The Wright choice for poet laureate

The Library of Congress exercised superb judgment earlier this month by selecting Charles Wright to succeed Natasha Trethewey as  U.S. poet laureate. Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 11.05.21 AMThere are few modern giants still standing in the world of poetry -- there's W.S. Merwin, of course, but I have a hard time identifying too many others (I welcome any and all of your suggestions, my friends).

Let's see ... Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Mary Jo Salter, Carol Ann Duffy ... ?

Wright is undeniably a part of this group. He's not only prolific; he also practices his craft well within that shimmering notion of a "tradition" that T.S. Eliot described in his famous, foundational essay.

Which made me a little surprised with some of the announcements of Wright's naming, especially in the Washington Post, because they emphasize (and over-repeat) that Wright is a "Southern poet" who was born in Tennessee.

They refer to his Southern background so many times that it seems like they're surprised by it, or else it's some kind of novelty. I can't help visualizing him in some stereotypical way -- as having a drawl or listening to Carrie Underwood (I don't know, maybe he does).

It's not that: It's just that the geographic insistence gives the impression to unfamiliar audiences that Wright is some kind of regional talent, not the bearer of literary tradition in a grander, older context (which he is).

The Wright I know is the admirer (disciple?) of Dante who describes his experience of reading Inferno during a summer in Laguna Beach, Calif., in an essay included in the volume The Poet's Dante (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Or else, for me, Wright is the speaker  who has an intriguing encounter in the poem "A Journal of the Year of the Ox":

Who is it here in the night garden, Gown a transparent rose Down to his ankles, great sleeves Spreading the darkness around him wherever he steps, Laurel corona encircling his red transparent head cap, Pointing toward the Madonna?

This mysterious figure has some advice for the poem's speaker about his craft, about life in general:

Brother, remember the way it was In my time: nothing has changed: Penitents terrace the mountainside, the stars hang in their                      bright courses And darkness is still the dark:                      concentrate, listen hard, Look to the nature of all things....

There are many works in which poets describe imagined meetings with other poets. Dante meets Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio ... Eliot encounters a poet (Yeats?) in Little Gidding ... Heaney meets Joyce in Station Island .... and Wright speaks to Dante in the above passage. There now, do you see it? Tradition.

A full circle.

There's a linkage to the distant literary past that's vitally alive in Wright's poetry, as this passage might suggest, and I'm excited by the Library of Congress' decision for a simple reason: It may give an immensely important poet a chance to become even more widely known.

RELATED:

Paris Review: J.D. McClatchy in conversation with Charles Wright

 

P.S. Dante's salty bread

Credit: Fastily While a Kirkus Review item on Prue Shaw's Dante book praises Shaw for showing us the genius of Dante's work, there's something else I'd like to mention -- more of an aside than anything else -- that is just as worthy as her assessment of that mighty poem.

The poet's biography, embedded in the lines.

Not the major elements of his biography -- not his encounters with actual friends and family members, enough's said about that -- I'm thinking more of stray, little bits that dramatically illustrate his own circumstances.

One is especially moving to me, my friends. Maybe it will be to you, too.

In Paradiso, canto 17, Dante speaks of his exile from Florence. Following a gorgeously-stunning line that I can't help but think inspired Cavafy -- Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta/piu caramente... ("You leave behind everything that you love most dearly"), he continues:

Tu proverai si come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.

("You will know how salty is the taste of another's bread, and how demanding a road it is to climb up and down another's stairs")

There's the real cost of being exiled -- the realization that one is lost comes with every bite of food and every movement through another's house. (I'm sure that anyone who's ever  had to sleep on a friend's couch for a few weeks  can appreciate this sentiment.)

Shaw is oh-so wise to include it. Yet another way to remind us of the poet's circumstances.

 

 

Second only to Paris ... 700 years ago, that is

Florentine sunset: courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/people/sherseydc/ Well, we wouldn't have Shakespeare's sonnets if plague hadn't closed all the London theaters; we wouldn't have Henry James' novels (a mixed blessing) if he'd struck gold as a playwright; and we definitely wouldn't have Dante's "Comedy" if the poet hadn't been driven out of Florence.

In other words, misfortune's often been the handmaiden to great art.

That last example is taken from Prue Shaw, whose recent book "Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity" (Liveright/W.W. Norton) achieves what seemed impossible -- to provide a fresh assessment of the poet and his poem for modern readers.

Why impossible?

It's not hard to understand, my friends. Go to the "D" shelf in your local university library. Or do a quick Google search. You'll find that Dante's poem is encased -- entombed (like Farinata in circle 6 of Hell) -- within layers of critical commentary (both scholarly and mainstream) . It seems that everything that could be said about the poem has been said about it.

And besides that, most of us cling to some snobby presumption about Dante that sounds like this:

"Devils and circles, a big terraced mountain and a damsel, and heaven at the end of it ... what else is there to know?"

What would Dante think of such a response? There's a Dore engraving that, I think, says it all:

dante-by-dore

He definitely didn't suffer fools. A pretty intimidating image.

And for those intimidated by the poem itself, the great mediator lately has been thriller-king Dan Brown, whose latest psychopath in the Robert Langdon series is a lover of "Inferno" (ok, so what does that say about the rest of his fans?).

ReadingDante_978-0-87140-742-9-1Shaw's the one, though, who really deserves the honor of being mediatrix, not Brown -- her book makes a compelling, poignant  case for why we should really care about this epic  composed some 700 years ago.

Why? Because it is easy to forget the ingenious, intricate structuring of the tripartite poem, the scathing political commentary, and the risks that Dante took -- which is why Shaw spends the first half of  her book on vivid descriptions of 13th century Florence's socio-political landscape. Today, she's a picturesque tour stop; in Dante's day, Florence was far more, "a huge metropolis in medieval terms. Only Venice and Milan equalled Florence in size; only Paris was larger."

When it comes to Dante, historical context is easily lost. But Shaw deftly sets his struggles against a tumultuous world and a corrupt pope (Boniface VIII) in terms that we can all easily understand:

Dante is as "engaged" a political writer as there has ever been, and as brave a one. A modern parallel would be Russian writers exiled under Stalin for speaking out: Osip Mandelstam comes to mind.

Dante as political dissident -- this is the sort of revelation that cracks away at all of the scholarship that's hardened over the poem through time.

There are plenty of other examples, like the "literary shoptalk" between Virgil and Statius which causes Dante to say of himself, "I listened to their talk, which gave me insight into writing poetry."

Or this bit about why, from a practical standpoint, Dante may have chosen to write in terza rima:

Medieval scribes often took liberties with the texts they copied. They cut bits they didn't like, added lines of their own, rather as a musician might treat a score as a basis for skilled improvisation. There is a whole scholarly industry devoted to scribal rewordings of the Roman de la Rose. Given the controversial nature of some of Dante's material, scribes might well have been tempted to censor the text by cutting awkward passages. But this is virtually impossible with the terza rims. Any cut will leave a text which is obviously botched. Any attempt to add material is likewise doomed to failure.

What Shaw accomplishes with passages like these is to inject blood back into the poet: He was human. He struggled as a writer, and he anticipated the meddling of editors by making his poem a bit harder to edit.

Scholar extraordinaire: Prue Shaw (photo by Cordelia Beresford)

(In this she is very much like "The Swerve's" Stephen Greenblatt, who is also published by W.W. Norton and who yours truly heard speak not long ago.)

My friends, I could easily go on, but then I'd have a 5,000-word blog post, which sort of defeats the purpose of a blog. If you've perused Call of the Siren before, I'm sure you know how much I adore Dante. But instead, I'll humbly point the way ahead to paradise, like Virgil did for the poet, and ask you to explore the riches of Shaw's book for yourself. Ciao, amici.

DANTE-RELATED AT CALL OF THE SIREN:

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Want to blog about books? Here's how you do it ... plus new Dante

Writing_ball_keyboard Many folks write about books, and one of the most effective practitioners is a WP friend of mine, Jil Hoffmann. I want to point you in the direction of one of her recent posts --  a blend of reporting/commentary/mixed media as she describes Dan Chaon's insights into the craft of writing. "The Uncanny, Hope, and the Short Story" takes us from a reading of a Chaon short story into his literary reviews via an interview and a video clip. I like how the post gives us a rich taste of the experience of this particular story  ... and it doesn't drag readers through a long, long, long explanation. There's a knack to writing that has brevity and depth, and Jil's got it. Check it out.

Another impressive writer in the WP realm is Kathara, ruler of The Red Serpent. Lately there's been a storm of posts on that blog, and I just haven't been able to keep up. If you're interested in excursions through the enigmatic Grail countryside of Rennes-le-Chateau and all things occult, this is another worthy stop on your WP ambling.

book_inferno_revealedNew Dante: Ok, that's misleading. I admit it. No, Dante didn't write anything new. I'd be very surprised if he did. Being dead for more than 700 years produces serious writer's block. A new book, however, did land on my doorstep, Inferno Revealed: From Dante to Dan Brown by Deborah Parker and Mark Parker (published this month by Palgrave/MacMillan). The Parkers explore the first of the Commedia's three canticas and its legacy. Brown might be the most prominent popularizer of Dante because of his latest bestselling thriller, but he's far from the best or only one. What I enjoy most about the Parkers' book isn't their examination of the Inferno (I'll stick with Barbara Reynolds or Charles Williams or T.S. Eliot or John Freccero) but their exploration of Dante today, from David Fincher's film Se7en and the paintings of Sandow Birk to Tim Burton's film Beetlejuice and Ridley Scott's film Hannibal, etc. The book serves as a very helpful guide to Dante aficionados interested in tracing the immortal Tuscan's influence in modern pop culture. Stop here to visit the Palgrave/Macmillan website; or stop here to visit Deborah Parker's site, The World of Dante.

Coda: There's also a recent essay by Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books. He takes on both Brown and Clive James' Commedia translation in a wonderful piece sent to me by the above-mentioned Ms. Hoffmann (thanks for that, Jil!).

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