My new year’s resolutions: poems in stranger and lower places, a pen by the bed, a filthier house, memorization, tenderness, sunlight. Learning how to recognize (maybe even early on) the scope of each poem’s ambition, then sizing and ending accordingly. (As I write this, my husband yells to me that our son has a new word: “burp.”)
Here’s one of my favorite clean slate poems, by Laura Jensen:
This weekend I read Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. The novel stretches the facts and the mystery surrounding one of the first people accused during the Salem witch crisis of 1692. The fact is Tituba confessed to being a witch. Her life beyond the crisis remains a mystery. Scholars are even unsure of her race. She may have been an African slave; she may have been an Indian; or she may have been a hybrid, the product of a collision of cultures.
With I, Tituba, Conde means to give voice to an invisible woman. Arthur Miller imagined intriguing possibilities for the accusers, but Tituba is a minor character who disappears for the bulk of the play—and reappears as a madwoman. For Conde, Tituba’s historical and narrative disappearance speaks to the larger problem of women’s voices. Tituba is not the only woman of color whose life simply vanished in the face of the dominant culture’s historical priorities. With the novel, Tituba—and every woman who lived and died as a slave—has her “revenge,” an audience compelled to know more of her story.
That said, on Amazon, one edition of Conde’s novel has limited availability. Another edition is out of stock. Tituba remains in danger of becoming invisible and unheard, a hazy ghost despite her role in one of the most curious moments in American history. It doesn’t seem fair that she can still get lost in the cultural and historical shuffle. Is that the postcolonial curse? Is that the way history works?
The state of English departments has been on my mind of late. So I’m interested that the new issue of Chronicle Review devotes three long articles to the topic “What Ails Literary Studies?” That alone suggests that my perception that something is amiss is widespread. No doubt the timing also has to do with the Modern Language Association meetings opening later this week in San Francisco, (and how did I fail to work up some scam to be there rather than central Ohio between Christmas and the New Year?).
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here, at least not now, bewailing how literature is taught or how curricula are structured. More immediately interesting, for the sake of the KR blog, is the growing paradox that the writing of literature (or at least the attempt to do so) is thriving as never before both in undergraduate and graduate institutions. The point is that students of all ages–and the KR Young Writers program is evidence as well–do still care about literature. They love it. They read it. They want to write it and be part of the ever more healthy community of writers and readers. (more…)
I haven’t left the house in days, because of the snow that has just now stopped. I was born in a blizzard but have lost my snow-muscle since moving to the Northwest and so I stay in, looking and baking and padding about in silent disrepair, marveling at the erasure. The sound of the road, the birds, our neighbors have all lifted and instead there is just this lovely light reflecting in. I feel a little bit stir-crazy, a little bit new. Though I haven’t been writing poetry during this particular Storm of the Century, this kind of fast-hearted trance reminds me of that place we go to when we write. It makes me think about the writers who really never leave the house–there’s an Austrian poet I just read about who hasn’t left the house in years, and there’s always good old Proust. It’s interesting to me how staying in the house can turn you wild, can un-domesticate you. That venturing out is what keeps us tame, that we are each other’s tethers, but that staying in one place for too long is unmooring. As writers we are always talking about the importance of finding a balance between this interior world and the outer one. A true balance usually means the souvenirs from the circus show up in our poetry. The danger of being too much in the world, of course, is not writing. And the danger of not leaving the house usually is not having anything to write about. A couple years ago I moved with my husband to Los Angeles for his job, and for the first time in my life I had the option of writing full-time. My version of discipline: I told myself I wasn’t allowed to leave the house each day until I’d written a poem. A good poem. And read a significant part of a good book. I could smell the orange trees through the window but I stayed at my desk, and each day it got harder to write what was increasingly a lifeless poem. Eventually I went back to work full-time, and my writing slowly came back to itself. I was so angry at myself for not being able to make better use of those enormous interior hours, and it’s that challenge–how to let the wildness of isolation inform rather than silence one’s writing–that draws me to writers who’ve made good of it. What beautiful wilderness there is in the same four walls.
7. Sprung Vision; Or, Who is Duane and Why Do I Have His Syndrome?
Perfect 20/20 vision will not be enough to pass an eye test given to military pilots. It also involves “contrast sensitivity.”One must be able, for example, to see a white cat walking in the snow.
Nothing! No oil
For the eye, nothing to pour
On those waters or flames.
–Robert Lowell, “Tooth and Eye”
The light was almost unbearable.
“Look right,” said Dr. de Souza. ”Look up. Look down.” He was examining my left eye with what I can only describe as an illuminated lens. His technician had spent 45 minutes taking detailed digital photographs of my retina–through layer after layer of retinal tissue, I was told–but if Dr. de Souza had made any use of those photographs, I never saw it. My impression is that, though Dr. de Souza works in a clinic that possesses all manner of marvelous devices, he prefers to trust himself instead of the machinery. Throughout my encounter with him, I was impressed by his aura of quiet authority and confidence, which was the very opposite of off-putting. I trusted this neat, semi-handsome, self-possessed man, and I was glad to trust him.
“Look left,” said Dr. de Souza.
“I can’t,” I said.
The burning lens flickered away. “You can’t? Why not?”
“I have Duane’s Syndrome in that eye.”
With my right eye, the one not being examined, I saw a smile flicker across his face, an expression I can only describe with the hackneyed word elfish. Dr. de Souza resembled an elf. Indeed, it occurred to me that he might have been one.
“Duane’s Syndrome! Really!” He bent closer to my left eye. “Look left?” he said again, this time with a different tone.
“Really, I can’t”
“Interesting,” he said, “Very interesting. But it causes me a little problem.” He stepped back and stroked his chin. “I must see your entire retina in order to find where the rip is. When there is that much blood in an eye, there is surely a rip. But if you can’t move your eye, I can’t see the whole expanse.” He paused again, looking at me as if I were a coconut that was being resistant to cracking. “What to do?”
The question was rhetorical. He knew exactly what to do.
“Here’s the thing. We’ll just pop that eye a little.” We will? He produced a demonic little metal spatula, which he pushed all too firmly against my upper eyelid, into the seam between my eyeball and its socket. “Now,” he said, “Let’s see.”
There’s still time to sign up for our holiday gift subscription offer! 70 seventy years of The Kenyon Review for the price of one! Details here. Offer good through Dec. 31st.
If you do take advantage of the holiday offer, you’ll be able to view poems and stories, essays and reviews from The Kenyon Review archive–each as they were originally published in The Kenyon Review, all online via JSTOR. From John Berryman to Carl Phillips, from Thomas Pynchon to Holly Goddard Jones–subscribe today for access to some of the most significant literary work from the past 70 years!
And, because we can do this now with our fancy new website, here’s a video of of Berryman reading, with his spectacular beard.
In this week’s New Yorker, David Denby reviews three of this season’s Oscar-baiting features, including “Revolutionary Road.” In his review, Denby indicates the film suffers “from the illusion that pain and art are the same thing.”
This observation reminded me of the very first argument I ever had about books. At age 17, I read Their Eyes Were Watching God alongside the biography of its author, and I asserted that only people who suffered could shape worthwhile narratives. My roommate reminded me that Jane Austen didn’t suffer in the same way Zora Neale Hurston suffered, and I made the mistake of admitting that I didn’t think Austen’s work was worthwhile.
“To reach the top of the canvas, she climbed a ladder and for each of the lower levels, she stood or sat on a special platform: a table, a box, a small Mexican chair, and finally, the floor.” If you are in O’Hare, this painting lifts off and descends in the same city as you…
Maybe one of these airport poems by Adam Zagajewski and translated by Clare Cavanagh will interest:
A smattering of Elizabeth Alexander’s poems are available for you to read online. She’s 45, she’s from Yale University, and she was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. You can read a little more about her appointment here.
In related news, the Pulitzer Prize now includes online journalism, though MediaBistro has struggled to find exactly who qualifies for the award. The Best American Short Stories also allow for online submissions. (The Kenyon Review also accepts these newfangled submissions, in case anyone has forgotten.) Will any of this affect the stigma attached to digital literature? (Is there a stigma attached in the first place?)
Good riddance to Christine Rosen, whose article David reflected upon yesterday. It turns out that the internet is not an addiction, according to a study by Cyberpsychology and Behavior (via HASTAC). It is, however, highly convenient and often free. Use at your own risk.
Interesting op ed blog in The New York Times today, “Reader Beware,” that expounds on the perils of reading on the electronic screen, from the Kindle to the desktop. It takes its lead from a longer article in The Atlantic. In fact, the writers propounding this position seem to be claiming that not only is reading on the screen different in degree from what we do when confronted with a printed page, but different in kind. And more: that to some degree it’s not reading, really, at all.
Hmmm.
First, I should confess that I had knee surgery yesterday and was reading the Times on my laptop, using the cool new New York Times Reader. Given my druthers, it’s true, I much prefer the print edition of the daily paper with a cup of coffee by my side. But that’s not always possible. How much am I losing by reading on the screen? Am I contributing to the collapse of my own ability to concentrate, as well as the collapse of our entire culture? (more…)
