It made me think about whether, as an author, you can […] expose your nonfictional self as a joke or a fraud or an embarrassment or a nonentity or an animal. And I think you can’t, because there is always also the author part of you, who gets the surprise explosion of stories, essays, poems crashing into you and cracking you open, like unexpected sex with Zeus when he’s a lightning bolt. It might be pleasant and erotic, or it might be a bruising assault that leaves you hunched in the corner clutching your bottle of whiskey and praying to deities you don’t believe in. Either way, you’re less a “manipulated object” and more conduit for spectacular energy.
Author Archives: weinberg
Tanztheater Wuppertal names Bausch’s successors
Dominique Mercy and Robert Sturm have been named as the pair tapped to take over the German dance company once led by the iconic choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in June, the theatre said Monday.
how about this?
Nevertheless, the ship in a storm,
Foundering and powerless,
Can save itself –
It can dump its cargo
As a tithe,
An offering.
There is hope.
and also:
That first vision of yours was common knowledge.
What you see now is pitch darkness.
– Chorus in T-Hughes’s AGAMMEMNON. I like this version better than I expected to, although his line breaks are often completely unperformable. But apart from that, the register of the language is good.
just ink and paper
Make Up For A Bad Poem With An Epigraph*.
One disgruntled parent sent an e-mail after a Snicket reading which read: “I was hoping that my kids would learn something about the writing process and all I got was ego and performance from you.”
.”And I thought,” says Handler, “That is the writing process. You’ve got ego and performance and that’s pretty much all there is. It’s you thinking that you have a story to tell, and it’s performance, which is going out and doing it. The rest of it is just ink and paper.”
– old salon interview w. snicket/handler
Ketchup:
1) Saw EURYDICE again over the weekend – this is the show at Single Carrot on North Ave where I got to do a chorus workshop for the Stones. This was the third time I’ve seen it. Closing weekend is sold out.
2) I had the opportunity to read some of my poems on Monday, which was fun. I read five depressing poems and one funny one. It was, I would argue, both egotistical and performative. The funny one, I realized, was sort of related to a poem I wrote for me, X, and A to read aloud at the end of TASP2 (2001), titled “I’m So Gone, I’m Not Even Here.”** Not in subject matter or form, but in funny. What kind of poet would I be if I had read five funny poems and one depressing one? A more popular one, I suppose.
3) And today I led a workshop at a high school in Towson on – yes! Greek choruses! This time in the Ted Hughes version of Agammemnon. Every time I get to do that, it makes everything worth it.
* By the way, an epigraph is the quote at the beginning of the poem, and an epigram is a catchy phrase, like this one: “Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. / Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.” Thank you, Wikipedia, I mean Catullus.
**I wonder if a copy of that thing is buried somewhere in the one remaining box of papers I have yet to unpack.
Challah at your boy
A is walking, very quickly, up Charles Street to One World to get some work done, for once. It may or may not be Sukkot. Suddenly, A is approached by a group of decked-out Baltimore Jews, spearheaded by a small boy of about 5.
Kid: Are you Jewish?
A: Uh…yes.
Kid: Do you want to say the blessing with us?
A: Okay.
At which point, the kid recites the blessing with A, one word at a time.
This happened to me, as it did to many unsuspecting Hopkinsians. We had a nice conversation afterwards about Poland – I was carrying the bag from the festival, and they saw the Polish and wondered. These particular Jews were from Belgium, originally, although they’d all been born in the US. They tried to recruit me for their Chabad. Although I’m not going to get recruited on any kind of serious basis, I will probably go check it out at some point. I visited a Chicago Chabad two Yom Kippurs ago and it was very interesting to observe.
It was pretty awesome the first time, but the kid, and various other kids from the Chabad, staked out Charles all that day and the next day, accosting students and having them do the blessing. I eventually started telling them “You guys already got me.”
Escalator safety tips
Please hold small children by the hand.
Don’t run or sit on escalators.
Make sure your shoe laces are tied.
Stand to the right. Hold on to the railing.
Thank you, MTA. Do you have a similar set of tips for how I am supposed to do other things in my life, besides ride escalators – and if so, can you also write them in loose tetra/pentameter, and print them on farecards so I can keep them in my pocket? Thanks.
among all your kind
APRIL
No one’s despair is like my despair-
You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.
Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.
– Louise Glück, “April,” The Wild Iris (1992)
I was alive, ten years old, when this book was published. I did not know it at the time, but it is nice to think that the book’s publication might have made some impact on the world I was living in, and thus also on me, even at ten. I bought it in undergrad at my professor’s recommendation. It has taken me a long time to read it carefully, although I read it as I have read most books of poetry before now – skimming, diving for a fish, getting out – but I am glad I have it now. It sees so distinctly.
The Proof, by W.H. Auden
THE PROOF
‘When rites and melodies begin
to alter modes and times,
And timid bar-flies boast aloud
of uncommitted crimes,
And leading families are proud
To dine with their black sheep,
What promises, what discipline,
If any, will Love keep?’
So roared Fire on their right:
But Tamino and Pamina
Walked past its rage,
Sighing O, sighing O,
In timeless fermatas of awe and delight
(Innocent? Yes. Ignorant? No.)
Down the grim passage.
‘When stinking Chaos lifts the latch,
And Grotte backward spins,
And Helen’s nose becomes a beak
And cats and dogs grow chins,
And daisies claw and pebbles shriek,
And Form and Colour part,
What swarming hatreds then will hatch
Out of Love’s riven heart.’
So hissed Water on their left:
But Pamina and Tamino
Opposed its spite,
With his worship, with her sweetness –
O look now! See how they emerge from the cleft
(Frightened? No. Happy? Yes.)
Out into sunlight.
– W.H. Auden
So there. If you don’t love “timeless fermatas of awe and delight” with all the bones in your body, you are no son of mine. I warned you. Also, It occurs to me that “Helen’s nose becomes a beak” is a variation on the whole “Jill goes down on her back” thing.
auden of our discontent
One of my fellow graduate students, someone who gets me pretty well, keeps pointing out similarities in my writing to Auden. He’s right, of course. Today, he pointed out a similarity in one of my poems to an Auden poem I haven’t even read. He’s probably right about that, too. If all I am one day is a sixth-rate Auden, I will be a hell of a lot better than I am now.
All this is to say that, a few weeks ago, reading poetry aloud with friends, I was trying to find this poem online (I principally use my smartphone to search for poems I need to read to people) and couldn’t. Part of the reason it’s hard to find is I can never remember either the title or the first line – but also, I don’t think anyone has felt this poem needed to be absorbed by the Internet Cube yet. Until Me. So, here I am, putting it online (in the next post). For at least a year, it was my most of all favoritest, because of the structure of the lines. It reminds me of Song. It is not my favorite now, but I still have a lot of love for it. You kind of have to read it aloud to get the fullness of the awesome. Other Auden I used to love and now love less includes Victor: A Ballad (which I once officiously read aloud to a roomful of Alpha Delts) and The Dead Echo. Perhaps I shall onlineize them too. Some day.
Dara Weinberg 