When we set out for a walk, the Blog is hard to keep at heel. He’s rushing ahead to sniff at every corner, to sense where the other blogs have been. In the weedy, run-down park, where you can just glimpse a corner of the Parthenon through the trees on winter days, he is full of joy—running after the circling pigeons, rolling in wild chamomile, discovering new lines of thought, scraps of poems. For a few months I have experienced everything partly through the eyes and nose of the Blog. What will the Blog make of this? Could I feed this to the Blog? Will this make it thrive?
The Blat, too, has been a companion. It sleeps in the sun, but prowls at night. It wants to be let out, it wants to be let in—crying in its shrill Siamese voice. Pay attention to me, it says—I have teeth, I have claws. Stroke me the wrong way and I will shock you with my electricity. Stroke me the right way and I will purr. Its smiles are disembodied, like something out of Lewis Carroll. Its hisses, too, seem to spit out of the pure aether.
The Blog clicks behind me now as it walks—tick, talk, tick, talk. Its nails need clipping. It needs its shots. It needs to be taken to the groomers for its shaggy and musty coat. Its easy to forget it isn’t really a domestic animal, though. Sure, it shared the house for a while. But it was feral once. It can fend for itself. It’s a social animal—it runs in packs. It doesn’t need a master. It will find a new home. Goodbye, Blog. I’ll miss you. Good Blog.

Certainly one of the things I do love about Greece is the rhythm of feasts and of fasts, the ceremony of the calendar. Coming to the end of my tenure here on Harriet (there might be one last post tomorrow on Leap Day), I have been thinking with gratitude about what a feast it has been–of conversations and controversies–so much learned, or rethought, or discovered, so much left to say. I shall put by posts that I had meant to do but didn’t get around to, or maybe thought better of–on Sincerity & Artifice, on English Sapphics, on “Robert Frost is the John Ashbery of New Formalism.” But I’ll enjoy peaking back in from time to time, and seeing what the new bloggers, and our faithful commenters, have to say.
A calendar only of feasts, of course, would become tiresome and bloating. The purification of fasts–the giving up of meat–is a necessary corrective and part of the rhythm too. (Here, even McDonald’s gets in on the act, offering a McSarakosti menu–McLent.) Lent for me will involve less time on-line, less time in conversation about poetry–but perhaps more time listening rather than talking, more time in poetry itself–which for me is a kind of having life, and having it more abundantly.

Dickey was also that very rare thing in the suburban sprawl of Atlanta in those days (before the scene was dominated by academic programs at GSU, Emory, even Georgia Tech)–a genuine poet the city could claim for itself. The self-created myth of course seems to have swallowed the man. One winces slightly now to see, as the first sentence of his bio on the back cover of The Early Motion: James Dickey is a former night-fighter with more than 100 missions in World War II, an athlete, hunter, and woodsman, and author of the novel and screenplay Deliverance, It reminds me that the root of “authentic” is violence–the Greek for murderer.
One is equally surprised to see, as a blurb from Choice that “his poetry is essential to modern American poetry studies.
Is it much studied or read anymore? It seems that the drive for authenticity in the legend has sunk the authenticity of the poetry.
But surely it is time to relook at his poetic accomplishments. I’m not sure when I became truly aware of his work as opposed to the anecdotes. “The Sheep Child” struck me early on, partly because I knew the dusty State capitol museum–which displayed jars of pickled animals, including a two-headed snake, and the odd freakish new-born calf or lamb–quite well from my childhood when my father used to take us there to look at the arrowheads.
I have long been haunted by poems from his early books, collected in The Early Motion. They are, among other things, bold rhythmic experiments, in unrhymed anapests–what Dickey calls “the night rhythm.” It is interesting that for Dickey, American poetry is not pivoted between the grand organ chords of Whitman and the a cappella of Dickinson, but between the intoxicating chant of Poe and the sober speech rhythms of Williams. By divorcing the lilt of “Annabel Lee” from rhyme, Dickey achieves a very different American sound–dreamy, Southern perhaps, elegaic (with those falling cadences at the end of lines), but not forced–it is not only iambics that are “natural” to English. And it is a meter of great versatility, since the anapests freely admit of iambic substitution without losing their swing. (One would wish to see more rhythmic experiment of this kind among contemporary poets… )
My favorites of these early poems are probably “The Lifeguard” and “The Heaven of Animals.” But another poem I always go back to is “The Poisoned Man.” About a man who has been bit by a rattlesnake, it expands to incorporate the Fall in a way that could be, in another writer, heavyhanded, but carried off by the anapestic pulse, the images, and the close:
When I rose, the live oaks were ashen
And the wild grass was dead without flame.
Through the blasted cornfield I hobbled,
My foot tied up in my shirt,
And met my old wife in the garden,
Where she reached for a withering apple.
I lay in the country and dreamed
Of the substance and course of the river
While the different colors of fever
Like quilt patches flickered upon me.
At last I arose, with the poison
Gone out of the seam of the scar,
And brought my wife eastward and weeping,
Through the copper fields springing alive
With the promise of harvest for no one.
I love the colors flickering like the patches of quilts, and the copper fields (like copper heads?) springing alive–and the last line that snakes directly into the memory.

Poets so concerned with getting these different registers into a poem may think that keeping a poem consistent in register (whether the classical purity of a Thomas Grey or the rough-hewn carpentry of a Thomas Hardy) is easy—surprisingly, though, it ain’t: a single wrong word can shake us out of a poem as fast as a bad rhyme or clichéd simile. So while I think shifts in register can be playful and thought-provoking when well-handled, I am more interested in poems that either use an accumulation of diction to press a poem in a certain direction, or poems that use a shift in register to a specific purpose, to indicate a larger shift in the poem.
These famous lines from Whitman always delight me with the exactness of their word-choices:
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
The tension between scientific and poetic/empirical knowledge is set up even if one were to change half a dozen words, but these words charge the lines to the full. The Greek polysyllabic word “astronomer” in the first line will be balanced by the monosyllabic “stars” in the last. (Stars—the actual subject of the lecture– is in fact held back to the last word of the poem.) The figures are “ranged in columns” as if a hostile army. And then “unaccountable”! Yes, he is unaccountably tired and sick, but also mind-boggled with numbers, unable to count. “Rising and gliding” and even “wander” are from classical descriptions of the movements of heavenly bodies (their Latin equivalents—orior, labor, meo–feature often in Lucretius and Manilius)—it is as if the narrator has actually become a star, rising and gliding, wandering into the night sky. Because of all this care in word-choice, even the potentially sentimental “mystical” becomes more charged. With moist it suggests “mist,” perhaps, as well as “mystery”—but one is tempted to check back into the dictionary, and discovers that “mystical” knowledge is immediate rather than mediated—observation, hunch, experience over deduction, diagrams and charts.
A very different poem, and one I love to discuss when talking about the sonnet, is Marilyn Nelson’s “Balance,” from Fields of Praise. A virtuosic display of slant rhyme, narrative and structure, it is among my favorite contemporary sonnets. Part of a series of poems about a woman named Diverne (an ancestor?) born into slavery, who bears a child by her master, it nonetheless is able to stand alone, a whole short story in fourteen lines. It is also fascinating as a study in diction and register:
He watch her like a coonhound watch a tree
What might explain the metamorphosis
he underwent when she paraded by
with tea-cakes, in her fresh and shabby dress?
(As one would carry water from a well—
straight-backed, high-headed, like a diadem,
with careful grace so that no drop will spill—
she balanced, almost brimming, her one name.)
She think she something, stuck-up island bitch.
Chopping wood, hanging laundry on the line,
and tantalizingly within his reach,
she honed his body’s yearning to a keen,
sharp point. And on that point she balanced life.
That hoe Diverne think she Marse Tyler’s wife.
The italicized lines, in the vernacular of Diverne’s fellow slaves, contrast abruptly with the decorous, literary language of the poem’s narration. (These italicized lines in fact almost serve as a chorus to the action of the poem—the simmering undercurrent of “public” opinion.) The contrast of register is driven home right away in the first two lines, not just by grammar but word choice—coonhound versus metamorphosis. A single poem contains “coonhound” “bitch” and “hoe” as well as “metamorphosis”, “diadem,” and “tantalizingly”—these lat three words not even Latinate but, more arcanely, Greek. The violently different registers of diction suggest the two worlds Diverne is balancing her life between. The relentless offness of the rhymes until the very last couplet (where life/wife also triangulate to hint at “knife”–the keen point), and the off-balance of the sonnet structure itself with its top-heavy 8/6 division, all contribute to the performance of this high-wire act, that has me, as a reader, holding my breath, speechless.

These wintry days remind me a little bit for some reason of the first year we moved here, into an old, high-ceilinged flat nominally warmed by some antiquated method of heated bricks that must have dated back to the Assyrians. (The cold here is a damp cold that tends to hover just above freezing, and is somehow the more bone-chilling for it, especially as houses are not well-insulated.) We moved into the unfurnished flat in January. I would sit trying to write at my laptop in a down vest, fingerless gloves and a hat as if I were a Victorian sonneteer in a garret, whatever a garret was. This was in sharp relief to the flows of e-mails and snail-mail I would get from friends and acquaintances, who seemed to think moving to Greece amounted to a life-long summer holiday of sun and ouzo on the islands. (Or perhaps they were putting a brave face on it, for my sake.) But of course, when you move somewhere and make a life there, that is your life. It isn’t a holiday. You still have to make a living (Greek salaries are low and inflation is high), and make your way in a strange culture, a strange language, navigate bureaucracy (both epic and Byzantine—for some months going to the police station every morning to try to make some progress with my resident’s permit was like a job), deal with plumbers and post offices, banks and physicians.
So I guess it is with increasing ambivalence I look on some breeds of travel writing. Maybe I see it too much now from the other side. We love to meet American writers who are passing through on six-month sabbaticals or Fulbrights, who come to absorb the atmosphere and write. One of the definite bonuses of living in Greece is just how many interesting people do come through and look us up–what precious friendships those are, what memorable taverna evenings! But I suppose too there is always a twinge of something—a kind of envy? Nostalgia? They, after all, are able to explore Greece, but in the end will go back to their real lives. And, sure, sometimes they write about the sun and ouzo and the islands, or perhaps spiritual journeys to ancient monasteries, which is all very well and good, but not something I could do now, any more than I could whip off a Dinner-with-Persephone type book that made sweeping pronouncements about Greeks or Greece, the Henry Miller effect, I guess. (For a rare non-romanticized view of life in Modern Greece, check out Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s Broken Greek.) The longer I am here, the more I realize I am and shall always be a Xeni, a foreigner—subject to the great hospitality and deep xenophobia that are flip sides of a single ancient Greek coin. I sometimes think perhaps I could write a chick-lit novel about the trials and tribulations of foreign wives—from Medea on?—a sort of Desperate Housewives of the Aegean—having witnessed the peculiar strains and blessings of many culturally-mixed marriages. But who would buy it but ourselves?
Well, the question remains I guess how to write about a life which is at once my one and only life, and a life that is foreign to me. How to not be a travel writer in an alien land that is my home. The snow seems to change things, at least for now—it too is a stranger here, and all of our visits are brief compared to the monuments and the stones.

Lear (1812-1888) is best known now for that poem and for his whimsical limericks. His nonsense verse doesn’t have the manic sharpness of Carroll’s, but it does have a surprising lyric melancholy all its own. Take his famous, wry self-portrait (later immitated by Eliot):
“How pleasant ot know Mr.Lear!”
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
*
“Long ago he was one of the singers/ but now he is one of the dumbs” strike me as some of the saddest lines in poetry.
Even in more rollicksome verse, there is a strangely melancholy note to the nonsense, as the eerie refrain of the Jumblies:
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies life:
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue;
And they went to sea in a sieve.
Then there is the surreal–innovative?–sonnet, “Cold are the Crabs,” that ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a shrug and an existential throwing up of hands:
Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills
Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,
And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe
The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!
For when the tardy gloom of nectar fills
The ample bowls of demons and of men,
There lurks the feeble mouse, the homely hen,
And there the porcupine with all her quills.
Yet much remains — to weave a solemn strain
That lingering sadly — slowly dies away,
Daily departing with departing day.
A pea green gamut on a distant plain
Where wily walrusses in congress meet–
Such such is life–
Though more famous for his nonsense, Lear was a painter and master of watercolors, who travelled extensively in Albania, Greece, the Levant and further east producing evocative landscape paintings and illustrated travel books, such as Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Southern Albania, 1851. I was just at the British School at Athens and noticed a couple of original Lear’s on the wall–how quietly excellent they were! And indeed they provide a record of Greece from a time–a mere thirty years after independence–when it was not well-travelled by Western Europeans.
(As late as 1908, Forster could have Mr. Bebe in A Room with a View say: “I haven’t been to Greece myself, and don’t mean to go, and I can’t imagine any of my friends going. It is altogether too big for our little lot. Don’t you think so? Italy is just about as much as we can manage. Italy is heroic, but Greece is god-like or devilish–I am not sure which, and in either case absolutely out of our suburban focus.”)
Steve’s refrain post with its mention of the ghazal also brought Lear to mind. I remember coming back across that old favorite, The Akond of Swat, a couple of years ago and suddenly realizing that, with its strict adherence to the form and “exotic” eastern locale, it was a ghazal, and consciously so. Though it is not the first ghazal in English I don’t believe, it is surely one of the very, very early ones, and to my knowledge not generally recognized as such.
Actually, when I approached Dick Davis, the poet and Persian scholar, about the ghazal-ness of the “Akond of Swat,” he agreed with me, but pointed out that “To be really picky Lear probably meant the poem as a qasideh, not a ghazal. The qasideh and ghazal are formally identical (except the qasideh is usually much longer than the ghazal) and are distinguished by subject matter – the ghazal being erotic/lyrical, the qasideh being a praise poem. The A of S is clearly a mock praise poem.”
Lear includes directions for its performance: “The proper way to read the verses is to make an immense emphasis on the monosyllabic rhymes, which indeed ought to be shouted out by a chorus.”

The only AWP I’ve been to is the one held in Atlanta in the 90s–it helped that I lived in Atlanta (definitely couldn’t have afforded to fly anywhere then, when I was a half-time secretary at George State), and I got a pass because Jeffrey McDaniel (a former Harriet blogger) put me on the roster for a Spoken Word event. The converence wasn’t nearly on the scale it was today. And I didn’t really know anybody except for the Atlanta locals I saw pretty often anyway. I remember feeling uneasy in the audience of a panel discussion on Humor when I suddenly realized it wasn’t going to be funny. (And none of the poetry discussed rhymed either, which, for a humor panel, seemed a little on the obtuse side–but that’s just my hobby horse.)
I meant to go to Atlanta last year–since I could combine that with visiting family, and I had a new book out. But I couldn’t make it happen.
This year, I also fully intended to go. But I didn’t. Is the truth perhaps that I have mixed feelings about going to a Poets’ Convention? (OK, there are fiction writers too I imagine–why does it strike me as such a Poetry event? Maybe fiction writers don’t need conventions in the same way, since they have agents.) Is the truth perhaps that some part of me resists? Sure, I would have seen lots of friends, got lots of books, made new friends, met people I admired, maybe been inspired. Reginald talks about feeling isolated in Pensacola–I also feel isolated in a different way in Athens, Greece. So maybe the whole thing would have been a wonderful boost and confirmation. But I also feel a bit queasy about the whole idea. And I think the truth is a lot of us do. Some of us have to go–especially if we teach. But most of us deep down have mixed feelings, don’t we? Isn’t it OK to fess up to this?
Here are some of my reasons for not going. What are yours?:
*Er, I live in Greece
*Flying makes me panic
*I had nowhere to stay
*Crowds make me panic
*How Public–like a Frog!
*Too much talk about poetry drowns out my Muse
*Drowning muses make me panic
*I too dislike it
*Meeting lots of successful poets makes me envious
*Envy makes me panic
*At my back I always hear the Great Dead Poets laugh and sneer…
*Maybe I am cultivating status as an Outsider, though obviously by being on this blog I am somehow really an Insider? Hmmm. (Must think about this one.)
*I had nothing to wear
*I’d rather glide out and look up in perfect silence at the stars
*MY PANEL WAS CANCELLED!!

He plays wonderful games with grammar that are as slyly didactic as they are ludic. How better to encapsulate the quirks and inconsistencies of English plurals than in the four syllables, “one fish, two fish”? Or to play with our expectations the other way round:
Then he did the same thing
To the other Whos’ houses
Leaving crumbs
Much too small
For the other Who’s mouses!
(Changing “who” from a relative pronoun to a proper noun is another twinkling wink at the rules of grammar.)
The Lorax, of course, couldn’t be more topical. It is clear as to its moral, but it conveys by showing more than telling (after all, the whole narrative is in the voice of the Onceler, a layer of dramatic irony). It isn’t, I would venture to say, preachy.
If you ever get a chance to pick up the CD of Dr. Seuss songs from the TV specials of the late sixties (The Original TV Sound Tracks Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas & Horton Hears a Who)–I think I picked up mine at a grocery store while Stateside one Xmas–it is a bargain. The songs, written by Dr. Seuss himself and set to music by Poddany, are as brilliant as the books. There’s his delicious “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch,” which I think has been covered by a number of bands. And the “alarmingly plausible” macaronic Christmas carol, which I can only call, “Wha Who Wha Who.” In his song for the Wickersham Brothers from Horton Hears a Who, Seuss encapsulates the occasionally paranoid streak in American politics that seems to be the flip side of our inalienable rights, in the voice of some sinister hear-no-evil see-no-evil Darwinian apes. “Pretending to talk to who’s who are not” is, they announce:
“A plot, plot, plot plot”.
Luckily they are
“Hot-shot spotters of rotters and plotters
And we’re going to save our sons and our daughters
From YOU”
Horton the elephant is apparently out to “kill free enterprise” and “wreck our compound interest rates,” and
Shut our schools
and steal our jewels
And even change our football rules
Take away our garden tools
And lock us up in vestibules!
BUT for-tu-na-te-ly we’re no fools…
OK, I had to try to jot that down in blue crayon as the CD was playing–so it might not be totally accurate, but you get the picture. Fun is good.
.

While not fanatic about it, we try to keep our 3-year old’s tv watching to a minimum–maybe a half hour a day, and some days with none at all of course. (I find it most useful when I am trying to fix dinner.) But whenever he gets sick, the amount creeps right up again, and it is a battle to bring it back down. I am not anti-television–I actually think some of the best writing going on today is in television, we’re living in a sort of golden era–but I would much rather our kid invent his own games and enjoy books. And it is pretty obvious that the two things are in inverse proportion. I think that is because the images flickering on the screen actually fill the mind and the mind’s eye to the extent that the mind does not feel the need to produce images of its own; maybe the mind thinks it is “image”-ining. Even if the tv show we are watching is, we would declare, “boring,” in fact the mind registers that it is entertained.
And it is not just television. I feel this looking at the internet or even at a lighted screen. I can write a poem directly on the computer, but I feel that the quality of my imagination is different from when I am walking about outdoors or sitting in a corner with an un-lit blank page. How many more poems I might write, I sometimes wonder, if I just got up and walked away from the e-mail and the google news and the blogosphere. A month long writer’s retreat in a castle in Scotland (Hawthornden) in 2004 showed me just how much I could accomplish unplugged from e-mail and the internet. Maybe I need to set limits on it for myself just as I do for my toddler!
The opposite of the aesthetic is not ugliness–it is the anaesthetic.

It isn’t a question that pops in my head about Cavafy, about whom I have no doubts whatsoever that he is great with a capital G.
Seferis developed an Aegean Modernism, taking elements from French and English modernists (particularly TS Eliot) and bringing them into anAegean land-, sea- history- and myth-scape. Deeply personal and political, but often expressed through private symbols, the poems, without those personal and historical “keys” can seem hermetic. Maybe part of the problem is that in English it is hard to grasp the texture of the Greek. Lawrence Durrell confesses to Seferis, “We are having trouble translating you so that you don’t sound like Eliot.”
I think the influence of Eliot seems more fully digested in Greek. Translated (back, as it were) into English, it can seem almost derivative, as:
Jerusalem, unruled city, city adrift!
Into the River Jordan
Three monks one day came sailing,
And on the bank made fast
A red, three-masted sailboat.
(translation by Roderick Beaton.)
Seferis isn’t the first person to bring free verse into Greek, of course, but he is one of the early practitioners. But, again, many of the poems rhyme, and without the music and juxtapositions and tensions rhyme sets up, the short song-like poems can seem almost banal. Keeley and Sherrard ingeniously and conveniently arrange Seferis’ Complete Poems into separate sections for the Rhymed Poems so that one at once knows the lay of the land. Take this deceptively simple poem (translated by Keeley & Sherrard):
Denial
On the secret sea-shore
white like a pigeon
we thirsted at noon:
but the water was brackish.
On the golden sand
we wrote her name;
but the sea-breeze blew
and the writing vanished.
With what spirit, what heart
what desire and passion
we lived our life: a mistake!
So we changed our life.
I’ve tried doing a rhyming version myself, and haven’t got far at all:
In the cove, the secret cove
White as any dove,
We thirsted under the shining vault
Of noon-day, but the water was salt.
Yikes! Terrible! (”A mistake!”)
But just listen to this! (Do take the time—it is short and worth it). The poem was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and became a famous popular song. At Seferis’ funeral it was sung by crowds in the street as a political anthem against the oppressive Junta. Imagine an English poem spontaneously turned into a popular protest song.
Here is a fascinating little interview with Edmund Keeley, where he relates how he had asserted to Seferis that Sikelianos and Yeats were both great poets, but Yeats was greater. This upset Seferis, who replied “What does that mean? For me, Sikelianos is the greater poet and Yeats is second in comparison. Because I am Greek and Sikelianos is the great poet in my tradition.”
It is a thought-provoking distinction. Cavafy is somehow easier to fit in with the English tradition—he is arguably a part of it, as deeply read in English (Browning for instance) as Greek. Seferis is less so. And perhaps when I am asking if Seferis is a great poet, I am really wondering where he fits in with Anglophone Modernists like Eliot. Maybe it is the wrong question. Maybe the point is he is a great poet in his tradition, a tradition to which I shall always be alien, however long I might dwell here, under the blue and white banner of the Aegean sky.