Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

I went into Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough by Kyle Tran Myhre (who also raps as Guante) expecting a collection of poems, like his first book, A Love Song, a Death Rattle, a Battle Cry. Instead, it’s a work of anthropological science fiction set on a prison world, called Moon, where all transportees were memory-wiped, with the last arriving two generations ago and there’s no communication with the home World. The bulk of the book is documents (poems, speeches, folktales, transcripts of conversations) relating to a famous itinerant robot poet, Gyre—or rather, that are supposed to relate to them, but what the folklorists collected are mostly about their apprentice, a human named Nazy.

Although this is clearly a pandemic project,* the strongest threads relate to what artists, especially those who use words as their medium, can do with their art to work against authoritarianism and other oppressions. This is on-brand for Myhre/Guante, whose songs are very often in activist modes.

There’s not much plot but there is definitely story, told indirectly, and even something of a(n open) resolution. Recommended, as it’s otherwise not getting much attention in SFF circles, that I can see, and it's part of that conversation.**


* Best evidence: the prose-poem “Ten Responses to the Proposal to Overcome the Current Plague by Challenging It to a Duel.”

** The short list of works he found helpful, in the back, include Parable of the Sower and How Long ‘til Black Future Month?.

---L.

Subject quote from “The Light We Make,” from Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, Kyle Tran Myhre.

For a Poetry Monday in a September that remains hot (highs still reaching 40°C):


Sestina d'Inverno, Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
not all of them polite, the wayward mind
basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

and O that we were there. But here the natives
of this gray, sunless city of Rochester
have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

an ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
with sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
the grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
unable to conceive of Rochester,
made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
do than some wistful reverie of an island,
especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
such profitable weather, while the natives
sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
the single verity of heaven’s making,
deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
and the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
where to the natives destiny is snow
that is neither to our mind nor of our making.


I don't think I could pull off using the name of a city as an end word in a sestina. For foreign context, the city in question is on the south shore of Lake Ontario, and northern winds pick up lake moisture and then dump it on the city as snow. all. winter. long.

---L.

Subject quote from "Homecoming (Walter's Song)," Vienna Teng.

Over on @poetry, I recently hosted a week where I shared poems too long to share, as in book-length poems that could only be posted as an opening passage with links to the complete texts for further reading. Since it may be of interest to some people here, here's links to the posts. Possibly someone will find something excellent to read, or good enough to.

Psyche by Mary Tighe
The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott
Don Juan by George Gordon, Lord Byron
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (trans. Johnston)
Amours de Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough
Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Metamorphoses by Ovid (trans. Humphreys)

(I of course have Things To Say about translations of Ovid, though that wasn't one of them, but that was outside my scope.)

---L.

Subject quote from "Half Asleep," School of Seven Bells.

It occurs to me that if you claim to be writing about events that no one has attempted to set down in neither prose nor poetry, you cannot also claim that it's all absolutely true because everything's taken from Turpin's contemporary account (with occasional additions gleaned from later historians).

This is not Ariosto's only rhetorical foul, nor even the worst* -- it warrants a free kick, perhaps, but not a yellow card. But it stands out, given the first claim is right up there in the second stanza of Orlando Furioso. It's like a bad tackle on the first pass of the game.


* I'm more than a little pissed about what Ricardetto did to Fiordespina -- that Ianthe wanted Iphis herorhimself, not Iphis's identical twin brother substituted in like instant coffee.

---L.

The more of the Kokinshu I translate, the more I appreciate how an anthology editor's choices create another story, the one assembled out of the collection. Not that I haven't been doing that myself with mixes for a couple decades, but being forced to go through the grass-level details at a slow foreign-language-learner's pace has made clearer how the selection of what to include and exclude as well as arrangement affects the whole.

So I had a fair bit of fun this week hosting poetry this week, as this gave me the chance to create a sort of mini-anthology of poems talking to each other across times and traditions:

"Hyla Brook," Robert Frost
Kokinshu 53, Ariwara no Narihira
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, A. E. Housman
"A Quoi Bon Dire," Charlotte Mew
"The Inlaid Zither," Li Shangyin
Kokinshu 658, Ono no Komachi
There's a certain Slant of light, Emily Dickinson

Offered here on the chance someone might enjoy the resulting story.

---L.

The ten best jokes of the year, according to this year's Edinburgh Fringe anyway. (via a coworker)

Description outsourced to Aaron Cohen: "So you're thinking, "It's getting late, I'm winding down the day, maybe I should watch some videos." And then you watch this snowboarding trailer with a metal soundtrack, avalanches, and a BEAR. Cripes, maybe you should just watch this one tomorrow morning instead of coffee." Trailer for The Art of Flight.

From @sam_tanner_: "An apostrophe is the difference between a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it's shit" (via cranky_editors)

... in your sad desperate loneliness / yet you left me swimming in circles as you rescued yourself

---L.

Yes, I've been reading Elizabethan sonnet sequences. No, I don't know why. Yes, there's a lot of them -- they were quite the fad in the early 1590s. No, I don't know why. Yes, they were rather a mixed bag. No, that'd be for the usual reasons -- everything is a mixed bag.

Recently read:

Delia, Samuel Daniel -- Previously noted.

Idea (1619 edition), Michael Drayton -- One of the three best. I especially like that Drayton rarely loses sight of the ostensible purpose of the sequence, to seduce, and most sonnets are acts of rhetoric trying to convince someone of something -- his beloved, himself, his audience. This gives the poems a dramatic tension (and makes some, such as the famous "Since there's no help," all but early forms of dramatic monologue) that's lacking in far too many of his contemporaries -- Shakespeare and Sidney being the notable counter-examples. Note that you really want to read the 1619 edition: Drayton revised over much of his career, generally for the good -- and more, this is where "Since there's no help" first appears. Fortunately, this last means it's the most readily available edition.

Amoretti, Edmund Spenser -- As versecraft, this is wonderful, and I appreciate that it's a sequence with not only an overall plot but, for once, a happy ending. I have to wonder, though, whether systematically recasting the imagery of the Petrarchan tradition in Christian terms is a worthwhile project. Not that Petrarch's Canzone wasn't deeply Christian in matter and manner, but aside from the spiritualizing effects of love, which was already in the air, those parts are not what got abstracted by his epigones. Ultimately, I'm convinced of Spenser's desire to honor his fianceé but not of his passion for her. Also, the guy needed therapy for his obsession with eyes. Srsly -- it's kinda creepy.

Astrophil and Stella, Philip Sidney -- The first and still, as far as I'm concerned, the best sonnet sequence in English. As a work of art, it has not only technical and rhetorical brilliance, it has drama. And a linear plot. And characterization. And even gives his object of obsession a voice in the verse, however small. Not to mention, it set the genre -- not that Sidney wasn't the inheritor of centuries of Petrarchanism, but he imported not just its full form but gave it a tighter form. (Disclaimer: I don't know enough about French models to know what innovations he might have taken from them.) He also experiments in small, ringing changes on variant sonnet forms -- though I also especially like arguments with details of the Petrarchan tradition (he does not fall in love at first sight, nor exhibits the classic symptoms of a Young Man In Love) while otherwise constructing himself in that tradition. Sidney's poetic persona gives the impression is of an intelligent and sensitive young man with a tendency to self-dramatize, writing as much for catharsis as anything else. This could be annoying, but the dramatizing is used to create actual drama, and he uses his gift for colloquial syntax to give his confessionalism a conversational tone. (Significantly, the romantic crisis is related in third person, not first, and that even that distancing breaks down at the end of the scene.) All in all this is, to use the technical term from lit-crit, Good Stuff.

Chloris, William Smith -- It's kinda obvious, really: sonnet cycles and pastoral poetry are both all about the lover's complaint, so why not combine the genres? The result is recommended only for readers with a high tolerance for the conventional machinery of pastorals -- whining shepherds, disdainful nymphs, fluffy flocks, et cet. It's also thoroughly conventional on the sonnet cycle side. The craft is melodious enough to warble it up into the ranks of the second-rate, but only barely.

Sonnets, William Shakespeare -- Gah, what a mess this is. Some of the best poetry written in English mixed with obvious early drafts, salted through with second and third thoughts that are realized not by revising but by starting another poem -- without discarding the first version. The order is manifestly inadequate -- it's a jumbled bag, not a sequence. But that's what we have, incomplete as it is. The tenor is non-Petrarchan mixed with anti-Petrarchan, and the texture is word-dense and image-drunk -- very much not the norm for the genre. If it even is of the genre. Also, the grinding misogyny gets a bit tiring after a while. Just an eensy-weensy tiny bit.* Withal, magnificent and imperfect.

Not finished: Lodge's Phillis (got bored), Griffin's Fidessa, More Chaste Than Kind (tin ear), Constable's Diana (in progress).

If you read only one, read Sidney's -- possibly after a generous selection of Will's greatest hits, but ahead of reading him entire.


* If the font Sarcasm Oblique is not installed on your computer, this phrase may not display correctly.

---L.

Department of redonklously adorkable: How mother otters teach their pups to swim. (via)

Jim Hines gives us the Spork Theory. (via)


[Poll #1579963]
---L.

Today, I've been practicing choka, a long pre-classical Japanese form.


    At this time of year
at the rag end of monsoons,
    when the rains trail off
like the dregs of a party,
    when the heat remains
like a sauna stuck on high,
    when clear desert air
is a distant memory
    like a tale once told
by a comforting granny --
    at this time of year
it can be hard to believe
    in desert beauty,
in the comfort of dry heat.
    Once the sky was wide,
not narrowed by daily clouds --
    once mountains were sharp,
not softened by daily rains --
    once washes were crisp
roadbeds through hills and bosques,
    not mushy sand tracks
still damp from last night's runoff --
    once, and once again,
I tell myself, they'll return,
    those days of glory
when deep blue has no edges,
when thornscrub is forever.

Envoy

    I look at the sweat
on my cold glass of iced tea
    and remind myself,
this, too, shall pass in due time
like these drops roll down its sides.

---L.

Yanno, what the world needs is a story about Monkey King meeting Br'er Rabbit. Or possibly Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear. I mean, the story goes that Sanzang and his disciples continued traveling west, sleeping in the air and eating in the wind, and by this time spring comes to an end and turns to summer. As they travel, they come to a river of green water, and see what it looks like:

The spreading live-oaks,
The cypress knees.
The spreading live-oaks hung with moss beards
Like old men gathered upon a front porch.
The cypress knees rise up from the water
As if the trees are bathing on the banks.
The mockingbirds trill a thousand calls,
The terrapins swim silent under the stream.
Beneath the magnolias cicadas chirr,
Above the briar-patch bees are circling.
In the lazy heat not a leaf is stirring:
The Song of the South is heard in stillness.

-- and sitting on a chair in the middle of the road is a small homunculus, pitch black all over. Sanzang tells Monkey to ask the man, politely mind, if there's any place nearby they can beg for a meal -- and we're off. See? Though someone else will have to write it, as that's not what this post is about.

Though speaking of mash-ups, it is startling to come across in a collection of Chinese poetry a translation into sub-Kipling jingle. It's very Kipling material, admittedly, about soldiers' life and prisoners of war and identities crossing the border, but still -- the disjoint jars. This being a one of Arthur Waley's bits -- one has to wonder what he was thinking. Yet that's not what this post is about.

I wanted this post to be about Sadako and the Thousand Folk Processes, but I do not have my supporting materials ready. I don't even have a thousand cranes, though I do have three dinosaurs in cherry blossom patterns to show off:



But as I said, that's not what this post is about.

Folk processes, though, reminds me that while it's probably way too late to still be talking about Yuletide 2008, I never did get around to recommending "Three Stories," a Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou fic set around the time of the penultimate chapter. Given how its purpose is to recapitulate (with different characters) several themes of the series, I'm not sure how it'll read if you haven't read YKK, but if you have, it should *ting* like a well-tuned glass bell. But that's not what this post is about.

Which brings me to, um. Er. What was this post about again?

[Poll #1334983]
---L.