Aug 2Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum, Joseph Bottum
I just finished reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. My first even Muriel Spark. I think I need to read more. And Jesmyn Ward's Sing Unburied Sing-- a haunting novel that switches points of view between a young biracial boy being raised by his grandparents, his mother who is a drug addict and abusive toward her children, and the ghost that haunts them. With a harrowing road trip to pick up the children's father from prison. Once I finished that, I embarked on Ward's most recent novel, Let Us Descend, which is essentially a slave narrative with an overlay of Dante's Inferno.
Reading a bit of A.E. Stallings here and there.
Not writing much of any thing except filling out forms for children. Paperwork is endless.
I agree --- though I really do like Miss Jean Brodie. And The Girls of Slender Means.
Her short stories are . . . the phrase that lies within easy reach is "a lot of fun," but you have to understand that they are a lot of fun in the exact way that Muriel Spark is fun, and no other.
I'm a retired English teacher--not in the sense that I'm no longer working but in the sense that I'm no longer "paid" to parse rhetoric and analyze literature. Your daily offerings keep me sharp and inspired, and they alleviate any minor regrets I occasionally feel about taking on a new role in a new industry. Keep up the great content!
What they all have said! Love these columns - they make me see old poems in new ways, reconsider their heft and the influences they’ve had through time. Don’t change anything.
I love what you are doing and think, along with many others, that you've hit on a sweet spot. I enjoy re-reading poems I already know and then seeing what you've got to say about that poem, and I love reading undiscovered poems. What you are doing works, and is worth supporting.
I've been re-reading Dana Gioia's verse for a freelance project. He, of course, is amazing in every way. His wrestling with the tragedy of life resonates with me so much. There's a way in which we just mess it up, life and everything that goes along with it, and literature, particularly poetry helps us to. . . "deal with it" isn't the right phrase, but something like that.
One thing I would love is some contemporary poetry, partly because too many people are of the "I don't read contemporary literature. Just give me the old stuff." Well, the old stuff was once the new stuff. We need to support it. I wonder if maybe some journals/substacks would be open to letting you crosspost in some way. I'm thinking, for example, of an outlet like New Verse News. The whole copyright thing is less of an issue with a journal like that & what contemporary poet wouldn't appreciate some attention here with this receptive audience and the two of you. But I get that the whole copyright thing can be a bear.
Yes, we definitely read and admire the good things going on in contemporary poetry (and they are going on, for sure), but as you rightly intuit, copyright can be a bear, and depending on the publisher, permissions are often prohibitively expensive. Alas.
I wish I could be reading a book about John Keats, or writing sonnets. I am finishing editing the OUP handbook on Joseph Ratzinger, and I am writing, cajoling letters, threatening letters, indeed, some death, threats, and soothing letters to the final lost contributors. I am reading the contributions, mainly to see if they follow the OUP style and have no typos.
I do some songwriting. Just reading through a poem in the morning seems to help me be more fluid with lyrics. The lyrics are harder for me than the music. Thank you for doing this.
Again, I have no suggestions about format or content; the current state is fine by me. In reading poetry, I'm near the end of the introduction to Richard Zenith's Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems but haven't sampled any of the wares yet, and I've reread some of the poems at the beginning of Bradley Morrow's Conjunctions 35. Apart from that, I'm halfway through Donald Keene's Chronicles of my Life, which I'm greatly enjoying, and have just started Michelle Paver's Dark Matter: A Ghost Story.
I've enjoyed the daily poem, analysis, and discussion--what a great way to begin the day. Since the last open thread, I've finished Alan Moorehead's "The Desert War" and begun and almost finished F.L. Lucas, "Style." I was prompted to read it by "Heavy Sentences," an essay by Joseph Epstein published 10 years ago in "The New Criterion." I've ordered the new edition of Emily Dickinson's letters mentioned by Sally.
Ah, Robinson and Hardy. Good places to enjoy and learn. Well done.
Meanwhile, for suggestions, how about a few more postings of poems most of us are pretty familiar with, but that are given fresh new appreciation and explication? Things no one has thought to say about these poems because they are so well known? Just a thought.
Currently: just finished Lampedusa's "The Leopard" and am still knee-deep in Trevelyan's "England: 1368-1520."
This "Simples" poem a little unknown? Well, yes, but I have a soft spot for such verse — but we did do, for example, Wordsworth's "Lonely as a Cloud" poem, read as something about banking and compound interest.
We do try to go for what we think of as poetic "A-sides" on Mondays and Fridays especially --- though just how well known a particular A-side may be is always up for grabs. But yes, it's fun to pick poems that everybody knows ("The Lake Isle of Innisfree" comes to mind) and ***try**** to come up with something to say that hasn't already been said a thousand times!
BUT we're always open to requests, as long as the poems are in the public domain and no longer than (roughly) 40 lines. As much time as we spend looking at the calendar and going, "Uhhhhh," we'd really appreciate suggestions of favorites to consider slotting in.
Overall, though we may riff on it a lot, our basic paradigm for every week is "A-sides, obscurities, and funny stuff." Recommendations under any of those categories are most welcome!
Thank you for the last six months of poetry, and thank you for this one. It has often been the only poem I read for the day. And it has broadened my horizons, because I tend to like a particular type of poetry, and a lot of what you post (like yesterday's poem) would not be my thing at all. Like Francesca, I also wouldn't want much to change. Having finished the Collected Hardy, I've decided to read the Collected Poetry of EAR. Apart from that, I've been dipping into some English Renaissance and Cavalier poets.
Apart from that, I finished writing a poem I had written part of and let percolate for a couple of months.
Much like Hardy (though he has a greater number of misses than Hardy), it is not just that he wrote great poems, but also that he wrote so much and so much of what he wrote is great.
Just want to say thank you for the understated but deft teaching of these daily entries. Formal poetry from the past is still a new world to me in many ways, and so I've appreciated how y'all approach its poems and poets as illuminating. Reading this much poetry on its own terms has me thinking about the form of poems themselves, specifically compared to the form of novels. Poetry might have endless purposes through poets' endless variations and innovations in its form, but the formal poems themselves usually have more circumscribed aims and means within their own verses (though I'm not sure if epic poems fit into this thought yet). Novels, meanwhile, have historically seemed more amorphous and open-ended than the measured work of poems.
I know you each have written widely on novels, not only as critics but as novelists. Am I making a false dichotomy here between the forms?
This is an interesting question, with probably no end of possible answers. One short answer would be that for both the writer and the reader, no matter how long or short a poem is, how formal or not-obviously-formal, in the flow of either writing or reading you're continually coming up against the boundary of line breaks. You don't have that in prose. The end of a line of poetry stops you momentarily --- even if, for the reader, only really fleetingly --- and you don't know, in that instant, where things are going next.
For me, as both a writer and a reader, this one element, the line break, creates an entirely different experience from that of writing or reading prose. There's obviously a lot more that one could say, and what I've just said is really simplistic, but I think about the definition of poetry that Dana Gioia offers in his excellent Art of Poetry series on YouTube. A quick paraphrase of that definition: Poetry is a special kind of language (existing inside our everyday language) that invites a special kind of attention. The various elements of poetry all mark this language out as special and invite that particular kind and level of attention, but I think the line break is at least one of the most fundamental elements, if not the most fundamental.
So we can talk all day about what those elements are, and how and why they work to do this, but I think that is a (very) fundamental difference. And I think the writer experiences that difference in the writing, just as the reader experiences it in the reading.
Also, as a chronic non-finisher of things (like my graduate degree), I've always found poems manageable. I can handily get to the end of a poem, and form helps with that (so does writing mostly short poems). It's still a source of utter astonishment to me that I managed to finish writing a novel. The open-endedness of that extended form is both a blessing and a massive difficulty.
I hadn't considered the line-break as something so consequential, but I know exactly what you mean: it shepherds the reader's attention in a way that paragraph or page breaks often don't, given that the eyes must hold the last word of one line and the first word of the next line in close tandem. Paragraph or page breaks don't have that same continuity, usually. (As usual, Gioia nails poetry in the simplest but sharpest insight.)
The open-endedness of the novel is definitely thrilling, but also invites despair the way a wide, unmarked wooded hike does. And, it's worth saying, Works of Mercy remains on my TBR (along with several other Wiseblood selections).
Yeah, I would never want to say that the line break is the only thing, but it's one immediate, significant difference that I think is perceptible to both the writer in the process of writing, and the reader in the process of reading.
But also, various formal elements, chiefly patterns of meter and rhyme, do direct things in a way that I'm not sure there's a real analog for in prose. I can start out thinking I'm writing about one thing in a poem, but whatever pattern I'm trying to adhere to will ultimately determine where the poem goes and what it's about, and my job is to assent to making that work.
Not that things don't emerge in surprising ways in prose --- they definitely do --- but it's all a lot looser, and for me, at least, it takes a LOT longer to see patterns that I can follow to their conclusions. I have to keep writing scenes endlessly and hope that they're actually going somewhere. The analogy of poorly marked hiking trails is a good one --- you can look at a hillside and see places where paths *might* be, but they might just be breaks in the underbrush, not going anywhere at all.
I just finished reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. My first even Muriel Spark. I think I need to read more. And Jesmyn Ward's Sing Unburied Sing-- a haunting novel that switches points of view between a young biracial boy being raised by his grandparents, his mother who is a drug addict and abusive toward her children, and the ghost that haunts them. With a harrowing road trip to pick up the children's father from prison. Once I finished that, I embarked on Ward's most recent novel, Let Us Descend, which is essentially a slave narrative with an overlay of Dante's Inferno.
Reading a bit of A.E. Stallings here and there.
Not writing much of any thing except filling out forms for children. Paperwork is endless.
Try Spark's Memnto Mori — her best, I think.
I agree --- though I really do like Miss Jean Brodie. And The Girls of Slender Means.
Her short stories are . . . the phrase that lies within easy reach is "a lot of fun," but you have to understand that they are a lot of fun in the exact way that Muriel Spark is fun, and no other.
I'm a retired English teacher--not in the sense that I'm no longer working but in the sense that I'm no longer "paid" to parse rhetoric and analyze literature. Your daily offerings keep me sharp and inspired, and they alleviate any minor regrets I occasionally feel about taking on a new role in a new industry. Keep up the great content!
The Rattle Bag. 1982 anthology by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
That's such a great anthology.
What they all have said! Love these columns - they make me see old poems in new ways, reconsider their heft and the influences they’ve had through time. Don’t change anything.
I first read your Substack a month ago and now it’s my favorite read of the day. Thanks for doing this!
I love what you are doing and think, along with many others, that you've hit on a sweet spot. I enjoy re-reading poems I already know and then seeing what you've got to say about that poem, and I love reading undiscovered poems. What you are doing works, and is worth supporting.
I've been re-reading Dana Gioia's verse for a freelance project. He, of course, is amazing in every way. His wrestling with the tragedy of life resonates with me so much. There's a way in which we just mess it up, life and everything that goes along with it, and literature, particularly poetry helps us to. . . "deal with it" isn't the right phrase, but something like that.
One thing I would love is some contemporary poetry, partly because too many people are of the "I don't read contemporary literature. Just give me the old stuff." Well, the old stuff was once the new stuff. We need to support it. I wonder if maybe some journals/substacks would be open to letting you crosspost in some way. I'm thinking, for example, of an outlet like New Verse News. The whole copyright thing is less of an issue with a journal like that & what contemporary poet wouldn't appreciate some attention here with this receptive audience and the two of you. But I get that the whole copyright thing can be a bear.
Yes, we definitely read and admire the good things going on in contemporary poetry (and they are going on, for sure), but as you rightly intuit, copyright can be a bear, and depending on the publisher, permissions are often prohibitively expensive. Alas.
I wish I could be reading a book about John Keats, or writing sonnets. I am finishing editing the OUP handbook on Joseph Ratzinger, and I am writing, cajoling letters, threatening letters, indeed, some death, threats, and soothing letters to the final lost contributors. I am reading the contributions, mainly to see if they follow the OUP style and have no typos.
You've made me wonder what a handbook of model death-threat letters would like look.
Please see if you can persuade Substack to make its type darker and more legible. These comments, however interesting, are difficult to read.
Am reading Lucasta Miller on John Keats. A brilliant book and a very good expository on some of his greatest poems.
I do some songwriting. Just reading through a poem in the morning seems to help me be more fluid with lyrics. The lyrics are harder for me than the music. Thank you for doing this.
Again, I have no suggestions about format or content; the current state is fine by me. In reading poetry, I'm near the end of the introduction to Richard Zenith's Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems but haven't sampled any of the wares yet, and I've reread some of the poems at the beginning of Bradley Morrow's Conjunctions 35. Apart from that, I'm halfway through Donald Keene's Chronicles of my Life, which I'm greatly enjoying, and have just started Michelle Paver's Dark Matter: A Ghost Story.
I've enjoyed the daily poem, analysis, and discussion--what a great way to begin the day. Since the last open thread, I've finished Alan Moorehead's "The Desert War" and begun and almost finished F.L. Lucas, "Style." I was prompted to read it by "Heavy Sentences," an essay by Joseph Epstein published 10 years ago in "The New Criterion." I've ordered the new edition of Emily Dickinson's letters mentioned by Sally.
Ah, Robinson and Hardy. Good places to enjoy and learn. Well done.
Meanwhile, for suggestions, how about a few more postings of poems most of us are pretty familiar with, but that are given fresh new appreciation and explication? Things no one has thought to say about these poems because they are so well known? Just a thought.
Currently: just finished Lampedusa's "The Leopard" and am still knee-deep in Trevelyan's "England: 1368-1520."
This "Simples" poem a little unknown? Well, yes, but I have a soft spot for such verse — but we did do, for example, Wordsworth's "Lonely as a Cloud" poem, read as something about banking and compound interest.
We do try to go for what we think of as poetic "A-sides" on Mondays and Fridays especially --- though just how well known a particular A-side may be is always up for grabs. But yes, it's fun to pick poems that everybody knows ("The Lake Isle of Innisfree" comes to mind) and ***try**** to come up with something to say that hasn't already been said a thousand times!
BUT we're always open to requests, as long as the poems are in the public domain and no longer than (roughly) 40 lines. As much time as we spend looking at the calendar and going, "Uhhhhh," we'd really appreciate suggestions of favorites to consider slotting in.
Overall, though we may riff on it a lot, our basic paradigm for every week is "A-sides, obscurities, and funny stuff." Recommendations under any of those categories are most welcome!
Thank you for the last six months of poetry, and thank you for this one. It has often been the only poem I read for the day. And it has broadened my horizons, because I tend to like a particular type of poetry, and a lot of what you post (like yesterday's poem) would not be my thing at all. Like Francesca, I also wouldn't want much to change. Having finished the Collected Hardy, I've decided to read the Collected Poetry of EAR. Apart from that, I've been dipping into some English Renaissance and Cavalier poets.
Apart from that, I finished writing a poem I had written part of and let percolate for a couple of months.
Robinson is great. I want to write on his poem for George Crabbe one day.
Much like Hardy (though he has a greater number of misses than Hardy), it is not just that he wrote great poems, but also that he wrote so much and so much of what he wrote is great.
Just want to say thank you for the understated but deft teaching of these daily entries. Formal poetry from the past is still a new world to me in many ways, and so I've appreciated how y'all approach its poems and poets as illuminating. Reading this much poetry on its own terms has me thinking about the form of poems themselves, specifically compared to the form of novels. Poetry might have endless purposes through poets' endless variations and innovations in its form, but the formal poems themselves usually have more circumscribed aims and means within their own verses (though I'm not sure if epic poems fit into this thought yet). Novels, meanwhile, have historically seemed more amorphous and open-ended than the measured work of poems.
I know you each have written widely on novels, not only as critics but as novelists. Am I making a false dichotomy here between the forms?
This is an interesting question, with probably no end of possible answers. One short answer would be that for both the writer and the reader, no matter how long or short a poem is, how formal or not-obviously-formal, in the flow of either writing or reading you're continually coming up against the boundary of line breaks. You don't have that in prose. The end of a line of poetry stops you momentarily --- even if, for the reader, only really fleetingly --- and you don't know, in that instant, where things are going next.
For me, as both a writer and a reader, this one element, the line break, creates an entirely different experience from that of writing or reading prose. There's obviously a lot more that one could say, and what I've just said is really simplistic, but I think about the definition of poetry that Dana Gioia offers in his excellent Art of Poetry series on YouTube. A quick paraphrase of that definition: Poetry is a special kind of language (existing inside our everyday language) that invites a special kind of attention. The various elements of poetry all mark this language out as special and invite that particular kind and level of attention, but I think the line break is at least one of the most fundamental elements, if not the most fundamental.
So we can talk all day about what those elements are, and how and why they work to do this, but I think that is a (very) fundamental difference. And I think the writer experiences that difference in the writing, just as the reader experiences it in the reading.
Also, as a chronic non-finisher of things (like my graduate degree), I've always found poems manageable. I can handily get to the end of a poem, and form helps with that (so does writing mostly short poems). It's still a source of utter astonishment to me that I managed to finish writing a novel. The open-endedness of that extended form is both a blessing and a massive difficulty.
I hadn't considered the line-break as something so consequential, but I know exactly what you mean: it shepherds the reader's attention in a way that paragraph or page breaks often don't, given that the eyes must hold the last word of one line and the first word of the next line in close tandem. Paragraph or page breaks don't have that same continuity, usually. (As usual, Gioia nails poetry in the simplest but sharpest insight.)
The open-endedness of the novel is definitely thrilling, but also invites despair the way a wide, unmarked wooded hike does. And, it's worth saying, Works of Mercy remains on my TBR (along with several other Wiseblood selections).
Yeah, I would never want to say that the line break is the only thing, but it's one immediate, significant difference that I think is perceptible to both the writer in the process of writing, and the reader in the process of reading.
But also, various formal elements, chiefly patterns of meter and rhyme, do direct things in a way that I'm not sure there's a real analog for in prose. I can start out thinking I'm writing about one thing in a poem, but whatever pattern I'm trying to adhere to will ultimately determine where the poem goes and what it's about, and my job is to assent to making that work.
Not that things don't emerge in surprising ways in prose --- they definitely do --- but it's all a lot looser, and for me, at least, it takes a LOT longer to see patterns that I can follow to their conclusions. I have to keep writing scenes endlessly and hope that they're actually going somewhere. The analogy of poorly marked hiking trails is a good one --- you can look at a hillside and see places where paths *might* be, but they might just be breaks in the underbrush, not going anywhere at all.
"Short answer." That'll be the day.
Your posts are exactly the right length and you engage in the kind of close-reading that calls attention to the activity of the poets. Great work.