As for item two, the point is taken. I am surprised you didn’t pull out the really big gun, when it comes to language-ing means, and example James Joyce in his self-imposed exile. On the other hand, the case could be made that Joyce wasn’t standing on the outside looking in. Rather, that he interiorized the language in the same way, and to the same lively extent, he first interiorized the map of Dublin’s city streets, then interiorized a certain epic poem, ending up interiorizing the whole of ancient Irish mythology. I guess if I were in your position and an expat this would be something of how I would go after the language.

Terreson
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http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300124231

Why Poetry Matters, by Jay Parini
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When you talk about a poet’s “strategy” of “style,” I think we have to realize that Gertrude Stein and her fellow High Modernists occupied a different world than poets like you and I.

As you know, with her brother, Leo, Gertrude was at the center of the Modern Painting movement, not only in terms of style, but in terms of influence, generally. Gertrude Stein was taught her automatic writing style by the distinguished philosopher, William James, while she was at Harvard.

All poets who get on the radar consciously do choose a style, one that, in most cases, a mentor suggests to them.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about in terms of the High Modernists:

Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” which famously excoriates the academic insularity of contemporary po-biz, exempts the High Modernists from the whole thrust of his critique, holding them aloft as a shining counter-example.

Gioia would agree with you that the Modernists did not reduce style to a “strategy.” I would disagree. I think the Modernists most certainly did, albeit in complex, and naturally evolving ways.

The rise of the workshop, the migration of poetry into the academy, the diminishment of poetry as a popular art, occurred because of conscious actions by the High Modernists—yet Gioia, and Joseph Epstein in his “Who Killed Poetry?” which Gioia imitated, speak of High Modernism as the good old days–before all the trouble.

This is the most blinkered view one could possibly take.

I only bring up Gioia, Martin, because you have used the High Modernists in your example.

If we’re going to talk about “choices” of “style” that get a poet read, then, yes, all poets who have made names for themselves did absolutely make choices to manifest a certain style,’ and, in terms of the High Modernists, like Gertrude Stein or William Carlos Williams, whom you mentioned, I refer not only to the manifesto-ism of High Modernism, but practical choices and strategies, which led poetry in precisely the direction which Gioia found so appalling in his by-now-classic broadside.

In his essay, Gioia uses terms like “clubby” and “coterie” to describe contemporary poetry.

Now, “Can Poetry Matter” cites as a sign of health, the example of the ‘Kenyon Review’ publishing, alongside its critical essays, poems by Robert Lowell.

Is it possible Gioia was unaware that Lowell left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, and that Ransom ran the Kenyon Review?

John Crowe Ransom, who is not mentioned in Gioia’s essay, was in the thick of High Modernism, not only as founder of the Fugitives and New Criticism, but he was also instrumental in making poetry an academic concern. (See essays such “Criticism, Inc” in which Ransom argues critics must be university-trained.)

Gioia nostalgically swoons over 1940, when there was “but one Writers Workshop,” recently founded at Iowa. What Gioia fails to mention is that Iowa workshop founder Paul Engle had connections to Ransom and the Fugitives (Engle was chosen for the Yale Younger in 1932 by William Alexander Percy, the Fugitive “godfather”). Allen Tate, a Fugitive/New Critic who is praised by Gioia in his essay, founded a Writing Workshop in 1942, at Princeton.

In brief, “Can Poetry Matter” favors those who were busily working towards the very result to which the essay objects.

Gioia makes much of the fact that most published contemporary poets teach creative writing for a living and that contemporary poetry anthologies consist of poets who teach each other.

Then Gioia names “independent” poets like Wallace Stevens, who had “real jobs” as businessmen, and poets like Ezra Pound, who “earned a living with their writing.” Gioia’s point regarding the incestuous nature po-biz may have a certain validity, but his Modernist counter-examples crumble under analysis.

Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot were shaped by the same two professors at Harvard, George Santayana and William James.

Wallace Stevens was a ground floor Imagist, part of the extremely well-connected coterie of Modernists which included Cummings (also at Harvard), Moore, and, of course, Pound.

None of these little magazine poets “earned their living” from writing. The Modernists were subsidized by all sorts of individuals and looked out for one another exclusively.

Gioia’s notion that the public is turned off by poetry today, and yet somehow everything was different when the public was buying up books by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens is a notion that prevents real headway on this whole matter.

Williams, Stevens, and Pound all began as Imagists. They all made that conscious strategic choice based on their affiliation with men like Santayana and T.E. Hulme. Modernism began narrowly, very narrowly, and with a strategy.

If we don’t acknowlege this, a truly historical understanding of modern poetry is lost.

There isn’t time to go into the whole story here, but the historical gap in Gioia’s thesis–through which the Modernists march untouched–needs to be sealed up.

The “style” of Imagism, and the subsequent “style” of the New Criticism (T.S. Eliot’s “difficulty” joined together with Fugitive theorists around Ransom), were “choices” every High Modernist poet made, and which every poet made in order to get known.

I’m sorry if this sounds cynical, Martin; and please do pardon the crudeness of my rhetorical sweep–which space constraints made necessary.

Thomas
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I tried earlier today respond to your comment, but it seems to have gotten lost in the electricity.

I liked the way you put this: “…just because you look at it from the outside doesn’t mean you can’t also experience it from the inside, as well.”

Patrick Kavanagh’s great poem “Epic” (which I’ve cited before in this space, though I can’t remember where) speaks to your concerns in this comment. Just in case you haven’t read it, here’s a link:

http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Written/Epic.html

Pound is a very interesting case in all of this. He wrote, as we all know, his Pisan Cantos -some say his greatest poetry – sitting in a cage in a military detention center without any of his usual apparatus criticus and most likely in a state of some disorientation.

Martin
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Just to respond quickly to two important points:

1. The question of “choice” – nature vs. nurture aside, do you really think poets chose to write in one style or another? This seems to reduce style to a kind of strategy? In my post, I was talking about a sudden realization that the style I was writing in, partly under the influence of my teachers, wouldn’t do. It took a few years to start writing in another way.

2. The idea that poets need contact with their language as it evolves has been debated forever. I think some poets do, and some do not. Gertrude Stein didn’t – she was happy – in France – to have English all to herself. Likewise Elizabeth Bishop. Yet Pasternak refused to leave Russia which turned into the Soviet Union (much to his own hardship when he was still a young poet) because he couldn’t imagine living without the Russian language in his ear. One can’t imagine Williams (though he did spend a good bit of time abroad) going to long without New Jersey. I take your point, but I think it has more to do with the particular poet. There are no rules about this and great poets have arisen out of both contexts.

Martin
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Today we need the classroom, the M.F.A. professor in front of us, the modernist poetry text with its particulars, in order to make poetry.

I don’t think you were being snarky at all, Tere. I suppose others would respond by saying, well it doesn’t hurt to look at language from all directions; just because you look at it from the outside doesn’t mean you can’t also experience it from the inside, as well. And, in your example, Yeats and Pound are both right; you need ‘the village, the scene, the particular,’ but you also have to make it universal. But then a poet shouldn’t have to think, “Oh, I like this particular, now let me think on how to make it universal,” the whole thing should be more unconscious than that. Which is why nobody trusts Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” formula. We don’t trust anyone with a formula. But we seem to fall in love with half-formulas, timid, placid, compromising sorts of formulas. Maybe that’s a greater problem: blandness.

Thomas
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The other comment whose sense escapes me is this: “These days, the best way to see the English language is to look at it from the outside, to hear how the world speaks it, and to learn to speak in their languages, as both a gesture of respect, and for the insight it provides into the relationship between the syntax of a culture and the way that culture manifests itself materially. It is only then that one can begin to understand the forces that have come to form our own contemporary vernacular.” This strikes me as counter-intuitive. Language is morphological. So to speak, it morphs. And the changes it assumes are environmentally produced. How then is a poet to keep responsive to language if she assumes a position on the outside looking in?

One last thought maybe. In his old man journals, I think it might have been in ’33, Yeats commented on Pound’s notions concerning the creation of a “universal language of poetry.” (A notion pretty Imperialistic when you think about it.) Yeats said the notion was not for him. He said he needed the village, the peasant woman in front of him, the scene, the particular, in order to make poetry.

Terreson
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Annie,

Thanks for the encouragement!!!!!!

This little incident, about the poem coming into your head in French as you say (“coming into the head” – that’s nice) is a major preoccupation of mine. I’m always trying to figure out how language is working in the brain. For instance, are different neurons firing and carrying information when we write different things, poetry, letters, commentary; or even when we’re sticking to a form, or writing more openly. I spent a few years after the events that I describe in the post above writing strictly in form (not as inventively as you do in your work, but nevertheless, with meter, rhyme, stanza patterns etc…in fact I wrote a book-length poem in rhyme royal which contained description of landscapes, philosophical passages, even recipes for making crack in your kitchen – crazy stuff. But I found that I could say more, bring a greater variety of material into the poem in the strict setting of the form – seven lines with only three rhymes – than I ever could in a more open approach. After about four years of writing in form I relaxed back into so-called free verse. But it still retained a quality of formalism.

I think foreign languages open up new space in the brain. Brain imaging shows that in multi-lingual children the spaces occupied by different languages are contiguous, while in adults who have learned a second language after, say, 18 or 19, those spaces are separate, as though the mind were looking for a place to store the new linguistic material. When I go to France, as I often do, or Belgium, it takes me several days to push the Portuguese out of the way to get at the French. Sometimes, in the States, in certain situations, or when I’m surprised, I’ll start speaking spontaneously in Portuguese, which of course draws the looks. Sometimes translating I’ll fix a sentence in my head in Portuguese, and then, instead of translating it into English, I’ll start typing out a paraphrase of the original in Portuguese. Sometimes, I’ll be reading something, when I’m traveling, like the inside of a tin of little cigars, and won’t know at first what language I’m reading. It’s all very strange indeed. But I think that moving from free verse to formal verse is somewhat similar to moving from language to language. One of my best friends, a Swedish painter, who grew up in France, lived in New York and now spends half of his time in Berlin, uses different languages for different things. He thinks in French, writes in his diary in Swedish, prefers reading in English, conducts his business in German.

King Charles V of Spain: “To God I speak Spanish, to woman Italian, to men French, and to my horse – German.”

Martin
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Thanks for reminding us all of Van Wyk Brooks. That’s a book that I didn’t discover until I actually came to Coimbra. The University library was full of stuff from that period. I read a whole range of things that I probably wouldn’t have read in a more up-to-date library.

Please look up-thread to Erica’s concerns about the “English language empire.” As you call it. You’re absolutely right, the fact that English has become a global language has influenced our capacity to speak other languages. I take this up in my introduction to my English version of Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic, Nuno Nabais (Continuum); you can see this at Google Books – Nietzsche and the metaphysics of the tragic – Google Books Result by Nuno Nabais, Martin Earl – 2006 – Philosophy – 204 pages). The issue I bring up there (similar to what your are describing in your comment) is the fact that most of current Nietzschean scholarship is conducted in English and that N. is more widely read in English than he is in German. This has certainly altered the nature of the scholarship.
As to your last statement, I would disagree. It’s impossible to know a country without knowing, even if imperfectly, its language. I love many countries in Europe, but I don’t know them like a know Portugal. For me, I have to be in the country to learn the language.
I would say, though, that there are plenty of ways, to make it strange. You can do it in Pittsburg or in Paris. And I totally agree with you that poets must do that. I think that somehow thinking that one is reduplicating the vernacular and thereby becoming more authentic, an obsession that runs from Wordsworth to Williams, or linking the poetic line to breathing (Olson and Creeley), are pretexts, descriptions after the organic fact of writing. Poetic speech is pure artifice, a blend of a lot of things: pseudo philosophy and music, colloquial speech and biblical pacing; it’s a narrative of what it feels like to be alive expressed in a language which is stretched, whether towards the minimal, or towards the expansive, the gothic or the baroque, but always stretched. As a mimesis of feeling, it has to be. Modern poetry (and for me that can go all the way back to Donne, but definitely kicks in with Shakespeare’s soliloquies and sonnets, utterly controverts Aristotelian plausibility, a quality which Chaucer, for instance still maintains.

Martin
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I’m writing this on the train down to Lisbon, so it might not get sent until tomorrow. I still don’t have one of those “everywhere” gadgets. Sorry I overlooked your very important comment in the thread. I was just this afternoon banging letters back and forth with Peter Cole, who was sharply critical of the “husk” sentence, as you were. I told Peter about your comment, which I just came across in the thread again yesterday. Like Peter (who I have known for thirty years, and whose work in translation, poetry and the essay should be a model for all of us) and perhaps like you, I am a professional translator. That is, I make my living by translating. I wish poetry made up a larger percentage of the kinds of things I work on than it does, but the money is in scholarship, theatre, film. That’s still on the lucky side of things. Most translators work on pretty dreary stuff indeed. Anyway, all this just to let you know I sympathize with what you are saying and that I’m not talking through my hat.

You’re absolutely right to point out the inconsistencies in my argument. I think (to come to my own rescue) I could have been letting my professional sense get in the way of my critical and philosophical sense. Professionally, when I evaluate potential work I’m looking at things like profit vs. effort. This tends to push one into heirarchizing texts in a way that has nothing to do with looking at them from a more literary critical perspective, or political or social perspective. As the difficulty increases the profit (a derivative of time margins) decreases. So you can imagine where poetry fits in. But I love to translate poetry. If you have time check out this link: http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007May/20quintais-earl.pdf

I like your capsule description of the history of linguistic monopolies, and I think you should expand on the place that translation as “art” has in that paradigm. I’m concerned that that you interpreted what I am saying about the translation of poetry as a “failed derivative reproduction”, but I’m beginning to see how you, and Peter Cole, could have come to this conclusion. I need to think about this further.

I think that in your penultimate paragraph (while I agree with you) you don’t sufficiently distinguish between production and literary and political consequences, i.e., “de-centering our native language,” which is essentially, as I say in this post, and in the three posts specifically on translation, a de-centering of ourselves as producers of that language. In other words, the artist, as poet or translator, is looking for a way to extend her own capacities, to find a way to write; the transformation of the language, adding new capital to our literary heritage, is the result of that. We don’t set out to change the language; we set out to change ourselves.

My friend Richard Zenith, who I am on my way to see at the moment (lucky me for counting two of the greatest literary translators of the day among my best friends) considers translation a craft. Peter Handke, the Austrian poet, novelist and playwright considers it an art equal to writing in one’s original language. Who knows if they’re not saying something very similar? But I’m sure your ideas will come up in our dinner conversation tonight.

Martin
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I had made them hate their cheese. It was awful. How quickly I had become the ugly American.

As an American visiting Europe I experienced a pride that was very intense, but not a pride of ‘here is our country and we live in it,’ but ‘here is the world and we live in it as uniquely as you.’
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I savor the tone of your post–as measured and charming as a light rain in Paris–and resonate to its theme (I remember the startled and unrooted and exploratory feeling I had once when, after several weeks in Paris, I found a poem first coming into my head in French!)

But most of all I admire the attentive way in which you respond to every comment. You are a model conversationalist. Salut!
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First, Thomas, thanks for elaborating on the questions that you put forward. What you describe is what I came here with in 2001 – the mythology of my predecessors, and a naive hope to capture some part of it. But Europe in 2001 (when I moved to Amsterdam) was quiet. Even Paris back then. What I helped start here in Amsterdam in 2002 was a response to the fact that there was nothing of any mythology of the expatriate writer left, and we had to start from scratch. More to the point: there were many isolated non-Dutch writers in Amsterdam in 2002, and as I do have faith in literary community (disclosure), myself and others set out to build one. Paris, Berlin, Prague and others have built similar communities since then, and I would say that “Europe” is rather vibrant again. Whether or not it’s the stuff of myth (or literary movement) making is up to…well, someone else.

As you pointed out, it’s obvious from my previous post that my interest is not so much in the mythology of living abroad as it is in what happens to one’s writing when one moves abroad. I’d generally argue that the writing of our literary expatriate greats changed – even improved – after their moves and long-term residences abroad. But I haven’t looked at that canon closely from this vantage point, so for now please see this as an hypothesis only.

This segues nicely into your last comment about multilingualism. I agree completely with your assessment that learning another language can have similar effects on one’s language/writing as moving abroad. This is one of the reasons why I alluded before to multiple pathways towards translocal characteristics in writing, and that long-term residence abroad is perhaps one of many. Translocality is certainly not new (though the term itself somewhat), but it is arguably a particular characteristic of much literary production today, which is 1) why I am interested and 2) why looking at it in places where it’s happening in high concentration (like Europe) may help sketch its outlines.

Moving quickly on to answer some of your questions, Martin: I’m happy to email you a kind of overview of “what is going on”, perhaps even post some sample copies your way, including some of the first instances of “translocality” in a literary context. Versal is print-only, yes. I honestly don’t want my life to speed up to the pace needed to meet the demands of (what I consider) quality internet publishing, and my editorial team is scattered around the world in constant motion. But I’m headed to Google now to look up Irish Pages; thanks for the note. You can find me on email via versal@wordsinhere.com.
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If one reads Van Wyk Brooks on New England, both volumes, on the linguistic mastery of many of those Harvard professors, guys like George Ticknor, or James Lowell who became ambassador to Spain, and countless others who knew dozens of languages fluently, I couldn’t believe how ambitious and learned these 19th century American scholars were in terms of languages; today it seems scholars are quite lacking in foreign language fluency by comparison, I wonder if this has hurt us deeply as poets and poet/ambassadors? English is now spoken in so many places. This Empire, this anglo-american english-speaking empire; it’s staggering to think of it, really. Has it made us lazy?

When one reads a great line of poetry in another language and comprehends it in that language, knowing it is a wonderful line, even as a ‘foreigner,’ there’s nothing quite like that feeling. But I suppose this can be over-sentimentalized.

Knowing another language helps to depersonalize yourself, helps you to distance yourself from your own language, and I think this is invaluable for poets, for there should be a certain strangeness in language for it to be poetically beautiful, even if the speech in question is ‘mundane.’ This sort of experience with language really doesn’t require that we travel to the country at all. It’s almost two different things really: going there and the language.
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I’d be happy to send you a copy of Edwin’s TIME & AGAIN. If you email me a street address, I can do that.

Yes, I worked on it with Edwin for 2 years or so, in the mid-90s. We tried to find a publisher, for another couple years.

My favorite are the old David McDuff translations of Mandelstam (selected poems, early 70s). Maybe a sentimental favorite. Came upon them on a bookstore shelf in about 1977. Finders keepers.

Yes, I certainly mis-spoke above about Mandelstam’s supposed “realization” in the “mid-30s, if not earlier”. M. was writing a kind of calibrated, ironic political poetry (like Marvell’s Horatian Ode) in the early days of the Revolution (see his poem about the “ship of state”). From there he sort of withered into reality – a reality of both greater complexity & greater emotional immediacy (he was living through Stalin).

But his entire career was a dialogue on 3 simultaneous levels : with poetic tradition (poetry per se); with the ruling regime; and with the Russian people at large. He made it into a game (“in Uglich they are playing knucklebones”, as the Czar is led away to his execution “on a sled”). “My sadness is luminous.” (Pushkin). “Two sisters, heaviness & tenderness – twin roses, bound in a double wreath”.
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Thanks for coming into this thread. I’m just so completely pleased to hear from people in Europe. Bordercrossing Berlin and Versal, and the kind of linkage between people in different cities you’re describing in your first post (APRIL 25, 2009 AT 5:20 AM),is VERY interesting news. I kind of figured something like this had to be happening, somewhere. Thanks so much for the sketching in some of the picture. I really would like to learn more about what’s going on.

Your exchange with Thomas (both of you) is, in my estimation, bringing something entirely new into the house of Harriet. I love the notion of “tanslocality”; it’s much more open and modern and pertinent than any of the definitions I’ve been struggling to come up with. Certainly it seems more fitting than “voluntary exile”, less value laden (or less encumbered by history); a more positive way to look at the experience of writers and artists who are moving about and settling in alternative capitals. Thomas (and he’ll have to respond to this himself) seems to be viewing these issues (US vs Europe, etc) through modernist lenses – the experiences of our most important expatriate writers of a period which probably ended mid-twentieth century. I think I’ve perhaps tended to see it that way myself. Although many European writers continue to take up residence in other European countries (which is quite significant, just as significant for them it is for Americans to go abroad…Peter Handke in France, how many British writers on the continent, Gunther Grass spending large chunks of time in Portugal, Saramago in Spain (albeit off-shore), Tabucchi half the time in Lisbon…the list goes on). But it is less the case during the last thirty years or so that “prominent” U.S, writers leave the States except on sabbaticals or for conferences. They’re not “translocal”…John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles were perhaps the last of a certain generation to live for significant time abroad. Harry Mathews, one of America’s most important novelists, poets, and theorists, is a different case. His fabulous late novels are under-read in America partly because he resists classification, geographically and literarily.

Is Versal a print-only production?

Do you know about Chris Agee’s (he’s an American poet and essayist) fabulous journal, Irish Pages, edited out of Belfast?

Martin
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I second that link to Honig at Jacket – I went to read them (http://jacketmagazine.com/16/honig-poems.html) – his is an understated reverence for the human condition, and a very delicate line…

I linked to his collected as well – it looks very fine. (Did you work directly with E.H. on that?) If I were anywhere near a reasonable bookstore I’d jump on it immediately. His Pessoa was one of the books that I read and re-read (lived through) during my first long trip through Europe in 79. (In fact, it’s twenty-seven years overdue at the Brooklyn College Library – I think, next time I’m in Flatbush, I’ll just drop it in the return slot and quickly slip away. The overdue fine could wipe out my retirement fund).

At any rate, I wanted to thank you for the reference to Elena Corrigan’s “Mandelshtam’s Poetics : a challenge to postmodernism”. Other than the primary texts (in English), poems (for me) – the selected, translated by Brown and Merwin, collected prose, etc., as far as criticism, I’ve only read Clarence Brown’s Mandelstam (Cambridge University Press, 1973), out of date, but still a good read. “Speaking truth to power” is interesting in the context of the Annie Finch’s post on Simone Weil. “Truth” is such a ticky subject in our day an age. George Steiner one of the great contemporary scholars of… let’s call it “comparative truth” never goes so far as to admit that it could be resurrected as a viable category. So I come to your statement that “by the mid-30s, if not before, Mandelstam understood very well that his poetry was contextualized by his political dilemma. When asked (or baited) by an interviewer for his definition of poetry, he responded : “the poet’s sense of being right”. This is basically saying that the poet “speaks truth to power” from poetry’s own realm of “authority””. This seems to divide M’s career into halves. As though he’d suddenly realized that lyrical poetry had, because of events, become irrefutably conditioned by the course of history. It seems to me that all the major Russsian poets of this period came to this same conclusion. Dr. Zhivago, a novel that Nabokov rejected for all the wrong reasons, is really the story of that realization. As you say, his later work was, as James Stotts signals above, “saturated with elegiac lament & double (political) meanings – for the waste & destruction not only of his own life, but of Russian culture & people in general.”

Martin
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Perhaps these questions are “American-centric,” as you say.

I was thinking more of a *tension* between Old World and New which has ceased to exist since Pound and Eliot returned to the Old World.

I thought my questions were almost more “London-centric,” but perhaps they’re an “Anglo-American” indulgence.

I remember how surprised I was when my new friend from London, a middle class, tradesman bloke who I met in a bar in Cambridge, MA, had never heard of Shelley. I immediately had a sense, then, that I was more European than this Brit who preferred living in America to his own England.

Most of us who were “English majors” in American universities traced the Greek & Roman Classics to Europe, then to America, and finally, in the 20th century, to the great U.S./London mingling: the migrating of Pound and Eliot, Auden coming over here (and becoming rather boring in the process), the Euro-centric aspect of American modernism, even Whitman’s reputation saved by the pre-Raphaelites, the French element of Modernism, the European aspect of Longfellow & Poe, the English Romantic poets so, so important to American English majors, and the Blake ‘vision’ for Ginsberg…

Perhaps my questions do spring from a postwar, American ‘English Major’ perspective, which, after all, is huge, a standard and quite uniform university curriculum having given to millions in the U.S what I have described, especially in the era of the GI Bill in the Boomer decades, when English majors were plentiful and were not yet replaced by “Communications” and “Human Service” majors, or, the more specialized Creative Writing degrees, which sounds more like where you are coming from:

“Grant money has borders. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nowhere else to go where you can improve your writing or get support for it.”

Because I’m not really talking here about “improving your writing;” I don’t think that’s what Pound and Eliot, did, per se, when they traveled to Europe.

“Improving your writing” sounds vocational and technical and boring and practical to me, and completely against the spirit of my quesions, though I know of course what you mean.

I’m thinking more of: “meeting Lady Ottoline Morrell” and “taking up a collection to get Tom out of the bank” and “H.D. sleeping with hundreds of lords and ladies” and the mingling of revolutionary ideas and personalities and national and cultural differences and tensions and dangers which seemed so important in the Pound era, but don’t seem to really exist anymore in the world of poetry, at least, as something that can be translated into a standard curriculum taught in the classroom, or made into a myth that all can share.

Sure, a poet can fly to Amsterdam today and have a conference and meet interesting people, but that’s not really the same thing, is it?

Thomas
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Finally, the questions suppose that the location itself is somehow responsible for the success of the writer, rather than the translocation of the writer over time – which is a more interesting and to my mind more accurate description of the development of writers who have moved abroad. Foreign cities do not necessarily embrace their resident foreign writers, at least not anymore. Grant money has borders. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nowhere else to go where you can improve your writing or get support for it. Long-term residence anywhere abroad (what some of us here are calling “translocality”), as Martin has so beautifully described, sets right in, all the way down to the poetic line, and it is that itself which I would say – and which Martin seems to say – is responsible for a writer’s growth when that writer has moved to another country. Martin, your description of your experience writing (or growing back into writing) abroad follows what I would call one of the paths into (contemporary) translocal writing, which could be summarized as awe, dislocation, relocation, and the spanning of multiple locations, identities, cultures to the point of never being quite “home” anymore (or to the point where “home” itself becomes redefined, sometimes internalized, as you have aptly described). This isn’t to say that writing needs a physical move into a foreign country to be translocal, but that such an experience leads to writing with translocal characteristics (e.g. altered, perhaps slightly “off” vernacular, multiple languages within the same text if not line, changed cultural signifiers). And as Martin has hypothesized, it puts your writing (practice) through a test that it needs to reach the “level of art”.

“I would say that the lessons I took from those early days, when I was still living in Paris, before moving to Portugal, were that one’s initial education in the craft needed to be tested severely if the craft was to be raised to the level of art. De-familiarization, self-estrangement and the abandonment of community were, however harsh, ways to test one’s range as a writer.”

This to me seems to be somewhere at the core of “why it even matters in the first place”. But I’m still working out my ideas on this subject (of the “moved” writer, or the translocal writer, or translocal writing itself), and I’m glad to have happened upon this blog. For anyone who’s interested in some of the journals which in some way or another revolve around this very subject, I’ve heard that the new issue of Upstairs at Duroc is coming out soon, as is a new issue of The Prague Revue, and my own journal, Versal, releases its 7th issue at a party here in Amsterdam in May. This brings up a completely different topic, that the “exile” does not have to be completely isolated, as in some cities there’s a great deal of activity.
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These are absolutely essential questions. I’ve bulleted them below, so that I can think about them, and with the hope that others will take them up as well.

Thanks,

Martin

1. Was there ‘a frontier’ in Pound’s day that no longer exists?

2. If so, what was that ‘frontier’ exactly?

3.Is this ‘frontier’ now closed to Americans? Are there no more lands to conquer or experience? Is the ‘frontier’ now the American University or the Poetry Foundation? Are these the last mountains to climb for the world’s poets?

4.Pound crossed the ocean and ‘made his fortune’ as a poet. Is this no longer possible?
And if not, why?
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Martin, don’t tell that to Ezra Pound. Let’s say Pound had stayed in Philly and earned his living as a professor. We could argue that Modern poetry wouldn’t have changed much, perhaps, but Pound’s career certainly would have been vastly different.

This raises a couple of questions.

Was there ‘a frontier’ in Pound’s day that no longer exists?

If so, what was that ‘frontier’ exactly?

Henry Gould went to London with no money or connections in the 70s and almost made his fortune with the Rolling Stones.

Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Pound, and Eliot found an audience and support in London (in all sorts of guises, Poet Laureate, pre-Raphaelite, Bloomsbury, Government, Old World money, Old World aristocracy, radical clubs).

Is this ‘frontier’ now closed to Americans? Are there no more lands to conquer or experience? Is the ‘frontier’ now the American University or the Poetry Foundation? Are these the last mountains to climb for the world’s poets?

Pound crossed the ocean and ‘made his fortune’ as a poet.

Is this no longer possible?

And if not, why?

Thomas
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glad you liked the parshchikov elegy, it’s probably already a little different (and much improved); i post things, and i edit them just as carefree as if the screen were pen-and-paper. i have a little time every day to write and use the computer, and usually use it the same way, like a caged animal making circles: tinker a little, visit this place and the NY times, repeat, back into the corner.
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Since you’re the last one on thread, let me respond to you first. Several of the comments over the last day or two seem to share concerns. I was impressed with the conversation between you and Henry and I’ll get back to that. But let me take up some of your more skeptical seeming thoughts here.

1) Bourgeois education. If you’ve had one, as I did (no denying it) it seems silly to start slumming. But that’s exactly what I did, especially in New York, living in Spanish Harlem (very few of my friends had the nerve to even visit me – in those days it was an extremely tough neighborhood. I was mugged on a few occasions (I know what it is to feel the cold steel of a blade against my throat, etc.); my apartment was robbed and ransacked four times in three years, and at one point an angry and thwarted thief came back and tried to set the building on fire. He nearly burnt the whole place to the ground. I took all this in stride, since it was all part of a kind of exercise to undo my bourgeois background. Except, the deeper into the city I got, the more danger I courted, the more bourgeois I became. “Finding myself”, as you call it, ended up with my finding out how bourgeois I was. It made me more self-aware, more critical, and clearer about what a fortunate life I’d had and what an unfortunate life my neighbors were having.

2) So, by the time I left for Europe I had already gone through that process. I knew Europe well already, having traveled extensively before deciding to go and live there. I was not planning to “change” as a poet, find my real voice, or anything like that. I felt that part had already become quite fixed. The “preciousness” had been bled out of me. I went partly for economic reasons. I could live in Paris more cheaply than in New York and I was frankly tired of my life in New York. I didn’t want to be around poets any more. I wanted to be by myself, clean up my act, get away from narcotics and alcohol, my family, my girlfriend. But mostly I wanted to write, and my life in New York was getting in the way of my writing. Too many poets were getting in the way; the community of writers was getting in the way.

3) Exile. I thought I was pretty careful in parsing this term in Part 1. I mean, obviously the reason I spent so much time with the categories is because I too am uncomfortable with calling myself an exile, voluntary or otherwise. And at first I didn’t use the term. In fact it was years before I used it. I wish, though, that I had learned to use it earlier. Hence the “Advice” in the title. I don’t have any idea how old you are, but my intention with these posts was to speak to “young” poets, as young as I was when I left the states, and to let them know that there is an alternative, but that it comes at a cost, and sometimes that cost is hard to bear: a much slower moving “career”, solitude and loneliness which is real and the opposite of preciousness, and the difficulty of being alone with your poems. I didn’t have a blog, I didn’t have Internet, I didn’t have cable television, I wrote with a typewriter, a rarely used the telephone, the mails took forever…and on and on. I had to scrabble to make a living. But I was essentially happy, because after the epiphanic experience I described in this post, even though I had to backtrack, even though for a long while I wasn’t writing as well, I was already a better poet. It is my firm belief that poets gain nothing by spending their lives hobnobbing with other poets. Admittedly, I’m writing this blog and trying to engage. But they’re paying me – it’s part of my income. It increases visibility. I hope it helps in getting my poems published. But it runs totally against my nature. It runs against 25 years of pretty serious isolation. The sense of exile really sets in when you realize there’s no turning back. I have spent more than half my life abroad. My only real country is the one I’ve been able to construct in my imagination. I am as foreign in American as I am here in Europe. The only difference is that I am more comfortable with my foreigness here. This is anything but Romantic. And there’s no preciousness at all. On the contrary, I feel an abiding sense of loss, of how irrecoverable the past can be. My attempt here, my message to younger poets is: you WILL change, poetically; your character will harden; the process of immersion in foreign languages will cause your brain work in a different way. Have no illusions about it, or as William Burroughs once put it: know what’s on the end of your newspaper spoon.

By the way, that’s a gorgeous quote from Brodsky.

Thanks for engaging, James. You’re asking important questions. I know you’ve had your own experience abroad, and my sense is that these questions are directed as much to yourself as they are to me.

By, the way, that was a wonderful poem at the top of your blog the other day, “for alyosha’.

Martin
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brodsky, again: ‘The wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of the tundra is a translation.’
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I thought that’s what poetry was.

M”

Is poetry love? Only the really, really good poetry.

Translation is an impediment to love.

I knew a man for whom other languages came very easily. His ability to articulate was such that he could speak French, which he learned in a week, and you could understand him even though you had no French. But he was something of a pedant, and his friends (as it happened, well-known poets, Weiners, Blaser, Spicer) disliked him for his pedantry and his languages. ‘Renaissance Man, go home.’

There is a long tradition of poets rejecting the idea of translation.

From the prison of Greek & Latin, from the disorientation created by my foreign friends, I happily escaped into a poetry that nearly resembled my native tongue.

Thomas
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It seems to me that in large part the assumption that nothing of value can move between languages is a result of linguistic monopoly, and an archaic one at that, coming from a previous language of empire and religion, Latin. Replaced by the religion of consumerism and the empire of free market, English supplants Latin but the premise is the same. Translation threatens the supremacy of the language of state, and therefore is classified as at best inferior and at worst traitorous. You mention that you’ve studied the ‘art of translation’ – and I do believe it is an art, at least when translating literary works – and so it is even stranger to me that you would reduce it to failed derivative reproduction.

While I accept that there are necessary sacrifices made during the translation process, there are also gains. These gains are not only in the sound, syntax, image and structure of the poem (as they can be, at times) but in the expansion of our horizons as readers and writers, and importantly the de-centering of our native language as the only legitimate producer of culture and art.

Translation, I think, is an inherently subversive act that can throw into sharp relief the bloated egotism of our linguistic assumptions. To use your term, it is through translation that we can perhaps un-co-opt poetic expression.
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Perkell’s Virgil (in Georgics & Aeneid) represents the poet’s role in culture as ESSENTIALLY audacity : audacity personified. How so? Because the poet dares to “sing the Golden Age” (and its “pity”) in the midst of the Iron Age.
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