Postcards from the Imagination

I'm going up to Maine for a few days, and leaving my computer at home. I'll catch up with emails and comments on Monday. Have a great weekend, folks!

Posted by Ginger at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

from W.H. Auden's introduction to Cavafy's Complete Poems (tr. Rae Dalven)

"What, then, is it in Cavafy's poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hand, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel: 'This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.' That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion I draw is that the only quality which all human beings without exception possess is uniqueness..."

"Poems made by human beings are no more exempt from moral judgment than acts done by human beings, but the moral criterion is not the same. One duty of a poem, among others, is to bear witness to the truth. A moral witness is one who gives true testimony to the best of his ability in order that the court (or the reader) shall be in a better position to judge the case justly; an immoral witness is one who tells half-truths or downright lies: but it is not a witness's business to pass verdict...As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest. He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles."

Posted by Ginger at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Since Reb asked in her comment below, I thought I'd elaborate on the statement I made below regarding sincerity and the use of myth. The old adage, "Show don't tell," is probably appropriate here. First then, an example of myth used insincerely (in my view!):

Cassandra
by Louise Bogan

To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,--
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

---------------------------

Bogan's use of myth strikes me as evasive. She seems to want to talk about the role of the female poet, but not directly--and so she calls her poet Cassandra. But instead of talking about what it's like to be a flesh-and-blood, contemporary, female poet, Bogan simply repeats a feminized version of the old Romantic idea of the poet as prophet. I hear lots of melodrama, but no real emotion. Moreover, by couching her assertions in terms of a familiar myth, Bogan takes much of the edge off her boldest assertions, thereby minimizing the risk of her speech. On the flip side of the same coin, I think she sometimes overstates or exaggerates--for instance, "Song...tears through my breast.../And madness chooses out my voice..."--in order to maintain the Cassandra metaphor.

Better, in my opinion, is the following:

Helen
by H.D.

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

---------------------------

Here I detect a number of motives, but at least one of them seems to be a critique of myth itself. That is, rather than seeming to avoid the real issue, the myth itself is the issue. Why, asks H.D., is beauty only beauty when it no longer breathes? Why the lionization of mythological women, and the persistent disdain for real ones? Why, she might even be asking, why Helen and not Hilda? It's a complex poem, with a number of possible readings, but its emotions seem to flow directly from lived experience, whereas Bogan's seemed to be co-opted from the myth.

I hope that clarifies what I meant in my earlier post, but if not I'd be happy to continue discussing it.

Posted by Ginger at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Talk about the New Sincerity is all the rage in blogland these days. Small wonder then that Seth and I found ourselves discussing the matter over brunch this morning--or that now we've retreated to our separate computers to parse our thoughts in--what else?--writing.

I can't speak to the burgeoning(?) quasi-(?) destined to fail/succeed(?) movement as a whole, because I haven't kept on top of all the conversations. The mega-doses of irony in Joe Massey's manifestos, for instance, make my eyes glaze over and my head spin. I can, however, speak to what sincerity as a concept means to me, and why I am a fan.

First, some bullet-points on what sincerity, in my view, is and is not:

• Sincerity is always emotionally honest, though it may play fast-and-loose with every other kind of truth.

• Sincerity is full of personality. That is, the human quotient always makes itself more palpably felt than the theoretical one. Even in poems whose primary subject is an Idea, one feels there is a flesh-and-blood consciousness at its core. Sincerity shuns sterility, and insofar as it is authentic, it cannot help but reveal the individual personality of its persona(s), character(s), and/or writer.

• Sincerity is not a catalog of suffering, written in the confessional style. No one wholly suffers, or if they do they owe it to themselves to seek help and try to heal. Life is as much about joy as it is about pain, and any poetics which deliberately excises the finer half of the human experience for the sake of art cannot properly be termed sincere.

• Sincerity understands the difference between joy and happiness and contentment and does not try to amplify cooler emotions for the sake of turning them into art. In other words, there are a very few things which actually make the heart leap, and the sincere writer will avoid turning mild gladness into an instance of the sublime.

• (Though this one may spark WWIII here at home) Sincerity does not employ myth unless Myth is itself the subject of the poem. Put another way, a sincere writer does not substitute heroes, gods, saints, or other archetypes in order to avoid looking directly at the people, emotions, or ideas they represent.

• Sincerity risks awkwardness rather than covering its ass with "I was only joking."

Aside from the fact that my ribs are little sore from all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, sincerity appeals to me because there is a glut of insincerity in the general culture. Politicians abuse language every day through the use of irony in its purest, dictionary sense--i.e. "The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning." Hollywood produces a celluloid world which bears little resemblance to real one. Television producers fabricate extraordinary environments, hand-select participants, then splice together dramatic moments, and call it "Reality TV." Magazines--even and especially women's magazines--proffer an idea of sex which is based on the fantasies of heterosexual, fourteen year-old boys. Advertisers...well, you get the point. All of which leaves me craving a little unguarded sincerity.

I may add to this list as new definitions occur to me, or I may not. Either way, I do think something in the notion of a New Sincerity, even if it began as a joke between friends, expresses a feeling in the air that irony, as a dominant feature of anything, may be long overdue for a hiatus.

Posted by Ginger at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I almost typed Oskar Schell's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close when I was adding it to my Recent & Recommended list--that's how powerfully Jonathan Safran Foer renders his protagonist.

Oskar is a precocious nine year-old who loses his father in the World Trade Center on September 11th.  His grief takes him on a journey to find the lock that fits an odd key he finds in father's closet after his death. He is old enough to think, "Fuck you!" when his therapist asks whether he thinks anything good can come of his father's death, but too young to know what the Great Depression was. He is a quintessentially 21st century innocent.

And the book, with it's red-pen corrections, run-together type, interspersed photographs, and disturbing flip-book, is itself unmistakably contemporary.  It never stops reminding you that it is art, artifice, writing--particularly in its epistolary chapters--but somehow that makes it feel more honest, more real. I couldn't recommend this one more strongly.

Posted by Ginger at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you read your own blog archives? I've been blogging for about seven months now, and have accrued approximately one hundred forty posts. Though I re-read posts on the front page from time to time, I rarely dip back into the archives. The same is true with regard to my spotty private journal.  Et vous?

Posted by Ginger at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This evening Seth and I went down to our City Hall to stand with about 85 others holding a peace vigil for Cindy Sheehan. Ours was one of more than 1,600 vigils being held around the country according to this AP story. Of course, I was in a hurry to get there and forgot to grab my camera on the way out. If our local paper runs photos tomorrow I'll post them here.

For the most part it was a subdued event--people carried candles and sang "Give Peace a Chance."  I met a woman from Texas who happened to be in town visiting her parents, who were also there. Her dad, a gentleman in his seventies, sported a "Veterans for Peace" military cap. There were a handful of twenty-somethings, a few more of us in our thirties, and lots of baby-boomers and seniors--which is typical of most of the smaller demonstrations I've seen.

Certainly there was no mistaking this event for a Vietnam-era peace demonstration. Nor was it comparable to the larger protests which took place in Washington, NYC, San Francisco, or London leading up to and just after the start of the war. We accepted Peter Campion's "Protest" for TNHR largely because of the power and accuracy with which I felt he captured the experience of those demonstrations. It would be wonderful if tonight's events signaled growing momentum for activism on a broader scale, but it's so difficult to gauge these things. I think a lot of the pre-war protesters felt defeated quite early on. It wasn't just that the Bush administration ignored the protests, but that the media treated them as though they were a mere cultural novelty. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to hear politicians and pundits talk about hindsight being 20/20 when so much of what they claim they could not have known was obvious to dissenters back in 2002-03. Hundreds of thousands of hard-to-motivate Americans demonstrating for peace in the wake of 9/11 should have triggered greater skepticism in the public discourse. Instead the anti- (and lets-not-rush-to) war crowd was dismissed as irrelevant by Democrats and Republicans alike.

In any event, tonight's vigil ended with a rendition of "Down by the Riverside," which I couldn't recall having heard before, but which Seth (who has a gorgeous singing voice) knew...

Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Ain't gonna study war no more...

Posted by Ginger at 02:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Did any of you, against your better judgment, see the movie Sylvia? I did and was terrified by the scene in which Hughes comes home from fishing and finds that Plath, who has had the entire day to herself to write, has instead baked a sunroom full of cakes and breads. I think I let dirty dishes pile up in the sink for a week after that--because it's not easy living with a poet who writes as quickly and as well as Seth. This weekend, while he was dashing off four new poems, I was busy torturing a helpless draft. Of dragonflies and spiders, I wrote:

I suppose fear has its particular shade as well—
     as in the cold efficiency with which
the natural world conducts the only commerce
          it has ever known, which is killing;

the subliminal blue in which a dragonfly finds
     itself caught—the frantic, futile beating of wings,
an American house spider descending
          from the corner of the window frame...

While he wrote:

          I will be comforted
by the fact that spiders gather before a thunderstorm,
how each web elongates to the next, to a whole
which shivers but will not break when the torrents hit.
I will be emboldened by the lesions on the dragonfly,
who feels nothing in being consumed alive in a silver
coffin bobbing outside the window...

Only my poem isn't finished yet, and now I'm not sure I see the point. I have the whole day to myself to write, and I'm afraid that at the end of it my kitchen sink--where the analogy finally slips down the drain--will gleam.

Posted by Ginger at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Moveon.org is helping to organize candlelight vigils across the country on Wednesday at 7:30pm in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan. You can find a vigil in your area through their web site. Mrs. Sheehan's son was killed in Iraq. She would like to ask President Bush face-to-face why he died, but the President refuses to meet with her. She is currently camped out near Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX where she has been joined by several other military mothers who also want answers. She is one of the founding members of a group called Gold Star Families for Peace. So, if you have some free time Wednesday night...

Posted by Ginger at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We just found our first two poems for the next issue of TNHR! Because the submission came to us via email, I was curious how many electronic vs. paper subs we accepted for the first issue. As it turns out the split was exactly 50/50--that is, of the unsolicited poets whose work we accepted, half sent us their manuscripts via email. And I'm quite sure no one reading the issue would be able to guess which poems came from where.

I have to admit this surprised me. Seth and I initially expected the paper submissions to be of a somewhat higher quality than the e-subs. We were wrong. While we did receive a handful of "poems composed in email," we probably received an equal number of paper subs that looked as though they'd previously lined a bird cage. But those were few enough that we could chuckle rather than be annoyed by them.

One tendency I have noticed is for people to either forget to include enough postage for return of their manuscripts, or to mention they need not be returned. Since I don't have a postage scale here at home, it was often difficult for me to decide whether or not 37 cents would cover it. Fortunately, nothing's come back so far.

And I'll have to cut it short there since one of our friends just called and asked if we wanted to meet him for a drink. If I don't post again before Monday, I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Posted by Ginger at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My part-time job just got parter. Why?  Because I work too efficiently. (That may sound like tooting my own horn, until you realize that what I'm really good at is mostly data entry.) I was hired to work four hours a day, but I've been finishing all the work they have for me in 2-3. Yesterday the woman I report to asked if I'd stay home on Tuesdays and Thursdays in order to give her more time to find things to keep me busy on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, my reward for being able to finish twenty hours worth of work in fifteen is the loss of five hours' pay.

I could call the temp agency and ask them to find me another assignment, but there are some benefits to staying where I am. Most significantly, I don't have a wardrobe full of business attire, and this company allows its employees to wear jeans to work. Because the temp agency doesn't know these things in advance, I could end up in an assignment for which I'd have to buy new clothes. Leaving aside the fact that I hate shopping, I'm also trying (successfully!) to lose some weight, and I can't see spending money on things that won't fit in a few months.

There's also a chance that this company will be able to keep me on a few hours a week after classes start in September--money I could use while I'm waiting for my financial aid to come through, which generally doesn't happen until mid-to-late October.

Speaking of which, I only have room for one prose seminar in my fall course schedule, and I'm having trouble deciding between James Joyce and Henry James. Any advice?

[For those of you not up to speed on the background, I'm a thirty year-old undergraduate. I worked after high school, because I needed to support myself--but I kept right on learning independently, and when the opportunity presented itself I went back to school. I have three undergraduate semesters left, after which I'm seriously considering a full-time MFA program. Going back to school later in life hasn't been easy, and I'd like to reward myself with a couple years' immersion in writing.]

Posted by Ginger at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Don't you love it when the right poem just falls into your lap? I was leafing through Donald Hall's Old and New Poems this afternoon, drowsy from having labored in my gray cubicle all morning, when I stumbled upon...

No Color Man

I lived no-color. In a gray room I talked
clipped whispers
with a woman who faded while I looked at her.
Our voices were oyster-white, my monsters
as pale as puffballs of dust. Leaves of my trees
turned dingy. I mowed pale grass.
Friends parked station wagons like huge dead mice
by my house that was nearly invisible.
Dollar bills lost color
when I kept them in my wallet.
I dreamed of mountains gray like oceans
with no house lights on them,
only coffins that walked and talked
and buried each other continually in gray sand.

                                                 --Donald Hall

Posted by Ginger at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I haven't felt compelled to blog much lately, and I imagine its an August thing. My part-time job is as dull as bad prose--gray office, gray cubicle, gray labor. I did, however, finish a poem last night. At Seth's urging I stuffed it into an envelope and sent it along to a journal that's looking for just that sort of thing for an upcoming theme issue. I have another poem in mind that I'd like to start working on right now, but alas it will have to wait until after work. Off to swim through the numbers...

Posted by Ginger at 08:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been doing a lot of private writing lately--emptying my thoughts into a paper notebook--thus the blog silence. Last weekend Seth bought me a new writing desk for the bedroom. Too many distractions at my computer desk, and I prefer to longhand most of my creative writing anyway. I adore this new space...

I've also been reading a lot, mostly from my local library's substantial Donald Hall collection. Life Work is going up in the Recommended list. If I have time this weekend I may write more about that wonderful essay-memoir on the blog. I'd also recommend Here at Eagle Pond (essays), Without (poems), and The Painted Bed (poems). I don't think I've ever cried so hard reading poems as I did reading these. "You think that their / dying is the worst / thing that could happen," writes Hall. "Then they stay dead." (from "Distressed Haiku" in The Painted Bed). It is impossible to read these poems without a deepening sense of gratitude for the presence of one's love. And even the best of us need reminding sometimes.

Posted by Ginger at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A hearty congratulations to New Hampshire Review contributors Paula Bohince, Clay Matthews, and Steve Mueske, whose work has been selected to appear in the new anthology Best New Poets 2005 (Ed. George Garrett; Series Ed., Jeb Livingood), due out in November! I can't tell you how pleased I am for each of these very fine poets!

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In other TNHR news, I've tweaked our Contributors Fund page. So far we've not had any donations, and I wanted to make it clear that we're only looking for $2.00-3.00 from individual donors. I've also added a feature whereby organizations and businesses can list themselves for a minimum $20 donation. The contributors fund is an experiment in that all of the money collected goes directly from readers to writers. The magazine does not keep any of part of the donations. As an alternative method of supporting the arts online, I'd love to see this experiment succeed.

Posted by Ginger at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)