How to Buy Great Poetry Books Using Spot Criticism

Here's how to do on the spot criticitism of poetry books:

1. Go into a bookshop and pick out two to four books of poetry.
2. Buy a coffee and read the opening lines of the books. Read no more than twelve lines of each unless they are compulsive reading.
3. Imagine that you must decide whether or not the whole book is worth reading based on their opening lines.
4. Ask yourself about how you feel:
- Do I find the opening lines interesting or dull?
- Am I surprised by distinct impressions?

5. Ask yourself about the strategy of the poem:
- What is the strategy of the poet obvious from the poem's opening lines? Is it obvious?
- Can I predict how the poem will go?

6. Ask yourself about the precise nature of the poem by looking for its center:
- What is the emotional or intellectual center of the poem?
- Given all this, then, is this book worth pursuing further?

7. Take the book you learnt was worth pursuing. Dip into the openings of two to four poems within that book.

8. Ask yourself:

- Are these openings of the same quality as the first poem I read?
- Is this book good enough to buy?

And you're done!

Buy or not buy, following this strategy with speedily educate you about modern poetry and poets, and let you get on the inside track of poetry publishing.

Reading the Aeneid of Virgil, Blow by Blow

I read books 3, 4, 5 and half of book 6 of the Aeneid tonight (so far). Publius Virgilius packs a lot of story in his text. I can best appreciate this work in the light of Homer, the tragedians and Plato; the summation of all story up til his time is simply remarkable. It is is as if Virgil in his epic has set out not simply to tell a story, but to give all Story, the archetype of story-ness, the All-Story. But he is not summing up like Homer; characteristically Roman, Virgil seeks to engulf the memories of stories past. Virgil's Aeneid is a colony poem in more ways than one.

And what about the person, the consciousness of Virgil? I must admit I read Virgil through the more accessibly humane Dante. So much of Dante is clearly enriched by Virgil, that if the character Dante had not kept him at his side the strength of Virgil's poem would have overcome Dante the poet. Keep your literary influences close - this seems to be Dante's approach to Virgil.

Virgil sometimes comes across as a bit of a patchwork man. The story leaps from reference to reference of other men's work - and it works, it flows, but we do not clearly get a sense of the cohent consciousness of a work. At least, not yet. Maybe I ought to read on before I judge the man!

The poetry is fine. I have fiddled with many translations, and chanced on the Fagles-like one by Kline, which is superbly lucid compared to the Dryden (best of the olde translations). Tony Kline's Aeneid is free online, and has the benefit of having the books subdivided into the more precise episodic structure. This means the reader gets to rest without losing the thread, and gets reminders of what the thread was, and the sense of the story stands more clearly out than if we just have books one to twelve. It really helps the read. Also, Kline's version renders words that past generations might have called the 'moral sentiments' into plain emotions, which is a bit more real.

Kline's translation of Aeneid is not fancy, but neither is it pedestrian - the poetry reads simply and roughly into Virgil's luminous verse. Compared with ye olde Englishe translations, with which one needs to stop and mentally retranslate into modern English every dozen lines, Tony Kline's translation is a pleasure to read.

Update: I'm now at book 8, and the patchwork is becoming clearer. It makes better sense how Virgil's exercise in epic poetry is not an end in itself but a means to justify the Roman empire. But I can also see how, by making the poem a means to a political end, Virgil undercuts his personal source of inspiration. One cannot turn such sophisticated and urbane critical and aesthetic faculties onto the legends of the founding of Rome without also uncovering something of a critique of the beautiful lies of armed force. Virgil's falterings really illuminate why the Romans were relatively scarce in creative genius: it is hard work being a good Roman!

Update: Finished. I can see why Virgil didn't finish the poem. love the first half of Aeneid, but the second is like reading Rupert Brooke's war poems for a few thousand lines. Pathos becomes bathos. Lyrical emotion become prim patriotism. By the time Turnus dies it is just dreary, and the rage of Achilles has become the duty of Aeneas. Meh.

Part two Aeneid sucks more than Scylla's whirlpool. I suggest prospective readers read up until the Trojans land in Italy and stop there. For reading pleasure, the first half is superb. Trust me on this one: the Trojans settled Italy just fine.

A New Nonlinear Way to Read Dante Alighieri.

You can get at the nonlinear and visual construction of Dante's Commedia can be got at by the mind by just reading from start to finish, if you want, passing through Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso.

But what tends to happen as the reader traverses Inferno is that they stop short somewhere. Perhaps they pause at the gates of Purgatory to watch Venus rise. Or perhaps they stop half way up the mountain at Vergil's second lecture of free will. The mind falls short of the passion of Dante's design. Failing to grasp the beating heart that is the whole piece, intellect grows cold at the foot of the mountain where it ought to fall silent in the transcendent presence of Beatrice at the crown of the summit.

Why?

The answer is the failure to invoke the vegetative soul in the recitation: or, in less Aristotelian terms, the failure to extract the juice and excitement that comes from getting the whole work in a single hit of image, light and song.

Here's the problem: Dante's Commedia is nonlinear. The book unfolds in an acausal structure: Inferno mirrors Purgatorio illuminates Paradiso and back again. And that is on the most gross level of the plot: at the deeper level every image calls to image, like three friends chanting at one another from three mountain peaks in perfect harmony and consonance.

So the Commedia of Dante forms a single field of inspirational power, a matrix of image and idea that must be sensed whole in order to be "read" in any realistic way. In a word, you only begin to read Dante once you have read the whole poem from start to finish and have closed the book and started reflecting.

With that in mind, here's a fresh new nonlinear way to read Dante Alighieri's Commedia:

Start with the three books of the poem in front of you.

Read through Canto One of Paradise, then Canto One of Purgatory, then pass through Canto One of Inferno.

Stop, reflect; then repeat.

Continue moving DOWN from Paradise to Purgatory to Inferno, canto by canto, until you get to Canto 15 of Inferno.

This is the pivotal point in each of the three books. In Canto 15 Inferno Dante is about to ride Geryon into the Abyss to meet those who are actively vicious and aggressive against God. In each book at this point we move into the zone of heightened aliveness after this point.

Now there's a small hitch: the same pivotal point I point to in Inferno 15 occurs in Purgatory in Canto Sixteen and in Paradise in Canto Seventeen. In Purgatory Sixteen Dante ascents on an Eagle's back to the midway gate of the actively virtuous and pure. In Paradise Seventeen Dante attains the vision of the Heaven of Mars, of the warriors for God.

So the suggested nonlinear path is as follows:

Read up to Paradise 15, Purgatory 15, Hell 15.

THEN, reverse the order of readings to put Paradise last instead of first, thusly:

Read Purgatory 16, Paradise 16, Paradise 17.
Read Hell 16, Purgatory 17, Paradise 18.

At this point you will be able to compare the three pivotal points (Hell 15-16, Purgatory 16-17, Paradise 17-18) in the plot. All the threads will come together in the martial action of the midpoint of all three books.

Reflecting on the midpoints, note that Dante deals respectively with vengeance, anger, and courage - the vices and virtues of Mars, and the uses and misuse of the vital energy of the vegetative soul. Notice your gut level reaction to the images and feelings. And notice especially how much Dante has grown as a person from the start of the book to the midpoint.

These are also the points in the poem where the personal psyche ends and the transpersonal realm of begins. From these three midpoints in the poem, Dante the man becomes less important than Dante the Everyman. The universal Dante shines forth.

These pivotal points are a great place to pause and check in, get an overview of the poem, and really stir up a bit of passionate motivation to finish the adventure by taking it all the way to the finish. The Mars archetype acts as a spur to motivation to complete the recitation of the poem.

So, to summarize: we read from Paradise DOWN to Hell through the personal realm, correlating all the expressions together of Dante's individual psyche as it expresses in all three realms, then at the midpoint of each realm we reverse the order of the books and begin the ascent into the transpersonal:

Read Hell 17, Purgatory 18, Paradise 19.

Continue until the end:

Read Hell 34, Purgatory 33, Paradise 33.

The latter half of the three books gives a sort of transcendent play of image and idea that, to my mind, best resembles the leisure of the Olympian gods.

I firmly assert that only readers who have first grasped Dante the man are equipped to make sense of Dante the visionary poet-prophet. In my opinion, we meet Dante the man himself in the first half of each of the three books and Dante the poet in the last halves of the poem.

By reading the first half of each poem to become acquainted with Dante, we motivate ourselves to read the entire poem and discover the entire "good of the human", as Dante puts it.

The Place To Meet Milton: On Re-reading Paradise Lost

I just finished re-reading Paradise Lost.

My impressions? It's very Christian. The end goes all prophetic. Really it's like four poems.

Paradise Lost Poem One tells Satan's comeback from his wee setback of eternal damnation.

Paradise Lost Poem Two is Archangel Raphael and First Human Adam's chitchat about this and that - war in heaven and the creation of the universe and sundry other cosmick gossip.

Poem One and Two are the great science fiction style parts of Milton, and show what he learnt from the speechifying of the Ancients and Mr Shakespeare's productions.

Paradise Lost Poem Three is the Action: vis, Eve and Adam eat and Fall. It's, um, a psychosexual drama with angels.

Last we get Paradise Lost Poem Four, the prophetic wrapup where God judges, the Son sacrifices, Heaven hurrahs, Eve repents and Adam hallucinates the future on a hilltop with Archangel Michael. Then it's out of the garden and into the book of Genesis.

What to think? It's hard to appreciate deeply enough the science-fictionality of Milton's Paradise Lost in context of a world where SF didn't yet exist.

Certainly the poem compares not unfavorably to Homer's work (Poem One and Two), Dante's (Poem Four), Shakespeare's (Poem One's psychological portrayal of Satan and Poem Three's portrayal of Adam and Eve), and D.H.Lawrence (Poem Three's frank eroticism). In the light of the Western Tradition Milton is indubitably great.

Dante, Milton's opposite in temperament, best shines a light on the artist John Milton. Where Dante's art is delicate, tinted mercurial (being a Gemini as he informs us) Milton's is darkly sensuous, visionary, and monumental art.

Milton's effects strain the imagination; much is left to the reader to imagine, and much of Milton is dark to the moral eye not through obscurity but through largeness of imaginating. These effects become vivid only when the reader's sensual and moral temperament happens to concur with Milton's.

Image making in Milton is moral AND sensual; he sees no break between the two natures of the animal and the angel in a true Christian. This view, so alien morally but so modern in its acceptances of sensual desire, at once endears and distances us from Milton.

We feel he is serious, and noble, and a man disappointed in his sex life, and yet we sense a rich inner life of emotion and sensuality survives the disappointment, an inner life sustained, to our modern consternation, not by healthy adult relationships but by mere moral fortitude! Milton becomes uncanny, heroic, when we consider him as the figuration of the Human. What kind of pragmatism is involved in such a moral-sensual stance? Perhaps outside the author of Paradise Lost we cannot imagine another such man.

Ultimately the greatness of Paradise Lost comes down to incommensurates: I find myself liking John Milton more for himself than for his poem. Paradise Lost becomes the place I meet Milton in rather than the poem I read.

Unspeakable Nature in Wordsworth's Prelude: A Poetry Recital

Tonight I read Crashaw's 'The Flaming Heart'. I recited poorly but the poem didn't bear repeating. Crashaw's 'Flaming Heart' is a fiery rush of sexual-religious rhetoric.

The poem is inspired by (a better word would be 'ejeculated from') Crashaw's reading of the life of Saint Teresa: the resulting gush of verbiage represents his unmediated transposition of female orgasm into Crashaw's intellectual process. That is to say, Crashaw's sustained passion for Teresa's piety, the images of fire and melting, the forceful accumulation of ornate figures that when read aloud are so isomorphic to a desperate squirming of the body - all this and more makes Crashaw's poem 'The Flaming Heart' just NSFW.

Crashaw's poem is an example of that obscure subgenre, Catholic erotica, at its finest.

Then I turned to Wordsworth's 'Two Part Prelude (1799)'; altogether a different order of poem. Really for the first time I got the shamanic darkness of the poem. As I read I heard a roaring in the inner ears and felt, as if from a shadowy second body which stood right behind me, mine and yet not me but the body of a dream, shadowing the physical body.

I'm not ashamed to say it frightened me a bit, this darkness and motion and words that name things which I knew no names for. I stopped reciting and turned on the TV.

But it was no use: the entire field of awareness went on vibrating inexplicably with the impact of Wordsworth's greatest poem.

The unutterableness of Wordsworth's poem, neither pre- or trans-verbal, has that quality of Nature Herself which also storms uneasily beneath the verse of William Shakespeare.

Perhaps it was the recital of Crashaw that evoked it; the darkness of Wordsworth was drawn by the fire of Crashaw. I don't know.

It made me uneasy all the next day.

This is just to say

A lil homage to William Carlos Williams: click the title for the original WCW poem.

This is just to say
I have read
Gateway to Great Books,
Grade One.

I am sorry -
Educated so finely, I am
Becoming a human being
At last, at last -

I could not resist.
Virtue is so delicious,
Desire for freedom
So sweet.