Lesley Wheeler

Five Ways of Looking at “The Waste Land”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve seen some takes celebrating the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s Modernist landmark poem “The Waste Land”  this month. To the smallish degree that Twitter recognizes poetry, there have been several threads there — and general arts and literature sections of publications and websites have taken notice as well. I think this notice is greater in the UK,* since the poem has more purchase in Eliot’s adopted homeland than in the US, but long-time readers here know that I spent five years serially performing the whole thing as part of my annual National Poetry Month observance.

Some of the notices disappoint me a little. Maybe I think of it too much as a poem I “own” in the same way you may feel about another poem you’ve kept in your consciousness over time. I was going to write, and may still write, a personal memoir piece on how the poem entered and mixed with me over the years — but those same long-time readers will know that isn’t my most common mode. Instead, I think it’s more important that you take some art, poetry and/or music, inside yourself. I’m here by my intent and your accident to raise the shades or turn on a light.

More than the centenary pieces themselves, what most causes me to rise to write this month is a response that commonly follows where comments or replies are allowed. Let me create a composite example of that: “The Waste Land’  is an over-intellectualized bunch of incomprehensible nonsense that requires footnotes to understand.**”

This may be how the poem first struck you, or the way school caused you to see and discard it. Let me open some shutters and offer five ways of looking at “The Waste Land”  that may allow you to see it with fresh eyes.

1. It was written after a great war in which nearly everyone in England knew casualties—and after a great deadly flu pandemic.  English culture had trouble confronting this, and the man who wrote “The Waste Land”  was in depressive crisis usually without the emotional capacity to confront these events, personal and national. Miraculously, the poem’s art is none-the-less that confrontation.

2. The poem doesn’t require you to understand some secret encoded message, it isn’t constructed to ask you to do that, at least immediately. Instead, it’s an intensely musical composition with various voices, motifs, and tones. Its words and images can gather more specific meaning over time, yes, but the experience is still saturated with the variety of voices and their moods.

3. If you think of Eliot as all the voices in the poem, then the poem plays with gender and sexuality more than you might expect.  The speaker in the poem is male, female, indeterminate, and in the case of Tiresias, canonically intersex. This in 1922 people! Some read the poem as misogynist, a logical deduction from Eliot himself being easily indicted as a misogynist. Yet I didn’t find it so. The men and women in the poem are degraded, damaged and distressed more or less equally. I do see two plausible gender inequality issues in the imagery woven in the poem: sexual violence in the underlying Philomena-related refrains which we may read as a female-role specific event; and if we read the final section as mostly in the male poet’s voice then only one character, a man presumably, Eliot himself presumably, is allowed to emerge from the waste land and into some consoling resolution. If I ever write my long personal piece I’ll go further into those things. In summary: I found that I could read, experience and perform the poem with sympathy and shared grief for those sufferings regardless of the faults of Eliot.***

4. Eliot, a smart, talented, but also wounded and limited soul could not have made this poem himself.  Ezra Pound and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood were necessary editors and midwives. While I resonate with “The Waste Land”  I’m not particularly connected to Eliot’s work in general, though the musicality of it can charm me. “The Waste Land”  may be an example of how muses speak through, despite the limits of authors. And just this year it occurred to me why so many of the poem’s words are paraphrases or quotes—used musically as samples might be if this was a hip hop record. The new thought that came to me: the damaged and constricted Eliot couldn’t (or wouldn’t) allow himself to write those words in his closed-in depression.**** I think that later in his life, the emotional expression of “The Waste Land”  frankly scared Eliot.

5. Want a demonstration of the points made above, that “The Waste Land”  wants to primarily convey emotions, not sense?  That it becomes vivid when performed, like music? That its voices are gender-fluid in their variety? This highly recommended Fiona Shaw video below is better than a raft of scholarly papers or old-men’s Internet posts in empirically demonstrating the poem’s impact. It does ask 35 minutes of your attention however.


You can find all of my musical performance of “The Waste Land” here, but this 20 minute section may best show what I hoped to achieve.

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I plan to return with more musical pieces and encounters with other poems here shortly with a focus on Halloween, ghosts, and the gothic.

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*For example, there was a new documentary this week broadcast on the BBC which I cannot yet see since I’m a US resident. I posted an earlier version of this piece on Twitter myself, but the Twitter audience and algorithm is smaller for me than this blog. Want another blog post with an incisive take on the critical blind-spots in representing “The Waste Land?”   Lesley Wheeler’s recent take caused me to jump in a bit too hot and barking in my shared frustration with those cold, shiver and sliver of humanity, appreciations of “The Waste Land.”

**The infamous footnotes — which I now explain in a footnote — were a makeshift tactic to lengthen the poem for hardcover publication. They may have also helped a closed-off fellow like Eliot cover the emotional tracks of the poem his name was now on, but even Eliot later admitted they weren’t the secret decoder ring to his poem.

***Plausibly, I should be more concerned with authorial intent, or how some misogynist or anti-Semite could view or perform the poem differently from me. The points that gender, joyless power-unequal sexual acts, and sexual violence are integral to the events and imagery of the poem is incontrovertible to me, and were overlooked or down-played by the “let’s find the secret scholarly message” critics for decades until queer and feminist readings emerged. Saying above that you can appreciate the poem without stopping for deeper analysis isn’t denying that deeper thought and examination isn’t worthwhile. Even given the professional format of many scholarly papers, I read some of them and out from me comes a “Yes! Someone else finds, sees, feels this too.” Lesley Wheeler again gives us links to one such set of papers from a 2020 conference. Oh, and if the idea of how one can personally resonate with poetry, how it can change how poetry works, her most recent book, Poetry’s Possible Worlds,  written for interested readers and requiring no scholarly pre-requisites is recommended.

****If you’ve ever suffered depression, you may relate to this.

Generations, and Poetry’s Possible Worlds

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

I won’t take much time today in presenting another short 90-second musical piece I composed. I also wrote the text for today’s composition, which isn’t the normal thing here. One of our principles is “Other People’s Stories” — we try to emphasize the value of a variety of poetic expression and what it’s like to encounter that. It’s not like I discourage the writing of more poetry, I only wish to increase the engaged reader side of the equation and to pay tribute to traditions that I draw from when writing or composing.

I’ve been reading this month a new book by poet and teacher Lesley Wheeler: Poetry’s Possible Worlds.   It’s a fine and enjoyable example of that sort of thing hosted inside another mind and lifetime. Wheeler takes 12 not-particularly-well-known contemporary poems and applies care, consideration, and her life’s own insight to them. This would be a different book if these poems were Contemporary English Language Poetry Greatest Hits. Such another book could have value — but it would be more about known worlds with existing maps and pins already placed. This book does something else more uniquely valuable.

Because we perform the poems we present in the Parlando Project, we must breathe inside them. Poetry’s chest inflates when you do that. Wheeler’s book makes each of these poems a sibling, cousin, co-worker, friend, parent, or child — those who we encounter life beside and together with.

One last thing I want to stress about this book: it’s entirely approachable. While Wheeler has written elsewhere as a scholar, and I have one of her books in that line that I’m anticipating reading this summer, this is a book about life and poetry looking at each other that doesn’t require any prerequisite classes. Middle-aged people and above may particularly appreciate “Poetry’s Possible Worlds”  due to the life events encountered, but not every young person is uncurious about life-planets they haven’t voyaged to yet. Here’s a link to details in case you want to join me in reading this book.

So, here’s today’s piece, and since it’s called “Generations”  you may expect it has something to say about different ages speaking to one another. Read/listen carefully, there’s a little barb in the middle of it.

Generations

Is there a Möbius strip inside this one, or just a recognition of how we recall life-lessons when we get older?

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Musically, this performance has a benefit from the new orchestral instruments I have available for the rest of the year in the richer French Horn that plays a prominent role. Player gadget below for many, and this backup highlighted link for the rest of you.

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Did you come here looking to celebrate Bloomsday? The Parlando Project has got 2 1/2 minutes of your young, concise poetic James Joyce right here.

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Fall 2021 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 4-3

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today we continue to move up the countdown to the most popular and liked piece from this autumn. I mentioned earlier in the countdown and elsewhere that during this year two poets that Dave Moore and I had grouped ourselves with over the years fell seriously ill, and this autumn they both died. Dave himself has been through a health swerve since 2020, but given that he’s alive and could tell his own story, I’ll leave that to him. I’ll just summarize that these three people were a large part of my direct and living connection to poetry, and my circumferential part of the ripples from two of them dying has been to sharply feel that human poetic-creation connection become past-tense.

Two of the pieces left in this countdown are remainder connections to those two poets.

4. Timepiece by Kevin FitzPatrick.  This is one of my favorite pieces that I heard Kevin read even before it reached its final draft for publication. I believe Dave liked it too, and shortly after we heard it, the LYL Band performed it and that’s the recording you can hear below.

Kevin, like our other departed poet, Ethna McKiernan, was a consistent reviser of his work. Poets in groups like ours sometimes present work soon after it reaches a completed draft, but Kevin’s early drafts nearly always seemed close to “ready to publish.” Despite his reliance until far into this century on a typewriter and carbon paper, his drafts’ punctuation and spelling was always correct and the suggested and taken revision ideas often revolved around clarifying narrative elements that would be in the forefront of his poems.*  Kevin also paid attention to meter, and when we’d see later revisions that would be another area he’d have changed.**  As a group we could sometimes be brutal with each other’s work, but it was rare that Kevin would present a stick-out sore-thumb.

“Time Piece”  (the title may have been a single word in the draft I performed it from) had one issue that I recall: there was discussion of the “incorrigibles” that the poem concluded hadn’t stolen the dead father’s wristwatch. At least one of us didn’t like it, perhaps thinking it an archaic, obscure or somehow too formal a word. Kevin nodded and said little as was his usual response to suggested revisions. I think I may have argued for incorrigibles, and since it was there in the draft we performed from long before the poem’s publication in Kevin’s 2017 collection Still Living In Town,  that was still the word in my performance.

Well, damn it, Kevin’s dead, and it’s his poem, and he was good at writing poetry, but “incorrigibles” is the right word, and his revision for publication: “those slick boys” doesn’t have enough flavor. That Dick Tracy word-aroma is just what’s called for! “Greatest Generation” father, and a wristwatch after all! He also made one other revision on the published version: from “That he wasn’t scheduled for a boxing match at six” to “That he wasn’t scheduled to box at six.” I suspect Kevin’s ear thought the later better meter-wise. However as boxing has become a more obscure sport the shorter “box” may miss some readers.***   “Did he work in an Amazon warehouse?” some moderns may think.

“Timepiece”  or “Time Piece”  is a poem well worth reading or listening to. The LYL performance of the earlier draft is what the graphical player below will play, and if you don’t see the player, slug this highlighted hyperlink.

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Still Living In Town and North of Boston

FitzPatrick’s publisher, Midwest Villages & Voices, doesn’t distribute online, but this link contains an ISBN and other info that may help you obtain a copy from your local book store or library. Then this other guy, Frost, has books available  too.

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3. After Apple Picking by Robert Frost.  Unlike our other Frost poem in this autumn’s Top Ten, the metaphysical “Bond and Free,”  you can feel this one. Particularly as Kevin began to spend his weekends working at his life-partner’s rural farm, I could see kinship between FitzPatrick and Frost. Both were drier than a Minnesota winter’s static humidity, both liked to observe human outlooks critically, and both of them could give you some of the tang of work tied to nature. I’m not sure if lifetime farmers are likely to write a poem like this, but someone coming to that work from something else, as Frost and FitzPatrick did, has the outsiders’ advantage of fresh observation.

When I presented this poem last month I thought about dedicating it straight out to Paul Deaton, who’s blog I’ve read for the past few years, in part to catch up on his accounts of small-format food farming, sometimes mentioning apple trees and orchards. But I wasn’t certain how well it fits anything Paul experiences. The apple trees of my youth were tall enough that ladders would be required, but the orchards I saw biking around Bayfield this fall have quite short trees, the kind where an adult would stand flat-footed to pick the fruit.

But maybe I should have gone ahead. Even though this poem has specifics, even to what aches after work, it’s about finishing a task. When another blogger I read: professor, editor, and author Lesley Wheeler wrote of getting to the final stage of a book-length manuscript, I thought of how I felt after finishing a manuscript decades ago. That same “Well, I probably missed a few, but I’m done  with apple picking now.”

Player gadget below for some, this highlighted hyperlink for the rest of you to hear my performance of Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking.”

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This post has gone long, though with things I wanted to say. Our next post will break from our usual Top Ten countdown, as it will deal with both the most popular piece, and the runner up, and I’ll talk more about poet Ethna McKiernan.

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*More than once I’d say to Kevin “If I had had the idea to write something from this same material that you used, I’d have written a short story.”  I remember once Ethna took me sharply to task for saying that, admonishing me that Kevin was writing a narrative poem. She misunderstood me, for I knew and admired that. Mixing into a short poem, with its almost unavoidable lyric immediacy and compression, with narrative elements sometimes even including a Joycean epiphany, is not easy. Once or twice, so taken with the story in one of Kevin’s poems I attempted to craft a short story from the same material, to demonstrate my point — and yet I could never complete one of those attempts. Kevin’s poetry may look unshowy, but it’s not easy to duplicate.

**Several years ago, Kevin and Minneapolis folk/blues revival pioneer Dave Ray of Koerner Ray and Glover engaged in a little side-bar about meter in Blues lyrics, with Kevin scanning their iambics. Kevin played a little blues harp, and Ray and Kevin’s dad were both in the insurance business.

***Kevin also boxed, and not in a warehouse way. He once wrote a poem which had as significant line “The boxer slugs!” Dave Moore’s punishing wit, after dealing with a lengthy group discussion about if that line would be misunderstood, was spurred to write an entire song about a garden beset by invasive…wait for it…”boxer slugs.”

Odds and Ends

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve not engaged much in re-blogging, but two pieces I’ve read this week really struck me: one for an idea and examples of how it might be executed, and the other for a sharply-written essay on a novel from the same early 20th century era that much of the poetry we use comes from.

The idea? A professor and poet Lesley Wheeler, who teaches a course in American poetry from 1900-1950, gave this assignment in lieu of the conventional essay: “create 8 pages of a little magazine from the period, including a cover, masthead, mission statement, table of contents, and a few ‘solicited’ submissions (mostly real poems from the period, but they were allowed to make up one or two plausible imaginary modernists, too, and write poems in those personas). They also had to write reflective essays explaining their literary and design choices and providing a bibliography of models and other sources they consulted.”

That’s a powerful idea. She shows examples of some of the responses to the assignment, and I’d love to see more of what the respondents chose to do. No one lives in history, even those old dead people were immediate. Here’s a link to her post.

The essay came from an unexpected source. I follow a blog Yip Abides  that features unusually framed urban-midwestern street photography, a genre that follows the photographic aesthetic of my late wife. He also likes to feature videos that have impressed him, often animation. Visual art and musically oriented blogs are a large portion of my follow list as my own portion of reading on literature is taken up almost entirely with things that directly apply to material for this project.

But this week, there was a post there about The Virginian, a novel I’ve never read, but one of that helped formulate a genre, “The Western,” that dominated popular entertainment in the mid-20th century much like a certain kind of SF/Fantasy dominated the last part of it and the beginning of our current century.

The blogger, Bob Roman, writing about The Virginian  ranges perceptively over the areas I’d want a writer to cover. What’s the connection between the cowboy “necktie party” and KKK style lynchings and murders?* How much does the American frontier underlie some particulars in contemporary libertarianism? And there’s more. Well worth reading, and here’s a link to it.

And before I leave to write another post on a new audio piece, a few miscellaneous follow-ups on things discussed earlier in the year.

How has Apple TV+’s Dickinson  turned out? This is one of the premiere offerings of the tech giants new video streaming service, and its over-heated pre-release trailer emphasized a conceptual strangeness that made many dismiss it as a deeply unserious piece of muddled youth pandering.

Sue Gilbert and Emily Dickinson rock out

“Rebel Girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood. I got news for you: she is!”

 

I’ve now seen the first episode, and so far it seems to be what I’d hoped it was: a tongue in cheek re-contextualizing of Emily Dickinson’s life which both comments on her actual mid-19th century issues and our own times. Last year’s theatrical film Wild Nights with Emily  tried to do something like this and had its moments, but I thought the overall execution flawed. Wild Nights with Emily  and Dickinson  are both comedies, but it was as comedy that Wild Nights  failed, its portrayals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Mable Loomis Todd were all too broad. True, they are peripheral characters in Wild Nights,  but that too was a choice. As best as I can tell from one episode Dickinson  doesn’t make those choices and is the better for it as a comedy. The characters of Dickinson’s world are more rounded portrayals.

The first episode was full of little footnote-quality accurate factoids about the Dickinson family—the creators apparently wanted to show they had done their research. Two choices Dickinson  appears to make could work or fail as the series continues: It may have trouble showing why Dickinson matters and it makes the choice to play Emily Dickinson as younger than she was.

At least in the first episode, Dickinson is represented as being recognized by some in her peer group as “a genius” and a few lines of one of her best known poems are repeated almost as often as the hook in a current pop song, but we so far get no sense of why her poems are crucial. This may change over more episodes of course, but it’s always hard to show what a writer does visually. If you do a biopic about a great performer you show an actor portraying them performing, if the simulation is good you’ve made your case. Watching someone write, or how that writing works inside the minds of readers, is not so easy to act.

The first episode seems to be set in 1852, when Dickinson was the age that actor Hailee Steinfeld who plays her is in real life, 22 years old. But this is before Dickinson wrote most of her poems. Chronology seems to be a difficult issue for filmmakers trying to portray Dickinson’s life, but if the show works, I’m willing to grant them license for being loose with that. More problematic is that they appear to be portraying Dickinson as a teenager rather than as a 20-something, much less the 30-something that apparently wrote much of the poetry. I’m aware that different times had different norms for childhood and youth, but were 22-year-olds acting more like 16-year-olds in 1852? I couldn’t help but think the history they were unintentionally demonstrating was the TV and Hollywood practice of having high-school age characters played by 20-something actors.

I’ve had to live through an era when Dickinson was thought of as an arid eccentric, frustrated spinster, and even as a corrective I’m not sure I want her now to be portrayed as only the hormone-saturated brain of our adolescences either. We’ll see how they deal with that as the show goes on.

The knowing comic anachronisms and indie soundtrack? Bring’em on! The Parlando Project obviously isn’t opposed to purposely doing that kind of thing.

In closing then another thing relating to a recent presentation of a Dickinson poem here. What might be behind that striking image of windblown snow starting to fill a field as “summer’s empty room” in Dickinson’s Snow  poem? Well, it was one of those poems she enclosed in letters (one of Dickinson’s contemporary uses for her writing). This one went to Susan Gilbert, the woman some modern scholars posit was her lover, and who was certainly one of the intelligent intimates that helped sustain Emily. I think that was an image of longing in the otherwise “winter wonderland” mise en scène of Dickinson’s poem.

An audio piece? As we approach winter solstice, here’s one of my favorite Dickinson presentations from this project, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”  The player gadget is below.

 

 

 

 

*White-on-white lynchings and extra-judicial killings were a common trope in Western movies and TV shows of mid-century, while terrorism directed at Afro-Americans was almost never the subject of popular entertainment. Consciously or subconsciously, this could have been American culture trying to address that which it was loath to address.