Author Archives: weinberg

gradschool, poetry, quotes

the simultaneous creation and disruption of pattern

This is from a section where he’s comparing the lines of several different poets – but he pulls back to make some larger statements which I love.

Both Whitman and Williams are creating a particular relationship between line and syntax, and both poems depend, as all poems do, on the interplay of what changes with what stays the same – the simultaneous creation and disruption of pattern. […]
…everything I’ve said about the fluctuating relationship of syntax and line in Williams’s free verse applies equally well to Shakespeare’s blank verse. Attention to the line tends to undermine a narrow preference for one form or another of poetry, for if you can hear what line is doing to your experience of the syntax in a free-verse poem, then you can hear what line is doing in a metered poem.

– James Longenbach, “Line and Syntax,” The Art Of The Poetic Line, 18

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gradschool

back-to-school

Yesterday was my first day of teaching my section of IFP I at Hopkins, which I followed by several hours of office hours in the library. I won’t be going into much detail about the course on this blog, naturally, but I will say that my class has a really interesting and diverse group of students, and I’m looking forward to working with them.

I do not start my own graduate classes until next week, and Labor Day delays the first day of our writing workshop for two weeks. So I have lots of time to focus on the class at this moment.

More James Longenbach for you, after this brief commercial break.

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poetry

your attention please,

for the awesome: I am about to begin a series of quotes from one of the required books for my grad poetry seminar, The Art Of The Poetic Line, by James Longenbach. I’m going to spread them out so that if I am a little MIA what with starting classes, there will still be poetical observations to be found. This book is one of the most useful technical poetry books I have ever read, and very entertaining. I have been carrying it around with me all the time.

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the chorus

What about this?

Two choruses, both alike in quality and number, one to focus exclusively on movement, the other on text, for a period of time until which they have decided they have perfected things sufficiently to move forward – and then rather than trying to train them my self on what they did not have, they would train each other, in an improvisation.

Yes.

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criticism, quotes, wordage

I do not intend to define the term “thought”

In beginning to speak about the application of thought to textual criticism, I do not intend to define the term thought, because I hope that the sense which I attach to the word will emerge from what I say.

– A.E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” Art & Error: Modern Textual Editing (ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett)

How awesome is that? Awesome, right? If I went around like that, I wouldn’t ever have to define anything. “I do not intend to define the term “assonance,” because I hope that the sense which I attach to the word will emerge from what I say…”

I am being kind of facetious. Actually, I like it. And I think he gets away with it. And more:

In beginning to speak about the application of thought to textual criticism, I do not intend to define the term thought, because I hope that the sense which I attach to the word will emerge from what I say. But it is necessary at the outset to define textual criticism, because many people, and even some people who profess to teach it to others, do not know what it is. One sees books calling themselves introductions to textual criticism which contain nothing about textual criticism from beginning to end; which are all about paleography and manuscripts and collation, and have no more to do with textual criticism than if they were all about accidence and syntax. Palaeography is one of the things with which a textual critic needs to acquaint himself, but grammar is another, and equally indispensable; and no amount either of grammar or of palaeography will teach a man one scrap of textual criticism.”

His semicolons are so dashing. Oh, and how about that “no amount either of X or of Y”? Yes. You know you like it.

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Baltimore, books

one potato, two potato

This morning, I walked with C2 to The Book Thing. We were there at nine, as if it was a farmers’ market and the freshest-baked and locally grown books would be all gone by 10 AM.

This was my first visit to Baltimore’s Charles Village book-recycler, and, oh, oh, oh, was it gorgeous. This alone may be enough to get my parents to come visit. Free books, guys. Free. Although I don’t know how you’re going to get them back to LA…but bring a truck!

This is what I came away with: a restrained count of seven items.

1) Art & Error: Modern Textual Editing (ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett)

2) A Reclam edition of the Nibelungenlied

3) A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy with a foreword by C.P. Snow

4) The Selected Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson – C2 made me get this. It remembered me that I haven’t read any RLS since I was a kid, when I tore through KIDNAPPED and TREASURE ISLAND and DR. JEKYLL in a very short period of time. I think we read KIDNAPPED for a 4th-grade lit unit and we had to make a movie poster for it. That was fun. I have always enjoyed imitating advertising.

5) Madrigal’s Magic Key to French (having passed my language exam, I am inspired to review the finer points* of grammar)

6) Das erste Jahr, second edition, Margaret Keidel Bluske and Elizabeth Keidel Walther

7) America The Beautiful, in the words of Walt Whitman – an art edition of 7 of Whitman’s poems with huge photographs of famous US national parks and scenic sites accompanying the poetry. One of them is next to a characteristically Arizonan rock formation, and we agreed that Whitman had probably never been there. It’s a little silly.

I am not going to keep or read them all – some will be wending their way to unsuspecting recipients. Beware. Beware!

* Why? Why the “finer” points? Why?

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theater, workstyle, writing

never have I ever

directed a play…

I am going through three boxes of scary files that have not been sorted. I bought something that looks like an able seaman’s chest, or some Western debutante’s Trunk, off the street where I live, and am filling it with properly alphabetized production documents. This is only reminding me of my age. I didn’t remember that I did the choreography for Don Giovanni…or AD’d a production of Frankenstein (the classical music version)…or…so many things.

I’ve been doing this for ten years, after all. Ten years. L once told me I needed to make a list of every production I’d ever done, because otherwise I would forget. I thought that was absurd. How can you forget something that takes so much work? But she was right.

Seeing these old files is like seeing a slide show of my past. Or reading a biography of someone whose work I like, but who I don’t know that well. The things I have done are now so far away that they seem detached from me. AVW and BH might as well have been directed by another person. I know I did it, but I don’t know how I did it! And I don’t know if I could do it again!

Also, I found a file of my old Stanford papers, one of which is about Bovary, and uses the word “Epist-Emma-Ology” in the title. Ha ha.

My writing, when I was in school, was insufferably arrogant. I don’t know that my writing has changed that much since then, or my ego, but I will say that reading these papers, written before I had learned how to spell “humility,” let alone possess it, makes me laugh. Some of the writing is awful. Some is okay. But all the papers, well written or not, are confident to the point of exploding.

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corpore sano

squash

is officially the second best sport ever. It feels like killing poisonous snails in a Nintendo 64-colored world. It feels like firing a phaser. It feels like you can fly. It feels like Quidditch. You will sweat so much, and you will have more fun than is reasonable. Go play it right now. There is no reason to run, swim, get on a treadmill, or even to play any other sports. Cardio shmardio. It’s like the Holodeck version of physical activity. If you like science fiction, video games, or really fast-moving things, for the love of God and your heart rate, go. play. some. squash. Yes, it’s a little elitist, you do have to play in a gym, you have to have a certain amount of money in order to participate, but you can deal with your guilt about that later by using your new, improved respiration and circulation to do something good and/or to not have a heart attack. It is almost but not quite as much fun as basketball.

You can help me spread the word about this by singing Everybody Must Play Squash to the tune of…oh, you know.

That will be all.

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