The Waste Land

 
The Waste Land

by TS Eliot

Liveright
1922, reprinted

 

 

I thought I was rereading TS Eliot's The Waste Land, but after finishing it, I'm certain of a couple things. First, I'm sure I never read it before (it must've been Four Quartets before). And second, I'm so far removed from the context Eliot wrote this in that it's nearly impossible for me to experience it the way readers in 1922 would have. The reprint edition I read was made to look as much like the original as possible, but unfortunately it takes more than the same dust jacket to recreate the original effect. I can parse the words I'm reading, and get meaning from the sentences (except the few bits that are in other languages), but I can't understand it as Eliot meant it, or as his intended audience probably received it.

 

I've seen any number of essays lauding The Waste Land as the one of the most important poem of the 20th century, as a text that perfectly captured the post-WWI zeitgeist, and that changed how poetry was written afterward. I'd hoped that reading it during a new age of warmongering and robber baronry, in the aftermath of a recent global pandemic, at a time when any sense of shared cultural referents or agreed-upon version of reality seems to be disintegrating, I'd hoped that some of it might still resonate. But I guess not. 

 

Apparently, one thing that was radical about the poem in 1922 is that it has no single narrator - the text is fragmented, with many speakers from many stations of life, making references both high and low, with allusions to classical poetry, but also Buddhism and popular children's rhymes. I suppose this must've seemed extraordinary the first time people encountered it, but by now, the technique is so common across every possible storytelling medium, that it might still impress when used well, but it no longer shocks.

 

One of the first audiences to watch the ballet The Rites of Spring rioted after seeing it because it was such a departure from what they expected or thought was permissible. I'm not saying audiences now are more tolerant or sophisticated - there are riots all the time because fans are very happy or very angry after an important sports match. But it's really difficult today to think of ballet or poetry, no matter how novel or strange, as being capable of inspiring violence or unrest.

 

Another thing that was apparently scandalous was that Eliot included end-notes to cite his allusions to the classics. Apparently, at the time, the suggestion that the highly educated audience of poetry readers might not share enough unity of culture and education that they would, that they might not all know all the references the poet was making, was either insulting or a further elaboration of the poem's themes of the old world falling to pieces. (If so, Eliot's audience may have inferred some authorial intent that wasn't really there. Because according to the reprint's introduction, he only added the end notes after the publisher demanded something, anything to pad out the page count before going to press.)

 

By contrast, I know I haven't been schooled on a single timeless canon of classics; I have no expectation that I'll recognize every allusion. For me, end notes like "V. Spencer, Prothalamion" or whole paragraphs of untranslated Greek or German or Latin are essentially useless, even as starting points; I'd need annotations just to understand the citations! (Another tidbit from the intro is that Eliot originally wanted to title the poem He Do the Policemen in Different Voices as both an allusion to Charles Dickens and an instruction about how to understand its polyphony of speakers. I can't help but think we wouldn't still be quite so enamored with the poem if it had a silly title instead of a harsh one.)

 

In trying to make sense of The Waste Land, I found that cartoonist Julian Peters has made an illustrated version of the first section of it. I have to say, it helped me enormously, because the visuals help provide the missing context that the intervening century between Eliot's time and today has deprived me of. Peters keeps sight of the fact that this is about the aftermath of WWI, and either on his own or by consulting the appropriate literary analyses, has given a new face to each voice, which also clarifies to edges of each fragment. If I do re-read The Waste Land again sometime, I'd probably be wise to seek out an edition that provides more context somehow, either with illustrations or annotations or companion essays.

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

 
 
I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

art by Ramsingh Urveti

Tara Books

2012

 

 

Ramsingh Urveti only credits himself as the illustrator of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, perhaps because the text of the book consists of only the title poem, a folk poem from England in the 1600s, and according to the preface, often included in collections of poetry for children. Urveti's version takes the form of a children's picture book, and the poem is simple enough to be enjoyed by children; but I think adults can enjoy this as well.
 
The poem's first few lines go like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
Read this way, it's a series of strange images. But the poem's 'trick' is that it can be read another way, no longer rhyming, but making perfect sense.
"I saw a peacock

With a fiery tale, I saw a comet
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud..."
 
Urveti's art allows both readings at once. Each two-page has one of his black-and-white ink drawings, and a half-stanza of text. Each also has a hole in the paper that reveals the next half-stanza. So it reads more like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
With a fiery tail, I saw a comet
I saw a comet drop down hail
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
At the beginning, the cut-outs only show text, but as the book continues, they reveal glimpses of art too, and the cut-outs themselves become an increasingly important part of each new drawing.
 
I don't know why, exactly, but this book feels very appropriate for the Solstice and New Year. Perhaps the images of darkness, of lights in the sky, perhaps the way the dual readings suggest transformation.

Crush

 
 

Crush

by Richard Siken

Yale University Press

2005 

 

 

 It's been a little while since I've read poetry, but a couple friends of mine both recommended Richard Siken's Crush to me when they learned that, and a third friend endorsed it when she saw me reading it. I noticed it also made Genrepunk Magazine's list of the hundred best indie books of the 21st century. (Impressive, since 80 of the books they listed are from the last 5 years! My personal fave, Clown Girl by Monica Drake, made it on there too.)
 
The combination of the title and cover art of Crush led me to expect it would be about desire, about the feeling of having a crush on someone, and it is, but Siken also seems to capture all the violent connotations of the word as well. There's very little romance or affection in these poems; Siken's desire is sexual, visceral, and the men he desires seem to want to both fuck and kill him, simultaneously, or maybe just to beat him up to demonstrate how thoroughly they disavow their own desires.
 
Reading this reminded me how homophobic the 90s were, how scary it was to realize your own same-sex attraction in the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard killing, at a time when so many of the seemingly reasonable people around you would openly praise or sympathize with or apologize for the killers. The men Siken writes about wanting seem to hate themselves and hate him, to hate him because they want him ... except for the ones who just hate him, because he made the schoolboy mistake of confessing his feeling to a straight boy who feels righteously justified in punishing him for being gay. "A Primer for Small Weird Loves" maybe shows this best, and shows Siken's own heart hardening as he goes from being the battered younger lover to the older partner, and the potential source of violence himself.
 
Reading this, it seemed like I could understand what it would be like to feel desire the way that Siken does, which is different from the way I feel it myself. It makes me wonder how common or universal his way of feeling is? Do other gay men experience their desire this way? Do straight women? Is this what it feels like to love men? Surely not for everyone, not every time, but is it common? Very common? Because I feel like maybe I recognize what he's describing, like I've seen it before, seen friends feeling it, at the start of relationships that seem almost self-destructive, because the men who inspire wanting like that are not nice men, are not good or safe to love.
 
The poems in Crush are organized into three chapters or sections. The ones in the last part all seem to be related to a single, fraught relationship with a young man named Henry. These poems are the most intense, the most violent, and it seems that Siken maybe literally took a bullet for the man he loved, who didn't know how or maybe wasn't able to love him back. My friends' favorite poem from the book, "You are Jeff," is from this section, and while overall it wasn't my favorite, I agree with them about the last stanza, the one that starts "You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you he loves you, but he loves you." If I could pick out just one thing from the book to share with someone else it'd be that stanza, but it's sort of unrepresentative, because it's like he finally reached the calm after the storm, the resigned acceptance of a truth he no longer rages against, the way he does throughout the rest of the book.

 

 "You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for." (58)

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

 
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

The Best of Early Vanity Fair

edited by Graydon Carter

Penguin

2014 

 

 

It's been kind of an eventful month, right? I've probably spent more time reading the news than reading any of the books I have started. Plus I took a trip, and spent almost the whole time visiting and chatting. But in typical booklover's hubris, I packed my bags with the answers to the questions 'what if I finish my book?' and 'what if I finish my backup book?' and, embarrassingly, 'what if I finish my BACKUP backup book?' Well, I didn't finish anything, and carried a lot of extra weight for nothing, but I was glad that my main read was a collection of short essays, just the thing for times when there are too many competing demands on one's attention.
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells is a collection of articles published in Vanity Fair in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Of the 400 or so pages, the 1910s and 30s each get about a hundred pages, and the 20s fill half the book with the other two.
 
Compared to An Editor's Burial, which was a tightly focused collection of New Yorker articles meant to show off certain authors and specific subjects, BBFS is clearly intended to show off Vanity Fair's range, and I suspect, to flaunt as many famous names as possible, even if it's hard to believe that what they wrote was in any sense 'the best' of anything. (I'm thinking especially of AA Milne's dull account of publishers thinking his author bio was too boring...) These pieces are all much shorter than the New Yorker reprints too, usually only 3 or 5 book pages long. I bet most of these would've fit on a single magazine page, maybe two if they had to share space with advertising or illustrations.
 
Most of the articles are nonfiction essays, although there are a handful of short stories and a smattering of poetry by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and TS Eliot. The best of these, I think, was ee cumming's "When Calvin Coolidge Laughed," which blurs the line between story and prose poem and depicts nationwide rioting and disorder in a sing-song tall-tale voice in response to the shock of hearing Coolidge sound happy. Colette's story "The Woman Behind the Mask," which shows a husband's jealous shock at spotting his wife having an awfully good time at an Eyes Wide Shut style masked orgy, which he'd snuck out to after telling her he'd never go to such a thing, was also pretty good.
 
The nonfiction pieces are a blend of trend reporting and profiles of famous people, and depending on how you look at it, those might not even count as two different kinds of things. My favorites were the satirical trend pieces, which rather than straight reporting, subjected whatever fad or style to some gentle fun. I loved PG Wodehouse's "The Physical Culture Peril" about the danger that fitness and exercise will make you a boring conversationalist; Hyman Strunsky's "Are Odd Women Really Odd?" in defense of women's suffrage, employment, and sexual freedom; and F Scott Fitzgerald's metafictional "This is a Magazine," which is a script for a short play where all the characters are different types of magazine articles.
 
Much of the regular reporting lacks flair by contrast, even when the subject should be intrinsically interesting, like Samuel Chotzinoff's condensed (and kind of racist) history of jazz or Bertrand Russell's explanation of behaviorism. There were a few that stood out to me, both for their quality and foresight. Robert Sherwood's "The Higher Education on the Screen" fears what kids are learning about the world from the movies. Walter Lippman's "Blazing Publicity," which depicts newspaper and other media coverage as a spotlight that subjects certain people and events to intense scrutiny, one at a time, before moving on to the next thing, and leaving whatever happens outside that spotlight comparatively 'in the dark,' which still sounds more or less like how it's done today. Walter Winchell's "A Primer of Broadway Slang" surprised me, because I knew almost every term he mentioned, a few from watching so much Looney Tunes growing up, but mostly because they left the backstage, entered the common tongue, and are still in circulation now.
 
While women's rights are mostly referred to positively, especially earlier in the book, Aldous Huxley got an essay to complain that sex outside of marriage shouldn't be considered 'modern' (or by implication, 'good'); DH Lawrence warns that while women seem to enjoy having sex for pleasure, they're sure to soon regret jettisoning romance and marriage; and Clarence Darrow totally beclowns himself by waxing nostalgic about the great discursive community that used to be found in barbershops before men could easily shave at home, and then concludes that it's women voting and getting short haircuts that's really ruining things, and that men are now an oppressed minority. Yes, even a hundred years ago, there were men whining that any little advance for women meant that men were being persecuted and we'd better turn back whatever gains we'd made toward equality before it was too late. It's sometimes hard to tell if these guys are sincerely panicking or making a cynical bad faith argument in the hope that it's more persuasive than raw misogyny would be, but it hardly matters because they're always wrong. They always think any step toward equality is 'too far' because what they really want is more in-equality, specifically the kind that favors themselves. (There's a similar sort of White reaction to any advancement for people of color that's just as awful.)
 
The celebrity profiles again mostly seem like editor Graydon Carter simply wanted to show off all the people who wrote for Vanity Fair and all the people they wrote about. We get so-so stories about Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Harpo Marx. The best one, I think, was Janet Flanner's "The Grand Guillotiner of Paris" about how even in the 1930s, being a French executioner was a hereditary position endowed by the state, and the family privately owned the only working guillotines in the country. Darwin Teilhet also has an interesting piece about the then-ubiquitous Tarzan and the many, many licensing opportunities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to get the character into books, magazines, the movies and Sunday newspaper comic strips, and working as an ad spokesman for countless products. Unlike a lot of the others pieces, those seem to be here due to sheer quality, rather than because they talk about something modern readers are likely to strongly associate with the time period.

Radial Symmetry

 

Radial Symmetry

by Katherine Larson

Yale University Press

2011

 

 

I'm halfway through a longer novel, but taking a break to read some poetry. Katherine Larson is a working biologist as well as a poet, and Radial Symmetry is so far her only collection.

 
Larson writes about love, about a loved on dying, about a research project on a Mediterranean beach, about loneliness. Her poems tend to refer to a specific moment in time and space, when she felt a particular emotion in response to a certain stimulus. She's very effective at evoking the specifics of both the place and the emotion.

 
When I read Kimiko Hahn's poems earlier this year, they reminded me of little essays. Larson's feel more like single memories - individual moments trapped in glass. For whatever reason, I think I like Larson's work better.

 
Larson uses a lot of oceanic imagery, and also frequently references sea birds, mollusks, insects. They're both real and metaphorical, but not romantic. She writes about the stink of rotting carcasses on the beach, and viscerally describes how an animal's body is turned into a meal.

 
Most of Larson's lines are short. They usually break mid-sentence, creating pauses that interrupt how how you would read it, if it were printed out like prose. Some of her poems are just one long stanza. The others are usually made up of 3-line stanzas. The shortness of the lines fits the mood of someone slowly recounting a memory, adding details as they surface in the mind.

Toxic Flora

 
Toxic Flora

by Kimiko Hahn

WW Norton

2010

 

 

Toxic Flora is another poetry collection by Kimiko Hahn. This time each poem is inspired by a specific article from the New York Times' science section. There's even a bibliographic key at the end, to link each poem to its inspiration.

 
I thought I was going to really like this one based on the premise, but it didn't do much for me. I have a sense that I'd rather have read the original articles, or prose essays inspired by them, instead.

 
Hahn writes about the relationships between plants and insects, about space including exoplanets and dwarf planets in our own system, about extinct birds, and about fish.

 
Each poem also links each topic to human relationships - her dates, her divorces, her fraught connection to her newly adult daughter. Often this link appears only in the final line, attempting to recontextualize what had appeared to be a simple description as a metaphor.

 
I'll probably wait a bit before reading more poetry.

Foreign Bodies

 
Foreign Bodies
by Kimiko Hahn
WW Norton

2020

 

 

I think I saw Foreign Bodies on a list of the best book covers of 2020, of all places, but the description sounded interesting (and accidentally very relevant for the first year of the pandemic,) so I found a copy, along with another book of Hahn's poetry I'll read later in the month.

 
The poem that inspired the book's cover art, and that gets mentioned in the jacket copy, is based on Hahn viewing a museum's wunderkammer that housed a collection of objects children swallowed that were retrieved from their bodies by the doctor who invented the endoscope.

 
Much more of the book however, is devoted to Hahn thinking about her father who died recently, and her mother who died longer ago. Her father was a hoarder, and she likens his house to a museum's cabinet of curiosities. Among the things lost in there, somewhere, are her mother's ashes. Hahn also reflects on her grandmother's internment as a Japaense woman in the US, and, if I understood correctly, on a miscarriage she had years earlier.

 
So it's a pretty elagaic collection.

 
I don't read a lot of poetry, and I don't think I really know how to judge it. If these were just essays, I would say that Hahn draws interesting parallels between a museum exhibit of swallowed junk, her father's hoards, and the few treasured possessions from her mother she keeps in a safety deposit box.