Morgan Myers on Diane Warren

Morgan Myers reviews “Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)”, with a bonus analysis of the “blinding crucible of nuancelessness” that is the Emily Dickinson of Pop showing us us. However much you love it, it’ll still love you more.

Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)

With just 12 shopping days left until Christmas, and Kwanzaa fruits about to pass beneath the nation’s kinaras, it’s high time to announce that the brave elves at OMG! Press have put together a one-stop-shop gift set for the small press poetry lover in your life. 14 bucks gets you a commemorative pen, a bonus CD, and four chapbooks featuring the literary stylings of Joseph Mosconi, David Brazil, Anna Vitale and me, in musical collaboration with America’s best-loved Warrens, Diane and Alli.

If you didn’t yet know this is Diane Warren’s world and the rest of us are just living in it, Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren), along with the companion The Hits (of Diane Warren), will show you why Devo’s rolled over for Il Divo, and how the Brill Building ended up inside a broody suburban kid from Van Nuys. What better way to say “(You Make Me) Rock Hard” to that special someone? 

from OMG!:
FOUR NEW BOOKS!

WORD SEARCH by JOSEPH MOSCONI for OMG!  Limited edition, 100 copies, commemorative pen (by my reckoning, the only pen with the word  “motherfucker” and  “Creeley” on it.)

MEET ME BENEATH THE WAR ANGELS by DAVID BRAZIL  Limited edition, 100 copies.

ANNA VITALE'S POP POEMS by ANNA VITALE  Hot pink covers, fresh new work by Anna Vitale!

NAMES OF THE HITS (OF DIANE WARREN) by RODNEY KOENEKE / THE HITS (OF DIANE WARREN) by ALLI WARREN  Limited edition, 100 copies of chapbook with text by Koeneke, and compact disc compilation edited by Alli Warren. Let freedom ring.

“I’m selling these books! 1 for $5, 2 for $9, 3 for $12, 4 for $14 what a deal! Just tell me which ones you want in the paypal field.”

Lewis Warsh's The Origin of the World

A seasonal time/energy deficit choked off the posts I meant to write on the strong run of readings in Portland lately: David Wolach with a laptop, Rachel Zolf with a Boykoff, Joshua Marie Wilkinson with a banjo, Katie Degentesh with unexpected sunshine, Mathias Svalina with surprise high school buds, K. Lorraine Graham with spangles, Anselm Berrigan with Sebaldliche syntax, Karen Weiser with Swedenborg, Alicia Cohen with autumn leaves, Kevin Sampsell with an SPD tee, Paul Maziar with a Catholic childhood, Standard Schaefer with false purgatories, Mark Wallace with lines for each audience member, Joseph Mains with skillfully held-back feedback, Les Fig with a pet caravan, etc. 

Those reports won’t ever get written, at least not by me. But I did manage to write something about the Lewis Warsh books I got in advance of his reading, which I liked a lot. Soft rock and cowbell’s bound to sound like a diss out of context; I hope you can hear that it’s not. 

Lately, I hear ‘70s “soft” rock on the radio and wonder at the craftsmanship. It takes a lot of chops to sound that easy-like-Sunday-morning smooth, and measured against the digital wizardry that’s come since, the production seems warm and honest, not MOR-slick. Once in a while a sharp bass lick or drum figure bubbles up through the flow, and I picture the studio musicians who gave everything they had to hits that got plenty of airplay, but little critical respect.

Warsh’s poems from the ‘90s work sort of like that lick. You move along absently tapping your toes across the registers—“She drove up to Boston & bought a handbag on sale at Filene’s”; “Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings by telling me/you hate me”—then suddenly, a sentence that pulls you up with its subtle vernacular majesty:

“Mansions where executives once lived with their families will
be split into apartments for the families of the workers”

or

“I plant the symbol of order, Neptune’s trident, on the opposite
side of the achipelago & set forth under warm skies to a
new terrain, spellbound by the possibilities of the future
& the shadows of the strange birds hanging motionless
on the horizon, but I don’t know the name of the boat
I’m aboard—it’s like a shadow of some other boat
that went down in the storm of the Isle of Good Hope,
where promises of love were made only to be broken
the next day, where marriage vows were spoken
in the shadows of an empty cathedral, where friends
& relatives gathered to wish you well—could
anyone of them, or you, predict
this spell of cold weather
we’ve been having recently?”

That last one’s from someone who owns a few Ashbery albums, but within the context of the assured, direct, observational comedy-like zingers that surround it, it leaps out with an intensity that’s all Warsh’s. If second generation New York School is Zappa, and Language poetry’s The Clash, and theory is techno, the poems here remind me that sometimes a reader just needs more cowbell.

Not All Bad

“As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father.”

Robert Graves's Poems Selected by Himself

To add to the this. (A click on books summons the rest.)

I’d like to like Graves’s poems; his surefooted defiance of Modernist convention is the kind of sacred cow-tipping that often shows better over time. Graves was badly off in his gamble, though. Certain that verse libre was a fad, and the Pound/Stein school would go the way of cocktails and the Charleston, he willfully closed himself off from the main creative seam of 20th-century poetics, building his own house on flat metrical sand. Despite its intellectual intensities, Graves’s poems straitjacket themselves in a formal wrapper that it’s hard for most modern readers to see their way around, sounding more like brainy oddities with a Victorian comic-verse twist than a daring riposte to Modernist poetics. Maybe he only wanted the few to find him, or maybe his sensibility was best pitched backwards, towards the Romans and Greeks and the Welsh Fusiliers that paid the bills on Majorca. Still, if Graves was “wrong” about modern poetry, he was wrong in a cranky, mad-uncle sort of way completely his own, as much a part of the century as, well, cocktails or the Charleston.

Bryan Coffelt's The Whatever Poems

Sun didn’t start until nearly July, rain came yesterday, so the 2-month summer is almost a memory whose madeleine for me is Bryan Coffelt’s The Whatever Poems. Though he’s Portland’s now, Coffelt’s a founding member of the Ashland School, which surely has as much right to the name as Ashbery’s “soi disant Tulsa School” ever did. Draw a loose circle around poets like Maurice Burford, Jess Rowan, Lacey Hunter, Mike Young, and Willie Ziebell, throw in a rejuvenated West Wind Review, check the Southern Oregon University faculty page for K. Silem Mohammad, and you’ve got some idea of the energies that move through Coffelt’s work. There’s a terse, Internety overlay to the poems (“the 80s was a motherfucker,” “i’ve been advised by Oprah.com,” “McAfee is #1 in/threat detection,” a dedication “for facebook”) that acts as a tonal blind for catching the empire’s blues in situ. “This is intended to make a statement/you know/and again/oh my gosh it’s horrible” is as good a precis as any for the areas the writing explores, where “a loss of market share” and “the sitcom fantasy/of the American dream” fuse with “The End of Major Combat”—Lincoln’s to Obama’s—in a war that never really ends at all. Coffelt’s especially deft at loosening affect from content; “everyone here is/losing at something” gains for not trying to pin down what the everyone, here, or something might be, which gives the “losing” an allegorical weight that can settle on almost any of the nouns that surround it: clubbed seals, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Baghdad, “expansionary policy” or Keynesian economics “of the tongue and genitals.”

Coffelt’s sharp sense of protest stays true to the weirdly distanced, spectral, technologically mediated nature of the disasters we face off against right now, but that riff on Keynes reveals a knack for charting these abstractions at the intimate, lower-case lyric “i” level. It’s an “i” that often sounds courtesy of Google, but wound around a coherent and affecting core of pathos:

“i slept with a gun
for nearly 25 years”

“i love you
i Google Street View you”

“as i returned to this
i talked
about the nothing that i could
not
not
prevent”

“i said i wanted you
i said i wanted something
to wake up for but i just
got a Game Boy Color
puzzle game developed
by Konami”

and, wrapping up the collection:

“i told my friends
one night in the kitchen
what i thought of everything

i made a circular motion
with a pen and paper.”

It’s the “motion” in The Whatever Poems that prevails over the “everything,” and circular, not Vico/Greenspan-cyclical, feels accurate, plangent, affirming, and magically exorcising all at once.

Epistemology

“Sir Matthew Dudley turned away his butler yesterday morning, and at night the poor fellow died suddenly in the streets: Was not it an odd event? But what care you; but then I knew the butler.”

—Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella

Marina Tsvetaeva's Art in the Light of Conscience

It’s been a Tsvetaeva/Mandelstam kind of summer, for no reason I can really account for except that the Rethinking Poetics kerfuffle (remember that?) got me curious about a time when the gulag, not Facebook or a conference room, was the endpoint for those kind of discussions. The trouble’s been finding translations, which never seem to bring over the poetry with the intensity of the critical responses it provokes. Prose carries better; so here’s something about that, for this.

Thanks to a wealth of publications since the ‘60s, there are lots of ways into Marina Tsvetaeva’s work via English. For my money though, few capture her force of mind and powerful wit as vividly as Angela Livingstone does in these essays, most written during Tsvetaeva’s prose-heavy émigré period in Paris in the ‘30s. Watching Tsvetaeva clarify for herself and her public where she’s been, what poetry means, and what value it has in the political roar through which she lived is fascinating, in part for the uncompromising way she responds to her contemporaries, partly for the rigorous measure of the art she leaves for us.

The circumstances that history forced upon Tsvetaeva and her cohort make our own hand-wringing about the efficacy of poetry look like a grade school play. I don’t mean that to put us down (well, maybe a little) so much as to elevate Tsvetaeva’s razor-sharp and intensely particular approach to poetics, which for her reaches beyond any syllabus or specialty to become a manual for how to stay human in a world with shrinking space for that.

History of My Own Time

Gilbert Burnet is my favorite prose writer. Not the greatest, not the most literary, no ingenious stylist moving the goalposts for English. But in the last few years, he’s the writer I turn to most when I can’t sleep or need to quiet the drone that passes for thinking. I read novels to distraction; if they’re good enough to keep reading, they become obsessions that last till the book’s consumed. I like Burnet too much to treat him like that. I dip in and out guiltlessly, mix up who’s who across paragraphs, come back after leaving for weeks, forget everything he’s said up to the bookmark then skim old sections, or leaf ahead, unsure if I’m moving forward or how far to go back.

The small interest I take in his subject enhances the comfort I find in his syntax, which I experience almost like pure syntax, much more so than with most experimental writing which claims that as an aim. The particular names and verbs in Burnet are largely occasions for placement, and the economy of his sentences exceeds the need to deliver story cleanly by so much as to become an ethic all its own, information freed from every burden but circulation. Here’s a characteristic passage, picked more or less at random from his chapter on Queen Anne:

“The Prince of Baden drew together the troops of the empire. He began with blocking up Landau, and that was soon turned to a siege. Catinat was sent to command the French army in Alsace, but it was so weak that he was not able to make head with it. In the end of April the Dutch formed three armies: one, under the Prince of Nassau, undertook the siege of Kaiserwerth; another was commanded by the Earl of Athlone, and lay in the duchy of Cleve, to cover the siege; a third, commanded by Cohorn, broke into Flanders, and put a great part of that country under contribution. Marshal Boufflers drew his army together, and having laid up great magazines in Roermond and Venloo, he passed the Maese with his whole army. The Duke of Burgundy came down post from Paris to command it. The States apprehended that so great a prince would at his first appearance undertake somewhat worthy of him, and thought the design might be upon Maestricht; so they put twelve thousand men in garrison there. The auxiliary troops from Germany did not come so soon as was expected, and cross winds stopped a great part of our army, so that the Earl of Athlone was not strong enough to enter into action with Marshal Boufflers, but he lay about Cleve watching his motions. The siege of Kaiserwerth went on slowly; the Rhine, swelling very high, so filled their trenches that they could not work in them. Marshall Tallard was sent to lie on the other side of the Rhine, to cannonade the besiegers, and to send fresh men into the town. The King of Prussia came to Wesel, from whence he furnished the besiegers with all that was necessary. There was one vigorous attack made, in which many were killed on both sides. In conclusion, after a brave defense, the counterscarp was carried, and then the town capitulated, and was razed, according to agreement.”

—Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time (1714)

Apparently Burnet’s style was once a subject of hot discussion, Swift, Pope, and Johnson against it, Walpole, Lamb, and Macaulay great fans. David Allen’s Introduction in my Everyman edition points out that Burnet wrote for the ear, drawing on the rich oral culture of the theater and pulpit, and not for the high-flown Latinate page. I was reading somewhere that the structure of Bach’s fugues parallels the instructions given in guidebooks for Lutheran preachers at the time, and there’s an interplay between simplicity and sinuosity in Bishop Burnet—the directness of the matter and his pleasure in the manner—that reminds me a little of Bach. Or finally, the manner becomes the matter, until the sentence can be a metaphor for whatever it’s describing, while the world comes to mimic the movement in the grammar used to describe it. Let me think about that for a little, but whatever your level of sleep debt, “so filled their trenches that they could not work in them” is great English.

Gustaf Sobin's Luminous Debris

Still on this. (The rest live under “books.”) Sobin’s Collected Poems just came out with Talisman House. His career gets an old-skool-thoughtful treatment by its editors, Andrews Joron and Zawacki, in the latest Jacket. Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their “delectable valleys” and “fanciful curves” and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global moment, Sobin reads the prehistoric record like a species of postmodern poem, alive to the absences, elisions, fragments, and traces that restore our earliest ancestors from silence to the fragile contours of memory. Who bu...mor

Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their “delectable valleys” and “fanciful curves” and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global moment, Sobin reads the prehistoric record like a species of postmodern poem, alive to the absences, elisions, fragments, and traces that restore our earliest ancestors from silence to the fragile contours of memory. Who but a poet like Sobin could see Stone Age arrowheads as “hyphens” connecting predator and prey, or an ancient quarry as the “inverted grammar” of a missing city? His prose turns Ionian pottery motifs into “the calligraphy of Logos” and place names into “breath shreds … endowed with all the material attributes of objects.” If Sobin occasionally makes prehistory sound like a giant example of slow poetry, rearguard and hectoring and nostalgic for a lost authenticity, he also recovers from the dull-as-dirt discourse of professional archaeology an “imminently semiotic” précis of our own condition here at the bleeding edge of human history.

Aijaz Ahmad's Ghazals of Ghalib

The search via Goodreads for a sleeping poetics is turning up instead (alongside?) a run of reviews of translations. Apparently the Unconscious wants new air holes poked in the Anglophone. Here’s one on the translation experiment set up by Marxist intellectual Aijaz Ahmad in his 1972 Ghazals of Ghalib.

It’s tempting to read Aijaz Ahmad’s translations of Mirza Ghalib, giant of the modern Urdu-language ghazal, against his later Marxist criticism. Ahmad’s intro lays stress on Ghalib’s role as witness to a declining Mughal world being steamrolled by the British, and lends a postcolonial shading to the poet’s special brand of wistfulness. But his politics is really in the book’s approach to translation. Other translators have only interpreted the poems; Ahmad’s point is to change them. His apparatus for each ghazal (or the portion of each he’s selected to translate) includes a prose-y, open-ended “literal translation,” often better than the poetic renderings that follow; a section explaining the key Urdu vocabulary he’s brought over into English; a General Explanation of puzzling couplets, detailing the philosophy and theology behind Ghalib’s imagery, or admitting his failure to grasp it; and two or three different translations for each poem provided by a pool of seven English-language poets.

The poets aren’t ones I’d think of for an exploratory project like this: W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, Mark Strand, and Adrienne Rich don’t conjure up visions of radical advances in poetics. The beauty of Ahmad’s structure though is that you can call them out for their complacencies and distortions, since you’re privy to the same text they worked from. By the same token, you end up giving credit where credit is due—Rich stands out as especially deft at catching the subtle thought at work behind the rainbows and wine cups and flowers. The book’s interest finally extends beyond Ghalib to the possibilities of translation in general, though the ghazals appear here with a beauty and accuracy that’s hard to best anywhere else.

Bring Me the Head of Richard Taruskin

So I’ve been following The Taruskin Challenge, wherein “two grad students blog their way through the most monumental musicological work in generations”— Richard Taruskin’s 6-volume, 4,154-page Oxford History of Western Music. The grad students behind it, Mark Samples and Zach Wallmark, write engaging, open entries loaded with handy YouTube clips to make points about a work I’m never in this lifetime going to read.

They did get me to read though Taruskin’s new On Russian Music, where he says something about Chaikovsky that’s almost exactly what I think I’ve been trying to say here about poetry. (He’s defending Yevgeny Onegin from Nabokov’s charge that the opera “insults” Pushkin’s story):

“To express the passions and spontaneous reactions of the characters by means of stereotyped melodic and harmonic figures, however freshly and virtuousically recombined, makes exactly the same point Pushkin makes in his novel: feelings are never truly spontaneous but always mediated by the conventions and constraints, as often learned from literature as from “life,” to which we have adapted. Therein lie both the tragedy (the constraints) and the salvation (the adaptation) of human society.”

—from Richard Taruskin, “Chaikovsky and the Literary Folk: A Study in Misplaced Derision”

Solitaria

“Intimacy resembles a cone, or even two cones. From my 'social I' stems one cone, shrinking down to a point. . . . Beyond this point, another cone is located: this is not a shrinking infinity but, on the contrary, an expanding one.”

—Vasily Rozanov, Solitaria

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych's Reorientations

Still combing the wreckage of recent enthusiasms for patterns that might pass for a poetics. In the weave so far: Zither & Autobiography, Spy Wednesday, David Young’s translations from Petrarch, and Dick Davis’s from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Up today: Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (ed.), Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry.

This scholarly clutch of “Chicago School” essays on classical Arabic poetry gives the non-specialist a chance to listen in on the stars and peek at their working translations. The real fun though is in watching the poetry they cover operate in an entirely different way than it does in our parochial here and now. Taking Arabic into English gives you a glimpse of the software, but it’s their knack for explaining the socio-cultural hardware that makes these brainy pieces shine.

A pre-Islamic genre with roots in the myths and harvest rituals of the ancient Near East, the Arabic qasidah, with its desert imagery and largely Bedouin social context, first gets written down, then Islamicized, then exported to regions far distant in time, tongue, and place. In the process, fixed images and rhetorical conventions assume new, often highly original meanings. A celebration of drunkenness or sexual love can become a trope for spiritual union, or praise for an absent lover an expression of the seeker’s desire for the divine, while each preserves its function in meeting the generic requirements of the classical ode. To twist a line from Olson, as the qasidah moves over the mountains what does not change is the will to make it look like nothing’s changed, until even the requisite camel dung left at the abandoned campsite gets itself stretched and metaphor’d into the princely ghazals of India.

The result is a poetry that’s highly aware of its status as a set of (increasingly artificial) rules and conventions, but one that shrewdly deploys allusion, intertextual chest bumping, and nimble ambiguities (is it wine or “wine”?) to leave a personal imprint on otherwise generic material. The closest comparison in our own culture might be to comics or opera, two forms with a clearly articulated code of conventions which their fans appreciate primarily as conventions, but which artists keep managing to turn to their own purpose all the time anyway without necessarily feeling the need to throw over the genre completely. (Brandon Brown’s amazing parsings of contemporary pop music come to mind here, too.)

I wonder if more contemporary poetry works like the qasidah—or like Brandon’s pop ballads—than we’re often ready to acknowledge, and if we might gain a more sophisticated appreciation of our literary resources if we talked about that more. I liked this book for making me wonder that.

Chris Daniels in Portland, 5/21/10

Chris Daniels gave a front-to-back reading—19 epigraphs-inclusive—of his first collection of original poems, porous, nomadic, last month with David Abel in Portland. It’s a slender production with a tellurian reach, “TIERRA DEL FUEGO TO BOOTHIA FELIX AND ON,” that moves from birth (“Open Letter Opened”) to perception (“In a Treeless Wood”) to despoiled innocence (“Paradise Found Encumbered,” “ANTIPHON TO SLAVE OWNERS”) to wordlessness (“Open Letter Closed”) with the history of the Americas as the unifying field that works the individual lyrics into a larger human pattern. In particular, the poems read as dialogs with modern Brazilian poets, from Cruz e Sousa to Josely Vianna Baptista, many of whom Daniels has translated in his earlier books.

Part of the appeal of porous, nomadic is how close it stands to Daniels’s work as a translator. His poems quote freely from Baptista, Jose Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos, Oswald de Andrade, and a cast of dozens cited near the end, but not at the very end; he names his sources inside the sequence instead of making them bring up the rear. Since his quotations are also translations, they act as expansive meditations on what translation in its widest sense might mean. In his remarks between poems, Daniels mentioned how much he’d learned from such and such a poet; where he first discovered her work; how learning to read the poems, and then how to translate them, had taught him how to write. In the case of Baptista, his interest led to a letter, then a visit, then a collaboration, then a walk on a wild beach with penguins where one of his own pieces got written. The poems in porous, nomadic save the traces of these affective genealogies, casting themselves as letters or choral antiphons or revolutionary battle cries (“Cruz e Sousa Lives!”) or open addresses to dear ones (“queridos,” begins the first poem) that push the social dimension of translation front and center. The result is that even at their most cosmic and lyric, the poems retain the flavor of a loving correspondence, as if the answer to the “usurping Personifications” of conquistador, banker, economist, and employer were as simple (and political) as uniting real persons, Berkeley to Curitiba, via friendship.

At several points in the sequence Daniels touches on the subject of the Baroque, the house style of the Ibero-American colonial regimes but also, if I’m reading right, a potential weapon against the deadening simplifications of Columbus, Hayek, Krugman, and Ayn Rand who’ve “undermined the idea of locality” to take exploitation global. The “foolhardy defense of beauty” that Daniels finds in Gongora, Bernini, and early accounts of the New World’s surfeit comes to rest in the final section like this:

“Teenage Bernini tried to sculpt living flames in marble. That his failure resulted in a near-parodic representation of martyrdom by fire in no way diminishes the beauty of his rejection of impossibility. I realized fairly recently that this has always mirrored my rejection of the grand social impossibilities trumpeted by demagogues. What I do is tiny. But I wouldn’t want to be without it. Language, our million-year collective endeavor.”

The same piece ends with a description of one of Lippi’s (pre-Baroque) paintings of the Nativity,

“... which forces my eye stage left, where a peasant, at play with his dog, is missing the whole millenary event. Sometimes I imagine that peasant to be Remedios Varo or Franz Marc, Lygia Clark or John Heartfield, among others, especially you—is that strange, do you think?—it’s just that we love to experience beauty together. It’s for our sake: the realest beauty is always among others.”

Trim Frommer’s to an alternate but still possible hemisphere, porous, nomadic is the third book available from Portland’s own Airfoil Chapbooks.

The Word

Jordan Davis just called Redburn Melville’s Rubber Soul in a comment box. The Mayan calendar ends the day no one trains kliegs over gems like that.

Bruce Boone in Portland, 5/12/10

I got caught up in the wave of Bruce Boone mania that swept Portland earlier this month, but because I lost my notes, and because so much of the fun was in the table talk, it’s been hard to decide what to report on here.

There shouldn’t really be a problem; the book he read from is newly available from Nightboat Books, while table talk—with its intimacy, off-the-cuff fluency, elevation of the incidental, and promise of access to circles outside the recipient’s ken—is already part of the weave of Boone’s writing.

Robbie Dewhurst gave a remote introduction, all CA Conrad/Small Press Traffic-style, through the vox of David Abel that noted Boone’s ability to “connect to a universe in which emotionality and experiment are not mutually exclusive terms,” a take on his work that reminded me of something Dana Ward says in his Century of Clouds review: “What happens to us is profound because our feelings are endeared to our politics by way of lived relations.” Some of the recent excitement around Boone’s work I think involves his special fusion of the “third-person” registers of theory, experiment, and political sophistication with the kind of “emotionality” and personal affections that come most alive in second-person address. The split between the two has always been more tonal than philosophical, since theory and affections can nuzzle up in any way anyone wants them to, but Boone’s especially deft at carrying on like there’s no gap to bridge at all.

His route to the join in Century of Clouds is to tell a friend about the goings-on at the then-recent meeting of the Marxist Literary Group in St. Cloud, MN some thirty summers back. The straightforward formal frame turns out to allow for all kinds of complex refractions and meta-moments, where the actors in the story replicate the power hierarchies they’re so earnestly out to take down. That a gaggle of literary Marxists should themselves become subjects of literature is already kind of delicious, like those scenes in movies where the camera swivels around to include the studio and crew in the shot. The result is that anything the characters say in the story becomes a potential commentary on the story, really on the nature of story itself, which is also the topic of the conference that drives the plot. The set-up allows for the most ordinary details—a volleyball game, a passed note, a Midwestern sunset, or a leisurely discussion of ceremony—to move simultaneously in multiple directions, from critique to metaphor to pathetic fallacy to objective correlative to fierce reportage, without strong-arming the reader to settle on any one.

Boone’s own situation, having recently turned 70, reading in his hometown for the first time from a newly “rediscovered” book published more than a quarter century ago, added an extra dimension to the narrative layering. For me, it gave his story the quality of a grand summing up, so that sunsets, the evening crossing of bridges, the falling arc of a volleyball, or the climactic rising up of our narrator to call out the academic Marxists on their homophobia all felt like tropes for ending, or interrogations of the idea of endings, a narrative convention that in Boone’s hands can feel casually descriptive, craftily contrived, and mythically profound all at the same time.

Early on, Boone read a passage in which he and another conference attendee talk about Marxism and funerals. Are they too bourgeois? Unnecessary? Should they be thrown out completely, or re-tooled to fit new social needs? What would a proletarian funeral look like? Do humans need ceremony, or should they be weaned from the urge for that kind of order? Aside from its obvious connection to death, the ultimate story-ender, the scene works equally well as a wry commentary on the ceremonial status of all manner of social conventions, from academic power structures to class divisions to religious rites to syntax itself, maybe the quintessential ceremony for enforcing and preserving communal meanings.

Boone deals with these heavy questions with such a light, insistent touch that when he told us he was skipping the volleyball game which launches the ball whose fall the story ends with, you could practically hear the audience collectively sigh.

Dick Davis's Shahnameh

Dick Davis’s English is the closest I’ll ever get to the Persian of Ferdowsi’s famous epic, a multi-volume poem condensed here into a version that leavens the inevitable tedium of the chronicle with a string of well-realized vignettes related in supple, vivid prose, with the occasional rhyming stanza for more festive or elevated moments. In Davis’s translation, each of Ferdowsi’s many kings and heroes miraculously stays distinct, and you get enough of each story—especially the famous Rostam’s—to gain a feel for the aesthetic predilections of classical Persian poetry: the jewels spilling from goblets, the kingly demons, the cypress-slim heroes and raven-haired princesses, the splendiferous banquets, thwarted loves, and shah after shah handing on the regal glow of his farr. Undercutting the bling is Ferdowsi’s insistent warning that glory’s born to fade, and that death meets us all when the wine cup’s dry; a little sour pathos to season the narrative sweet.

For historians, the Shahnameh is a rare window onto pre-Islamic Persia, as Ferdowsi carefully marshalled the legends and folktales that were diplomatically forgotten at the glittering Muslim courts: “No one has any knowledge of those first days, unless he has heard tales passed down from father to son.” Ferdowsi, who ended his days (and this volume) lamenting how little his efforts brought him, found a way to be distinctly Persian but still a sound Muslim, and his work lives on in the plots of a thousand and one Bollywood films, as well as in this effective translation by the man Penguin’s backflap doesn’t balk to call “the greatest translator of Persian poetry.”

David Young's Petrarch

Poets like Petrarch, who lived in times that savored technical virtuosity and skill at fulfilling strict formal rules more highly than our own does, can suffer badly in modern translations. They’re often either brought over into contemporary blank verse, or straitjacketed into meters and rhyme schemes that are dead to modern ears.

David Young’s translations of the Canzoniere—all 366 of 'em—are remarkable for the way they succeed at combing Petrarch’s medieval Italian into direct demotic English that also approximates the shapely, measured elegance of the form for which he’s famous. Young creates the effect by putting caesuras where the rhymes ought to be, so that you get a feeling of completion at the ends of lines without disrupting the push into the next syntactic unit. The result is that meaning slops freely, almost conversationally, across the sentences while the individual lines preserve a sense of being elevated and formally “wrought.” It might be this combination of colloquial intimacy and technical brio that accounts for the longevity of the Petrarchan sonnet, the most familiar form to survive the Renaissance. Young sheds light on that, too, arguing for Petrarch’s Canzoniere as a sequence as deliberate and epistemologically sharp as Dante’s Commedia, but one that approaches the question of how to narrate the progress of a self through time in a more modern way, relying on echoes, resonances, and readerly inference rather than architectural rigor.

The notes are also helpful and unobtrusive, without a lot of scholarly chrome and fenders, and not a footnote in sight. A great introduction to Petrarch’s under-read achievement.

David Brazil's Spy Wednesday

Spy Wednesday is the hump day of Holy Week, smack in the middle of Christ’s Passion, but it also evokes the surveillance and identity protocols that condition dissent in our age of “intense decathexes.” The title’s a great example of Brazil’s allusive dexterity as he plays embedded reporter to himself over the course of a single week involving protest, arrest, breakups and meetups, all set to the rhythm of a witty “call & response across the segment” with Beckett, Melville, St. Paul, Patti Smith, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Lou Reed, Ranciere, and Augustine (Dylan’s plus Benedict’s), inter alia. A real-time interrogation of “the possibilities of/meaningful intervention” under Code Yellow conditions, the poem’s also a meditation on the value of ‘the literary’ itself, in which what you read figures as a Greek chorus of comforters and told-you-so confidants, and what you write becomes “an education in what/life is when it goes otherwise—/otherwise than planned.”