Today is the birthday of the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this day in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, England. Raised Anglican, in an artistic and prosperous home, he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866, and he decided to become a priest himself. He entered a Jesuit novitiate near London in 1867, and he vowed to “write no more…unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burnt all of his poetry and would not write poems again until 1875.
Nonetheless, when he began writing again, on the occasion of a shipwreck that took the lives of five Franciscan nuns, it was an outpouring unlike anything English language poetry had seen. His highly compressed, musical language introduced new aural affects, often using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Straining at the boundaries of sense, he pushed poetic language into the 20th Century.
For a full taste of Hopkin’s accomplishments, try the magnificent poem below — perhaps the first cri-de-coeur for environmental sensitivity in English Letters:
Binsey Poplars
felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
If the above piqued your interest, the Poetry Foundation website has more here on Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In a brilliantly provocative essay for the New Republic, Ruth Franklin describes a poetry reading she went to recently where poet Amelia Gray “took the stage and announced with a demure smile that she was going to read some ‘threats.’”
As Franklin relates,
Some were humorous: “I will gather your oldest friends at my home and we will have a conversation. You will hear us talking but when you come into the room we will stop talking.” Some left the menace to the imagination: “Try to kiss me. See what happens to your lips.” Some were vividly violent. “Your face is sealed with glue I have boiled in a vat. … Trust me when I say this: I exist to ruin you.” She read each cheerfully off a tiny slip of paper, which she would then toss onto the stage behind her.
The atmosphere was instantly charged. What was this—prose, poetry, neither, both? At first there were some quiet chuckles, then open laughter at the end of each outrageous expression of anger. “My truth is a sucking chest wound. The field doctor will apply a makeshift occlusive patch crafted from cellophane, aluminum foil, and duct tape. You are far from home.” The laughter was both shocked and relieved. There was something electrifying in the spectacle of this sweet-looking woman blithely reading off her visions of brilliant mayhem ….
It was enough to make Franklin consider “how unusual it is for poets, and women poets in particular, to express anger. To the extent that such things can be generalized about, there is a distinct style of contemporary American poetry that tends not to range dramatically in mood. For the most part it is serious, elegiac, wistful, perhaps with a sideline of dark humor. It coolly offers images and observations; it does not judge or rabble-rouse or incite revolution.”
That’s point one. But in point two, Franklin takes the consideration someplace even more interesting — into the heart — or, as she might say, the guts — of our democracy, where it belongs:
But the other reason the audience responded so favorably to Amelia Gray, I think, had to do with the contrast between her appearance and her words ….
What if Amelia Gray were to disguise her beauty with dumpy clothes, a wig, big glasses? Or if she delivered her menacing lines—“I could quite literally devour you”—in a tone that sounded like she meant them? What does true, sincere, gut-wrenching anger even look like anymore—can it be marshaled without the accompanying doses of irony to soften its edges? In an age that worships even-temperedness and deflection, a little righteous fury seems like it could be a necessary correction. I’d like President Obama to stand up before a room of BP executives and proclaim, “You are the acid in my guts. You are the pile of sand behind the curtain of my memory. You are the fish on the hook of my ugly heart. You are the tie around your own neck.” If he could do it without smiling afterward, that would be truly subversive.
In 1993 I worked as the assistant manager of the Classic Bookshop on the concourse of the World Trade Center. Several weeks after the February 26th bombing, after we had removed the billowy black ash that had settled on all the books and shelves, Classic reduced its stock in a fire sale. On an ordinary Friday, our best day of the week, the store would take in an average of $7,000. On the best day of the sale -– when prices had been cut fifty to seventy-five percent -– we took in over $30,000.
One quiet weekday morning shortly after the sale had begun I was called to the front of the store. One of the cashiers had been presented with a gift certificate and didn’t know whether it ought to be redeemed.
I had never seen him in the store –- but I recognized the customer with the gift certificate. And I had noticed him when he had come in. A slight man with a step that might have given an impression of frailty, his mask-like face emanated self-possession. As I now know, he would turn seventy that year, but his evident age -– more than twice mine -– drew my attention to his clothes. In the World Trade Center, our customers were bankers and traders or were drawn from the nearly 40,000 office workers in the towers above us whose costumes were mostly functional, and hard to tell apart. The store’s best-selling subjects — we had tables devoted solely to stacks of Frank Fabozzi’s Handbook of Mortgage Backed Securities -– were banking, investment, business, and computer manuals. “Poetry not sold here” (an inevitably disappointing shelf or two was tried out later). And although I did wait on Lawrence Joseph once (and Ray Sokolov, a poet of another kind, who refused to be flattered by my recognizing him from the photo on the jacket flap of his irreplaceable biography of A.J. Liebling, Wayward Reporter) we were not patronized by poets and we were not accustomed to waiting on elderly gentleman in clothes of many colors -– and textures. Not that this customer’s clothes were garish. Even the mauve scarf complemented his meadowy palette. And the clothes were clean and new, those of a natty bohemian.
The gift certificate was bright and crisp, a single fold in the middle. Its corners and edges were still sharp. It looked new, but I had never seen one like it. The color was lighter. There was the corporate logo -– but the font was different.
The amount: $7.50. It wasn’t even in the denomination of a gift certificate but was the balance or remainder of a partially used gift certificate. Who had given the gift and what its original value had been were not displayed.
The date of issue? I don’t remember the date. But I remember the year. The gift certificate, or what was left of it, had been issued in 1979. And the bearer was Tuli Kupferberg, the poet, singer, and self-described “world’s oldest rock star,” who died this Monday at age 86.
Like most people who didn’t know him, I knew Tuli first through the Fugs, introduced to me by an uncle in the form of their vinyl record album It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest and their song “Wide, Wide, River” which, since I rarely consulted album covers or notes, I have ever since referred to as “River of Shit,” after its chanting lyric.
In his biography of Paul McCartney, Barry Mileswrites that Paul would sign his autograph “Tuli Kupferberg” “whenever pushy tourists called upon him to sign” one.
When I got to New York Tuli was still a presence – you could see him perform at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, or buy his drawings on St. Mark’s Place, or see them in the Voice – and I’ve never outgrown the sensibility enshrined in his collection Teach Yourself Fucking, which I bought for the title and the photos of Tuli on the cover hoisting his boner. (The two-star review on Amazon is titled “I didn’t learn anything from it” and pleads, “Please don’t mistake this for an instructional guide, as I did.” – There are two kinds of people in the world…)
I regret that I did not record his purchase. I do remember that he browsed the store for a length of time that indicated careful consideration. As the price of books rose, the relative value of the gift certificate declined – but the sale restored its original buying power. Having been given the gift in 1979, and having found little in the store to recommend it (I imagined), Tuli had waited for an opportunity that wouldn’t be bettered. Where had he kept that piece of paper all those years? How had he known where to put his hands on it when he needed it? (There’s something scrupulous about this that is at odds with Tuli’s anarchic persona.) What did he find among all that drek?
In 2007, I worked in an office across the street from Housing Works bookshop on Crosby Street. Every other day or so I would wander over to cull the dollar book carts that have supplied my library (or “hoard,” if you must) for the last 15 years. The competition between the carts sometimes gets a little huffy. The books are only a dollar, after all, and there are treasures in there. The space is tight. There’s only room for one. One day, rounding a cart, I found the space between two of the carts blocked by a man, down on his hands and knees, peering at the bottom row of the cart. It was Tuli. The last time I saw him. I joined him and his armful of books at the cash register. “Are you still buying books at your age?” I said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I know,” he said, smiling, in his whispery croak, “ but I can’t help myself.”
The only woman in contention for the Oxford Professor of Poetry position — vacant ever since Ruth Padel was driven out for pointing out to the press that her competitor Derek Walcott had numerous, settled-out-of-court sexual harassment charges against him — has withdrawn from the race after charging Oxford with ginning the game in favor of a man, Geoffrey Hill.
As a Guardian story reports, Paula Claire “has withdrawn in protest over what she is describing as “serious flaws” in the election process that she believes have pushed best-known candidate Geoffrey Hill ahead of all other contenders.”
She is protesting over the fact that she was described as a “performer and artist” in Oxford’s announcement of the 11 candidates for the post, omitting the fact that she is a poet. The “last straw”, she said, was a flysheet published last week in Oxford’s Gazette, the official journal of the university. supporting Hill. It called Hill, the frontrunner for the election, “quite simply a giant” and “the finest living poet in English today”.
Describing the flysheet as “repugnant” and “deliberately written to devalue all other bona fide candidates”, she said today that the university was supporting Hill for the post “and the rest of us are ignored as not worthy to be in the set-up”. “I’m very happy to say that he is one of the finest poets in English today – I agree with that. But not the finest,” she said. “That is grossly over the top. They shouldn’t allow it ahead of the election – an election is supposed to be a fair system and until the voters come in everybody’s equal.”
“I haven’t withdrawn in a pique – I’ve withdrawn for women,” Claire tells the paper. “The post was founded in 1708. They haven’t had a woman since then and I think they’re still determined to put a man in.”
“Her resignation letter demanded that an independent committee unconnected with the university’s faculty of English be set up to run the election,” says the Guardian, in what the paper terms “a genuinely reformed and modern way: efficiently, transparently and democratically, backed up by advice from internet experts and given an independent complaints procedure.”
On this day in 1048 the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam was born in Nayshapur, Iran. A brilliant polymath, Khayyam was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician and poet. Most renown during his lifetime as a mathematician, Khayyam wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which, according to this Wikipedia entry, “laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Persian Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. In particular, he derived general methods for solving cubic equations and even some higher orders.”
But Omar Khayyam is now most widely known in the English-speaking world as a poet and the author of The Rubaiyat,a long poem comprised of one thousand quatrains — four line verses, or rubais. There is a wonderful compendium of the various translations on the Electronic Literature Foundation’s website, which includes the most famous among the translations, by English Victorian poet and translator Edward Fitzgerald. It is Fitzgerald who we have to thank for the quatrain:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow.
On this day in 1861, the Indian polymath and Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore was born in Kolkata. Tagore, who began writing poetry at eight yrs old, published his first significant volume of poetry when he was sixteen, under the pseudonym, Bhanushingho, “Sun Lion”. Tagore protested the British Raj and endorsed independence for India. He was a great admirer of Mohandas Gandhi, whom he named “Mahatma” or “Great Soul” out of his deep respect.
Tagore’s famous volume, Gitanjali, is a collection of 103 English poems, translated from the Bengali. Undertaken prior to a visit to England in 1912, the translations were extremely well received in the UK, where they were published in 1913, with an preface by William Butler Yeats. In the same year, 1913, based on a small body of translations, Rabindranath became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize.
Last week in New York Bill Murray stopped by the almost-completed Poet’s House to read poems and joke with the construction workers. (The first minute or so is slow but it’s worth it for the Emily Dickinson poem.)
MobyLives reader Steve Mitchemore tips us off to a post by Pierre Joris saying that the story about the discovery of a previously unseen photograph of Arthur Rimbaud (see yesterday’s MobyLives report) is a hoax.
According to Joris, the photos “are in fact the work of a crazy Rimbaldian forger who has already committed various literary hoaxes (a sort of French Kent Johnson, maybe…?). I was alerted to it by another Frenchman who seems to track the forger mercilessly through cyberspace, if not to Aden ….”
That “other Frenchman” — Raphaël Zacharie de Izarra – posted his comment, in French, on Joris’ earlier post about the photo.
Newly discovered photograph showing Arthur Rimbaud (second from the right)
Both metaphorically and in reality, it has been hard for literary historians to get a picture of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He produced his best know work while still in his teens, then quit writing to travel the world. Little is known of his activities during his adulthood — he is rumored to have been a gun-runner, and, as discussed in this Will Self commentary, a slave-trader — and he died young. He lived, in short, a rather shady life, and only seven known photographs of him were known to exist — most of them of him in childhood, and most of them blurry or indirect.
Close-up of Rimbaud
But now, a previously unseen photograph of Rimbaud has been discovered. According to a Daily Telegraphreport, Jacques Desse and Alban Causse, who call themselves “literary bounty hunters,” “made their extraordinary find when they came across a black and white photo taken circa 1880 among postcards and bric-a-brac in a market ’somewhere in France’. The photo showed a group of mustachioed bourgeois Frenchmen and one woman in white and was signed Hotel de l’Univers on the back. Rimbaud enthusiasts would know this was the hotel in Aden, Abyssinia, where Rimbaud spent the last years of his life before dying of cancer aged 37.”
According to an Agence France Presse wire story, Rimbaud biographer Jean-Jacques Lefrere, who verified the photo was indeed Rimbaud, says it is “the only one in which Rimbaud’s adult facial characterisics are distinguishable.”
A few months back, the race for the revered position as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University turned into an ugly brawl, whereby a poet (Derek Walcott) known in America for some prominent instances of sexual harassment ran against another poet (Ruth Padel) who, after tipping off the press to his past, was called every name in the book. She won, but became the victim of an astonishing smear campaign by British journalists and academics, and was drummed out in short order. (See the earlier MobyLives report).
Now there are some new candidates to replace her and, well, the headline for Cahal Milmo’s report for The Independent says it all: “Writer famed for brutality of his verse nominated for prestigious professorship.”
As the story continues, “The Endgame of one of the most acrimonious literary spats in recent times began yesterday when one of the nation’s most divisive poets – revered for his ‘brooding verse’ and chastised for being “inaccessible” – was announced as a candidate for Oxford University’s next professor of poetry.”
The candidate is question is Geoffrey Hill, “widely considered to be one of Britain’s finest living writers and critics,” and “regarded as a powerful and tenebrous voice, unafraid of immersing himself in a world of violence and brutality across subjects from the mythology of his native Malvern Hills to the Holocaust. But he is not without his detractors, who have criticised him as ‘difficult’ and representative of an archaic nationalism.”
Oxford English department deputy chair Seamus Perry says this time out “We are hoping for a debate about poetry rather than other things this time, and I think the fact we have a poet of Geoffrey Hill’s distinction is proof that the position itself has emerged unscathed. His is a very strong candidacy.”
Voting takes place in June.
Meanwhile, observes Milmo, “The row fitted into a long history of distinguished fallings out between poets. Ben Jonson reputedly took aim at Shakespeare, suggesting that contrary to the great scribe’s reputation for never having to erase a line of verse, he wished ‘he had blotted a thousand’. Thankfully, few have felt so impassioned as the French poet Paul Verlaine, who shot his lover Arthur Rimbaud with a revolver.”
Today is the birthday of the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this day in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, England. Raised Anglican, in an artistic and prosperous home, he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866, and he decided to become a priest himself. He entered a Jesuit novitiate near London in 1867, and he vowed to “write no more…unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burnt all of his poetry and would not write poems again until 1875.
