successo
Ce l'ho fatta. Nailed it. Post in the hole. One of the advantages of this blog is that it is an alternative place for us to meet, a way that members can keep up with what others are doing or thinking or writing. It's better than a listserv because it doesn't clutter up a mailbox: one can come and go. That helps a traveler like me, looking for the site in Venice or Cambridge or wherever.
I know we're still unsure of such things as copyright, protection of our own "intellectual property." I have a suggestion in the meantime: let's post poems (or references to poems), or books or events related to poetry, and raise questions or muse (pun intended) on them awhile. Then others can comment or post their own disquisitions.
I'll start the ball rolling with something that's definitely out of copyright: Dante's Inferno, which my reading group is just starting to read, in Italian. It's rather intimidating, starting off on something so grand, so famous, so long, so owned by other people, in which each word, each obscure phrase has been studied and haggled over by generations of scholars and literati. "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che la diritta via era smarrita." I wish you could hear it! So one starts out, as if on a grand adventure, a little frightened, but thrilled, all the same, to have arrived at the beginning. All'inizio del cammin. I'm not a scholar, and I don't know much Italian, after all, and certainly not early 14th-century Tuscan, tuned and turned to fit the terza rima form. My position is one of the tourist, I suppose (a role I am familiar with), or a child. The questions are the same: why are you doing this, rather than another thing, rather than loaf around or take a walk or do something more constructive? what reasons, what goals? what do you get out of it? how does it (does it?) change how you do things, write, read, think?
I know we're still unsure of such things as copyright, protection of our own "intellectual property." I have a suggestion in the meantime: let's post poems (or references to poems), or books or events related to poetry, and raise questions or muse (pun intended) on them awhile. Then others can comment or post their own disquisitions.
I'll start the ball rolling with something that's definitely out of copyright: Dante's Inferno, which my reading group is just starting to read, in Italian. It's rather intimidating, starting off on something so grand, so famous, so long, so owned by other people, in which each word, each obscure phrase has been studied and haggled over by generations of scholars and literati. "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che la diritta via era smarrita." I wish you could hear it! So one starts out, as if on a grand adventure, a little frightened, but thrilled, all the same, to have arrived at the beginning. All'inizio del cammin. I'm not a scholar, and I don't know much Italian, after all, and certainly not early 14th-century Tuscan, tuned and turned to fit the terza rima form. My position is one of the tourist, I suppose (a role I am familiar with), or a child. The questions are the same: why are you doing this, rather than another thing, rather than loaf around or take a walk or do something more constructive? what reasons, what goals? what do you get out of it? how does it (does it?) change how you do things, write, read, think?
posted by Maura at 10:45 AM
4 Comments:
I'm fairly certain about copyright. I teach about it. I'm involved with the Creative Commons folks. My own blog uses a CC license. I don't post copyright protected work by others. It's not hard.
About your own work. I encourage CC licenses whenever possible especially for poetry. The point is for people to have access to it.
That said, I've sold a poem to the News and Observer. It'll be out on Sunday February 13. A Valentine or anti-Valentine poem depending more on you than on me. The News and Observer has a circulation of over 1/4 million on Sundays. I like that much better than being in a 200 copy lit mag. I'll post a link and/or the poem here as an article after it comes out in NandO. That's my deal with them.
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I think your "tourist" analogy is productive. Dante (or Joyce, my corresponding vice) is like Rome or Beijing. It's been studied in great detail by hyperqualified scholars for centuries (well, not quite for Joyce). You can get a Blue Guide telling you the location of every marginal painting or dusty shard in the Vatican Museum or Forbidden City. You can get a Lonely Planet book instructing you in what to sneer at. You can get a Guide To The Best Dive Bars In Town (well, you can for NYC; I dunno about Rome or Beijing). Or you can get a huge tome on the "Scandinavian Elements in Finnegans Wake."
But despite the infinite literature that's come before, you can also explore on your own. In the barely-comprehensible warrens of Beijing's hutongs (alleys), you can find a Muslim halal restaurant that will never appear in any guidebook and that probably doesn't even have a name, where the chef, perhaps an illegal internal immigrant from Turfan, is firing up the grill at 4:00 a.m. You can try to follow the infinite number of connections that come to mind when you see an overdressed businesswoman shouting into the cellphone in her left hand while she uses her right hand to offer incense in the city's Tibetan Buddhist temple. Or notice, without any critic's help, that a passage in Finnegans Wake that contains the name "Morpheus" and a few other clues seems to invoke the shade of the late, insane chess champion Paul Morphy.
But then there are other places you can go besides Rome or Beijing: places few foreigners visit. They aren't Dante or Joyce, but rather, obscure old poets or undiscovered new ones. Fresh woods and pastures new. There are places recently undiscovered but perhaps becoming known (Kathmandu? Loraine Niedecker?) and the truly invisible (Fort Portal, Uganda? Bruce Tindall?).
Boil your water when you go there, and inform your consul of your whereabouts. Maybe not your Ambassador -- we've discovered they're an unreliable lot.
Bruce's comment--as Bruce's comments are wont to be--was thoughtful and thought-provoking. Traveling in the land of poetry, the gestures, the behind-scenes scenes, the lesser sites/sights, I'm all for that. Perhaps, though, one needs to have seen the Colisseum in a tour bus, or had a photo take of yourself holding up (ha-ha) the Leaning Tower in order to seek out the others. I'm finding that Dante's poetry, in the end, overcomes my diffidence. Other members of my group (professors all) study the footnotes, while I ponder the light-footed leopard with its spotted skin, that so fascinates Dante but at the same time prevents him from advancing (what does it all mean? did Dante know, and does it matter if he had some one thing in mind?). And that image of someone who crawls ashore from a wreck, barely alive, and turns back to look at the sea fromm which he has escaped. And the ingeniousness of the rhymes, the simlicity of the syntax, the variety in the sounds, the delight one feels at finding lines that you'd always heard about, never before read in context:
Laciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate.
I find out that it's ironic: Dante is entering precisely to recover hope and, in narrating his journey, to restore it in us, too. He constructs this elaborate plot device whereby Mary sends Lucia to Beatrice to fetch Virgil to go to Dante and charm and bully him into continuing the journey. Of all the possible guides, a poet--Virgil--is chosen because his "parola ornata" will be persuasive. Only, of course, it's Dante's parola, and it has to--it does--sustain him throughout the poem, and sustain us as readers.
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