EthicalDative

‘You Have to Be Interested in the Playfulness of Poetry’

Posted on March 22, 2023 by JMN

This is a doodle from last year that went nowhere. It reflects my foolish obsession with Scottish ancestry. While living, my dad obtained from somewhere a document saying that my family’s clan was associated with the MacLeods, MacFies and Campbells. What does that mean? Connected through marriage? As an undergrad I spent a summer in Mexico City. One of my classes at the national university, taught by Ermilo Abreu Gómez, was on the “novela de la Revolución.” A guest lecture was given by author Nellie Campobello. She was a Campbell! I elect association with her.

[Billy Collins] sat on a bench and watched some students playing Wiffle ball on a quad. “You have to be interested in the playfulness of poetry to want to keep writing it,” he said. Then, as if to shoo away the fatalism, he added that he has already written a hundred poems for his next collection, not all of them short.

(Bob Morris, “A New York Poet Laureate in Deepest, Darkest Florida,” The New Yorker, 3-13-23)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged miscellaneous, personal | Leave a comment

‘I Discovered That the Act of Writing Is Also an Act of Drawing’

Posted on March 21, 2023 by JMN

Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Etel Adnan. Private collection Courtesy Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris; © Etel Adnan.

Lebanese-American painter-poet-novelist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was interviewed by Gabriel Coxhead for the June 2018 issue of Apollo. I’m drawn to her work for how it mingles Arabic language, painting and poetry.

Journey to Mount Tamalpais (detail; 2008), Etel Adnan. Private collection Courtesy Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris; © Etel Adnan.

Quoting from the interview:

Perhaps most interesting, in terms of her parallel practices of art and writing, is the display’s focus on what she refers to as ‘leporellos’ – a term for a sort of pleat-folded, concertina-style book, typically many pages long. It’s a format she began experimenting with while living in California, after coming across leporellos in a Japanese store there… “The guy in the shop told me it was for putting photographs in! But when I saw it, I knew that what I wanted to do was write Arab poetry.”

She doesn’t mean, though, that she used the leporellos to write her own poetry – not initially, at least. She tells me how she was part of the generation in Lebanon who was taught only in French at school, and punished for speaking Arabic, while at home she spoke Turkish and Greek. So she never became fluent enough in Arabic to compose in it (her own poems tend to be composed in English). It was other contemporary Arabic writers, then, whose poetry she turned to for her leporello pieces – and what attracted her, besides each poems’ [sic] meaning, was the process of transcription itself. “The flexibility of the Arabic script excited me. In Arabic, you have greater freedom to manipulate writing, visually. You can stretch letters out, you can put one letter on top of another.” She also added watercolours, coiling delicate, washy patterns around the words or through them – turning the texts into visual art, essentially. “In this way I discovered that the act of writing is also an act of drawing.”

Posted in Quotations | Tagged Arabic, art, language, painting, poetry, writing | 1 Comment

Ann Lauterbach’s ‘Door’: Trouble Me, Poet

Posted on March 20, 2023 by JMN

A noun or pronoun, with a participle in agreement, may be put in the ablative to define the time or circumstances of an action. This construction is called the Ablative Absolute… The Ablative Absolute is an adverbial modifier of the predicate. It is, however, not grammatically dependent on any word in the sentence: hence its name absolute (absolūtus, i.e. free or unconnected). A substantive in the Ablative Absolute very seldom denotes a person or thing elsewhere mentioned in the same clause.

DOOR
World fills up
imperious pace

vagrant matter
into the humming

pooled at the feet
what soul went down

what inventory
mud slippage tracks

marked shells
anointed there

the ravenous real
flowering

above torsion of waves
unexpected

threshold
thrown open crossed.

(Ann Lauterbach, from Poetry March 2023)

Here’s how I read it:

World fills up. Imperious pace. Vagrant matter into the humming. Pooled at the feet, what soul went down! What inventory mud slippage tracks, marked shells anointed there! The ravenous real flowering above torsion of waves. Unexpected threshold thrown open: crossed.

Other phrasings can be inferred. For example: Vagrant matter into the humming, pooled at the feet. What soul went down! Etc.

I have an affection for the verb “cohere” — the state of being joined up, of hanging together. I also like “construe,” which is a feat of elucidation resulting from analysis. Whether it’s a painting or a verse that one reads, does it overstate the case to say reading is construal in pursuit of coherence? We’re meaning seekers; we want to claw message from noise. Figuring out what relationship words have to one another conduces to signal reception. One way to confirm we’ve been signaled is to restate message in our own terms, albeit paraphrase is a widely deprecated expedient. I like to think of it as translation.

“Door” is a sustained interjection built with declamatory ecce language: Behold! I speculate that a confluence of intensely perceived marine stimuli triggered a private ecstasy, a flash of insight into plenitude and convergence, a breakthrough to transcendent understanding, a “door of perception” moment which the writer sought to freeze-frame in haiku-esque shorthand. Terse headline language cascades through elusive dependencies, disputable enjambments, and a succession of power words — imperious, vagrant, soul, anointed, ravenous, torsion. Where I glimpse poem at last is in the ravenous real. I’m smitten with substantivized “real” and how it flows participially into a flowering above torsion of waves. Ecce coherence!

Whatever they say about “connecting” with an audience, writers who identify as poets fulfill themselves first. Perhaps “Door” scores artistic achievement by forcing me to come to terms with it to this extent, at this cost in spent treasure of life-moments. The question a reader must ask always is, “How does verse-speech fulfill me?”

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged grammar, language, personal, poetry, reading, rhetoric, style | Leave a comment

‘They Can Feel Almost Like Exquisite Texts to Be Read’

Posted on March 18, 2023 by JMN

Richter’s “Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting),” from 2016. Credit… via Gerhard Richter and David Zwirner.

… Each [painting] presents so much information that you have to move in close for further contemplation and deciphering, trying to figure out how the paintings were made and which of their weird little details are accidental, which deliberate. They can feel almost like exquisite texts to be read [my bolding]. But instead of words, you follow painterly events of different sizes; one color gives way to another; smooth passages blur adjacent colors and then break apart into patchy areas that resemble reptile skin or tiny islands that expose multiple layers of color. Sometimes the blue layer with which Richter usually starts a work is visible, or it may be scraped far down to reveal nearly bare canvas.

“Painterly events”! I found exhilarating the spectacle of a prominent art critic delving into the grit of paintings to probe their “information.” It reassures me that, analogously, my reflex to decipher verse at a grammar level in pursuit of its “poetry” may not be goofy.

An interesting detail is that Richter, aged 85, says he finds painting tiring now and will devote his energies to drawing. His drawings slap me in the face with a reality that I struggle in all honesty to fathom, ratify and prosecute in my own trivial practice: Drawing is important; what you draw is not.

“22.9.2022 (6),” an ink and pencil drawing from 2022. Credit… via Gerhard Richter and David Zwirner.

“18.7.21,” from 2021, is all-pencil. Credit… via Gerhard Richter and David Zwirner.

(Roberta Smith, “Gerhard Richter Rides Again,” New York Times, 3-16-23)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, criticism, drawing, language, painting | 3 Comments

Arabic Poetry Note: A. J. Arberry (1905-1969)

Posted on March 17, 2023 by JMN

**^ āliyaẗ(un)**… *The upper portion of the spear-shaft; … or the head* **(ra’s(un)** thereof: or the half that is next to the iron head: or the part of the spear that is below the iron head: or the portion of the spear that enters the iron head, extending to the third part thereof [i.e. of the shaft]; so that it signifies the uppermost of the three equal portions of the shaft: pl. **^awāl(in)***, which some explain as meaning the iron heads of spears.* — **Lane’s Lexicon**.

Given the exiguous outbound appeal I muster, I work hard at not being longwinded. I revel, though, in venting puffs of comment on my adventure with Arabic and its poetry.

A.J. Arberry’s essential anthology of 31 poets spans a period from mid-6th-century A.D. until mid-20th-century. The British scholar’s slightly old-fashioned English translations (he calls al-Khansa’ a “poetess”) sit opposite the Arabic texts he scrupulously edited, providing strategic voweling and useful notes, references and biographies, not to mention a formidable introductory essay. The volume is a primer — and a crucial resource for me at this stage.

From schooling in Arabic that started adventitiously at the University of Barcelona and proceeded deliberately at UNC, I’m in reasonable control of Arabic morphology and syntax despite a hiatus wasted in earning a mediocre living; I know enough for the incredible Wright’s grammar to be useful when needed. Building up recognition and recall vocabulary is the job now. It’s enthralling. Classical verses are packed like sticks of dynamite. I read them slowly and aloud, consulting Hans Wehr and Lane for voweling and meanings. I transliterate the verses, and I draw them. By then they’re largely memorized.

Arberry’s translations provide valuable guidance, but they aren’t the last word for me. I don’t contest them, of course; it’s simply that for their virtues of style and readability his versions don’t always track the Arabic as closely as I need. I want to own the verses in my personal English so as to feel I’ve caught what powers them in their element as best I can. Literal translations serve me more than literary ones.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Arabic-English, culture, language, personal, poetry, reading, translation | 2 Comments

‘Again and Ever’: Richard Deming Teaches at Yale

Posted on March 15, 2023 by JMN

Reading what writers who identify as poets say about verse can be waftish and atomized like verse itself. Straight talk doesn’t go with the territory. Richard Deming introduces the Poetry – March 2023 portfolio celebrating Ann Lauterbach with a 1-page amuse-bouche. He works references to Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams into his beginning:

In her work — fierce, complexly lyric — we see some of Beckett’s struggles with silence… In Lauterbach’s poems we catch sympathetic resonances of Williams’s insistence on particulars as the engine for esthetic insight.

Then he quotes a paragraph by Lauterbach herself, from her 2008 book of essays titled The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. I’ll paraphrase it. She says loftily that the artist’s job is to “release materials” into a “middle ground” in order to connect with someone else, but also to foment awareness of people who are elsewhere, even far away. Something like that.

In his last paragraph, Professor Deming says this:

[Lauterbach’s] poems are, again and ever, an act of the mind testing the integrity — structural, moral — of the world.

In his finale he uses the word “wonder” 8 times, including this:

A wonder without sentimentality, a complex, difficult wonder that needs at last to be earned. A wonder like that.

Ending is a pirouette:

Did I say “wonder”? I meant “a world.” Ann Lauterbach means the world. Let’s put it that way. What else is there?

Make of it what you will. It’s starkly free of particulars about the work it introduces, which is just as well. What follows it is a flight of Lauterbach’s materials — a tray of versecraft specimens for the reader to roll on the tongue, earning his wonder.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, rhetoric | Leave a comment

Try It My Way

Posted on March 13, 2023 by JMN

Ladies and gentlemen (grant me this antiquated mode of address), we have much in common. We all have nipples. We all have equivalencies of kit in our genital wheelhouses. There’s a comical, often derisory cliché of the (rare) male striving to get, or be, in touch with his female side. There’s not a respectable female analog to it (I mean the cliché, not the reality) — i.e., the woman reaching into and connecting with her maleness — that I’m aware of.

Since creation, a lot of men have been abusive, murderous jackasses, often depriving the female half of humanity of agency, respect and self-realized fulfillment. I harbor suspicion that the snowballing nonbinary movement has been lent great momentum by accumulated disgust with self-serving, presumptuous, undeserved, enervating, theocratic male domination.

The nonbinary is an exclusionary mode, however. What about a “bilateral” alternative? Neither-male-nor-female could segue into Both-male-and-female, neither-ism not giving way to, but rather making way for, both-erism. On a personal note, I’ve always felt I have some woman in me and, like Binx Bolling, I seek the company of women. I embrace being somewhat of a bundle without putting dukes up about it. One grows into who one is, a nurture-minded father hen who keeps an orderly house.

Taxonomically, my doctrine of bilateral-ism versus nonbinary-ism may not be bullet-proof. I hear objection that “both” still implies only two. Some may insist that gender transcends arithmetic, that it’s infinitely multiple, that it occupies a sliding scale of finely nuanced gradation, or an idealized spectrum in which the colors meld one into the next without distinct boundaries. This position has metaphysical and visionary appeal; it’s dogmatically seductive and theoretically elegant.

I concede that bilateral-ism does make an implicit appeal to a bias founded in physical biology, which is that nature as we know it seems to produce in first instance (note how I hedge) only two versions of ourselves, with exceptional cases of the two combined. I contend, however, that both-erism as a mindset does not preclude a polylateralist mindset — call it all-erism. No problem; it’s a distinction without a difference for the moment, but it moves us closer to a sunny upland of positivity for which we, short only the apposite pronoun, badly long.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged culture, language, personal, society | Leave a comment

Stored Mental Habitat for When You Need It

Posted on March 12, 2023 by JMN

Found in a sketchpad I’d forgotten. I must have “sketched” a verse fragment during the end times preview! I guess I caught its movement OK, though the treatment of “specious” is stretched.

The lucky, when young, get their noses rubbed in something that as far as they’re concerned they’ll never need to know in order to make a living. Science. Grammar. Mathematics. Latin…. It will hide in the back of their minds as they are sucked into the reductive hustle of what passes for an education and a life.

When they’re old, broken and alone with their thoughts, it’s there, in their heads, ready to keep them company. The spell of the recondite and joy of disinterested cerebration come into their own at the end of the line, easing the last moments of the lucky.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged education | Leave a comment

Dawn of the ‘Inherently Improbable’

Posted on March 11, 2023 by JMN

For the observer of language, phrases are the news. Today’s newsmakers are “inherently improbable,” “AI persona” and “crypto world.”

“Inherently improbable”

Florida wants to change the legal definition of actual malice to include any allegation that is “inherently improbable.” The bill targets press freedom, but one frets over collateral damage to poetry and theology. There’s more than one assertion in scripture and verse that’s inherently improbable. Actual malice? Noam Chomsky writes this:

The theory that apples fall to earth because mass bends space-time (Einstein’s view) is highly improbable, but it actually tells you why they fall. True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.

(Editorial Board, “Florida Is Trying to Take Away the American Right to Speak Freely,” New York Times, 3-4-23. Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” New York Times, 3-8-23)

“AI persona” and “crypto world”

“In the short term, we’ll focus on building creative and expressive tools,” [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg] wrote. “Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways…”

The journalist notes that legacy “remnants” of the extinct metaverse — such as VR headsets — will continue being developed for niche audiences “such as videogamers and the crypto world.”

(Luc Olinga, “Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Buries the Metaverse,” thestreet.com, 3-2-23)

What gamer dudes and crypto bros have in common is moot, but it’s clear physical persons are on our way out. It’s a brave new world a-knocking.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged culture, journalism, language, rhetoric, society | Leave a comment

Drawing in the Dark

Posted on March 10, 2023 by JMN

*“Untitled (Contemplation of the Chrysanthemum)” is a series of drowsy, sun-drunk works on paper that Cy Twombly produced between 1984 and 2002*. Art work © Cy Twombly Foundation / Photograph by Jeff McLane / Courtesy Gagosian.

… As a young artist living in Georgia, he spent nights alone in a dark room, teaching himself to draw without the meddling of his eyes. Unlearning is still a kind of learning.
(Jackson Arn)

(Jackson Arn, “Cy Twombly, the Content Painter,” The New Yorker, 2-7-23)

I subscribe to Arn’s assertion that unlearning is learning. Twombly’s work has great appeal, and the notion of his practicing sightless in a dark room is endearing. Removing our lying eyes from drawing seems a beginning.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, drawing, style | 4 Comments