Cigarette lighter or squid?

The epigraph of Paul Muldoon's translation of Baudelaire's "Albatross" is from this BBC story:

Nearly two million Laysan albatrosses live [in the Midway Islands] and researchers have come to the staggering conclusion that every single one contains some quantity of plastic. [...] He explained how some chicks never develop the strength to fly off the islands to search for food because their stomachs are filled with plastic. [...] Many albatrosses are found to have swallowed disposable cigarette lighters - which look remarkably similar to their staple food of squid. 

I can't see the resemblance myself, but it is exactly the sort of association that belongs in a Paul Muldoon poem. I've skimmed through the new volume, Maggot; it offers the usual pleasures, but there are perhaps too many stunt poems, e.g., sonnet sequences that exhaust all possible rhymes for a word. (I guess I was also expecting more maggots!) Nevertheless, if you like reading about someone "malformed in his formaldehyde" this is very much the kind of book you should read; the sequence on "The Humors of Hakone" in particular is very good. One of the best poems in the new volume, "Love poem with pig," is here; "Quail" is available here and used to be on Muldoon's website for a long time.

(Needless to say I'd welcome any insight into why/which cigarette lighters look remarkably like squid.)

"Not all good poetry is also 'important poetry'"

Mark Ford has a good article in the new LRB (gated) on A.S.J. Tessimond and Bernard Spencer, two largely forgotten English poets of the Auden generation; on the strength of the quotations, Tessimond seems reasonably worthwhile, Spencer less so. (Ford's remarks on Spencer seem muddled to me. Not only is all the quoted verse bristling with Audenesque phrases -- "a word or a lock which gunfire may not break, / Or a love whose range it may not take" -- but surely the idea that one couldn't write tentatively while under Auden's influence is refuted by the example of Louis MacNeice.) Anyway, here is Ford on Tessimond:

Tessimond can’t be said to have developed as a poet in any clearly discernible way, and it’s not easy when reading his posthumously published poems to decide which is early, which middle and which late. All seem buoyed up by his wit and curiosity and compassion; this is especially surprising given that in middle age he developed severe manic depression and underwent extensive electric shock therapy.

And here are two Tessimond poems quoted in the article, both of which I like:

Letter from Luton

Dear Hubert,
                  Bored, malevolent and mute on
A wet park seat, I look at life and Luton
And think of spittle, slaughterhouses, double
Pneumonia, schizophrenia, kidney trouble,
Piles, paranoia, gallstones in the bladder,
Manic depressive madness growing madder,
Cretins with hideous tropical diseases
And red-eyed necrophiles – while on the breezes
From Luton Gasworks comes a stench that closes
Like a damp frigid hand on my neuroses,
And Time (arthritic deaf-mute) stumbles on
And on and on and on.
                      Yours glumly,
                                       John

In that cold land

Ghosts do not kiss, or, if they kiss, they feel
   Ice touching ice, and turn away, and shiver;
But there as here, perhaps, we still can steal
   Quietly off, and talk and talk for ever.

O Murse! The causes and the crimes relate

This WSJ article on the words for men's fashions is very good.

Men can also wear "mandals" (male sandals), "murses" (purses), "mantyhose" (pantyhose) and "mankinis" (swimsuit variants)—though not necessarily all at the same time.

A few expressions deal with the less glamorous side of fashion. Some male models are said to suffer from "manorexia." Several words describe grooming more than fashion, such as "guyliner" (eyeliner for guys) and "manscaping" (the removal of hair from men's limbs and loins).
[...]

To the consternation of the fashion industry, the new terms are redefining fashion faux pas. The British beach town of Newquay has witnessed a rise in mankini violations, according to chief of Newquay Police Ian Drummond-Smith. This summer, for example, a man was reprimanded on an English beach for wearing a thong-like suit with a halter strap similar to the one made famous by Borat, the fictional Kazak journalist.
Mr. Drummond-Smith said the slinky one-piece breached Britain's Section 5 of Public Order Act 1986, "which prohibits the display of items likely to cause harassment, alarm & distress."

"Alarm" really is the mot juste here. See also: mancakes. (Bit of a misnomer, these have nothing to do with pancakes.) The "bro" version of this punning trend is also quite fertile -- see bromance, broetry, Broseph Stalin, brwned, etc.

Re mankinis: there is a distracting association with the name Mancini. Similarly, the word "burkini" always makes me think of Edmund Burke.

Parallel passages: English riots edition

Glen Newey, "To Hell in a Looted Shopping Trolley":

The weather here this week has been typical of the Scottish summer. No one feels like rioting when it’s pissing down with rain.


Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. In fact riots often combine the form of radical protest with reactionary content. The Gordon Riots that erupted in the early summer of 1780 after the partial repeal of the 1698 Popery Act led to an orgy of looting not of moveable property, but of gin (though that isn’t where the name comes from). The riots drew on long-simmering resentment against excise duties on liquor. Horace Walpole remarked that more people had been killed by drink than by musket-ball, as the mob rifled gin-palaces for free booze; at one point a fire in the Fleet was unwittingly fuelled when it was doused with gin instead of water. One of the rioters’ targets was the old Clink prison. That was part of the medieval ‘manor’ or liberty of Southwark, an area so free of city jurisdiction that the bishop, whose manor it was, used it to run bear-baiting shows and a brothel.

Jon Day, "In Hackney":

A young woman with a red bandana tied round her head carried a green recycling box filled with bottles to throw. ... A man carrying a charred rocking horse ran up and clowned around for the phalanx of photographers and cameramen that stood between the riot police and a large group of teenagers. ... Someone threw a Molotov cocktail, but it went out in flight. An off-licence was broken into and people formed a reasonably orderly queue, emerging with bottles of spirits, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of lottery scratch cards, which they smashed open on the curb.

(Both from the LRB Blog, which has a great deal of excellent coverage.) Perhaps it is inappropriate to blog about this issue in a purely frivolous way, but I have read virtually no interesting analysis, & have little to say other than what is obviously implied by my general political outlook.

Unrelated link -- or related only through the non-etymology of Gordon's! -- a list of words for which the first OED quotation is from 1925: incl. arachnophobia, chewy, Comintern, cuppa, electron volt, enhat (i.e. provide with a hat), Kleenex, Leica, knitwear, makeover, neurosurgeon, nudnik, oncologist, paraphilia, recycle, shamus, sousaphone, superstar, Tootsie roll, Trotskyism, and zipper.

Of hillbillies and hobbits

I see John Holbo was here, but that isn't going to stop me from quoting Guy Davenport on J.R.R. Tolkien and the Appalachian lineage of the hobbits:

The closest I have ever gotten to the secret and inner Tolkien was in a casual conversation on a snowy day in Shelbyville, Kentucky. [...] I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien’s. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.

“Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.”

And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbits’ pipes suddenly made sense in a new way. [...] Practically all the names of Tolkien's hobbits are listed in my Lexington phone book, and those that aren't can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living. Talk with them, and their turns of phrase are pure hobbit: "I hear tell," "right agin," "so Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way," "this very month as is." These are English locutions, of course, but ones that are heard oftener now in Kentucky than in England.

A few random notes:

1. Davenport "never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile." (Thus, after my own heart, to some extent. But he also believed in "a Fourierist utopia, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body" -- decidedly not something I approve of.)

2. Vaguely related geographical tidbit: "Kentucky has 120 counties; depending on definitions, this is either third or fourth among U.S. states. [...] The original motivation for having so many counties was to ensure that residents in the days of poor roads and horseback travel could make a round trip from their home to the county seat and back in a single day, as well as being able to travel from one county seat to the next in the same fashion."

3. There might be scope for an updated Hobbit in which Smaug (clearly also a tobacco reference) runs a meth lab.

"Keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men"

Man-eating is in the news! For instance, your dogs would eat your dead, or even not-quite-dead, body:

Some dogs don't even wait until their masters die to dig in. There are many reports of dogs eating the wounded toes of family members. The victims are often afflicted with diabetes, which causes numbness in the feet, and they can't feel the dog gnawing at them.

And hunger, as it turns out, extends to cats, who have been known "[to eat] the foot of an elderly man found dead with his mother." Both links via Alan, who remarked, "god, i love these stories about pets eating dead owners."

Possibly of comparable grossness is this story (via the Rumpus) about gelatin made from human collagen. A little disappointingly, no cadavers are harmed in this process... It turns out that the appeal of human collagen has to do with avoiding liability of the mad-cow disease variety, and also with the curious fact that human collagen generated by yeast has strands of uniform length, unlike regular gelatin, "made from bits of many, many animals blended together." (This is probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, as I am not only obsessed with all things translucent and gelatinous, and all things slightly macabre, but actually have a passing academic interest in the physics of gel formation.)

Only a verbal connection to the rest of this post, but I enjoyed Stephen Burt's post about Bob Mould, formerly of Hüsker Dü, and esp. Mould's comment about the parallels between "bear culture" and punk rock culture.

All roads lead to the temperance literature

Elephantine readers! I had an irritating free-food experience today. On my way to work this morning I nearly walked into a sign somewhere saying there would be free food at noon. Naturally I went back at noon for the free food, to find nothing but sesame sticks, lukewarm lemonade, and cupcakes next to a sign saying "LET THEM EAT CAKE" -- funny at some level but very disruptive. The advertising was horribly misleading, I think: free food at noon is a technical term that means lunch, not snacks and definitely not cake. 

When I IM'ed CWA to vent about this she responded with a "no free lunch" joke, which led to my poking around in Google n-grams for "free lunch" and coming upon the free lunch chapter in Substitutes for the Saloon (which, as you no doubt remember, I had previously blogged about):

The free lunch is free only in the sense that when a
man has bought a drink, he is not charged for eating. [...] 
The quality of these lunches varies a good deal. Where 
the competition is not great, or where the license is 
high, the free lunch is not so attractive. In Boston, 
New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia the ordinary 
saloons certainly do not serve a very abundant or a 
very appetizing free lunch. Usually this lunch is cold. 
Where a hot lunch is found, it will almost always con- 
sist of soup with bread. The cold lunch is generally 
made up of the following articles : Bread, crackers, 
and wafers ; cheese, bologna sausage, wienerwurst, cold 
eggs, sliced tomatoes, cold meats, salads, pickles and 
other relishes. The demand is commonly for something 
sour or salt. The consumption of pickles, salt meats, 
sauerkraut, and potato salad runs far ahead of anything 
else. The drinking man's stomach seems to crave the 
acid. A workingman does not need to eat very heart- 
ily of the free lunch in order to appease his hunger. 
A slice or two of bread, a few pickles, and a small 
piece of meat with the beer is all that many of them 
eat at noontime. The meagre lunch which many of 
the saloons in our Eastern cities afford is perfectly 
adequate to the needs of a great majority of drinkers.

(It goes on to talk about various things, including racial attitudes toward free lunches in the early years of Jim Crow.)

2.. There was a Language Log post this morning about chemists' (and materials scientists') use of "imbibe" in a "causative" sense -- e.g., "Mixtures of lutidine and water imbibed in porous Vycor" or "[some people] made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte" -- which turns out to have been the way Chaucer used the word. As Liberman notes,

it seems that the historical progression was exactly the reverse of what I expected: first the causative subject-causes-object-to-take-in-liquid, then the metaphorical sense of drinking in ideas, and last the simple subject-takes-in-liquid. Go figure.

This talk of "imbibing" led me to search for the relevant medieval Latin song, which naturally took me to Alcohol in History (written by a theologian, also most probably part of Calista's original list), which has the following folk etymology for honeymoon:

Mead was also a favorite drink among the ancient Germans, and according to Henderson, it was customary to drink it for thirty days after a marriage. Hence, probably the familiar expression, the Honey-moon.

Regrettably, very folk. OED seems to have no etymological note at all, but the Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say:

1540s, hony moone, but probably much older, "indefinite period of tenderness and pleasure experienced by a newly wed couple," from honey in reference to the new marriage's sweetness, and moon in reference to how long it would probably last, or from the changing aspect of the moon: no sooner full than it begins to wane. French has cognate lune de miel, but German version is flitterwochen (pl.), from flitter "tinsel" + wochen "week." In figurative use from 1570s. Specific sense of "post-wedding holiday" attested from c.1800; as a verb in this sense from 1821.

So the German for honeymoon isn't even cognate... again, this is perhaps an unexpected usage history, as the specific use is centuries later than the figurative one.

Unregistered occupations, Yeats-mocking, etc.

George Yeats, writing -- not automatically for once -- to W.B. in 1930:

"No newses here but for the thrill of our dustbin being stolen yesterday evening from the pavement between the hours of eightthirty and ten. McCoy was most puzzled this morning when he went out to fetch it in and found nothing to fetch, and filled with vehement righteous indignation when I told him that I had observed on returning home last night at 10.15 that it was not there. He insisted on my telephoning to the police at Lad Lane [...] 'There's a lot of police regulations that are never enforced' says the police at the other end of the telephone 'but there's a regulation that bins shouldnt be put out as early as that.' 'Do you think the police took it' says I. 'O no' says he 'They wouldnt take it. They'd notify.' Then, 'When they take them they generally empty them out on the pavement, did they empty out yours?' 'They did not' says I. 'They must have had a handcart with them' says he. 'Do you mean the Garda would have emptied it out' says I. 'No, the people who take the dustbins' says he; so it is evidently one of the unregistered occupations like the stealing of doormats, washbaskets and umbrellas."

From Don Share's blog. In other Yeatsiana, Ray Davis recently quoted Anne Gregory (subject of this poem) rather delightfully mocking Yeats. Possibly the ne plus ultra of this particular unregistered occupation is that bit about the peacock in one of Pound's cantos:

The Kakemono grows in flat land out of mist
        sun rises lop-sided over the mountain
              so that I recalled the noise in the chimney
as it were the wind in the chimney
              but was in reality Uncle William
downstairs composing
that had made a great Peeeeacock
        in the proide ov his oiye
        had made a great peeeeeeecock in the . . .
made a great peacock
              in the proide of his oyyee

proide ov his oy-ee
as indeed he had, and perdurable

a great peacock aere perennius

By the way, Michael Wood recently quoted Auden (in a longish review of the new vol. of the Prose, of which more later) complaining as he often did that "I sometimes feel that the question “Is this statement true or false?” has never occurred to [Yeats]." (In the Dyer's Hand Auden compares Yeats unfavorably with D.H. Lawrence re sincerity.) The first vol. of Roy Foster's biography of Yeats (and maybe later ones but I haven't read those) lends a lot of support to the notion that Yeats didn't really believe, in the usual sense, in the mythological stuff; he just found the masks useful, and had to keep up the solemnity to sustain the mood (hence the general sense that he was pompous and affected). He was a bore by choice, unlike (say) Auden and Wordsworth who were bores by nature.

(On Auden as a bore see Alan Bennett. Or for that matter read as much as you can of that horrid little book on Auden's Table Talk. It is the only book I know that is almost as bad as its Richard Howard introduction. (The link is to a prev. post about Richard Howard's introductions.))

I have never read, or wanted to read, a biography of Auden or a critical/expository work by Yeats (I am interested in anecdotes about both, however), but am endlessly fascinated by the thought of the one and the life of the other.

(A few miscellaneous notes. 1. I introduced someone to Peter Porter. 2. In a comment on yesterday's post Jenny Davidson suggested that "hierarchy" probably implies priesthood; this would make sense of the "order" -- as in monastic order -- of people who believe in intrinsic value. I don't think one can make complete sense of Hill's answers, treated as answers -- he seems to be conflating the questions, "what entities should a poet enter into an imaginative relationship with?" and "whom should a poet write for?" -- but I think he is just ignoring the second question. 3. I greatly enjoyed this book review by Keith Ridgway in the Irish Times.)

Accessibility and the audience for poetry

Elisa Gabbert pointed out this interesting sociological experiment, a survey of MetaFilter users "who read widely but don't read poetry" on why they don't read poetry. Results anthologized in EG's post, though she omitted my favorite ("I want a story, or facts. I don't want little snippets of writing."); a majority of the answers are ignorant/silly rationalizations like

• Poetry--it seems to me--will only bring greater understanding of one particular person's inner thoughts and feelings: the poet.
• I have a strong sense that it is contrived.

Like all obvious rationalizations, these don't hold up well; they also tend to shift the blame onto "poetry"/"poets" in general, as though, if poetry were nicer to them, they'd give it a chance. The generalizations are grating -- e.g., "[random myth] is the blessing and the curse of poetry" -- but I don't want to dwell on this end of things. The real question with rationalizations is what's behind them: are the stated reasons stand-ins for actual reasons or for laziness and prejudice? (The answer is both, I imagine, but in what proportions?) Reading the responses charitably I can either understand or sympathize with 3.5 reasons:

1. (the half-reason) The poetry culture is off-putting, "poets sometimes recite their poetry in these hushed, reverent tones," etc. This is not a v. good reason but seeing that one has lots of things to do, it is reasonable to avoid whatever seems dreary. I, too, dislike poetry readings; it's hard to hear the linebreaks, you can't rewind, etc. -- it's often like doing a crossword from 1-across to 69-down. I'm not surprised that casual attendees come away baffled and bored.
2. Poetry is dense, slows you down, is demanding, etc. Reasonable in general but a little narrow-minded; one's reading doesn't have to be escape reading. (There is a case to be made that reading poetry impairs your ability to read certain sorts of thriller, when written very badly as they sometimes are. And maybe one gets a sense of accomplishment out of the sheer volume of what one has read...)
3. "I want a story or facts, not snippets of writing." / "I don't 'get' poetry." The more and less self-aware versions of not looking for, or not caring about, language as an end in itself. This is a respectable view; language has lots of perfectly good non-decorative purposes.
4. It's hard to find good poetry books, relative to (say) good literary fiction. You don't have the constant ambient buzz of critical judgments and recommendations -- word-of-mouth, NYTBR, etc. -- that you do with fiction and nonfiction. "You don't know where to start." I'd add that as poetry reviewers go there are no figures analogous to Dwight Garner or James Wood, whose approval guarantees an at least somewhat enjoyable book.

[An interesting feature of the replies: the "avid readers" screen basically worked. I approve of the screening: it is useful to separate the question of why people don't read poetry from that of why they don't read. The discourse that (e.g.) this post belongs to, though valuable, is different from why, say, Franzen readers don't read poetry.]

---

The Q. of where to start is an interesting one. Primary possibilities: (1) a class, (2) friends, (3) an anthology, (4) a review. I have no business talking about (1), but see Kathleen Rooney's comment. (2) and (3) are similar in that, as the reader isn't being guided through the poems, the optimal poem is one that reads itself. Which brings one to the question -- which I meant to blog about before the proem ran away with the post -- of what makes a poem an efficient enticement to poetry in general.

I do not think "accessibility" in the ordinary sense is the issue; Eliot's remarks (in the Jonson essay in The Sacred Wood) ring true to me:

Shakespeare, and smaller men also, are in the end more difficult [than Ben Jonson], but they offer something at the start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer poetry in detail as well as in design.... But the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity.

As a lazy adolescent I had my fatuity reflected at me by, say, Elizabeth Bishop and Frost and Yeats; I could "understand" the poems, but didn't see why they were supposed to be good. The first poems that really clicked -- in the sense of showing that there were possibilities that were essentially endemic to poetry -- were the poems in the first half of Prufrock, esp. "Prufrock," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody." (E.g. "The conscience of a blackened street / impatient to assume the world" -- I found it extremely neat that you could systematically get a certain kind of "effect" out of tacking the adjective onto the wrong noun.) Similarly e.e. cummings seems to draw people into poetry, and I've known early Stevens to work for some people. A lot of this is subjective: the reason (say) Dylan Thomas wasn't appealing to me as an adolescent was that I wanted to be reassured that poetry was "OK for boys," could be clever and cerebral, etc. -- I found it strangely reassuring that Bertrand Russell had had an affair with the first Mrs. Eliot. Others would have been turned off, and probably were, by precisely these things...

What emphatically would not have worked -- and I suspect won't work in general -- is unobtrusively brilliant phrasing as in middle-period Yeats; anything that can be missed will be missed if one is in the habit of reading things fast; any metaphors that can be taken "metaphorically" won't work. "Mackerel-crowded seas," for instance; it's not the expected verb but it's not unexpected enough either; there are mackerel in the seas; the evening as "a patient etherized upon a table" is a different story. I'd be very surprised if anyone used to high-volume prose reading got interested in poetry through Ashbery or Frank O'Hara. (On the other hand, it seems plausible that one might first get interested in poetry in a foreign language when one's learning the language, so that one hasn't zoned out the writing yet. This is one possible mechanism, btw, by which the demise of classical education might have assisted the general decline in the audience for poetry.)

PS: See David Orr on how Larkin was the first poet he understood. This might be a different question from the poet who first got you interested in poetry as a medium; I imagine Orr already knew how to read poetry when he got out of college. All the same, Larkin is often a fairly flashy writer ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad") -- though maybe not at his best.

"And you watched them watch you?"

From a Mississippi Supreme Court decision about a paternity case (via @nybooks on twitter); even if this should strike you as TLDR, do not miss the last line:

Eula Mae testified that she did in fact see Virgie Mae and Johnson engage in sexual intercourse in the spring prior to Claud's birth in December. The resulting courtship is best expressed by Eula Mae herself in response to pretrial questioning by attorney Victor McTeer, wherein Eula Mae described an incident where she, her boyfriend, Virgie Mae, and Johnson all went for a "walk" in the spring of 1931:

Q: All right, so you walked off the road, correct?
A: Right.
Q: And you started to kiss and do whatever people do?
A: M-hm.
Q: All right. Now, when you started that, what was Virgie and --
A: Doing the same thing we were.
Q: How do you know? You were sitting there watching them while you were -
A: We was both standing up.
Q: Oh, so both of you were standing up in the woods?
A: Sure, we was standing up out there in the woods.
***
Q: Excuse me, I haven't finished yet. Virgie and Robert, were they kissing and standing up?
A: Right.
Q: Was there ever a time when you were not looking at them?
A: Well, yes.
Q: I see. Did you at any point in time remove your clothing?
A: Well, had to.
Q: Okay. Did you observe them remove their clothing?
A: Sure.
Q: You were sitting there watching someone else do this?
A: I done told you.
Q: Well, let me, let me share something with you, because I'm really curious about this. Maybe I have a more limited experience. But you're saying to me that you were watching them make love?
A: M-hm.
Q: While you were making love?
A: M-hm.
Q: You don't think that's at all odd?
A: Say what?
Q: Have you ever done that before or since?
A: Yes.
Q: Watch other people make love?
A: Yes, I have done it before. Yes, I've done it after I married. Yes.
Q: You watched other people make love?
A: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Q: Other than...other than Mr. Johnson and Virgie Cain.
A: Right.
Q: Really?
A: You haven't?
Q: No. Really haven't.
A: I'm sorry for you.
Q: Well, I appreciate that. And perhaps I need the wealth of experience that you have. But share with me this. Did you actually watch them engage in the act? You actually watched that?
A: Yes.
Q: When they were engaging in the act, was your husband (her boyfriend at the time) watching, too?
A: Sure.
Q: Okay. Did they watch you?
A: Sure.
Q: And you watched them watch you?
A: Yes.

11. The above testimony is more than sufficient to establish the credibility of the witness and to prove the facts asserted. It rings true.

Dept. of sticky ends

1. I just stumbled upon this creative bit of Larkin-as-fanatical-misogynist criticism (the quoted poem is "Myxomatosis," which, btw, is about this, though it is not clear that the author bothered to look it up):

"Myxomatosis" transforms the sufferings of a wounded rabbit [Ed. ?!] into the common predicament of the male:

What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask. 
______________I make a sharp reply.
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate.

The 'jaws' are simultaneously of the trap, death, and of the vagina dentata; and 'suppurate' identifies the dying animal with a diseased wound or organ. What should surprise us is not that some element of this imagery is present, but that it should assume so little prominence: there is no possibility of compiling 'daily quotations for a misogynist's calendar' from his verse.
(Steve Clark, in Philip Larkin ed. Stephen Regan)

I love the insane incoherence of this reading... and esp. its implication that the rabbit is the stick. (Cf. joke about what's brown and sticky.)

2. Lest you forget, "snarge" is a technical term that refers to "the residue [1] of birds that have struck an airplane." It was also, apparently, soldier/sailor slang for "an ugly or unpleasant person." Two other terms near it that (for obvious reasons) resonate with me: "snifter (adj.) = good, satisfactory" and "snout (v.) = bear a grudge against." [H/t Ray Girvan]

---
[1] "Residue" is rich with implication here because of: (i) the mathematical notion of the "residue of a pole" in complex analysis, (ii) the famous math joke about the Pole who hijacked a plane and had to justify his inability to start it with the excuse that he was just a simple Pole in a complex plane, (iii) the tragic life-meets-art news story about the former Polish government. [Also, (iv) a pole is a stick.]

Books, beds, and bedbugs

Via twistedlilkitty on twitter, optimal living conditions:

I wouldn't describe myself as a book groupie in the Maud Newton/Book Bench sense, but do in fact have a regrettably large collection of books, many of which I intermittently reread. One could imagine groping for books on sleepless nights...

In other bed-related news, Alex Balk at the Awl points out that we're due for a "bedbug infestation explosion" this summer. (This is esp. regrettable as this summer's going to be a fairly travel-heavy one for me.) NB:

"Check your laptop. The bedbugs are attracted to the heat and body oils on the computer."

"Urn burial and X"; monarchs and minors

1. Ed Park's article on minor poets at the Poetry Foundation website [1] got me thinking about how boringly conventional my response to literature often seems; one needn't be a hipster to want to have unheard-of kindred spirits in the safely inimitable past. (Major poets are not kindred spirits, being major.) There are some I am idiosyncratically drawn to -- Dunbar, Skelton, Ralegh, Peele -- but none of these is really sufficiently minor or sufficiently kindred; to get some good examples one has to turn to contemporary poetry and to a writer (not obscure enough) like Amy Clampitt, who scooped me on the Urn Burial template. I had been meant at some point (probably years ago) to write a poem about urn burial and the stability of matter, but discovered that she had already written a long one on the much better theme of "Urn burial and the butterfly migration." (Google wildcard search yields no other instances of this template; it probably bears recycling.) This is not one of my favorite Clampitt poems (O the overdone apostrophes!), but there is still much to like, e.g. this bit near the beginning:

Bark-creviced at the trunk's
foot, ladybirds' enameled herds
gather for the winter, red pearls
of an unsaid rosary to waking.
From the fenced beanfield,
crickets' brisk scrannel
plucks the worn reed of
individual survival.

And this bit:

_______Listen
as the monarchs' late-emerging
tribes ascend; you will hear
nothing. In wafted twos or threes
you may see them through the window
of a southbound Greyhound
bus, adrift across the
Minnesota border,

or in flickering clots, in dozens
above the parked cars of the
shopping malls of Kansas -- this
miracle that will not live to
taste the scarce nectar, the
ample horror of another summer.

Cf. D.H. Lawrence's wonderful comparison of a mosquito to "a dull clot of air." I remember finding it stirring, in the late fall a long time ago, when the year's entire stock of swallows materialized at the Hartford Greyhound station during a layover. I had never been off the bus at this stop -- which I later discovered was a terrifying place with armed ATM guards and meth-addled Subway customers -- and it might as well have been anywhere else with a lot of sky and a lot of concrete. The swallows gathered in small circles that merged into larger and larger circles -- the temporal version of a gear (or gyre) if you will -- and then everything went in reverse as clumps of swallows split off from the main body and trailed away in various directions, as if they were collectively enacting the imminent disintegration of their individual bodies. I've always been attracted to this inverse of the butterfly effect -- a relevant technical term, btw, is "enstrophy cascade" -- as a picture of a sensibility like Sebald's, in which a catastrophe is repeatedly relived on smaller and smaller scales with no loss of vividness.

2. On the topic of monarch butterflies and the inevitable chaos theory ref., see also Muldoon's "Milkweed and Monarch" (linked site has the wrong title).

3. It was probably inevitable that "littoralist of the imagination" should have been taken, but the title surely fits Bishop's sandpiper much better than A.R. Ammons.

4. Re minor poets, seventydys on twitter has been rediscovering Nathaniel Wanley, a devotional poet roughly contemporary with Dryden. (Here is a Review of English Studies article, there is supposedly a brief mention by T.S. Eliot in the TLS in 1925 but our TLS back issues link has been malfunctioning.) As far as kindred spirits go I fear Wanley won't cut it, despite the name, but there is a good deal to like in his verse, esp. the vividness of some bits ("to have the knife / not cutt but saw the thread of life"), the crisp cleverness of some bits,

False heart that dost pretend to thrust
Through flames and floods and death to Rest
Yet dar’st not quitt one bosome lust
For Gods or thine owne Interest.

and the obvious virtues of "The Resurrection":

Can death be gratefull and the grave be just,
Or shall my tomb restore my scattred dust?
Shall every hair find out its proper pore
And crumbled bones be joined as before,
Shall long unpractis'd pulses learn to beate
Victorious rottennesse a loud retreate,
Or eyes Ecclipsed with a tedious night,
Shall they once hope to resalute the light?
What if this flesh of mine be made the prey
Of Scaly Pirates cannibals at sea
Shall living Sepulchres give up their dead
Or is not flesh made fish then perished?
[...]

----
[1] Much of Park's article is an appreciation of the Ashbery/Schuyler collaborative novel A nest of ninnies. I wasn't as fond of it as Ed Park; I don't remember much of it but for what it's worth I wrote an Amazon review at the time. Like most of my Amazon reviews, it's a little painful to reread.

Stories of Alan's life, part XLII

Inspired by this Language Log post ("a little light draggle"):

There once was a man in the draggle

Who continued to strive and to straggle:

In the end he congealed

In a desolate field

And was gobbled up whole by a gaggle.

"Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity"

The TLS's slang dictionary review sent me back to an old essay in Thumbscrew by Craig Raine, on swearing and translation, which doesn't live up at all to my memory of it. However this bit has always stuck with me:

I recall Thom Gunn asking me in San Francisco if I had really published a poem entitled ‘Arsehole’. I had. […] Gunn’s comment was a poet’s comment on two languages. “Gee, ‘arsehole’ is so much dirtier than ‘asshole’.” […] “Asshole” is a possible translation of “arsehole” but it isn’t the right translation - not only for the reason given by Thom Gunn. To call someone an “arsehole” is quite different from saying someone is an “asshole”. The former is malignant where the latter is harmless. To be on a desert island with an asshole would be irritating perhaps. To be on the same desert island with an arsehole might even be dangerous.

And, as if on cue, here's Daniel Davies on Egypt:

Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren't interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising - there are fucking millions of them.

(Via Yglesias, who has the linguistic tact not to translate the word.) One is inevitably reminded of the "I'm surrounded by assholes" set-piece in Spaceballs, a precisely converse situation where "arsehole" would be a mistranslation.

I wonder if anyone's bothered to study the difference between "arsehole" usage in rhotic and non-rhotic dialects -- Green's dictionary, maybe? -- there must be something, I feel, but it's hard to isolate immediately from all the other differences between Scottish and southern English speech.

Any time Thom Gunn comes up is a good time to reread "The Gas-poker."

As if airports weren't disorienting enough

From the BBC via Dainty Ballerina, Luton airport has introduced holographic announcers Holly and Graham. Rationale: 1. "They're absolutely compelling" 2. "They'll be really consistent in the message they give":