The Poet-Historian: C. P. Cavafy

I have been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's translations of Cavafy: Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems. I have read Rae Dalven's translation of his collected poems, and while I enjoyed them, I continued to migrate my favorite modern Greek poet: Seferis. Mendelsohn's translations are revelatory. I have had several friends tell me that Cavafy's poems read in the original Greek are delicious and beautiful, but, alas, I don't understand Greek. Mendelsohn performs some magic here though.

First and foremost, both books are filled with copious notes providing context, details, and other trivia that illuminate the poems and are, frankly, interesting reading in themselves. His introduction to the Collected Poems states clearly his methodology and discusses important themes in Cavafy's work, which center around two ideas: history and sensuality. With history, Cavafy writes frequently of the collapse and breakdown of the Hellenistic and then Byzantine world. This is not exclusive, but it is a dominate theme. In the sensual area, many of Cavafy's poems are openingly homosexual, though his earlier ones are more closeted and speak powerfully to the consequences of secrets.

Unfinished Poems are the first translations into English of the poems left unfinished at the time of Cavafy's death in 1933. A Greek scholarly edition edited by Renata Lavignini appeared in 1994. Mendelsohn has removed most of the scholarly apparatus and provided these 30 poems and some fragmentary texts. Again copious notes are provided along with relevant variants, but the poems add to the themes of Cavafy's poetry and many are essentially complete.

Cavafy called himself a poet-historian, and that had special implications for him. He sought out truth in his historical settings and obtained multiple sources, but he still wrote poetry, so some of his characters and settings are fictional, though they often discuss actual events and actual people. Years before I had heard of Cavafy, I too had begun writing historically based poems. (None nearly as good as Cavafy's.) Mendelsohn's translations have brought to the fore an affection for Cavafy's historical poems that I had found interesting but not inspiring before. Now I am inspired by his work.

I want to quote a couple of things. The first bears an interesting insight to the rigor Cavafy applied to his poems. Regarding the unfinished poem "The Patriarch" Mendelsohn states: "Lavagnini notes that fully two years elapsed between the first version [a single draft] and subsequent rewriting." In the press to get items published these days, I wonder how many poets have let an idea percolate for two years?

Finally, I think it only appropriate to quote a short poem. But instead of a historical poem, from the Unfinished Poems, one titled "Birth of a Poem" is pertinent perhaps as an ars poetica:

One night when the beautiful light of the moon
poured into my room...imagination, taking
something from life: some very scanty thing--
a distant scene, a distant pleasure--
brought a vision all its own of flesh,
a vision all its own to a sensual bed...

Raintree County, or the Genius of Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Novel

Raise your hand if you have heard of Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr.? I hadn't until Jared Carter handed me a copy of the book a few months ago. I very much wish I had found this book earlier, though, perhaps, I may not have enjoyed it as much (I did not really appreciate Moby-Dick until well after college). Speaking of Moby-Dick, I have always considered that novel THE American novel. Raintree County does not displace Melville's masterpiece, but it definitely comes in with the silver medal as far as I am concerned. This is an astonishing book. A family tale. A war story. An epic. A story that teases out the myths of youth that we carry forward to adulthood. A story about creation and loss and love. A local story. A universal tale.

The novel is so lusciously sprawling that a summary is futile. The story ostensibly takes place during the course of July 4, 1892. But the day is splintered by memories that reach back to the 1840s and reach forward to 1892. John Wickliff Shawnessy is the hero of the novel, but he is flanked by a mesmerizing cast of characters: Garwood Jones, Professor Jersusalem Stiles, Nell Gaither, and Susanna Drake among others. Each character is fully formed, but they are archetypal at the same time.

• Jones is the great friend and archrival. A politician so successful that you feel the slipperiness of him because he knows how to read the public and ride on the wave carrying the largest bloc of voters. He becomes a Union Army colonel at the tail end of the war--late enough to avoid real fighting but soon enough to boast of his soldiering credentials.
• Stiles's middle name is Webster, and if you think of Webster's dictionary, you've thought correctly. A man who debates fluently with Shawnessy about any number of things, metaphysical to sexual.
• Nell is the true love of Shawnessy, a woman for whom he has framed an entire myth around, but also a woman always just out of reach or time to truly be happy with. Something or some one is always a barrier to their final happiness.
  
• Susanna is a troubled Southern girl whose mental anguish, stemming from a Faulkner gothic family, whose tormented mind is metaphorically the result of the conflict of the slavery in pre-Civil War America. The hypocrisy of freedom, the commercial abuse (i.e., an honest wage for honest labor), and moral degradation of the enslavers....all come into a debilitating mental conflict. To the northern Shawnessy, she is a beautiful mystery. Even a scar whose importance only becomes apparent later is mysterious and erotic to the young Shawnessy.

I am leaving out a host of minor characters of the kind that fill small towns throughout America. However, another major character in the novel is America itself. Lockridge often riffs off of Whitman in long prose-poem passages:

America was a city by a river, a city of gloomily eclectic buildings, confused unhappy domes and spires of buildings that were trying to be the most beautiful buildings that ever were but couldn't be because they hadn't any souls. America was faces in the Avenue of the Republic, eager, excited faces with mobile eyes. America was the place where all the world sent its third-rate art and gaudiest claptrap and where it was all piled up together and then became something hushed, exciting, wonderful because it was in America.

Another non-human character is a central myth built into the mind of Shawnessy, of the fabled raintree and the creature of the lake. These myths and America weave in and out of the novel, haunting the edges, inspiring the noblest of human passions, and acting as the unmovable background on which all the characters act.

As the day moves along and the 1892 characters become visible in the past, the story of where they are and what they've become emerges as a record of memory, though memory is not revealed as an American specialty. The Civil War necessarily looms large in the consciousness of the memory. Shawnessy joins the war effort a couple of years after the conflict begins, but he enters the war to participate in Sherman's march to the sea. Lockridge captures adequately, I think, the pervasiveness of slavery and the North/South tensions and also all the uncertainty of whether war was inevitable.

One of the minor characters, Flash Perkins, the fastest man in Raintree County until defeated by Shawnessy in a drunken race is with Shawnessy's unit. In a looting tangent, they face a small group of Confederates. Perkins wounded, keeps fighting until

Here, surely, was the strongest life that ever lived, and it was dying, it was beating itself out in blood and fury.

There was nothing good about the way Flash Perkins died in a forest near Columbia, South Carolina. He died choking with his throat full of blood, still trying to beat some unseen competitor who was too much for him.

What I find so admirable in this passage is that it captures both the dignity of the man and the horror of war. Those emotions are enmeshed within the structure of the sentences themselves.

I could carry on randomly like this for some time because there is so much that is delightful in this novel. I am still absorbing the weight and breadth of the novel, but I am certain it is a triumph. Lockridge, sadly, killed himself shortly after this novel was published in 1948, but he left behind a masterpiece of fiction and I hope that others will discover its richness.

Shameless Plug

This post is dedicated to a shameless plug for my wife. She has begun selling a couple of her knitting patterns at Ravelry. Additionally, she has opened her Etsy store, which includes some items made by my mother as well. If you like hand knits, knitting or crochet patterns, or knitting related items, stop by her store.

Chris Jordan and Intolerable Beauty

I was listening to The New York Review of Books podcast with Chris Jordan regarding his Midway: Message from Gyre photographs, which are a series showing deceased young albatrosses fed by their parents pieces of plastic they mistook for food. Jordan is explicitly clear and the did not stage these photographs in the slightest. Eve Bowen, the interviewer, asked Jordan: "What does it take to make the intolerable beautiful?"

The question relates back to a series of photographs that Jordan titled Intolerable Beauty. Of course, the photographs of dead young albatrosses killed by human trash should provoke just this sort of question. Jordan's reply is thoughtful and worth quoting:

It is a bizarre experience to feel the aesthetic beauty of something so horrible and yet I think aesthetic beauty can be a portal.... If i took ugly photographs of a scary subject, no one would want to look at them. And so I think by presenting these things in a beautiful way it not only honors the complexity of the issue to some extent; it also draws the viewer in. There is a kind of seduction in a beauty like that. It can draw the viewer into a difficult conversation with himself that they might not otherwise be willing to have...making it past the defenses to bring a viewer in to face a difficult subject that they might not otherwise want to face, even sometimes trick them into showing up for that conversation.

This seems to relate extraordinarily well to what Wilfred Owen achieved in his most horrific, yet beautiful poems related to combat. I think by illuminating how beauty can be such a powerful force in art in these extreme instances indicates the necessity of beauty in artistic communication.

Helvetica: The Movie

I recently saw the film Helvetica, which is, yes, an hour and twenty minutes about a font. But this film is so much more than that.

Picture the ads from the 1950s. Fonts of all different kinds. Cluttered imagery. Seems like they could be from any of the earlier decades. Then see what happens to ads after Helvetica enters the scene. A graphic designer shows you this in this film. A Coke ad pre-Helvetica. A Coke ad post-Helvetica. And what a difference it is.

We are much more attuned to fonts these days, what with computers and all. Times New Roman. Arial. Helvetica. Palatino. Etc. So it is hard to imagine the revolutionary qualities of Helvetica. It is also difficult for most of us to think of fonts as Modernist, Post-Modernist, etc., but that is how these graphic designers and typeface creators do describe fonts.

You get to hear the thoughts of what can be called pro-Helvetica Modernists, those who found in this font a clean, sophisticated aethestic. But you can then listen to the reactionaries. A graphic designer refers to the ubiquity of Helvetica like McDonald's. Crap food, but you eat it because it is on the corner. Then you can hear the younger generation discuss how Helvetica was reacted against but how they now have found its value.

The name of this film may be a font's name and the film may seemingly be about a font's effect on culture, but I think this film as more to say about us and our relationship with design (every day, common place, not so common place). What do fonts indicate regarding emotion and logic? Are they simply end means of communication that should carry no emotion themselves? Or do the fonts we choose steer us toward certain emotional and, perhaps, unwitting responses?

Knitting a Poem

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my wife had requested a knitting poem and about the challenges of pursuing such a writing task. Here's an update regarding that poem, which is really a discussion about the process of writing a poem.

For me, this is a poem that is constructed until something snaps into place and feels right. A metaphor for this process occurred to me yesterday. I had recently had my oil changed at one of those oil change places. They do the usual tests of lights, wipers, etc., and on the way home from work I noticed that one of the wipers was just sitting there, detached from its arm. Once home, I worked on trying to reattach the wiper to the arm. I knew the general idea of how it fit together, but I had to struggle with it a bit. I think I reversed it a few times, but finally it snapped into place and I knew it was done.

A long-winded metaphor for a writing process, but I think it captures what I think will happen with this poem. I had written some stuff down, no lines. Just words associated with knitting. Images. Words acting as signs and representations for unformed thoughts. I had heard of paintings featuring the Virgin Mary knitting, so I wrote that kind of stuff down. These were all simply methods to think about possible approaches to themes, methods, etc. It's hard to indicate how important, to me, the act of contemplation is in writing a poem. I can turn phrases over, put words together, and mine for metaphors.

But thinking about a poem over days and months (and even years) allows other outside influences to come into play. On my drive back and forth from work, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen frequently to The History of Rome (that's a plug for this great podcast). More specifically, I also listen to the podcast of Speaking of Faith, and in particular, I was listening to the interview with John O'Donohue. I cannot say I'm an admirer of his poetry, though I have read too little thus far to make any categorical assessment, but his ideas regarding beauty and its importance to life interest me a great deal, if for no other reason on how I have often pushed that a requirement of great poetry is beauty. Listening to the interview, a particular phrase burrowed into my thinking and seemed pertinent to the poem about knitting: "Taking time for things." I cannot rightly remember the exact context of the phrase, but I was able to spin the context for my own purposes. This phrase may or may not appear in the final version of the poem, but it was a launching point. From here, I was able to free-write a series of lines and stanzas. Most of them will probably be edited out eventually, but the process has begun. I'll be able to continue to pry, poke, and otherwise experiment with imagery and lines.

[Madonna image source.]

[Thanks to my wife for the image of a sweater she is knitting for me.]

Poems Published at The Monongahela Review

One of my poems has just been published at The Monongahela Review. Go check it out. The Monongahela Review publishes two versions: a straight PDF version and an Issuu version, which presents the journal in an online rendition of a traditional print journal.