Natasha Trethewey, poet laureate

The New York Times reports on Natasha Trethewey, the new poet laureate, with a sampling of her poems. The four samples become more interesting when one looks at them in light of Marjorie Perloff’s recent commentary on the “well-crafted” poem (also known as the “workshop poem”). For clarity: “well-crafted” is not a term of praise. It’s meant rather to suggest a formulaic and deeply restricted sense of what poetry might be. Perloff describes three main features of the “well-crafted” poem:

1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain, whether of our imperialist wars in the Middle East or of late capitalism or of some personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one.

The one “well-crafted” poem Perloff quotes in full in making her case: “Hot Combs,” by Natasha Trethewey.

I’ll consider the first six lines of one of the Times’s sample poems, “Limen”:

All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the
    catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,

his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.

“Irregular lines of free verse”: yes, though there is a ghost of iambic pentameter in several of the poem’s lines, and three instances of rhyme or off-rhyme. But the lines do appear to be what I call chopped prose. Notice too the many prepositional phrases, beginning to, of, outside, at, to, of, and in.

If these lines suffer when turned into prose, it is because their false insistence and strained metaphor become more evident when the line breaks disappear:

All day I’ve listened to the industry of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree just outside my window. Hard at his task, his body is a hinge, a door knocker to the cluttered house of memory in which I can almost see my mother’s face.

False insistence: would you, reader, really listen to a woodpecker peck all day? When it’s just outside your window? Wouldn’t you go the library or a coffeeshop or something? Strained metaphor: the bird’s body is a hinge but also a door knocker? And that makes the tree a house of memory that the bird is trying to enter? A treehouse in which the poet can almost see her mother’s face?

As the poem continues, the mother turns out to be elsewhere, “beyond the tree,” hanging sheets on a clothesline, “each one // a thin white screen between us”: another strained metaphor. And then “the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany”: the woodpecker is looking “not simply” for “beetles and grubs,” “but for some other gift / the tree might hold.” The poet is “sure” about it.

There’s nothing wrong with making something of a bird: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (to name a few poets) do so in poems that enact imaginative discovery and invite the reader’s participation in that discovery. What I see in Trethewey’s poem is a too-facile application of “poeticity” to a scene, an application that invites the reader to nod, Yes, it’s poetry. When it comes to poetry and woodpeckers, I’ll stick with Ron Padgett.

[That title — “Limen”? A word to look up. And yes, I’m aware that the presence of the poet’s mother in the poem involves a family tragedy.]

Neologism contest keeps on going, shows no sign of stopping

Needed: a word that means a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.” The neologism contest that began on Monday runs through Monday. There are now fifteen entries.

The toast sandwich

I just learned about a bit of cookery that sounds like something from a Bob and Ray sketch: the toast sandwich. The ingredients: bread, butter, toast, salt, pepper. In November 2011 the BBC reported on this sandwich, billed as the United Kingdom’s cheapest meal. As the BBC notes, the recipe may be found in Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), which happens to be at Google Books:


[From The Book of Household Management; Comprising Information for The Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper And Under House-Maids, Lady's-Maid, Maid-of-All-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nursemaid, Monthly, Wet And Sick Nurses, Etc. Etc. Also, Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda; with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of All Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort. (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861).]

Here’s a review, from a writer who dubs the sandwich the BBC Austerity George Osborne Toast Sandwich.

A related post
Beeton on French coffee

[The BBC does not mention that the recipe comes from the chapter “Invalid Cookery.” Bob and Ray’s Harry and Mary Backstayge ran for a time a House of Toast, which offered toast, buttered on the far side or the near side, and prune shakes. The toast sandwich would have been a fine addition to the menu.]

Neologism contest keeps continuing

Can you think of a good word for a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit”? The neologism contest that began on Monday keeps continuing, with thirteen entries so far.

Rooms, radios, hurdles

On reading and attention:

Too few boys and girls seem to know the simplest facts about reading. When a student comes around with a baffled look, saying that he has spent several hours each evening doing the assigned work but “don’t seem to get anything out of it,” the case is usually easy to diagnose: “Do you study in a room by yourself?” “No.” “Then, do.” Sometimes the answer is “Yes, I have a room of my own,” in which case the next question is, “Do you keep the radio on?” “Yes.” “Then, don’t.” Jane Austen could write novels in the family parlor and some people can think in a boiler factory, but it is foolish to take the hardest hurdles first when the power of attention is so rare.

Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).

Barzun’s observations remind me of a 2006 post I wrote about finding a good place to study. That post is also (still) available in Renzai’s Japanese translation: 勉強しやすい場所. Google Translate makes a sometimes lovely mess turning it back into English: “It is easy to do and study anywhere, it’s various colors.”

Related reading
All Jacques Barzun posts (via Pinboard)

Not from Lincoln

There’s a passage attributed to Abraham Lincoln, widely distributed, which goes as follows:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

I encountered this passage for the first time in a television commercial paid for by a union local. As you might guess, I am sympathetic to what this passage says. But I know that apocryphal quotations are, as Thomas Jefferson said, “a dime a dozen,” so I wanted to check on the source, which the commercial identified as a November 21, 1864 letter from Lincoln to Colonel William F. Elkins.

A quick search for lincoln elkins corporations brought up a page at snopes.com. Uh-oh. If Snopes was correct, this passage could not be attributed to Lincoln. I e-mailed the union local and was told that the local consulted Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer before running the commercial and that Mr. Holzer confirmed that the passage comes from Lincoln’s Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861. And I felt like an idiot.

But then I noticed that the source being cited was not the source cited in the commercial. And when I looked up the December 3, 1861 Message to Congress, I found that it doesn’t contain the passage in question. I then e-mailed Mr. Holzer, who replied that this passage is not Lincoln’s. I am grateful for Mr. Holzer for his reply: he has better things to do than answer questions about apocryphal quotations.

I don’t know how to explain the union local’s response to my query. It would be simple enough to say “We goofed”: plenty of people have taken these words to be Lincoln’s. But the words aren’t Lincoln’s. Here though are words from another president, John Adams, as quoted in David McCullough’s 2001 biography: “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Related posts (on another apocryphal quotation)
From Eliot to Woolf to Montaigne
It is the correction that matters

[I don’t like explaining a joke, but in case there is any doubt: Thomas Jefferson didn’t say that apocryphal quotations are a dime a dozen. He did though, with Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and David Rittenhouse, propose a decimal-based coinage system.]

Neologism contest continues

What’s a good word for a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit”? The neologism contest that began yesterday continues through next Monday.

David Foster Wallace, nonplussed

Several years ago I came to realize that I misunderstood the meaning of the word nonplussed. So I am amused to see David Foster Wallace using the word correctly in his first novel, The Broom of the System (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987). Rick Vigorous (of the publishing firm Frequent and Vigorous) approaches switchboard operator Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman:

I see Lenore looking up to smile at my approach. I see me exhausting the subject of the weather, then asking Lenore if she might perhaps care to have a drink, with me, after work. I see one of the rare occasions I’ve encountered in which the word “nonplussed” might profitably be used in description. I see Lenore momentarily nonplussed.

“I don’t really drink,” she said, after a moment, looking back down at her book.

I felt a sinking. “You don’t drink liquid of any sort?” I asked her.

Lenore looked up softly at me and gave a slow smile. Her moist lips curved up softly. They really did. I resisted the urge to lunge into disaster right there in the lobby. “I drink liquid,” she admitted, after a moment.

“Splendid. What sort of liquid do you prefer to drink?”

“Ginger ale’s an especially good liquid, I’ve always thought,” she said, laughing.

I’m almost a third of the way through the novel and am surprised to see so many elements of Infinite Jest already in place (in a novel written as an undergraduate thesis): non-chronological narrative, sections and subsections identified by year, multiple narrators, exhaustive catalogues, excerpts from other texts, awkward dialogue, long stretches of dialogue without attribution, the use of “‘. . .’” to mark baffled silence, even a reconfigured American landscape (the Great Ohio Desert). I see me finishing this novel in the near future.

June 9: My friend Sara McWhorter reports that nonplussed also appears, correctly used, in Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996). The word comes up on pages 57 and 692: “the guy was to say the least nonplussed”; “Day was nonplussed when he found himself, after a couple long nights, almost missing Lenz.” Thanks, Sara.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[Lenore’s fellow switchboard operator is named Judith Prietht.]

"The Education of Dasmine Cathey"

At the University of Memphis, Dasmine Cathey is working on his résumé with “life-skills coordinator” Kristin Rusboldt:

“What's your major?” she asks.

“Sports management.”

“Is that a bachelor of science or arts?” she says.

He doesn’t know, so he walks a few steps away to ask [football counselor] Ms. [Sharyne] Connell.

“Do I have a bachelor of science or arts?” he says.

Ms. Connell comes out of her office and heads toward Ms. Rusboldt. “He has a bachelor of liberal studies in interdisciplinary studies,” she says.

Mr. Cathey sits back down, a staff member by each side. He taps out, “Bachelor of Liberal Studies.”

“Type ‘in Interdisciplinary Studies,’” Ms. Rusboldt says.

“How do you spell that?”

Read it all, including the samples of academic work, and weep:

The Education of Dasmine Cathey (Chronicle of Higher Education)

[I think though that medical not academic issues will doom college football.]

“It’s ordered special for you!”

[Mark Trail, June 4, 2012.]

Mitt Romney and D-list cartoon hero Mark Trail are, it seems, the same person (or character). Here he takes the fight to President Obama in the White House itself. Enough of these special privileges, says Mitt/Mark.

Related posts
Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail
Mitt/Mark and the big trees
Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail, learning from experience