Even as I ponder over where October sneaked away ....these beautiful lines by T. S. Eliot come to mind.

"What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation."
- Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot.

I have not read this famous poem in its entirety but I remember the beautiful lines from this poem that used to be on a now defunct website which I had developed 10+ years ago (hosted on geocities in those pre-blog days!).

"Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden."

Also, so much is conveyed through the first few lines of the first quartet itself...

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

You can hear Eliot himself reading this first quartet here.

Even as I ponder over where October sneaked away ....these beautiful lines by T. S. Eliot come to mind.

"What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation."
- Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot.

I have not read this famous poem in its entirety but I remember the beautiful lines from this poem that used to be on a now defunct website which I had developed 10+ years ago (hosted on geocities in those pre-blog days!).

"Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden."

Also, so much is conveyed through the first few lines of the first quartet itself...

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

You can hear Eliot himself reading this first quartet here.

In a piece in the New Yorker, Verbage -The Republican war on words, critic James Wood talks about how the Republicans political discussion has confused and corrupted language, reflecting perhaps a "deep suspicion of language itself". I am reminded of the recent Peggy Noon WSJ op-ed piece: Palin's Failin', in which she wrote:

More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G's. Hardworkin' families are strainin' and tryin'a get ahead. It's not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama, and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say "mom and dad": "our moms and dads who are struggling." This is Mr. Bush's former communications adviser Karen Hughes's contribution to our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics now, that's too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers and fathers, it's all now the faux down-home, patronizing—and infantilizing—moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a nation obsessed with politics, our children—sorry, our kids—look to political figures for a model as to how adults sound?

Anyways, Wood's article has come for some criticism, as I gleaned via this Bookslut post today:

Mark Liberman at the Language Log chastises Wood (also this) for his "childish egocentrism, which assumes without checking that 'This isn't how I pronounce or use this word, so it must be wrong; and I don't recall having seen this before, so it must never have happened before.'"

Marilynne Robinson, whose recent novel Home made the 2008 National Book Award Finalists list last week talks about the development of character in writing in an interview in The Paris Review this month.

In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

And this later in the interview:

I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.

Couple more excerpts:

In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?


ROBINSON: I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

....*.....

Ames says that in our everyday world there is “more beauty than our eyes can bear.” He’s living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?

ROBINSON: You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

Marilynne Robinson, whose recent novel Home made the 2008 National Book Award Finalists list last week talks about the development of character in writing in an interview in The Paris Review this month.

In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

And this later in the interview:

I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.

Couple more excerpts:

In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?

ROBINSON: I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

....*.....

Ames says that in our everyday world there is “more beauty than our eyes can bear.” He’s living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?

ROBINSON: You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

P.S. Title is a phrase from an essay Dybek apparently wrote in 4th grade. The piece also has a great anecdote about an experience he had while he was enrolled for his Ph. D. in the esteemed University of Iowa program.

“I had never met a real writer at that point, and it was only after I got there, in the company of people like Richard Yates, Cheever, Don Justice, that I began to realize the enormous commitment writing really demanded.” He surrendered completely to his writing, taking poetry and fiction workshops simultaneously.

His classmates—among them Tracy Kidder, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Laura Jensen, Thom Jones, and Michael Ryan—challenged and inspired Dybek, but he also grew weary of the place on occasion. Dybek recalls: “I was walking across a parking lot in the rain, talking to Jon Jackson, and saying to him, ‘I don’t think I could stand reading another goddamn worksheet this semester’ ”—worksheets were how student work was distributed in those days, on mimeographs—“and suddenly, a wet piece of paper was stuck to my foot, and I pulled it off, and I said, ‘Look, it’s a goddamn worksheet! You can’t even walk without them sticking to you.’ And I looked at it, and I started reading it, and they were these fantastic poems. They were by Tom Lux. So it was that kind of place, where you’d be walking across the parking lot in the rain, and suddenly you’d be reading this wonderful stuff.”

Good writing is of a similar kind...it sticks to you and won't let go long after you are done reading.

Murakami on dreams:

"I don't dream. I use my dreams when I write. I dream when I'm awake. That's the job of a novelist. You can dream a dream intentionally. When you're sleeping and you have a nice dream, you're eating or with a woman, you might wake up at the best part. I get to keep dreaming. It's great."

More excerpts from the interview here, including such gems as:

On Reader's Questions: Apparently Murakami actually answers all of his fan mail personally. "I like stupid questions. A guy sent me an email about squid. He asked 'are their tentacles hands or feet?' I told him he should give a squid ten pairs of gloves and ten pairs of socks and see what happens."

and..

On his favorite music: "I listen to classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening. I listen to rock when I'm driving. I like Radiohead (big round of applause). I like REM, Beck, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thome Yorke is a reader of mine. He's in Tokyo now, and he wanted to meet me, but I had to be here. It's a huge sacrifice for me... I sing "Yellow Submarine" while I swim. It's sounds like bubbling. It's great. I recommend you try it... I loved the Beach Boys when I was younger. I met Brian Wilson when he came to Tokyo. He's strange."

On Berkeley: "Something's wrong with this town."

:)

Murakami on dreams:

"I don't dream. I use my dreams when I write. I dream when I'm awake. That's the job of a novelist. You can dream a dream intentionally. When you're sleeping and you have a nice dream, you're eating or with a woman, you might wake up at the best part. I get to keep dreaming. It's great."

More excerpts from the interview here, including such gems as:

On Reader's Questions: Apparently Murakami actually answers all of his fan mail personally. "I like stupid questions. A guy sent me an email about squid. He asked 'are their tentacles hands or feet?' I told him he should give a squid ten pairs of gloves and ten pairs of socks and see what happens."

and..

On his favorite music: "I listen to classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening. I listen to rock when I'm driving. I like Radiohead (big round of applause). I like REM, Beck, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thome Yorke is a reader of mine. He's in Tokyo now, and he wanted to meet me, but I had to be here. It's a huge sacrifice for me... I sing "Yellow Submarine" while I swim. It's sounds like bubbling. It's great. I recommend you try it... I loved the Beach Boys when I was younger. I met Brian Wilson when he came to Tokyo. He's strange."

On Berkeley: "Something's wrong with this town."

:)

More from the aforementioned interview with Jesse Ball and his wife, Þórdís Björnsdóttir:

Ball: I also favour forcefulness in writing. You have to be able to present your work with strength and hope. Some people think of poetry as being some fancy, delicate rhyme thing that doesn’t have a lot to do with them. And that is all wrong. Poetry is the most forceful and powerful use of language, if you want to write a poem and get to how you feel, getting it down, forcing it away by original means, that’s poetry. Cynicism, however, is… probably the saddest trait of our society right now. And it’s rampant.

Q: You’re waging a war on cynicism?
Ball: All cynicism does is subtract. It doesn’t add. Every single genuine endeavour goes forth despite cynicism. Even something like punk, which presents a lot of cynical ideas, is inherently hopeful, it has a deep strong hope in it’s core, and a strong spirit. As I see it, being disaffected is one thing, that’s actually hard not to be in this day and age. But being cynical is a step too far.

The interview is full of much wisdom (also see this post) -- the poet/writer Jesse Ball is not only creative but also seems wise beyond his years!

More from the aforementioned interview with Jesse Ball and his wife, Þórdís Björnsdóttir:

Ball: I also favour forcefulness in writing. You have to be able to present your work with strength and hope. Some people think of poetry as being some fancy, delicate rhyme thing that doesn’t have a lot to do with them. And that is all wrong. Poetry is the most forceful and powerful use of language, if you want to write a poem and get to how you feel, getting it down, forcing it away by original means, that’s poetry. Cynicism, however, is… probably the saddest trait of our society right now. And it’s rampant.

Q: You’re waging a war on cynicism?
Ball: All cynicism does is subtract. It doesn’t add. Every single genuine endeavour goes forth despite cynicism. Even something like punk, which presents a lot of cynical ideas, is inherently hopeful, it has a deep strong hope in it’s core, and a strong spirit. As I see it, being disaffected is one thing, that’s actually hard not to be in this day and age. But being cynical is a step too far.

The interview is full of much wisdom (also see this post) -- the poet/writer Jesse Ball is not only creative but also seems wise beyond his years!

Two excerpts today, which, apropos of nothing, somehow seem to fit together today.

First, something from the poet Jesse Ball, whose intriguing and creative novel, Samedi the Deafness (NYT review), I started reading today. As is my wont, I googled him to find out more about him and ran into this interview with him and his wife, the Irish writer Þórdís Björnsdóttir, who together have written a book of short stories "concerning the love of Vera and Linus." Here, in an interview, Ball explains what the collaborative aspects of the creative process entails.

In general, great artists are individuals, to be an artist is to gather an aesthetic that’s going to be the whole about yourself. It is a very complicated process and it can brook no admission of another person. It is a single process concerning an individual who’s often excluded from society at that point in their genesis. To find another person, especially in literature, whom you can work with is incredibly rare. In our case, it works really well, especially in the context of this book, since the object of it is to render a certain life. One of the goals when you live together is the creation of a combined life, so you could say that our book is in a way the revisiting of that in a literary sense. You should read the book as if it’s a product of one person’s imagination. Going back and forth and wondering who wrote what is not a pleasurable act.

And the second excerpt is from Hanif Kureishi's novel Intimacy (NYT review) from 1999.

I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn't the worst thing you can do to them. Sombre it may be, but it doesn't have to be a tragedy. If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

Two excerpts today, which, apropos of nothing, somehow seem to fit together today.

First, something from the poet Jesse Ball, whose intriguing and creative novel, Samedi the Deafness (NYT review), I started reading today. As is my wont, I googled him to find out more about him and ran into this interview with him and his wife, the Irish writer Þórdís Björnsdóttir, who together have written a book of short stories "concerning the love of Vera and Linus." Here, in an interview, Ball explains what the collaborative aspects of the creative process entails.

In general, great artists are individuals, to be an artist is to gather an aesthetic that’s going to be the whole about yourself. It is a very complicated process and it can brook no admission of another person. It is a single process concerning an individual who’s often excluded from society at that point in their genesis. To find another person, especially in literature, whom you can work with is incredibly rare. In our case, it works really well, especially in the context of this book, since the object of it is to render a certain life. One of the goals when you live together is the creation of a combined life, so you could say that our book is in a way the revisiting of that in a literary sense. You should read the book as if it’s a product of one person’s imagination. Going back and forth and wondering who wrote what is not a pleasurable act.

And the second excerpt is from Hanif Kureishi's novel Intimacy (NYT review) from 1999.

I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn't the worst thing you can do to them. Sombre it may be, but it doesn't have to be a tragedy. If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

Ran into this poem by Denise Levertov, while looking for something about Creeley (since he wrote the Introduction to a book of her Selected Poems; adapted from a lecture he gave at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in honor of her life and work.)

September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"-Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"-
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
I can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don't
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea...

Seems, 1961 was the year William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle both had severe strokes, and Ezra Pound stopped writing and this poem is in honor of those great ones leaving us alone on the road.

Picture titled Night Wind Landscape I is © Karen Kucharski (kkucharskiart@yahoo.com)

But, of course, to me...this is the year of loss in a different way. How will it be without him is difficult to fathom but sometimes the night wind carries him back to me through dreams.

Ran into this poem by Denise Levertov, while looking for something about Creeley (since he wrote the Introduction to a book of her Selected Poems; adapted from a lecture he gave at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in honor of her life and work.)

September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"-Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"-
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
I can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don't
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea...

Seems, 1961 was the year William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle both had severe strokes, and Ezra Pound stopped writing and this poem is in honor of those great ones leaving us alone on the road.

Picture titled Night Wind Landscape I is © Karen Kucharski (kkucharskiart@yahoo.com)

But, of course, to me...this is the year of loss in a different way. How will it be without him is difficult to fathom but sometimes the night wind carries him back to me through dreams.

I remember reading Robert Creeley's poetry many years back and loving it and so have picked up 3 books of poetry by him today - Life & Death, Echoes, and If I were writing this.

Just one of his early poems for now...

Poem for D.H. Lawrence

I would begin by explaining
that by reason of being
I am and no other.

Always the self returns to
self-consciousness, seeing
the figure drawn by the window
by its own hand, standing
alone and unwanted by others.
It sees this, the self sees
and returns to the figure
there in the evening, the darkness
alone and unwanted by others.

In the beginning was this self,
perhaps, without the figure,
without consciousness of self
or figure or evening. In the
beginning was this self only,
alone and unwanted by others.

In the beginning was that and this
is different, is changed and how
it is changed is not known but felt.
It is felt by the self and the self
is feeling, is changed by feeling,
but not known, is changed, is felt.

Remembering the figure by the window,
in the evening drawn there by the window,
is to see the thing like money, is to be
sure of materials, but not to know
where they came from or how
they got there or when they came.
Remembering the figure by the window
the evening is remembered, the darkness
remembered as the figure by the window,
but is not to know how they came there.

The self is being, is in being and
because of it. The figure is not being
nor the self but is in the self and
in the being and because of them.

Always the self returns to, because of
being, the figure drawn by the window,
there in the evening, the darkness,
alone and unwanted by others.

Hmmm... There are some deep questions and ruminations about the self here but I am not sure I get the whole poem.

a great picture, which I call The Evolution of Self; © Alfredo Gomez Jr.

I'll try to post some of his more accessible poems in the days to come from the three books, which I hope to read in the next couple weeks.

For now, here is a quote from his poem that I had posted elsewhere and I had also excerpted lines from Creeley's poems as a prologue to a poem I wrote in 2005, which is when I first was introduced to his poetry through a book of selected poems - this one, if I remember right. (I believe there is a new book of collected poems this year, collecting poems from 1945-2005.)

Also a review of his work in the NYT and an interview with Creeley from 2003 after a reading at Emerson College here in Boston.