The Urban Eclogue, or, Poems in Praise of Pavement (9.30.20)

We haven't discussed the eclogue in all our time together at Wednesdays@One, though many of poems that you've submitted over the years have touched on or gestured toward the genre.  What's an eclogue?

Robert Fagles defines it literally in the introduction to his translation of The Aeneid: "a word that means something like 'Selections'."  An eclogue is a "taste of life" that you might be more or less familiar with, but have perhaps not experienced directly.

But more to the point of this project (writing poems with the title "Pavement"), Fagles goes on to describe the eclogue as "a genre of poetry that used the Homeric hexameter for very un-Homeric themes: the singing contests, love affairs, and rivalries of shepherds and herdsmen who relieved the boredom of their lonely rural life by competing in song accompanied by pipes and pursuing their love affairs and rivalries far from the city and the farmlands, in the hills with their sheep, goats, and cattle."

Before I go farther . . . the project.  Write a poem with the title "Pavement."  Your poem can be literally about pavement; it can be about pavement in relation to earth or soil, that is, wilderness; it can be about pavement in relation to cultivated earth or soil, that is, farmland (and all the things that go with farmland: farms and farming, farmers, crops, animals and husbandry, farm customs, tilling, planting and harvests, weather, etc.).  It can be about one way of life as opposed to or in complement to another way of life.  Or, as I say, it can simply be about . . . pavement.

I mentioned during our salon today that I need your help writing a jazz poem on this subject.  If each of you comes up with a take on "pavement" as a theme or a rhetorical device in a poem, I hope to grab from you some insights, language, rhythms, tones, etc. that I can make my own poem from, something that my band can then work on as a jazz piece.  

But I have another use in mind as well.  I am working on what you might call a group of "urban eclogues," poems that very loosely follow Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar.  But instead of setting them in the countryside, among shepherds and their flocks, as Spenser did, I place them in New York City, where my "shepherds" are city denizens of all sorts and settings are street scenes and cares are cosmopolitan, urban, "concrete."  So your poems titled "Pavement" will help with this project, too.  But see below for more background on the eclogue and some of its basic elements (which I'm trying to preserve or at least suggest in my urban version).

I've joked before, probably even during one of our salons, that I prefer pavement.  Ha. Ha.  I mean this as a lifestyle choice and as a philosophy.  I prefer the community that pavement implies (town vs. country, for instance).  I prefer the stability of pavement, rather like the firm footing (literally and figuratively) that paved surfaces promise.  "Pavement" implies to me order, governance; safety and security; achievement, public expression; humanity and community; mutuality and responsibility (as in the give and take of living among others); norms.  "Pavement" implies to me structures, such as buildings and bridges, thoroughfares and boulevards, promenades and city parks, cities in other words.  "Pavement," as I use the term when I say "I prefer pavement," implies the social life, law, commonality, and from there, tolerance and forbearance, interdependence.

For you it might mean something like this, or something more like scourge, inhumanity, technology run amok, hubris, the unnatural, even the death of nature.  That's okay for your poem.  I'm after your take on whatever the word "pavement" conjures for you intellectually and emotionally.

I'll close with a few of the elements of an eclogue, which may or may not be helpful as you think about your poem, so feel free to ignore these things.

• The pastoral, or rural life as more natural and more humane than city life
• Shepherds (that is, not aristocrats or intellectuals or the hoity-toity) in their element: tending fields and flocks, lounging in the great outdoors, suffering wants and ills, defending against dangers of all kind--but readily recognizable dangers, like marauding wolves
• Love complaints, love rivalries, love songs and ballads (eclogues often embed songs, ballads and the like)
• Contests, friendly or otherwise, between shepherds or country wanderers, on various subjects, such as country vs. city, competing prowess, lovelorn-ness, rivalries in love, or fortune good and bad
• Dialogue between or among characters that are often realized as types (the wastrel, the frugal shepherd, the wise old man, the impatient young man, the cheat, the puritan, the fool, the faker--note that I haven't mentioned women in this list; women in pastoral writing, eclogues especially, are depicted as objects of desire, the things shepherds lust after and compete for . . . so, what's changed, eh?)

The eclogue, as I mention above, is a slice-of-life depiction of the rural, its customs and cares, its foibles and nobility.  

If you want to learn more about eclogues and pastoral poetry, just google the terms.  There's plenty out there.

If This Is Love . . . Program for Jazz's Inaugural Album!

Friends!

Program for Jazz, the spoken word jazz band I write for & perform with, will soon release our first album!  We are sooooo excited about this milestone in the band's history . . . and we think you will be too.  We spent most of the summer inside our own little creative bubble rehearsing material for the album, then masked up and went into Bunker Sound Studios to record and mix.  Our producer-engineer, Steven Raets, has done a marvelous job of capturing the band's special sound.  Here we are in studio . . .

and the band with Steven . . .

The timeline for release isn't definite, but we hope to have it out in time to make your holiday shopping list.  The album's title, "If This Is Love," isn't quite set in stone yet either, but we'll make that decision soon. 

We're still working on one or two permissions to use and reproduce lyrics/poems that aren't our own and that are under copyright.  Once that's in the bag, I'll reproduce all the album's poems and lyrics here.

Until then, we'll keep plugging away at finishing the fine carpentry on the album and organizing a release campaign.  

We.  Are.  So.  Pumped!

New look for Adelaide Literary Magazine

 ALM has upgraded its online presence and look.  Take a look!

Adelaide Literary Magazine

While I'm thinking about it, visit Katherine James Books to order your copy(ies) of Doug Stuber's Heron Clan series.  The latest is a huge international undertaking.  Where does this man find the energy?

Heron Clan at KJB

Reading Dostoyevsky for the Poetry (9.1.20)

Confession: I opened a copy of Crime and Punishment for the first time this past month.  Part of the pandemic reading program, maybe--get to those books that have rested untouched on your shelves for 30 years.  I majored in Modern American Poetry, after all.  Why would I spend time reading a fat Russian novel of the 19th Century?  As it turns out, for the poetry.

The copy I've moved around with me for all these years isn't mine, actually, but my sister's.  I must have borrowed it intending to read the novel which then got lost among the other books of my library.  Her name is elegantly autographed on the title page and, given the book's brittle, yellowed pages, it clearly is a text from some course at university (we attended the same school, three years apart) in the late 1960s.  

What strikes me about this copy as I plow through it are the occasional marginal notes in my sister's unmistakable hand: blue ballpoint ink, a cursive that only a professional elementary school teacher would have developed.  Those notes are frequent in the first dozen pages before tapering off to stray marginal ticks, an underlined phrase here and there, then nothing for over a hundred pages.  Then suddenly a rush of underlines and comments on the the translation's text in the margins.  The notes have that cadence of pedagogy you'll probably recognize in many of your own college textbooks, reflecting a remark or some idea your professor (or TA?) told you to be on the lookout for as you read the next few chapters of the assignment.

But what really intrigues me are the 150-page gaps throughout.  Was my sister skipping whole chapters (no doubt like I did, like some of my own students did), kind of reading her own Cliff Notes text of the novel?  Maybe.  But what if she was in fact reacting to the novel's meta-text at those points where her marginal notes appear?  By meta-text I mean of course that aspect of any writing, especially artistic writing, that reveals itself as artifice: the style, tone, voice, syntax, narrative structure, cadence and figure of creation.  

What if she'd become caught up in--implicated in--the story Dostoyevsky tells and only occasionally became aware that she was actually reading and that the text was performing?  Isn't this when you, too, underline a word or phrase of a text, or record a thought in the margin of something you're reading?  You become aware of a repetition, a certain flow of language, a performance. Now, all creative texts perform continuously; they are performative.  We note their performance more readily at certain junctures than at others, say, in purple patches, or especially lyrical passages, or in unusually constructed forms of expression.  We are awakened to what we're actually about: reading texts.

I think this is the "poetry" of any writing, that portion where the text draws attention to itself, to what it is and to what we are as its reader.  Poetry is the one verbal art almost completely devoted to its status as pure text.  The story it tells is the story of its own writing, which is retold with every new reading.

Of course, poems can be about something besides themselves, and that is in fact how most people read and write poems, as other ways of stating something about the world.  My friends at Wednesdays@One usually react to the poems we share on this level alone, at least initially: How true that expression is!  How accurate!  How real!  But we don't (can't) discuss poems very long before their textuality asserts itself.  We begin to note rhymes and rhythms, images and lines, locutions and hyperbole, ellipses and "loaded" expressions.  We begin to see where a poem succeeds and fails, on its own terms and also on the terms of convention.  We start to unpack the poem.  

That's when we really start to get down to the work of Wednesdays@One.