A Music--Wendell Berry

I employ the blind mandolin player
in the the tunnel of the Mètro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we're necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
––it's vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen
to place his music in this cavity
where there's nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It's his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing of rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but is a singing in a dark place.

Image and Line

As you polish poems for me, I promised to link you to the primer on the poetic line that I often use. One on imagery in is the works, though I think many of you got the embodied, sensuous particular quite well last week, as well as the notion of thinking through the logic of the image. Still, I will post it later. This means you need not necessarily send your polished poems this evening. Instead, you might send them by Wed. night. See you at the Art Institute.

In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: “Stay fit the Morandi way!”

--from The New Yorker and Peter Schjeldahl's review of a Morandi exhibit at the Met.

I mentioned Morandi briefly last year when I wrote about ekphrasis in the novel Falling Man by Don DeLIllo.

Complete Schedule

ENGW 444/Poetry, Poetics and the Arts
Fall 2008/D. Wright, Instructor

Complete Assignment Schedule (still open to adjustments and additions)

Sept 23 AIC Trip / Two polished poems due via email

Sept. 30 Read Rusk,“Perils and Possibilities” / 2 AIC poems due (submit with digital images &
read one aloud in class) / Discuss Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
Craft Element: Diction

Oct. 7 Introduce Manifesto / Artistic Process (guest artist)
Read Ratzlaff (all) / AIC Polished poem due in class
Craft Element: Voice

Oct. 14 Manifesto poem due / Finish Ratzlaff discussion / Deep context/Introduce Hymn Lyric Project
Craft Element: Figurative Language

Oct. 21 NO CLASSES—Fall Break / Project Proposal Due via Email by Oct. 25

Oct. 28 Hymn Writer John Bell on campus—Activities TBA

Nov. 4 Hymn draft due / Read Poetics Handout /Form Handout/ Other reading TBA
Craft Element: Form(s)

Nov. 11 Read Keane / Additional Blog Reading
Project Conferences

Nov. 18 Collaboration(s)—Working with artists and musicians
Schedule Peer Crit Sessions/Groups
Craft Element: Revision

Nov. 25 Poetics Draft Due for Peer Critique
Craft Element: Prose Poems

Dec. 2 Portion of Project Due for Peer Crit/Conferences
Optional Class on Ekphrasis and Midrash

Dec. 9 Final Party/Readings/Poetics and Project Due

reorganizing

With the new semester and a new batch of poets working hard, I am working to reorganize this blog, to give instructional materials in some kind of order, to arrange drafts, to highlight student work, etc. Check back next week.

dw

Anthromusicology

". . . the thesis of Daniel J. Levitin’s lively, ambitious and occasionally even persuasive new book, “The World in Six Songs.” Music, Levitin argues, is not just something to help pass the time on road trips anda swell facilitator for meeting girls: it is, he writes,“the soundtrack of civilization” — a force that shaped us as a species and prepared us for the higher-order task of sharing complex communications with one another."

from today's New York Times Book Review

Another draft

Temptation,
after Chagall’s Temptation (1912)

My God, you know, how temptation sits
  in the belly of the world,  red fruit, round, 
  already bitten.  

You know it is not all that matters. Small, hooved creatures,
 tiny birds, Eve’s several glances, and the canopies 
  of  red and blue leaves matter as well.

The real fall will be to believe in Pablo.
 Apollinaire will love you, your round house and the herring brine
  on your father's hands.

Bella loves you, even as you grieve for the Shtetl, for the pale Christ.
  
I understand, my brother, the desire to pare a body 
 into something that will serve beauty.

You understand, my brother, how the world 
 revolves around the edges of the world.

Let the others  eat their fill of square pears on triangular tables,
 suckle at the circles and the cones.

I want to eat, together, whatever we’ve been given.
 The moon behind the garden will be green and will disappear quite soon.

I want, as well, to thank you for this: I woke today  
 and was surprised, like you, to see that I am still alive.

A couple of notes on process in regards to this poem.

1) Earlier this summer, I read Jonathan Wilson's biography of Marc Chagall. Wording of some lines, as well as some of the context of 1912 in Chagall's world have likely been stolen from this good work.

2) Apollinaire wrote these lines for Chagall: "your round house where a smoked herring swims in circles . . . a man in the sky / a calf peers out of his mother's belly" (See Wilson, p. 51).

3) "Let the others eat..." is an adaptation and extension of Chagall's own comment about Cubism: "Let them eat their fill of square pears and triangular tables." He also announced, later, that as Europe was going to war he thought: "Picasso, Cubism is done for!" Picasso often said disdainful things about Chagall, though the two were able to have a semblance of companionship at points in their lives.