Forgodot

Daniel Swift, a young British literary critic, sets out to solve the riddles of literary and familial history in his new book, Bomber County. The volume combines criticism and memoir, and discusses both the under-appreciated poetry of World War Two and the mysterious life of Swift’s grandfather, who served, and died, as an RAF pilot.  In the New York Times, Dwight Garner praises Swift’s inventive cocktail:

This book’s twin stories — about one man, and about one war’s poetry — begin in the same graveyard. Along with his own father, James Eric Swift’s son, who was 3 when his father died, the author visits the cemetery in the Netherlands where his grandfather is buried. He notes the severe uniformity of the wartime headstones, but also this: that many headstones have scraps of poetry on them.

“The graves were quoting one another,” he observes, and “they were carrying on a conversation in verse.”

He moves from this awareness to make two points about the poetry of World War II. One, that it is mostly undervalued. Two, that the best and most representative of it, and the most morally complicated, is the poetry of air bombing.

“Bombing was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First,” Mr. Swift writes, “a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss.”

Over at the Best American Poetry site, Dante Michaux offers thought on Jorie Graham’s evolution. He summarizes the analysis of the venerable Vendler, and continues:

By recycling the examples that Vendler offers in her study and adding a few others, it is clear that what is significant, or most consequential in Jorie Graham’s work is not lineation—long or short. The strength of her composition lies in a highly-evolved, demanding addressee and the process by which she communicates with it, called, for the sake of argument, vocative sublimity. The rhythm, grammar, lineation or other such features are rendered differently by Graham depending on unknown variables to the reader but what shapes those features into a whole, the communication with the addressee that exists on the plane of poetic thinking, is consistent. Vocative sublimity might better be defined as thus: “to be knitted up, chainmail of vocables—link / by link— / till even the air all round you suddenly seems to / shine—really now—there where it means, / or means to mean, because mostly of course it is just talk…” (The Errancy, 75). No better understanding of this process is to be found than, perhaps, those lines that limn the geography of a poetic mind and attempt to fix a dialogue that is at once clear and completely metaphysical. The philosopher, Martin Buber, describes the effect of this kind of dialogue on thought and perception: “When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things…[n]eighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light” (I and Thou, 59). In Graham’s poetry, she is the “I” of Buber’s philosophy and her addressee is the “You”, not as an exercise in egocentrism but in the dynamic of apprentice to omniscient master, always questioning. It would be easy to mistake the object of Graham’s poetry as multiple, as “You” in reality changes, but a prudent position would be to view the object as a singular entity with the ability to be all things at once—much like the relationship between a divinity and the adherents of its cosmology. Her poems seem to state what she has observed and beg notice of what she has observed, the better to question her addressee . . .

The Telegraph has the story of Paul Hurt, an animal rights protester who traversed great distances to a Seamus Heaney reading in order to rage against the poet’s perceived love of bullfighting. For evidence, Hurt pointed to Heaney’s love poem “Tate’s Avenue” in which the speaker mentions “getting drunk before a corrida.”

Jonathan Reekie, organizer of the event, thought that perhaps Hurt had taken Heaney’s poem a bit too literally:

The organisers tried to persuade [Hurt] his protest was a folly and the police intervened at one point but he carried on regardless. The organisers even offered him a free ticket but he refused on the ground it would compromise his position.

Eventually he packed up and went home.

Mr Reekie said: “Mr Hurt has got it very wrong – Mr Heaney has written about bullfighting but it was about someone else’s view.

“There is no suggestion that Mr Heaney supports bullfighting.

“He based his protest on a piece that Seamus Heaney wrote about somebody else and there is nothing to suggest Mr Heaney himself supports bullfighting.

“But unfortunately he is not basing it on facts, he is basing it on a misreading of things that Seamus Heaney has written in the past.”

Back home, Mr Hurt is still convinced that he is right.

“This explanation came too late in the day,” he said.

“The awful truth is that Seamus Heaney’s reputation could suffer very badly from his support for bullfighting.”

That’s the question the Guardian asks as it peruses the curious number of stand-up performance poets at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival:

Historically, few genres have faced more derision (or parody) than performance poetry. The common charge? That it’s boring, embarrassing, or both, capable of inducing deep sleep and a clenched sphincter at the same time. Worse still, it’s got a reputation for taking itself too seriously. And to material-thirsty comics, that’s the equivalent of labelling your milk in a communal student fridge.

But this year are we laughing at, or with, the bard? “Don’t worry,” says Hamilton at the start of Eldon’s gig. “This particular poet’s middle name doesn’t happen to be dreary!” And ironically, he’s right.

What approaches cliche in a lesser-spotted comedy show becomes something rather sublime in other hands. We laugh at Key’s poems because they’re so bad, they’re good (and written on Jacob’s Crackers). But sometimes, they’re just good. Period.

Porter—a friendly influence on James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—gets a little retrospective look at This Recording:

Fairfield kept an apartment on Avenue A, and began to integrate himself into the next generation of poets and artists. His attraction to the young gay poet James Schuyler verged on romance, and Fairfield began to explore his bisexuality. The younger crowd looked up to Fairfield and admired his work, and Elaine de Kooning recommended him to Art News, where he began his second life as a critic. Fairfield’s politics had influenced the faux working-class realism of his first paintings, but the attraction of the art world to Abstract Expressionism was, in part, a rejection of those communist ideas. Now the painter began creating a new critical vocabulary similarly absent from political value.

Already nearing his late 40s, Fairfield was still pursuing a doctrine of free love, but in this case his target was (for a short time) the poet John Ashbery . . .