When I was young and subject to the tender mercies of religious educators, I learned a maxim popularized by Jesuits: repetitio mater studiorum, repetition is the mother of learning. Later on in my career as pupil and victim, I learned thatrepetitio is a term with some depth. It is dot simply a term denoting a commonplace or rote repetition. Rather it has the arcane sense of a calling back, a renewal. It is, in the words of the alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, the gold of philosophers, which is not the gold of the common folk. In The Attic Nights Aulus Gellius tells us:
repetitio instauratioque ejusdem rei sub alio nomine, recall and renewal are the same thing under a different name. Perhaps Gellius, according to the idiosyncratic understanding of an old man, is shedding some light on not just a point of grammar, but on why we seek and find refreshment in returning to old works.
There are some great nuggets of real wisdom in this comment that seem to go against the grain of modern thinking, which Mike has rightly taken issue with in any case for deliberately limiting the opportunities to repeatedly read a great work of art.
Before now, I wasn't aware of that Jesuit maxim, but I must repeat it to myself and remember it, along with the idea that 'recall and renewal are the same thing', because the poems we treasure and carry with us (and re-read whenever we can) strike me as being our true spiritual resources in a world that seems increasingly to be losing its way.
Joyce gives a pretty balanced account of them in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. In his account, they were obsessed with sin and sex and left him and his classmates in no doubt that those having impure thoughts would be burning forever in eternal fire, but they don't seen to have been as perverted as other celibate religious orders.
There is nothing "sensible" about believing in gods, hell or "salvation" via bloody sacrifices. There was no "hell" in biblical chronologies covering 4,000 years. Then one charlatan invented "hell" in the first gospel, Mark, and eventually billions of gullible Christians came to believe it was real place.
The New Stylus has published - or, more accurately, republished - this fine article on the folly of journals and publishers publishing only works that have been previously unpublished. The argument that the author (Mike Burch) makes is that this piece of perceived wisdom is ultimately detrimental to the well-being of poets because it ensures that only a very small handful of readers ever get to read what they have written, no matter how good it is. The accompanying poem, appropriately called 'The Folly of Wisdom', was previously published and has some great lines, including these:
And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves
that flutter above us, and what she believes -
I can almost remember - goes something like this:
the prince is a horned toad awaiting her kiss.
Thankfully, Shannon had the wisdom and the good sense to republish it here, because the bottom line is that fine works need to be read by as many readers as possible for the well-being of poetry itself - and she, being a fine editor, knows this.
Poetry in Cihcago continues to remind everyone it was the first to publish Eliot. Its prestige is largely based on that fact. Eliot therefore played a large part in establishing the journal's reputation. But I agree the ongoing demand of previously unpublished is automatic, as opposed to being based on any hope of being the first to publish some new literary phenom. Poetry today occupies a much tinier niche in the public mind than it did a hundred years ago, and thus republishing poems is entirely unikely to produce a deja vu reaction. Journals should feel glad if a good writer lets them reprint him/her. It might even boost their standing with readers.
Surely the whole point of poetry is that it bears rereading. In fact of course if it's any good it absolutely demands it. You want to reread it. And then again. And then again.
'Memorable' doesn't just mean unforgettable - lots of horrible things are that - it also means you *want* to remember it. And 'wisdom' doesn't just mean some hoary old adage, with which we've been utterly bored long since, but, more importantly, some startling new insight which casts a whole new light upon everything. Including ourselves. We see ourselves in an entirely new way. As we really are.
Religions often repeat particular sayings almost ad nauseam. Except of course that far from nauseating us they reassure. Whereas, with politics and journalism, it's always some new wonder, or horror - more usually the latter - but in any case something soon forgotten about, except by musty old historians. And needing to be forgotten about if we're to live our lives as abundantly as we can.
Pound reiterated his mottos 'Make it new' and 'Poetry is news that stays news'. And Rilke too talked about the importance of seeing things as if for the first time. This is wisdom. This is what is genuinely memorable. This is what poetry is really about.
I am forever rereading, and as with Montaigne, the texts I revisit are always brand new, because my memory's at least as bad as his was. While I indeed want to remember many of the words of authors I've found agreeable, I must always go back to them to know what they said, although I do write down quotes sometimes as a mnemonic aid. Last week I wrote down "Absence destroys weak passion but increases strong," and thus can now quote those words which express a truth in a crisply wrought apothegm. They are Hume's. But yes, to your point, which is a good one, a reader will wish to return to agreeable territory even if little specific is remembered about its terrain. l somehow did remember, right from the first encounter, Schopenhauer's observation that "religion is like fireflies, it shines best in the dark"--but with my memory, I can only hope I got him word-perfect.
What poetry's most about for me is self-translation, turning one's understanding and experience inside out, and as truly to one's self-awareness as one can. If I'm odd and original enough, I suppose things I write could startle, possibly strike some as a new take on something. and one worth considering. I never think of readers when I write; I'm wholly focused on geting myself right.
Yes. It's strange that, isn't it? The less one thinks about one's possible readers, and the more one focuses on oneself, and the actual poem, the more likely one is to come up with something that in the end will please the reader. (One wonders how Shakespeare thought about it. And how much his attitude varied between his plays, say, and his sonnets.) I suppose it's because one is one's own ideal reader, and one is acting the part of oneself to oneself, and the deeper one gets into a poem the more universal the regions into which one will be entering.
Ultimately one enters a realm where everything is utterly paradoxical.
Auden at one point wrote the line 'in solitude for company'. He was referring to the business of writing. But did he think about his readers while he was writing?
Of course just by the very fact of using a common language one is involved with other people. And I do tend to craft my poems in the direction of greater and greater comprehensibility, where I want them to be comprehensible. But sometimes I don't want them to be understood, not even by myself. In many ways it is like the confessional. A private confession to God which the priest just happens to overhear.
And then what of those poems that are specifically addressed to another person? And then the dedication of a whole book? Pound once dedicated a book of poems to a friend of his adding the afterthought 'if she wants them'! I wonder how much she appreciated the afterthought.
When I've written incomprehensibly on purpose, i.e. knowing the audience will be left clueless, it's been by way of parody and self-amusement. Instances of that sort will always mean something very specific and real to me however, even though no one else will ever get it. When not indulging in parody, but my writing still bewilders readers, it's because I'm not addressing them but another audience, one less likely to to be stumped, one acquainted enough with me and/or certain circumstances to get what I'm saying. The inside story will mean more to insiders.
When addressing the generality on matters of importance to people, my aim is not to be misunderstood by any reader. When addressing the crowd I aim to come thru quite clearly.
Yet all my writing is merely a pastime. It distracts me from reality, from ennui, boredom, dull routine, various unpleasant deprivations. I write to forget time and space, to the extent possible. My company in solitude call it.
My poetry is never fictive. The notion that poetry should ignore personal experience and worldview is absurd. Allegory's ok if it sticks close enough to fact not to be read as fiction. My taste leans decidedly to realism.
Voltaire declared that writing could enlighten others. His own proved him right, but he made a strict point of confining all his writing to the practical domain.. His pamphlets and all his works and writings focused exclusively on the injustices of everyday life, never questioning the race's most sacred assumptions. No, every word he wrote was to dethone religious tyranny. He settled for that as his target, since it was one he could hit with no worry of being ignored. He called Montaigne "the least methodical but wisest of philosophers." He himself was the most practical of philosophers, restricting his philosophic efforts to an assault on the church and its abettors in the French ruling class. Thinkers who--unlike me--stick to practical ends have the best chance of rallying support. Was it Hume, Emerson, one of them anyway, who said the masses would always dictate events. Whoever said it was right.
When I write incomprehensibly on purpose it is merely to point out the absurdity of the world we live in. Or some other more direct absurdity. One of my English teachers was an exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd: NF Simpson. And in any case I'm rather an absurd person in myself.
Incidentally I occasionally include putative replies and comments in my poems from my putative readers. So quite a lively conversation can be got going. Indeed it can get quite heated.
Like other hives, other colonies, it is forever conscripting new drones, new workers. After reproduction, indusry is life's main driver. Thus the chipmunk collects nuts to store in his undergound larder. Self-replication and self-preservation sum it up nicely. Can the obligatory ever please?
You and the world are in harmony then? Both being absurd? Ah, the celestial harmony. "All sound and fury, signifying nothing" always made me wonder if Shakespeare got the idea from experience "at stool." Sometimes, as you no doubt know, after seating oneself on the throne to make a deposit, nothing comes forth but a burst of gas.
Something that distinguishes Montaigne from all other thinkers is that he gives you 2 for the price of one. Both his take on the world, and autobiography, down even to his preference for no audience when "at stool," which he seemed to regard as a bit unmanly, a fault in himself. Long ago, when I still read them, I noticed that novels always had characters that never used bathrooms. I once owned a book entitled "Everyone Poops." I kept it in the front hall, so all visitors might know they couldn't hide certain things from me. It was a children's book, and was illustrated.
I agree with that, Tom. I think that poetry has largely lost it's standing in the world, and that poets are not valued in the manner they once were. It isn't that the poets aren't there anymore because theHyperTexts and a few other online sites have plenty of good ones. The problem as I see it is that the editors and the publishers of the mainstream journals and poetry books have no interest in them. They just don't care what's good or bad anymore - that it's all about what the market wants, and what they can sell to a public fixated on relatively trivial things such as youth and image and soundbites.
It's the mainstream journals and publishers and colleges that have driven the real poets and real poetry underground by deliberately not helping them, or it - and by turning mediocrity and mediocre concerns into a very lucrative business for themselves and a few 'right profile' people they can easily dispose of when better 'cash-cows' come along.
Mammon worship indeed seems to have the world today in a tighter-than-ever stranglehold. Sales and profits are all. Hardly a shekel to be made on any muse's word-art, whether the apogee or the nadir. God knows enough people try to write the stuff-- but most today have their noses permanently glued to their gizmos, those hypnotic little square pocket devices they can't take their eyes off, and whatever the fixating element in them is, I'm somehow sure it isn't poetry. Whatever it is, it has proven quite addictive quite fast.
Culture has been in deep decline for quite some time now. It can feel like the start of a new Dark Age. Not the best time for anyone who should be remembered to be alive. I foresee no easy recovery from where everyone is now and is further headed. When selfishness becomes inextirpably entrenched, you might as well try to wipe out knotweed. Rules and policies need to be radically changed before recovery can begin. Only revolutions can yield quick policy changes. I see none on the horizon.
When I was young and subject to the tender mercies of religious educators, I learned a maxim popularized by Jesuits: repetitio mater studiorum, repetition is the mother of learning. Later on in my career as pupil and victim, I learned thatrepetitio is a term with some depth. It is dot simply a term denoting a commonplace or rote repetition. Rather it has the arcane sense of a calling back, a renewal. It is, in the words of the alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, the gold of philosophers, which is not the gold of the common folk. In The Attic Nights Aulus Gellius tells us:
repetitio instauratioque ejusdem rei sub alio nomine, recall and renewal are the same thing under a different name. Perhaps Gellius, according to the idiosyncratic understanding of an old man, is shedding some light on not just a point of grammar, but on why we seek and find refreshment in returning to old works.
There are some great nuggets of real wisdom in this comment that seem to go against the grain of modern thinking, which Mike has rightly taken issue with in any case for deliberately limiting the opportunities to repeatedly read a great work of art.
Before now, I wasn't aware of that Jesuit maxim, but I must repeat it to myself and remember it, along with the idea that 'recall and renewal are the same thing', because the poems we treasure and carry with us (and re-read whenever we can) strike me as being our true spiritual resources in a world that seems increasingly to be losing its way.
Hopkins was a Jesuit. They're pretty sensible people, apparently.
Joyce gives a pretty balanced account of them in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. In his account, they were obsessed with sin and sex and left him and his classmates in no doubt that those having impure thoughts would be burning forever in eternal fire, but they don't seen to have been as perverted as other celibate religious orders.
There is nothing "sensible" about believing in gods, hell or "salvation" via bloody sacrifices. There was no "hell" in biblical chronologies covering 4,000 years. Then one charlatan invented "hell" in the first gospel, Mark, and eventually billions of gullible Christians came to believe it was real place.
The only religion I believe in, and I've said this many times, is about love and kindness and compassion for all living things.
I agree. Of course we need justice here on earth but no decent human being or deity would condemn anyone to eternal suffering.
It's an honor to be published by Shannon Winestone and The New Stylus. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.
The New Stylus has published - or, more accurately, republished - this fine article on the folly of journals and publishers publishing only works that have been previously unpublished. The argument that the author (Mike Burch) makes is that this piece of perceived wisdom is ultimately detrimental to the well-being of poets because it ensures that only a very small handful of readers ever get to read what they have written, no matter how good it is. The accompanying poem, appropriately called 'The Folly of Wisdom', was previously published and has some great lines, including these:
And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves
that flutter above us, and what she believes -
I can almost remember - goes something like this:
the prince is a horned toad awaiting her kiss.
Thankfully, Shannon had the wisdom and the good sense to republish it here, because the bottom line is that fine works need to be read by as many readers as possible for the well-being of poetry itself - and she, being a fine editor, knows this.
Totally agree. But I don't suppose you'll publish this even once.
Poetry in Cihcago continues to remind everyone it was the first to publish Eliot. Its prestige is largely based on that fact. Eliot therefore played a large part in establishing the journal's reputation. But I agree the ongoing demand of previously unpublished is automatic, as opposed to being based on any hope of being the first to publish some new literary phenom. Poetry today occupies a much tinier niche in the public mind than it did a hundred years ago, and thus republishing poems is entirely unikely to produce a deja vu reaction. Journals should feel glad if a good writer lets them reprint him/her. It might even boost their standing with readers.
Habits die hard.
Surely the whole point of poetry is that it bears rereading. In fact of course if it's any good it absolutely demands it. You want to reread it. And then again. And then again.
'Memorable' doesn't just mean unforgettable - lots of horrible things are that - it also means you *want* to remember it. And 'wisdom' doesn't just mean some hoary old adage, with which we've been utterly bored long since, but, more importantly, some startling new insight which casts a whole new light upon everything. Including ourselves. We see ourselves in an entirely new way. As we really are.
Religions often repeat particular sayings almost ad nauseam. Except of course that far from nauseating us they reassure. Whereas, with politics and journalism, it's always some new wonder, or horror - more usually the latter - but in any case something soon forgotten about, except by musty old historians. And needing to be forgotten about if we're to live our lives as abundantly as we can.
Pound reiterated his mottos 'Make it new' and 'Poetry is news that stays news'. And Rilke too talked about the importance of seeing things as if for the first time. This is wisdom. This is what is genuinely memorable. This is what poetry is really about.
I am forever rereading, and as with Montaigne, the texts I revisit are always brand new, because my memory's at least as bad as his was. While I indeed want to remember many of the words of authors I've found agreeable, I must always go back to them to know what they said, although I do write down quotes sometimes as a mnemonic aid. Last week I wrote down "Absence destroys weak passion but increases strong," and thus can now quote those words which express a truth in a crisply wrought apothegm. They are Hume's. But yes, to your point, which is a good one, a reader will wish to return to agreeable territory even if little specific is remembered about its terrain. l somehow did remember, right from the first encounter, Schopenhauer's observation that "religion is like fireflies, it shines best in the dark"--but with my memory, I can only hope I got him word-perfect.
What poetry's most about for me is self-translation, turning one's understanding and experience inside out, and as truly to one's self-awareness as one can. If I'm odd and original enough, I suppose things I write could startle, possibly strike some as a new take on something. and one worth considering. I never think of readers when I write; I'm wholly focused on geting myself right.
Yes. It's strange that, isn't it? The less one thinks about one's possible readers, and the more one focuses on oneself, and the actual poem, the more likely one is to come up with something that in the end will please the reader. (One wonders how Shakespeare thought about it. And how much his attitude varied between his plays, say, and his sonnets.) I suppose it's because one is one's own ideal reader, and one is acting the part of oneself to oneself, and the deeper one gets into a poem the more universal the regions into which one will be entering.
Ultimately one enters a realm where everything is utterly paradoxical.
Auden at one point wrote the line 'in solitude for company'. He was referring to the business of writing. But did he think about his readers while he was writing?
Of course just by the very fact of using a common language one is involved with other people. And I do tend to craft my poems in the direction of greater and greater comprehensibility, where I want them to be comprehensible. But sometimes I don't want them to be understood, not even by myself. In many ways it is like the confessional. A private confession to God which the priest just happens to overhear.
And then what of those poems that are specifically addressed to another person? And then the dedication of a whole book? Pound once dedicated a book of poems to a friend of his adding the afterthought 'if she wants them'! I wonder how much she appreciated the afterthought.
When I've written incomprehensibly on purpose, i.e. knowing the audience will be left clueless, it's been by way of parody and self-amusement. Instances of that sort will always mean something very specific and real to me however, even though no one else will ever get it. When not indulging in parody, but my writing still bewilders readers, it's because I'm not addressing them but another audience, one less likely to to be stumped, one acquainted enough with me and/or certain circumstances to get what I'm saying. The inside story will mean more to insiders.
When addressing the generality on matters of importance to people, my aim is not to be misunderstood by any reader. When addressing the crowd I aim to come thru quite clearly.
Yet all my writing is merely a pastime. It distracts me from reality, from ennui, boredom, dull routine, various unpleasant deprivations. I write to forget time and space, to the extent possible. My company in solitude call it.
My poetry is never fictive. The notion that poetry should ignore personal experience and worldview is absurd. Allegory's ok if it sticks close enough to fact not to be read as fiction. My taste leans decidedly to realism.
Voltaire declared that writing could enlighten others. His own proved him right, but he made a strict point of confining all his writing to the practical domain.. His pamphlets and all his works and writings focused exclusively on the injustices of everyday life, never questioning the race's most sacred assumptions. No, every word he wrote was to dethone religious tyranny. He settled for that as his target, since it was one he could hit with no worry of being ignored. He called Montaigne "the least methodical but wisest of philosophers." He himself was the most practical of philosophers, restricting his philosophic efforts to an assault on the church and its abettors in the French ruling class. Thinkers who--unlike me--stick to practical ends have the best chance of rallying support. Was it Hume, Emerson, one of them anyway, who said the masses would always dictate events. Whoever said it was right.
When I write incomprehensibly on purpose it is merely to point out the absurdity of the world we live in. Or some other more direct absurdity. One of my English teachers was an exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd: NF Simpson. And in any case I'm rather an absurd person in myself.
Incidentally I occasionally include putative replies and comments in my poems from my putative readers. So quite a lively conversation can be got going. Indeed it can get quite heated.
Does it ignite a bonfire of the vanities?
Like other hives, other colonies, it is forever conscripting new drones, new workers. After reproduction, indusry is life's main driver. Thus the chipmunk collects nuts to store in his undergound larder. Self-replication and self-preservation sum it up nicely. Can the obligatory ever please?
You and the world are in harmony then? Both being absurd? Ah, the celestial harmony. "All sound and fury, signifying nothing" always made me wonder if Shakespeare got the idea from experience "at stool." Sometimes, as you no doubt know, after seating oneself on the throne to make a deposit, nothing comes forth but a burst of gas.
Something that distinguishes Montaigne from all other thinkers is that he gives you 2 for the price of one. Both his take on the world, and autobiography, down even to his preference for no audience when "at stool," which he seemed to regard as a bit unmanly, a fault in himself. Long ago, when I still read them, I noticed that novels always had characters that never used bathrooms. I once owned a book entitled "Everyone Poops." I kept it in the front hall, so all visitors might know they couldn't hide certain things from me. It was a children's book, and was illustrated.
I agree with that, Tom. I think that poetry has largely lost it's standing in the world, and that poets are not valued in the manner they once were. It isn't that the poets aren't there anymore because theHyperTexts and a few other online sites have plenty of good ones. The problem as I see it is that the editors and the publishers of the mainstream journals and poetry books have no interest in them. They just don't care what's good or bad anymore - that it's all about what the market wants, and what they can sell to a public fixated on relatively trivial things such as youth and image and soundbites.
It's the mainstream journals and publishers and colleges that have driven the real poets and real poetry underground by deliberately not helping them, or it - and by turning mediocrity and mediocre concerns into a very lucrative business for themselves and a few 'right profile' people they can easily dispose of when better 'cash-cows' come along.
Salut Martin.
Mammon worship indeed seems to have the world today in a tighter-than-ever stranglehold. Sales and profits are all. Hardly a shekel to be made on any muse's word-art, whether the apogee or the nadir. God knows enough people try to write the stuff-- but most today have their noses permanently glued to their gizmos, those hypnotic little square pocket devices they can't take their eyes off, and whatever the fixating element in them is, I'm somehow sure it isn't poetry. Whatever it is, it has proven quite addictive quite fast.
Culture has been in deep decline for quite some time now. It can feel like the start of a new Dark Age. Not the best time for anyone who should be remembered to be alive. I foresee no easy recovery from where everyone is now and is further headed. When selfishness becomes inextirpably entrenched, you might as well try to wipe out knotweed. Rules and policies need to be radically changed before recovery can begin. Only revolutions can yield quick policy changes. I see none on the horizon.