Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

It is not possible to be any kind of writer other than yourself. Some days, it is not even possible to be the best version of yourself, or a good one. On those days, all I can do is try to be a more tasteful version. It’s like – you didn’t iron your shirt? Again? Then don’t take off your jacket.

We are seven

1) The last day of classes is Monday.

2) Of late, the writing of papers has gotten me into some silly situations – when you find yourself flipping through a Collected Poems and muttering all the last stanzas aloud to see if you can find hidden ballad meter, you may have gone too far. That’s not to say I’m not going to keep doing it.

3) Outside, it rains.

4) Fiction is all about quotation marks and how to display them. This becomes clearer the longer I have to teach it. I never would have thought they would be so problematic – but they are! You could spend the rest of your life puzzling over quotation marks.

5) I saw the moon move across clouds like ice-floes one night a few weeks ago, illuminating a small searchlight of a circle as it drifted (yes, I know, the clouds are moving, not the moon) after a graduate reading, and it occurred to me that, rather than attempting to capture the movement and the light of the moment in theatrical presentation, I now have to try to capture those things in words. The impulse is the same, but the method is different. If it is to be captured at all, of course. Delusional. The moon: observed in captivity.

6) Poetry is sometimes about taking out the words.

7) words

a fight with my own dog, for god’s sake

Competitiveness you went down to Testosterone Village last night
And got loaded. What was I supposed to do with you today,
This morning, when you tried to get me into a fight
With my own dog, for god’s sake, over getting
To the newspaper first?

- Kenneth Koch, “To Competitiveness,” New Addresses

not to be abed after midnight

I might as well leave you with Toby and Andrew for the hiatus. I have been writing a poem about Twelfth Night. Writing poems about plays is, I suppose, like composing music about music. But I like it. Anyway, I hope these gentlemen take better care of you, SOS, than I have been since coming here. They are great fun to drink with, although a little repetitive. (R&G, anyone?) You say honestly. Rest you merry.

TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT II, SCENE III. OLIVIA’s house.
Enter SIR TOBY BELCH and SIR ANDREW

SIR TOBY BELCH
Approach, Sir Andrew: not to be abed after
midnight is to be up betimes; and ‘diluculo
surgere,’ thou know’st,–

SIR ANDREW
Nay, my troth, I know not: but I know, to be up
late is to be up late.

SIR TOBY BELCH
A false conclusion: I hate it as an unfilled can.
To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is
early: so that to go to bed after midnight is to go
to bed betimes. Does not our life consist of the
four elements?

SIR ANDREW
Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists
of eating and drinking.

SIR TOBY BELCH
Thou’rt a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.
Marian, I say! a stoup of wine!

further,

On hiatus (writers’ strike?) till Mon”one week left to do all work for all classes” day, folks. Happy, turkey, etc.

from the backhanded department

Last week, there were people standing outside the Hopkins bookstore handing out free copies of The Origin Of Species to everyone who passed by. The edition was published, and I have to assume the effort was funded, by these people – “publishing the changeless word for a changing world.” It’s a Florida-based Christian publisher – and the back cover tells us, “A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved,” and otherwise refers to evolution as “an unproved theory.”

An interesting way to make your point, handing out copies of the foundation text of the theory you’re arguing against. I would think that the arguments of the Darwin would outweigh the commentary they’re trying to package it with.

Also fun, from the cover: “This [edition] is for use in schools, colleges, and prestigious learning institutions.” Not for the un-prestigious. I wonder how many colleges in the South they’ve been handing these out in? And if one more person tells me that Baltimore isn’t in the South, I’m going to have to refer the matter to the enormous statue of Stonewall outside the door. It may not be the deep South, but it sure isn’t the North.

His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

…until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as “minimalism” or “dirty realism.”

- Stephen King in the NYT on the new Carol Sklenicka bio of Carver (and the new Library of America Collected Stories of Carver)

It’s not where you start;

it’s where you finish.

spontaneous, unliterary speech

In even a short run of spontaneous, unliterary speech, some combinations of consonants and vowels are certain to recur, even though we don’t take special note of them. On the other hand, if a few vowels and consonants recur with more than average frequency, we can’t avoid noticing their sound, and we become conscious as words as an auditory experience, not merely as a medium for conveying information. For many centuries now English poetry has used this recurrence of sound expressively, organizing phonic repetition so that it becomes clearly audible and relevant to other constructive aspects of a poem…

- Alfred Corn, THE POEM’S HEARTBEAT

many are the monsters

Yesterday I taught a chorus workshop in the home of a professor here in Baltimore, to two faculty and four students. We worked on a passage from Judith Molina’s translation of Brecht’s adaptation of ANTIGONE. There was quiche. It was good. Things observed:

- Brecht completely rewriting choruses (Many are the wonders, but none more wonderful than man; Love undefeated in the fight) by simply changing the thesis statement (Many are the monsters, none more monstrous than man; Lust, not love…etc.)

- Why should the members of the chorus have the same point of view, or objective, even when they are all reciting a speech with a unified objective? They don’t have to. They can each have a different approach to it. Complexity = good.

- It is always worth it to get off book, no matter how long it takes, for the text exercises.

I then went to the Towson mall with one of my friends here, and bought a watch. Then I couldn’t use my eyes any more, so I got nothing done. And today I have to catch up on work. I’ve been sick a lot lately – five days of strep throat, several days of not being able to use one of my eyes.