Happy Shakespeare's Birthday, everyone! One of the seventh-graders whom I was substitute teaching today asked, when I had written that on the chalkboard, shouldn't I have written Happy Birthday, Shakespeare. Well, no, because he is dead and anyway it's a happy occasion for us, not just for him. Not even for him, now that he is dead. Anyway here is a Birthday Listicle for my man Shakespeare, of the top four quotes that I think celebrate the big 4-4-5.
Oh, also, I think "Talk Like Shakespeare" day is kind of silly unless you take it WAY EXTREME and start using real, pre-vowel shift, clipped jabbering instead of just saying "sirrah" and "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I don't think that part of "talking like Shakespeare" is the same as "quoting unnecessarily and stupidly". We'll save that for talk like Polonius day.
4)"Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, when we first smell the air
We wawl and cry..........................
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools." -- King Lear
So, right of the bat, a downer. Someone, I think Cavell, points out that, uh, Shakespeare, that's not really why we cry when we're born. But still. On your birthday, you can feel that way. I used to refuse to celebrate my birthday, because if you made up a ledger with all of my woes on it, I was doing a lot better pre-birth than post-birth, and didn't want to celebrate just the start of all my troubles. But with the right inflection, you can be a good stoic on your birthday by reminding yourself that indeed, we came crying hither.
3)"And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones." -- King Henry V
This one is a little testy, too, and I'm not totally sure that the tennis balls that the Dauphin sends Henry (for laffs) are a birthday present (in fact, I'm almost positive they're not). But this is a useful one for the Shakespeare-birthday quote arsenal, to trot out if anyone's gag gift incites you to invade their country while claiming the benefit of Salic law.
2) The First Twelve Lines of Sonnet XXX
I like this one -- it's the "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past" one -- not just because it's a little Prousty (a lot Prousty for anglophones), but also because it has the kind of grim account taking that I imagine one does on one's birthday. The last lines, though, I feel are a little soppy. This one's kind of a downer, too, like the first one; but like I said, with the woe-ledger, I generally get down (sad down, not boogie-down) about birthdays.
1) "When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows up a man like a bladder."--Falstaff
So, sad about anyone's birthday? Nothing will cheer you up out of that faster than Falstaff. After all the mopery of the proceeding, I laughed several times reading the post-Gad's Hill robbery scene, the one whence this quote. One of the best things available to us on our birthdays -- other than the impulse to pwn your Salic enemies -- is to look back and reward ourselves not just with the "fore-bemoaned moan" from the sonnet, but also with, what the hell, a vision of your life as you'd have liked it to be. Falstaff is an expert at that, and on Shakespeare's birthday and our own birthdays, we can choose to remember the times that we could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring, because why not.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wild Surmise
Here are some thoughts on poem two of a long National Poetry Month; let's see if we can knock down poems a little more quickly from here on in. This poem is about looking into old poetry, because what else is this month about? This poem was re-brought to my mind by a friend of mine who lives in Darien (but not the one mentioned in the poem) and who vacations in Smyrna (but not the one from the famous Hemingway supershort story On the Quai at Smyrna), making her, I guess, a sort of ersatz literary celebrity. Anyway, the poet is Keats (big poet Keats) and the poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer".
This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".
I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.
This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".
I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Charmed with Smiles and Soap
This post is about snark, or rather, The Snark, the quarry of Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark". It is not about David Denby's book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, which I will talk about soon. Rather, my reading some of Denby's book (which Miles mentioned in a comment a little ways back, and which seems in general the kind of Hip Zeitgesity Thing I tend to write about a few months late) has inspired me to look into the etymological provenance of Snark, and that place is Carroll's poem. And! It is National Poetry Month! So, count this as the festivities beginning.
What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.
Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.
What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.
Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.
What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.
Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.
What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.
Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.
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