it wasn’t just me, I toughed it through the remainder of the volume.
          The consensus on Thomas’s poetry more or less tends to be that it’s full of powerful, unique language that can captivate the reader, even while some of its exact meaning remains clouded beneath surreal and fantastic imagery. I tend to agree with this assessment. In fact, it seems Thomas wishes more to engage with the reader on an emotional level and is not overly concerned about his poems’ literal interpretation. When Thomas’s confident voice and striking imagery and rhythm all work together, the result is some fantastic poetry, as in one of my favorites, “All all and all the dry world’s lever,” which opens:

                   All all and all the dry world’s lever,
                   Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
                   All from the oil, the pound of lava.
                   City of spring, the governed flower,
                   Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
                   Towns around on a wheel of fire.

                   How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
                   Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
                   Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
                   All all and all, the corpse’s lover,
                   Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
                   All of the flesh, the dry world’s lever.

It’s moments like these I really enjoy in Thomas. There’s a vitality and originality to the language and imagery that sticks to you. Even if you have trouble getting your exact bearings at any one point in this poem, the piling on of images in this section and the ones that follow make it clear Thomas is describing the simultaneous fruitless and regenerative processes of the mortal world.
          Unfortunately, for every poem I found like this, I also would find one along these lines:

                   And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
                   From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
                   The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
                   Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
                   Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.
                   Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.
                   For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,
                   Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,
                   A climbing sea from Asia had me down
                   And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,
                   Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel
                   Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa
                   By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil
                   And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw.

This is a sonnet from the sequence “Altarwise by owl-light,” an often-discussed Thomas piece that has to deal with religious experience. I found it frustrating, as was often the case in this book.
          As I typically do when encountering a difficult poem, I relied on subsequent close readings of this and other poems like it to try and open the door to Thomas. Sometimes these subsequent readings led to epiphanies, but often they didn’t, and that is where my main frustration with Thomas stemmed from. I enjoy challenging poets, but when their works are too obscure for me to confidently form any sort of interpretation, I get annoyed. At this point of opaqueness, the verse becomes less a mystery to be unlocked and more an intellectual puzzle to be solved. As a result, I find the lyrical rewards of the verse are greatly diluted – one is too distracted by the challenges of meaning to focus on anything else.
          But again, when Thomas hits the right balance and has everything working – music, imagery, originality – he is quite a poet, particularly when he doesn’t go over the deep end of obscurity. He does so in poems like the aforementioned “All all and all the dry world’s lever,” as well as others like “A saint about to fall,” “We lying by seasand,” and “Into her Lying Down Head.” It’s the promise I see in poems like these that I think frustrates me that he can’t demonstrate it more consistently throughout his work.
          All the same, I have to admit I’ve come a long way with Dylan Thomas. As I was nearing the end of the volume, I originally thought I would probably just pass it along to charity or something when I was done. But I have to admit, there’s a haunting quality about Thomas’s verse, and it really sticks with you. Now I don’t think I’m quite done with Thomas after all. I think I’m going to hang on to the book for a while and maybe one day revisit it. There may be some poems I skip the second time round, but the fact that I’m willing to give it another shot at all is a sign of how things have changed.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

5 reasons I'm not buying an e-reader just yet

          OK, it’s not exactly a topic about poetry, but since I’ve written some in my short time here on technology and its effect on the written word, I thought it would still be relevant.
          We’ve come now to a time where more and more of the stalwarts who once stood beside me by the gates of the city have fallen to the onslaught of the new promising technology offered by readers such as Nooks and Kindles. They’ve stepped out of the line, deciding to forego their substantial tomes for lightweight, elegant handheld devices. Still standing guard, but now with only a few in front and around me, I can clearly see the flashing lights and sensuous functionality that tempted away so many a brave warrior. I waver. . .
          But I stand firm. Here, in the end, after some contemplation, is why I decided against jumping on the e-reader bandwagon just yet:


1. I still love books. It’s one of the arguments made most strongly by those not yet willing to make the jump to e-readers, but oddly, it’s probably the argument most difficult for them to defend. But yet, there is something to it.

Yes, I know that it’s what’s written inside a book that matters and that that part will stay the same regardless, but still. . . I’ve devoted a large part of my life to books and I’m just not quite ready to make the jump. Plus, without books, scenes like those displayed here – bookshelfporn.com – just wouldn’t be possible.

2. I’m a late adopter when it comes to technology. Particularly considering the speed with which it changes nowadays, I prefer to wait it out on the sidelines a bit to see where the dust settles. I’m also not one who burns through different models or versions of the same technology – so once I finally get something, I plan on sticking with it for a while.

I was tempted to get an e-reader this year because it seemed like maybe it had come to a temporary stopping point where I was comfortable – i.e., it had made great jumps in the technology and the price had come down considerably. However, it seems like many more things might still occur in the next couple of years. For example, the lighting on the color readers might improve, making a purchase of a color reader possible without the annoying glare. Perhaps more importantly, I see the line between reader and tablet continuing to blur, so that in a short time one might get much more functionality out of a very basic reader (capability for email, apps, etc.) than one does today.

3. Hmmmm. . . I can think of no other way to put this one.

In my own personal circle, the few people I know who own e-readers at this time are not the ones I’d most like to emulate. In fact, they can be kind of annoying. I actually know very few very dedicated readers who own e-readers at this point. Most of the people I know who own them are actually more casual readers who are interested in technology. Once that dynamic starts to shift, I think peer opinion might bear more weight with me than it does now. Of course, I think this has much more to do with my limited sample than anything else, but still, it does have some bearing in my own personal decision.

4. Some of the most appealing aspects of an e-reader to me are its benefits to the environment and the reduction of “stuff” in my own personal space. I can save both trees and space.

A nightmare of clutter or a dream come true?
Well, thinking along those lines, there’s still plenty I can do without the aid of an e-reader. Over the course of the years, I’ve gathered many a book from friends, thrift stores, and bargain bins that I have yet to read. Many of these are books I’ll probably just read once and then be willing to pass along to charity. (Not to mention there are some books I’ve read in the past that I’ll likely never read again; I could jettison these as well, if I could just get over my biblio-attachment to them.) By making an effort to read and donate some of these, I can still be doing some service both environmentally and personally.

5. I tend to read some of the more specialized titles (as demonstrated in my interest in poetry). Many of the books I’m interested in are not currently available in e-reader formats, so switching to a reader would not benefit me in these instances. This trend is obviously going to be changing swiftly in the coming years, but for the present, a reader wouldn’t do me much good for many of the books I wish to read.

On a related note, my local library is surprisingly eclectic in its tastes and does often have these volumes on hand in a traditional print format. Thus, by utilizing its criminally underutilized resources, I can read many of the books I want and still be doing my “green” duty.


          I think that about covers the major points of my reasoning. I should point out that this is not a dig at e-readers. On the contrary, I think I’m finally caving to the fact that at some point in the future I will be acquiring one. In this post, I didn’t really say anything about the many benefits of these devices (such as their increasing functionality, the thousands of classic titles available free, the increasing library support of electronic formats, etc.), but maybe I will whenever I get to that point when I decide to purchase one.
          However, that point has not yet arrived for me. I’ll continue, for now, to stay true to my print books. Traditional, yes, but exciting nonetheless.