The fourth of our recurring opportunities — currently, every other Thursday — to learn what your fellow subscribers are reading and writing and thinking about
I've been re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Haven't read it since I was in school. And thoroughly enjoying it this time. But I'm still puzzled as to why Atticus feels so strongly about mockingbirds vs bluejays. But then he never had to contend with mockingbirds imitating car alarms.
I just finished reading The Iliad as a read aloud to my kids. Hadn't read it since college and found that reading it aloud with a group really made it shine. We've had so many great discussions.
Picking up some Seamus Heaney. I started reading him probably around the time he won the Nobel Prize, briefly considered doing him as my Junior Poet project at UD, but then was persuaded not to because he was still writing. Still, I've been collecting his volumes for almost 30 years. Currently I'm perusing the collection 100 Poems, selected by his wife and children, and thinking about how that familiar, familial choices are different from what a more critical reader might choose. And yet his wife, Marie, has edited collections of poetry previously, so I surmise that it's not exactly an uncritical selection either.
And drawing close to the end of Kristin Lavransdatter at last. I'd forgotten how downright brutal everything, including her feud with Erlend gets. Heading into the final section of the final book.
Mostly writing emails these days and comments on social media. No time for much else. Though I'm trying to get some of my kids to do some daily freewriting with me.
While browsing the poetry section at a Half Price Books store, I came across The Poetry of Louisa May Alcott. I did not know she had also written poems. I bought the book and am enjoying reading her poems.
I must say I do not agree about that change to Deborah Warren's poem, though I understand why the change was made! But plough and plow have different connotations. A "house style" is necessary, but if it is so rigid that poetry and fiction are changed (and some non-fiction), well, then is it really serving the work as well as it should? I think about this a lot and it seems that the "rules" should have some flexibility.
Well, technically, they are designating the same thing and yet. . . when I hear or see the word "plough" I think of something older, more human with a touch of melancholy that reminds of a beauty that is always right there and yet out of reach. I suppose I feel wistful and nostalgic for something I've never had, though the long generations of my people have had this thing that I long for and don't know. Also, "plough" would make me think of a simpler device being used on a smallish farm by a farmer who knows his land and loves it.
When I hear or see "plow" - I think first and every time (and, strangely, I've encountered this spelling a few times in recent months) that the word has been misspelled. After I realize that it's just the American spelling, then I actually feel nothing, or not nothing, but a flatness - same feeling I get when I go to a store and see a zillion big screen tvs on sale. Plow evokes very little. Plough evokes a whole world.
There are times when maybe a writer is affecting a Britishism, but that is when you have a conversation. Whisky and whiskey are not the same thing. I'd contend that neither are plough and plow. I agree heartily with Sally that when it comes to poetry (and I'd say fiction) we need to sometimes rely on the author's intuition, though a conversation is in order.
I can't explain it, but I would resist that kind of change strenuously, on the (maybe indefensible) grounds that in texture, tone, and association, if not in actual sound, one word is not like the other. One calls up things like "Is My Team Ploughing?" The other calls up snowplows.
I would assume, in charity and respect, that the writer was not being affected, but had some valid if inexplicable reason for having made, and being invested in, that choice.
What about British single quotation marks and periods outside them? Not being sarcastic but genuinely interested in how far down it goes. I wouldn't give that to an author in an American publication. Nor without serious defense would I give eccentric, outside-house-style capitalization (e.g., violating the contemporary lowercasing of adjectives from capitalized nouns: "Congress" to "congressional").
Those don't seem as likely to be considered rhetorical or associative choices on the same level as a word. At the copy-editing phase of a book, an American publisher will typically correct for things like that, but query about a word choice --- and really, in my experience, the poet always has the final say, albeit sometimes after some conversation. Ditto fiction. I wrote a lot of STETs in the notes on my novel, whose narrator has a particular and eccentric voice. I did opt for American spellings, because in the flow of prose that wasn't going to alter her voice.
But in a poem, where every word has weight, that kind of choice does affect the shading of the voice, and it's both valid and respectful to assume that a poet who has written a generally fine poem is capable of making that kind of decision in the service of that voice. If the poet insists on it, then I think that the poet's judgment should stand.
One less popular option to consider as a public domain poem source could be Aline Kilmer. A couple years back I read her first two collections (1919 and 1921) which had several poems I enjoyed. Her style reminds me at times of the much-better-known Sara Teasdale.
Here is her 1921 collection Vigils - it tends to be a bit bleak, coming in the aftermath of losing a young daughter in 1917 and her husband Joyce in 1918 (WWI). The first poem "Things" and the final poem "The Gift" are good ones - also "The Night Cometh," "One Shall Be Taken and the Other Left," "The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness."
Egads! Here I am in a pleasant mood turning to my Daily Dose of Good Old-Fashioned Most Excellent Commentary and Most Excellent Poetry only to horrifyingly find an Untoward Screed against that Harmless Adornment of Prose, the Split Infinitive. Surely, We Conservatives can agree that some Prohibitions from the Past are better left Behind. Bring Back Superfluous Capitalization and End the War on the Split Infinitive is and ever more shall be My Rallying Cry.
You, Dear Editors, can Restore My Faith in Your Excellent Good Sense by taking up one of the shorter poems from Prufrock and Other Observations.
I am still pressing on with Hardy's Complete Poems, but only a hundred pages more to go. I also read the Latin poems of Thomas More the other day, and really enjoyed them. I don't think you have done Adelaide Crapsey as yet. Fulke Greville, Barnabe Googe, and Walter Raleigh are also worth visiting (a very Wintersian list so far). Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne and Robert Southwell too (though I am sure Sally would have several of the last in mind). Unfortunately, many of my favourite poets are ruled out because they are not out of copyright (Australian poets like Rosemary Dobson, Vivian Smith, and James McAuley, Americans such as Louise Bogan, Dana Gioia, Yvor Winters, and Janet Lewis, British poets such as Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Daryush). But if the restriction applies to the poems themselves and not the poets, then Bogan's first poems were published in 1923, and Janet Lewis' first two collections in 1922 and 1927. Winters published four books of poetry before 1929. Then there is Low Barometer by Robert Bridges (died in 1930, but this was published well before, I think).
The trouble with Browning — and Whitman and others — is that they write long, and choosing one of their shorter works often has an odor of choosing the poet, not the poem.
My daughter and I have both found ourselves in a rut, reading-wise. So she devised a reading tournament for us for this year. She took a double elimination bracket and filled it with genres instead of sports teams. We read something new to us from each genre in the current match up, then decide which we prefer, trying to think in terms of the genre not just the execution by the particular author. I let her pick the genres in my tournament so I have an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction noticeably missing the reading I was typically doing.
Some of the match ups are easier to determine for me (Cozy Mystery vs. Classics), while others are more challenging. Currently my match up is Travel vs History. I'm reading The Two Week Traveller by Mathew Lightfoot (pretty meh, imo) and I'll follow it up with The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel, which I'm more excited about, because I enjoy working with fabric and thread.
I am greatly enjoying the poems you offer here and since I am so inexperienced with poetry, I love the variety.
I don't mind a good mystery (also on my genre list, but lost to Science Fiction), the cozy mystery sub-genre was just too silly and light, especially when compared to Jane Austin's Emma.
Oh, I thought the clash was between cozy mysteries and classic mysteries: Joanne Fluke's Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, say, vs. E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. Yeah, not surprised Austen won.
I just picked up a copy of Leaves of Grass for the summer. I couldn't find my copy when I looked for it a few weeks ago. Will be fun to dig in again -new and familiar.
Hi, Jody. On the matter of prescriptivists, descriptivists, and proscriptivists: while it's true that "language changes" or "is organic"--always a dubious metaphor--the basic grammar of the English language is for better or worse, Germanic. That is, are there ANY rules one shouldn't break? I say yes. In the sentence, "Give me the book that's on the table," we cannot ever say (at least say and expect to be understood), "Me table the on book the that's give." The core in English (with of course a gazillion variations) is S-V-O---subject-verb-object. But that implies that if there are "rules," lines will have to be drawn at times. English is analytical, not synthetic (pity the poor translator of Horace). And of course there's always the embarrassment test: which of us in even casual conversation will say "I is a good boy"? Any descriptivist takers?
On unrelated matters, I just finished "Plays and Poems of George Chapman" and am beginning a history of Ravenna. Re-reading "Bussy D'Ambois" after 30 years was disappointing, but "All Fooles" has much to recommend it. "Ovid's Banquet of Sence" is surprisingly entertaining, while no one should ever, under penalty of death, try to make his way through "Euthymiae Raptus, or The Teares of Peace."
You're setting up a typical strawman of the sort prescriptivists love to make. Of course language has structure and regularities, and linguists describe those. So, if a given sentence would never be said because it violates the implicit rules of speech, how does it invalidate the descriptivist approach to analyzing language if you toss out word salads? What you're implicitly doing is taking the rules developed basically for uniformity in writing as if they are the linguistically the exact equivalent of the rules implicitly underlying speech, and in particular rules by speakers of one class or region set up for purposes of a common written language that do not reflect the usage of other classes or regions. As a less common example nowadays, the quondam rule that "shall" is first person and "will" is second and third person was usage in southern English dialects used more widely in the geographical sense a few centuries ago especially in teaching Latin, and was propounded for English during the prescriptivist activities of the Royal Society and similar movements especially by John Wallis, who, having been born in Kent, actually spoke that way, but people from other parts of England did not.
Amusingly, I've had a couple of people think I must be under constant language strain because I have a PhD in linguistics and work as an academic editor, but that's silly. Writing and speech have different conventions, and if you have a fairly literate society, you will always have differences in conventions between writing and speaking because of the different cognitive skills involved in the two media: Writing makes use of the strengths (pattern recognition, etc.) and distinctive features (permanence of writing, allowing backtracking, etc.) of the visual system, speech those of speech processing. There's also the differences in education: Speech is learned implicitly from infancy, writing is taught explicitly and for the most part in schools, and thus the conventions are closer to what we think of as rules in the full, prototypical sense. Looked at philosophically, they're different sets of conventions as analyzed by David Lewis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher)#Early_work_on_convention .
The problem is not that the conventions differ, but that many educated people consider mastery of the rules of writing a sign of intelligence and culture rather than primarily of thoroughness of training and of cultivation in just one aspect of high culture. I won't bore you with the insults I've gotten because I have a Texas accent (less so nowadays as a result, but still appearing in full strength when I am tired, drunk, talking to my relatives, or getting up the nose of uppity northerners--especially funny was some of my Hoosier students who were English education majors complaining in their student evaluations that I "talk bad" [at least I don't write badly] because I use "y'all" for the plural, while they had no problem using positive "anymore" and the "needs fixed" construction), and use an example less likely to trigger native English speakers. When I was a grad student, I was something of an up-and-coming expert in Mongolian dialects. I was familiar with the distinctive features of all of them and could distinguish many of them in listening (I'd have difficulty with that now, apart from the big ones like Buriat and Kalmuck). It is thus a little perturbing but not surprising that my wife, who is a published poet and teacher, always trashes Inner Mongolian speakers for bad Mongolian and, by extension, poor education. No, they speak different dialects, and in literary terms their dialects have different conventions in some ways closer to classical Mongolian, and more Chinese literary influence--calques of Chinese poetic expressions, for example, like "unfilial bird" for owls (standard Mongolian calls them "yellow bird" and the onomatopoetic "uul") and "clouds and rain" for sexual relations. (Standard Mongolian does not entirely lack such calques; they are rarer, however.) Interestingly, as a Texan I just laugh at her responses; it's as a Mongolist that it saddens me a little. (Scholarly, or at least scholastic notes: The Inner Mongolian dialects form a continuum, and as a group are in fact closer in several important ways to the language of the Secret History of the Mongols, which was written in an earlier form of one of those dialects; standard Mongolian is based on the speech of the Khalkha "tribe," a more marginal group to the northeast who expanded to the west in the steppes north of the Inner Mongolian "tribes" a couple of centuries after the end of the empire and forged close ties with one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism for the political benefit of both parties. As a result, where Inner Mongolian dialects use more Chinese loanwords, standard Mongolian uses passels of Tibetan vocabulary.)
I just finished “Wonder Strikes,” Steven Knepper’s book on philosopher William Desmond, as well as Elaine Scarry’s “On Beauty and Being Just,” a book cited by Knepper. I’ve also been reading some essays by Simone Weil (also cited by Knepper) that I’ve never read. I’m writing a memoir of my father, so I’m reading, or rereading, some of his favorite books, beginning with Robert Ruark, “The Old Man and the Boy.” Somewhere or other I came across a mention of Allen Grossman, so I’m reading "Descartes’ Loneliness" in small doses, a poem or two a day. What a fine book!
As to poems that I’d like to see you post, I have a fondness for the poetry coming out of World War 1: perhaps a poem cribbed from the Greek Anthology (Housman’s “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” or a handful of Kipling’s epitaphs) or a poem from one of the slightly lesser-known poets like Ivor Gurney or Edmund Blunden; or maybe Whittier’s “An Autograph” (some lines and rhymes seem Hardyesque – “defeatures / creatures”); or Swift’s tonic “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” Or a poem I don’t know at all, so cannot commend until I see it.
I knew William, working with him when I taught at Loyola, and even thought of him as a friend — but I haven't read Knepper's book about his thought yet. So much to do.
I finally found my copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I had read half of and then misplaced, and have happily dived back in. It’s a great read for summer.
I wondered if y’all could help place a recent poetic essay in context: it analyzes the resurgence of formal poetry here on the Substack platform in a few young poets writing here. In your memories, how often has there been American commentary on a return to/resurgence of formalist poetry?
What's the link for the essay? As Len Krisak observes, the spring of a new formalism has been breathlessly announced more than once, but the summer has somehow never quite arrived.
The writer is a friend of mine, as are some of the poets discussed. I just want to contextualize if this is a true trend different from previous iterations.
12.35 times, Kevin. (Just kidding) Actually, I've been reading about the "resurgence" for 40 years now, off and on. There must be a lesson in there somewhere.
Jun 27·edited Jun 27Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
As for reading, I've nearly finished Elaine Fantham's Roman Literary Culture and have returned after a long time to a collection of Hu Shih's political writings (available for free here: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Freedom-Political-Writings-Understandings-ebook/dp/B0BJK6V313 ). The latter is an interesting read because while I have read quite a bit of his cultural writings, his political writings seem to be somewhat...radioactive in the modern academy. In poetry, an interesting combination (interesting combinations?), a short collection edited by Valeska Matti of paired eight-line poems by Teasdale and Dickinson, and several of the sonnets in H.P. Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth, mostly because I hadn't read them in a while when I ran across a setting of three of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYFiJ6L7Sb4
And I might have finished the Fantham except that I was reminded by reading an article about the New Madrid Fault of a story in one of the year's-best SF collections my father handed down to me that I last read about 40 years ago. There are about five from that time I want to track down, and that one I was able to find easily (Allan Danzig's "The Great Nebraska Sea"). It was in a collection with at least one of the other stories I want to reread, so I was able to narrow it down to two collections, so I started reading a number of stories I have in various Kindle collections that were in those two and was able to figure out the collection because one, only one, of the other stories was in it (William Tenn's "Bernie the Faust," in Merrill's 9th Year's Best collection, from 1963). No luck on the others yet, but I have enjoyed the stories I have read (in a couple of places reread), in many cases by minor favorites of mine, like E.C. Tubb, Lloyd Biggle, Jr., and Bruce McAllister.
I still recall some of those "Year's Best" SciFi collections. Of course, I read them in early adolescence, a period in which memory stored everything. These days, not so much.
Jun 27·edited Jun 27Liked by Joseph Bottum, Sally Thomas
Amusingly, the plural of "syllabus," historically speaking, is pretty much what you want it to be because it's a medieval misreading of Cicero; if curious, you can check the last paragraph of this satire for somewhat further details:
I've been re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Haven't read it since I was in school. And thoroughly enjoying it this time. But I'm still puzzled as to why Atticus feels so strongly about mockingbirds vs bluejays. But then he never had to contend with mockingbirds imitating car alarms.
I just finished reading The Iliad as a read aloud to my kids. Hadn't read it since college and found that reading it aloud with a group really made it shine. We've had so many great discussions.
Picking up some Seamus Heaney. I started reading him probably around the time he won the Nobel Prize, briefly considered doing him as my Junior Poet project at UD, but then was persuaded not to because he was still writing. Still, I've been collecting his volumes for almost 30 years. Currently I'm perusing the collection 100 Poems, selected by his wife and children, and thinking about how that familiar, familial choices are different from what a more critical reader might choose. And yet his wife, Marie, has edited collections of poetry previously, so I surmise that it's not exactly an uncritical selection either.
And drawing close to the end of Kristin Lavransdatter at last. I'd forgotten how downright brutal everything, including her feud with Erlend gets. Heading into the final section of the final book.
Mostly writing emails these days and comments on social media. No time for much else. Though I'm trying to get some of my kids to do some daily freewriting with me.
While browsing the poetry section at a Half Price Books store, I came across The Poetry of Louisa May Alcott. I did not know she had also written poems. I bought the book and am enjoying reading her poems.
Are others familiar with her poetry?
Interesting! I didn't know she was a poet as well.
I must say I do not agree about that change to Deborah Warren's poem, though I understand why the change was made! But plough and plow have different connotations. A "house style" is necessary, but if it is so rigid that poetry and fiction are changed (and some non-fiction), well, then is it really serving the work as well as it should? I think about this a lot and it seems that the "rules" should have some flexibility.
What's the difference, except that one is Brit spelling and the other American?
Well, technically, they are designating the same thing and yet. . . when I hear or see the word "plough" I think of something older, more human with a touch of melancholy that reminds of a beauty that is always right there and yet out of reach. I suppose I feel wistful and nostalgic for something I've never had, though the long generations of my people have had this thing that I long for and don't know. Also, "plough" would make me think of a simpler device being used on a smallish farm by a farmer who knows his land and loves it.
When I hear or see "plow" - I think first and every time (and, strangely, I've encountered this spelling a few times in recent months) that the word has been misspelled. After I realize that it's just the American spelling, then I actually feel nothing, or not nothing, but a flatness - same feeling I get when I go to a store and see a zillion big screen tvs on sale. Plow evokes very little. Plough evokes a whole world.
There are times when maybe a writer is affecting a Britishism, but that is when you have a conversation. Whisky and whiskey are not the same thing. I'd contend that neither are plough and plow. I agree heartily with Sally that when it comes to poetry (and I'd say fiction) we need to sometimes rely on the author's intuition, though a conversation is in order.
I can't explain it, but I would resist that kind of change strenuously, on the (maybe indefensible) grounds that in texture, tone, and association, if not in actual sound, one word is not like the other. One calls up things like "Is My Team Ploughing?" The other calls up snowplows.
How do we distinguish this from affected Britishism, Sally?
I would assume, in charity and respect, that the writer was not being affected, but had some valid if inexplicable reason for having made, and being invested in, that choice.
What about British single quotation marks and periods outside them? Not being sarcastic but genuinely interested in how far down it goes. I wouldn't give that to an author in an American publication. Nor without serious defense would I give eccentric, outside-house-style capitalization (e.g., violating the contemporary lowercasing of adjectives from capitalized nouns: "Congress" to "congressional").
Those don't seem as likely to be considered rhetorical or associative choices on the same level as a word. At the copy-editing phase of a book, an American publisher will typically correct for things like that, but query about a word choice --- and really, in my experience, the poet always has the final say, albeit sometimes after some conversation. Ditto fiction. I wrote a lot of STETs in the notes on my novel, whose narrator has a particular and eccentric voice. I did opt for American spellings, because in the flow of prose that wasn't going to alter her voice.
But in a poem, where every word has weight, that kind of choice does affect the shading of the voice, and it's both valid and respectful to assume that a poet who has written a generally fine poem is capable of making that kind of decision in the service of that voice. If the poet insists on it, then I think that the poet's judgment should stand.
And it is the kind of difference that wouldn't matter to me in feature/critical writing, but would matter intensely to me in a poem.
One less popular option to consider as a public domain poem source could be Aline Kilmer. A couple years back I read her first two collections (1919 and 1921) which had several poems I enjoyed. Her style reminds me at times of the much-better-known Sara Teasdale.
Don't know her work. Any particular poem catch you?
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/kilmer/vigils/vigils.html
Here is her 1921 collection Vigils - it tends to be a bit bleak, coming in the aftermath of losing a young daughter in 1917 and her husband Joyce in 1918 (WWI). The first poem "Things" and the final poem "The Gift" are good ones - also "The Night Cometh," "One Shall Be Taken and the Other Left," "The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness."
I've read several of the poems in "Vigils." Bleak but bracing, or so I find many of them, especially the shorter, epigrammatic poems.
Egads! Here I am in a pleasant mood turning to my Daily Dose of Good Old-Fashioned Most Excellent Commentary and Most Excellent Poetry only to horrifyingly find an Untoward Screed against that Harmless Adornment of Prose, the Split Infinitive. Surely, We Conservatives can agree that some Prohibitions from the Past are better left Behind. Bring Back Superfluous Capitalization and End the War on the Split Infinitive is and ever more shall be My Rallying Cry.
You, Dear Editors, can Restore My Faith in Your Excellent Good Sense by taking up one of the shorter poems from Prufrock and Other Observations.
Sally Thomas is a fan of that early Eliotian work.
I am still pressing on with Hardy's Complete Poems, but only a hundred pages more to go. I also read the Latin poems of Thomas More the other day, and really enjoyed them. I don't think you have done Adelaide Crapsey as yet. Fulke Greville, Barnabe Googe, and Walter Raleigh are also worth visiting (a very Wintersian list so far). Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne and Robert Southwell too (though I am sure Sally would have several of the last in mind). Unfortunately, many of my favourite poets are ruled out because they are not out of copyright (Australian poets like Rosemary Dobson, Vivian Smith, and James McAuley, Americans such as Louise Bogan, Dana Gioia, Yvor Winters, and Janet Lewis, British poets such as Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Daryush). But if the restriction applies to the poems themselves and not the poets, then Bogan's first poems were published in 1923, and Janet Lewis' first two collections in 1922 and 1927. Winters published four books of poetry before 1929. Then there is Low Barometer by Robert Bridges (died in 1930, but this was published well before, I think).
We did an early Graves: https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-in-the-wilderness. So yes it's the date of the poem. Dana and other living poets we can ask. Googe and Raleigh are in the pipeline. The rest: Thanks!
And oh yes, Robert Browning, particularly if you could do an excerpt from Ring and the Book.
The trouble with Browning — and Whitman and others — is that they write long, and choosing one of their shorter works often has an odor of choosing the poet, not the poem.
My daughter and I have both found ourselves in a rut, reading-wise. So she devised a reading tournament for us for this year. She took a double elimination bracket and filled it with genres instead of sports teams. We read something new to us from each genre in the current match up, then decide which we prefer, trying to think in terms of the genre not just the execution by the particular author. I let her pick the genres in my tournament so I have an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction noticeably missing the reading I was typically doing.
Some of the match ups are easier to determine for me (Cozy Mystery vs. Classics), while others are more challenging. Currently my match up is Travel vs History. I'm reading The Two Week Traveller by Mathew Lightfoot (pretty meh, imo) and I'll follow it up with The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel, which I'm more excited about, because I enjoy working with fabric and thread.
I am greatly enjoying the poems you offer here and since I am so inexperienced with poetry, I love the variety.
Not a fan of Postrel, but on this topic she sounds fascinating. Who won the Cozy Mystery vs. Classics match-up?
Classics, hands down. Although
I don't mind a good mystery (also on my genre list, but lost to Science Fiction), the cozy mystery sub-genre was just too silly and light, especially when compared to Jane Austin's Emma.
Oh, I thought the clash was between cozy mysteries and classic mysteries: Joanne Fluke's Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, say, vs. E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. Yeah, not surprised Austen won.
I just picked up a copy of Leaves of Grass for the summer. I couldn't find my copy when I looked for it a few weeks ago. Will be fun to dig in again -new and familiar.
Hi, Jody. On the matter of prescriptivists, descriptivists, and proscriptivists: while it's true that "language changes" or "is organic"--always a dubious metaphor--the basic grammar of the English language is for better or worse, Germanic. That is, are there ANY rules one shouldn't break? I say yes. In the sentence, "Give me the book that's on the table," we cannot ever say (at least say and expect to be understood), "Me table the on book the that's give." The core in English (with of course a gazillion variations) is S-V-O---subject-verb-object. But that implies that if there are "rules," lines will have to be drawn at times. English is analytical, not synthetic (pity the poor translator of Horace). And of course there's always the embarrassment test: which of us in even casual conversation will say "I is a good boy"? Any descriptivist takers?
On unrelated matters, I just finished "Plays and Poems of George Chapman" and am beginning a history of Ravenna. Re-reading "Bussy D'Ambois" after 30 years was disappointing, but "All Fooles" has much to recommend it. "Ovid's Banquet of Sence" is surprisingly entertaining, while no one should ever, under penalty of death, try to make his way through "Euthymiae Raptus, or The Teares of Peace."
Cheers to all,
Len
You're setting up a typical strawman of the sort prescriptivists love to make. Of course language has structure and regularities, and linguists describe those. So, if a given sentence would never be said because it violates the implicit rules of speech, how does it invalidate the descriptivist approach to analyzing language if you toss out word salads? What you're implicitly doing is taking the rules developed basically for uniformity in writing as if they are the linguistically the exact equivalent of the rules implicitly underlying speech, and in particular rules by speakers of one class or region set up for purposes of a common written language that do not reflect the usage of other classes or regions. As a less common example nowadays, the quondam rule that "shall" is first person and "will" is second and third person was usage in southern English dialects used more widely in the geographical sense a few centuries ago especially in teaching Latin, and was propounded for English during the prescriptivist activities of the Royal Society and similar movements especially by John Wallis, who, having been born in Kent, actually spoke that way, but people from other parts of England did not.
Amusingly, I've had a couple of people think I must be under constant language strain because I have a PhD in linguistics and work as an academic editor, but that's silly. Writing and speech have different conventions, and if you have a fairly literate society, you will always have differences in conventions between writing and speaking because of the different cognitive skills involved in the two media: Writing makes use of the strengths (pattern recognition, etc.) and distinctive features (permanence of writing, allowing backtracking, etc.) of the visual system, speech those of speech processing. There's also the differences in education: Speech is learned implicitly from infancy, writing is taught explicitly and for the most part in schools, and thus the conventions are closer to what we think of as rules in the full, prototypical sense. Looked at philosophically, they're different sets of conventions as analyzed by David Lewis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher)#Early_work_on_convention .
The problem is not that the conventions differ, but that many educated people consider mastery of the rules of writing a sign of intelligence and culture rather than primarily of thoroughness of training and of cultivation in just one aspect of high culture. I won't bore you with the insults I've gotten because I have a Texas accent (less so nowadays as a result, but still appearing in full strength when I am tired, drunk, talking to my relatives, or getting up the nose of uppity northerners--especially funny was some of my Hoosier students who were English education majors complaining in their student evaluations that I "talk bad" [at least I don't write badly] because I use "y'all" for the plural, while they had no problem using positive "anymore" and the "needs fixed" construction), and use an example less likely to trigger native English speakers. When I was a grad student, I was something of an up-and-coming expert in Mongolian dialects. I was familiar with the distinctive features of all of them and could distinguish many of them in listening (I'd have difficulty with that now, apart from the big ones like Buriat and Kalmuck). It is thus a little perturbing but not surprising that my wife, who is a published poet and teacher, always trashes Inner Mongolian speakers for bad Mongolian and, by extension, poor education. No, they speak different dialects, and in literary terms their dialects have different conventions in some ways closer to classical Mongolian, and more Chinese literary influence--calques of Chinese poetic expressions, for example, like "unfilial bird" for owls (standard Mongolian calls them "yellow bird" and the onomatopoetic "uul") and "clouds and rain" for sexual relations. (Standard Mongolian does not entirely lack such calques; they are rarer, however.) Interestingly, as a Texan I just laugh at her responses; it's as a Mongolist that it saddens me a little. (Scholarly, or at least scholastic notes: The Inner Mongolian dialects form a continuum, and as a group are in fact closer in several important ways to the language of the Secret History of the Mongols, which was written in an earlier form of one of those dialects; standard Mongolian is based on the speech of the Khalkha "tribe," a more marginal group to the northeast who expanded to the west in the steppes north of the Inner Mongolian "tribes" a couple of centuries after the end of the empire and forged close ties with one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism for the political benefit of both parties. As a result, where Inner Mongolian dialects use more Chinese loanwords, standard Mongolian uses passels of Tibetan vocabulary.)
Any poems you think we should run here at Poems Ancient and Modern, Len?
I just finished “Wonder Strikes,” Steven Knepper’s book on philosopher William Desmond, as well as Elaine Scarry’s “On Beauty and Being Just,” a book cited by Knepper. I’ve also been reading some essays by Simone Weil (also cited by Knepper) that I’ve never read. I’m writing a memoir of my father, so I’m reading, or rereading, some of his favorite books, beginning with Robert Ruark, “The Old Man and the Boy.” Somewhere or other I came across a mention of Allen Grossman, so I’m reading "Descartes’ Loneliness" in small doses, a poem or two a day. What a fine book!
As to poems that I’d like to see you post, I have a fondness for the poetry coming out of World War 1: perhaps a poem cribbed from the Greek Anthology (Housman’s “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” or a handful of Kipling’s epitaphs) or a poem from one of the slightly lesser-known poets like Ivor Gurney or Edmund Blunden; or maybe Whittier’s “An Autograph” (some lines and rhymes seem Hardyesque – “defeatures / creatures”); or Swift’s tonic “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” Or a poem I don’t know at all, so cannot commend until I see it.
I knew William, working with him when I taught at Loyola, and even thought of him as a friend — but I haven't read Knepper's book about his thought yet. So much to do.
I finally found my copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I had read half of and then misplaced, and have happily dived back in. It’s a great read for summer.
I wondered if y’all could help place a recent poetic essay in context: it analyzes the resurgence of formal poetry here on the Substack platform in a few young poets writing here. In your memories, how often has there been American commentary on a return to/resurgence of formalist poetry?
What's the link for the essay? As Len Krisak observes, the spring of a new formalism has been breathlessly announced more than once, but the summer has somehow never quite arrived.
Here it is: https://www.ruins.blog/p/poetrys-return-to-form
The writer is a friend of mine, as are some of the poets discussed. I just want to contextualize if this is a true trend different from previous iterations.
12.35 times, Kevin. (Just kidding) Actually, I've been reading about the "resurgence" for 40 years now, off and on. There must be a lesson in there somewhere.
As for reading, I've nearly finished Elaine Fantham's Roman Literary Culture and have returned after a long time to a collection of Hu Shih's political writings (available for free here: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Freedom-Political-Writings-Understandings-ebook/dp/B0BJK6V313 ). The latter is an interesting read because while I have read quite a bit of his cultural writings, his political writings seem to be somewhat...radioactive in the modern academy. In poetry, an interesting combination (interesting combinations?), a short collection edited by Valeska Matti of paired eight-line poems by Teasdale and Dickinson, and several of the sonnets in H.P. Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth, mostly because I hadn't read them in a while when I ran across a setting of three of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYFiJ6L7Sb4
And I might have finished the Fantham except that I was reminded by reading an article about the New Madrid Fault of a story in one of the year's-best SF collections my father handed down to me that I last read about 40 years ago. There are about five from that time I want to track down, and that one I was able to find easily (Allan Danzig's "The Great Nebraska Sea"). It was in a collection with at least one of the other stories I want to reread, so I was able to narrow it down to two collections, so I started reading a number of stories I have in various Kindle collections that were in those two and was able to figure out the collection because one, only one, of the other stories was in it (William Tenn's "Bernie the Faust," in Merrill's 9th Year's Best collection, from 1963). No luck on the others yet, but I have enjoyed the stories I have read (in a couple of places reread), in many cases by minor favorites of mine, like E.C. Tubb, Lloyd Biggle, Jr., and Bruce McAllister.
I still recall some of those "Year's Best" SciFi collections. Of course, I read them in early adolescence, a period in which memory stored everything. These days, not so much.
Amusingly, the plural of "syllabus," historically speaking, is pretty much what you want it to be because it's a medieval misreading of Cicero; if curious, you can check the last paragraph of this satire for somewhat further details:
https://specgram.com/CLXXV.4/10.scrugg.latin.html