From Muriel Rukeyser on “The Fear of Poetry“:
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry. […]
Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives. […]
In such a town, I spoke to a psychologist, a man who has made his work and his theme the study of fear, and the talk went well enough until poetry was mentioned. Then, with extreme violence, a violence out of any keeping with what had gone before, the psychologist began to raise his voice and cut the air with his hand flat. He said, his voice shaking, that he had cut poetry out of his life, that that was something he had not time for, that was something out of his concern.
From Samad Alavi’s World Literature Today review of Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (edited by Christopher Nelson):
For me, though, I encountered the best surprises in poems like Reza Baraheni’s “Daf,” which plays with the form and sounds of the daf, a tambourine-like drum. Stephen Watts’s co-translation with the author struck me as itself untranslatable, the words melting into one another and reemerging transformed: “Now night will never sense silence again / and after these circles of turbulence / I’ll not sleep for a geology of un-numberable years / Here night swells on rim edges of drums and bells— / the daf’s white moon.” The impossibly poetic English of the translation sent me to the internet to discover what was going on in the Persian. There, I encountered several easily found videos of Baraheni performing the original poem and was amazed to hear just how closely the English follows the Persian in structure and form, even with all the inventiveness in translation. But you don’t need any knowledge of Persian to appreciate the sound qualities of Baraheni’s performance.
You can read the translation here; a brief excerpt:
iris
throat that is kissable
you head beheader
it is the sound of the daf
that knocks off our heads
Are you struck dumb
are you headless
yet
The original:
آه، ای جوان!
ای ارغوان!
آن حنجره
بوسیدنی ست!
بوسیدنی!
سر میزنی!
شمشیر دفدفست كه سرهای خلق را
از بیخ میزند
دف میزنی؟
سر میزنی؟
Note that daf is “ultimately from Sumerian 𒁾 (dub, ‘tablet’),” making it a cousin of divan.
Are the exclamation points in the Persian misplaced?
I expected that the “Same as it ever was” link might have led to inclusion of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”
Are the exclamation points in the Persian misplaced?
They are indeed — good catch! I don’t know how that happened; I copied and pasted from here.
I expected that the “Same as it ever was” link might have led to inclusion of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”
Well, that could be appropriate background music.
As could Edwin Starr.
Pitiful Illustration
Daf devolves to daft.
The Rukeyser piece is enough to put you off poetry for life.
I might as well use this thread for two comments on Persian-language poetry:
1) There’s a tension in talking about Iran’s poetry. One one hand, many want to emphasize to the world that the Persian-speaking lands are a place of centuries-old culture beyond the stereotypes of joyless mullahs etc. On the other hand, some Iranians I have met despise their own poetry tradition: they complain that it is a fig leaf of refinement over a culture that they believe is quite backward – perhaps it is comparable to how some turned away from German classical music and poetry after the Holocaust: obviously that art did not produce better people if Germans could be fans of it and still commit atrocities. For me it’s frustrating, since so much of my own interaction with the Persian language involves poetry, but I can’t ask certain Iranian contacts about what a particular word or expression means, because they bristle at the very genre.
2) A lot of the works on the Pamiri peoples published into the late twentieth century, in explaining how Persian served as a language of culture for the region, claimed that it was common for Pamiris young and old to know great Persian poetry by heart. I was completely unable to verify this in the Pamirs last year: Ismaili devotional songs in Persian remain current, but even members of the local intelligentsia I met were baffled by these claims of widespread knowledge of poetry. This makes me wonder if either previous reports were exaggerated, or if (and when?) some immense cultural rupture had occurred.
“…the psychologist began to raise his voice and cut the air with his hand flat. He said, his voice shaking, that he had cut poetry out of his life, that that was something he had not time for, that was something out of his concern.” In the uncomfortable silence that ensued, we focused on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, which was playing in the background. “This song has great meaning for me,” said the psychologist. “I don’t know where I’d be in life without Bob Dylan. I named my son Dylan after him.”
On the other hand, some Iranians I have met despise their own poetry tradition: they complain that it is a fig leaf of refinement over a culture that they believe is quite backward
That must be a very limited slice of Iranian society indeed.
@Christopher Culver,
1. All my female Iranian friends and acquitances – of thouse I know reasonably well for this – read their poems to me.
The percent of women among my friends is unusual even for my highly mixed circle in Russia (a half of them) and for some reasons (some of which I understand) it is also high for my foreing friends (especially given that the percent of same-sex acquaitances among Arabic speakers – no stats for Iran – for Western men is normally no lesser than 100). Also applicable to Iranians, but there are not many of them.
However it makes me wonder is poetry is gendered. Say, whether male educated Iranians are less enthusiastic about it that female educated Iranians.
(One also immediately thinks about all those female poets from Kokand – or at least I do)
2. There was an exchange somewhere on the internet: someone asked about strange letters on some rock in Tajikistan. Perplexed specialists who responded didn’t recognise them, but offered various parallels with scripts I never heard about.
In one photograph there was a verse in Arabic script (I think simply because it is same rock), this recieved a comment ‘some shepherd wrote it, a poem in Persian’ [perhaps also with a comment on errors in the script]. This made very curious about those shepherds.
So I wonder if what you read refers not as much to widespread knowledge as to some knowledge among people who aren’t ‘intelligentsia’.
from Middle Persian 𐭣𐭯 (dp /dap/), ultimately from Sumerian 𒁾 (dub, “tablet”).
hm
(To 1 above – on the other hand, Christopher said some Iranians. Women will only change the stats if this ‘some’ is ‘most’)
‘Everywhere we are told…’
Er. I never heard that)
Not about humans, and definitely not that civilisation ‘means the uses of everything it has’
But poetry is, of course used. Variously.
Memorisation, entertainment, communication of sentiments, prestige, propaganda, what not. I think she’s misattributing her own feelings to all people across all history.
But I agree that ‘useful’ is hardly a good motivation for anything. One transcends for the sake of transcending, not for the sake of what she transcends.
The Rukeyser piece is enough to put you off poetry for life
The article works with a remarkably limited conception of poetry. And the replacement of Truth and Beauty with Useful Knowledge in education at the behest of governments whose sole metric of value is material prosperity affects much more than just that particular subgenre of poetry.
DE, in school I was told English is useful. I was annoyed by that, but it’s also the actual attitude of the teachers: we won’t demand it from you, you need it. And that’s beautiful.
As result I can claim that I never studied English: language teachers tried not to disturb me.
(somehow I still learned more English from videogames than most kids from teachers)
(They didn’t apply this word to normal subjects or did so much more rarely. And their teachers are much less tactful. Let’s don’t forget that compulsory education is compulsory, when talking about the Truth and Beauty (and Darja and Fusha too:)). We’re forcing some people to do something and these people aren’t even our own children who’re often quite willing to play our games)
hm
Indeed. Persian to Arabic is plausible enough – assuming they aren’t both simply onomatopoeic – but I don’t for a moment believe in “tablet” to “drum”, much less in a direct loanword from Sumerian into Pahlavi. Akkadian would be the expected intermediary, but the Akkadian for “tablet” is ṭuppu, with a ṭ not a d, so no.
Pamir… in Tajikistan? The Soviet Union certainly was an immense cultural rupture.
The poetry-eschewing psychologist as described by Rukeyser does not sound very plausible or very non-fictional. Although this piece was written over 75 years ago, so maybe you got a different genre of psychologist back then and/or at least a different set of social types and/or stereotypes that might plausibly end up as psychologists?
I associate Rukeyser with the ill-starred generation of poets who managed to move beyond the excitement of early Modernism to successfully make newly-written poetry a marginal artform of little-to-no interest to the general reading public. The poetry of the prior generation, loosely speaking (say Yeats and Eliot and Frost etc.) seemed “relevant” to a broad public audience without needing to seem “useful” in some sort of reductionist sense. Now, Rukeyser was almost exactly the same age of Dylan Thomas but he was kind of a throwback in being a general public celebrity etc. and Rukeyser seems more in step with the hermetic self-marginalization of poetry in post-WW2 culture.
indeed
“Same as it ever was” reminded me for some reason of how the TH’s drummer Chris Frantz* has segued so successfully into being a largely-retired and preppy-adjacent Connecticut suburbanite, as if to the grand-bourgeois manner born. This past Saturday he was apparently hanging out at Fairfield Make Music Day, checking out a free set (on the sidewalk near the train station) by the Zambonis, who are of course the greatest rock and roll band in the world playing music with 100% ice-hockey-themed lyrics.
*Hattic interest: He spells his name on his facebook page as Frántz. I guess the accent is to make sure we know which syllable the stress goes on?
It’s to make sure you pronounce it with high tone, not mid or low.
No self-respecting Frántz wants to be mistaken for a mere Frāntz or Fràntz, still less a Frântz, or (worse yet) a Frǎntz.
um …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBr0FJsDk1g ?
@ J. W. B.: I don’t think Rukeyser’s idea of the use of poetry was reductionist. I might mention, though, that one Sam Huber said in the Paris Review that her “Poem” (beginning “I lived in the first century of world wars”) became “a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment” during Trump’s first term (quoted here). (I missed that, but then I didn’t and don’t have my finger on the pulse.) So that one might have been useful in a narrow sense after all.
In keeping with your comment on the hermeticism of American poetry in her generation and later, I wonder whether she ever thought that Hollywood trained Americans in film-watching by offering entertainment aimed at all brow levels. (Not that my poetry attempts that.)
rukeyser does talk about film in The Life of Poetry, but i only retain a pretty loose sense that she felt (like many of her generation, especially people who’d seen films made outside the u.s.) that the studio system was based on eliminating most of the formal, and thus expressive, range of the medium (at all brow levels), and so betrayed film’s phenomenal potential for aesthetic education (about itself, but also beyond). i tend to agree, and to appreciate the rule-proving exceptions when i find them. though i do also agree with myra breckinridge that the studio system (especially in its mid-century peak) produced vanishingly few movies that were not deeply relevant – the problem is that relevant can mean profoundly awful (i’m thinking of Salome, Where She Danced, for instance).
but the last things rukeyser ever was are hermetic or marginalized (especially not self-marginalized; other folks did their level best and failed). one end of her work is formally fascinating, transparently modernist, documentary-based projects whose aim was specifically to deepen the impact of the facts they contain in ways that the forms of muckraking journalism can’t, for an overlapping but distinct audience (her early The Book of the Dead, most overtly, but also the late, kaleidoscopic, cycles like “Breaking Open”) – which is one opposite of hermeticism. another is plain-language pieces conveying thoughts and feelings that range from club-blunt to quite subtle (“Myth” or “A Simple Experiment”, from the book Breaking Open, come to mind) – which is another opposite of hermeticism. and, of course, her work sold well enough for her poetry collections to be published mainly by major presses over fortyish years, without her being a particular editor’s Chosen Protegée.
to me, a big part of the point of her poetry – and of her very period-and-context-dependent polemical book on poetry (especially read with an eye to what could not be said in a book printed by a mainstream u.s. press in 1949) – is about what it means (socially, materially, formally) for poetry to be a popular medium, both in the sense of widely-read and -written, and in the sense of vernacular.* which makes it pretty unsurprising that it’s exactly the popular (and often populist, as well) poets, across the generations from stephen vincent benét to adrienne rich to judy grahn, who championed her during her writing life, and that her work has been lastingly popular itself – within the limited scope that the u.s. allows for that outside of popular music, of course (exceptions like haki madhubuti aside).
anyway, here’s a rukeyser poem about poetry that i like:
FROM A PLAY : PUBLISHER’S SONG
I lie in the bath and I contemplate the toilet-paper:
Scottissue, 1000 sheets—
What a lot of pissin and shittin,
What a lot of pissin and shittin,
Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats—
All the poems of Shelley and Keats.
.
* i so wish she’d lived a decade longer, and gotten to see a poetry-centered genre become the heart of u.s. popular music again, and that she’d been asked to write as a fellow poet on the first generation of hiphop emcees.
Thank you, rozele.
@rozele: When I mentioned movies, I was thinking of this passage from the essay Hat linked to:
In that essay, she doesn’t discuss the issues about the studio system that you mention.
I agree that Rukeyser could be quite accessible as post-Prufrock poets go, as in the early “Ceiling Unlimited”. (The only place I could find it on line was this Google Books line. It starts at “3” and ends at the decorative symbol.) I haven’t read the poems you mention.
On the other hand, after reading “The Speed of Darkness”, I can’t agree that the last thing she ever was is hermetic. As for “marginalized”, you call her popular, but that’s in the small pond of people who read poetry that’s favored by the academy and is not by people who have hit records or are invited to speak at inaugurations.
found my copy of The Life of Poetry! which confirmed my vague memories about where rukeyser went from that very positive relation to film as a juxtaposition-based medium, and as a medium that offers a way into understanding how juxtaposition-based methods in other media work. she never quite (at the height of the Second Red Scare) names early soviet film as the primary reference point, but she circles very close to it, emphasizing documentary and hybrid documentary/”enacted” films, and european “makers of ‘art’ films” (cocteau, prévert, clair, rosselini, eisenstein, pudovkin, dovzhenko, reiniger). on documentary films, her overall take on hollywood is “the youngest art, the art which could have been a revolutionary one, became the newest cliché” – and she goes further, saying that narrative film has taken in the techniques pioneered by documentary filmmakers, but with a few exceptions “not advancing in their style, but using these methods as tricks.” her more detailed critique focuses on the role of the writer in hollywood, “used almost exactly as the writer in advertising is used”, with very little autonomy or control, “the archetype of the citizen of the police state”. but she insists that “in spite of every limitation”, vitality and possibility still exist even in what hollywood produces.
on the other side of things, you’ve got rukeyser’s actual life, and the life of her poetry, pretty throughly wrong. she never has been particularly embraced by the academy; never held the writers-workshop or english-department jobs that get you that, much less the laureateships and pulitzers that mark success in that realm. in this, she’s diametrically opposite all three poets who’ve performed at presidential inaugurations after robert frost’s near-deathbed appearance – every one of them holding an academic post, and far more widely assigned in academic contexts than rukeyser ever has been.
rukeyser’s popularity has been among people in specific social worlds that value poetry: in her lifetime, first the Popular Front and later the women’s movement, which both constituted mass audiences for poetry ranging from the formally experimental to the folksy (and both at once), and were quite definitively outside the academy (though some of their members later entered it, primarily after the movements’ suppression or cooptation, and the concomitant fading of active exclusion from those institutions). to keep it to white women from the u.s., she’s not a carolyn forché or rae armantrout (whose work i quite like at least some of); she’s a judy grahn or diane di prima, both of whom have reached substantially more readers and hearers than their academic-world contemporaries.
as to “The Speed of Darkness”, i don’t know what to tell you. it’s a poem i’d use precisely to illustrate rukeyser’s lack of hermeticism. most of it is direct description – some of it perhaps less clear now because it began so topical (section VIII’s shot-down war criminal, for example) – or very straightforward metaphor, or direct address, with occasional eruptions of abstraction (often in the last lines of the stanza). it does, however, function primarily by juxtaposition, assembling itself out of multiple angles of view, motions from concrete to abstract, deployments of metaphor, that accumulate around “the life of the child”. it might be helpful to read it as analagously structured to a godard film of the same period.
I agree with rozele about both Rukeyser in general and “The Speed of Darkness” in particular.
it might be helpful to read it as analagously structured to a godard film of the same period.
Yes! As I was reading that quote about poetry and movies I was thinking “I’ll bet she’ll enjoy the new wave that’s going to wash onto our shores in a few years…”
@Jerry F.: I meant “reductionist” to apply to an idea of usefulness not an idea of poetry, if that makes sense. Probably “hermetic” is not the optimal word to apply to that marginalized and self-marginalizing set of poets. (That they may not have all understood themselves to be pursuing marginalization as a strategy and may in some cases have fancied themselves pursuing the opposite is perhaps neither here nor there.) Maybe a fair comparison to the general prominence/celebrity and broad cultural salience of Rukeyser would not be to compare her to let’s say Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was 21 years (a scant generation) her senior.
I see on wikipedia that Kenneth Rexroth supposedly described Rukeyser as “the greatest poet of her ‘exact generation.'” One would like a better sense of what exactly he meant by “exact” before evaluating this claim, although maybe that’s at a minimum exalting her over Delmore Schwartz, who was born exactly one week before she was.
Do you consider Emily Dickinson “hermetic,” or perhaps “self-marginalizing”? Because I’m pretty sure most people would find an average Rukeyser poem easier on the brain than a great deal of Dickinson.
“Easier on the brain” = the style of culturally-marginal 20th century poetry in which one makes banal (or clever-to-ones-own-satisfaction) observations about quotidian life, but with a ragged right margin so it looks like verse on the page? Like what you want, but don’t blame the public for not digging it as much as whoever/whatever they dig more.
Or here’s something I just found on the internet by Rukeyser that has a modestly “poetic” conceit in it. It’s not bowling me over, to be frank.
“In the night
wandering room to room of this world
I move by touch
and then something says
let the city pour
the sleep of the beloved
Let the night pour down
all its meanings
Let the images pour
the light is dreaming”
(I don’t know if this is average or not, but it was the first option I clicked on.)
On the other hand, I’m impressed to learn that apart from her poetry Rukeyser also wrote full-length biographies of both Josiah Willard Gibbs AND Wendell Willkie, who are not usually mentioned in the same breath.
add in thomas hariot, whose rediscovery she helped launch, and her unfinished biography of franz boas, (and if you like, the musical on harry houdini) and you start to get a sense of her range of interests!
and, again, i’m not sure what the stake is in trying to declare a poet who was very popular in several of the widest moments/contexts of poetry-reading that the 20th-century u.s. saw to be not only “marginal”, which is empirically untrue, but “self-marginalizing”, which (if it were even a verifiable assertion, rather than a weird pseudo-psychologizing gesture) would seem to at a minimum involve not submitting work for publication by Viking, Doubleday, Harper, Macmillan, New Directions, Random House, and McGraw-Hill (to name some of rukeyser’s publishers). you’re allowed to not like a poet without making shit up.
&jwb
The lines you quote are from a larger sequence:
—
RATIONAL MAN
The marker at Auschwitz
The scientists torturing male genitals
The learned scientists, they torture female genitals
The 3-year-old girl, what she did to her kitten
The collar made of leather for drowning a man in his chair
The scatter-bomb with the nails that drive into the brain
The thread through the young man’s splendid penis
The babies in flames. The thrust
Infected reptile dead in the live wombs of girls
We did not know we were insane.
We do not know we are insane.
We say to them : you are insane
Anything you can imagine
on punishable drugs, or calm and young
with a fever of 105, or on your knees,
with the word of Hanoi bombed
with the legless boy in Bach Mai
with the sons of man torn by man
Rational man has done.
Mercy, Lord. On every living life.
* * *
In tall whirlpools of mirrors
Unshapen body and face
middle of the depth
of a night that will not turn
the unshapen all night
trying for form
* * *
I do and I do.
Life and this under-war.
Deep under protest, make.
For we are makers more.
but touching teaching going
the young and the old
they reach they break they are moving
to make the world
* * *
something about desire
something about murder
something about my death
something about madness
something about light
something of breaking open
sing me to sleep and morning
my dreams are all a waking
* * *
In the night
wandering room to room of this world
I move by touch
and then something says
let the city pour
the sleep of the beloved
Let the night pour down
all its meanings
Let the images pour
the light is dreaming
—
I think the lines are somewhat clearer in context and would note also
1. She seems to have several poems where she is awake at night (and maybe unsure whether or not she is really dreaming?).
2. The image of the city pouring is repeated from one of her other poems, and seems to refer to a pouring forth or spilling over (of something pent up?).
I appreciate the context provided by PlasticPaddy, which was missing from my source, which appears to be a scan from the September 1973 issue of _Poetry_ magazine – a periodical which was a big deal back then in the Poetry-Industrial Complex. Perhaps the editors chose their excerpts sub-optimally.
I think rozele and I are maybe talking past each other to some extent but I am happy to stipulate that whatever was going on over the course of Rukeyser’s career that made the P-I Complex inexorably more culturally marginal as time went on, she was not in favor of that direction and was not consciously trying to steer things in that direction. And of course it’s a gradual progression – there were several decades where your big-name publishers like those rozele cited felt a certain obligation to keep putting out X volumes per year of Serious Poetry regardless of whether it sold well before they finally ceased feeling that obligation. Just the other day I was noting to myself with surprise that way back in the Seventies Arista Records put out five or six consecutive modestly-selling albums of the free-jazz stylings of Anthony Braxton* before giving up on him. Some sort of residual feeling on the sense of Clive Davis or someone in his orbit about supporting art for art’s sake that did not endure at that sort of label into the Eighties?
But maybe it would have been more interesting if Rukeyser had written not a bio of Willkie but a stirring poem about his doomed Presidential campaign along the lines of Vachel Lindsay’s doomed-1896-campaign parlor piece titled simply “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.”
*Back when one of his quirks was not giving his original compositions names that are easily-typed strings of words but rather designating them by diagrams that look rather like they represent molecules or are perhaps schematic renderings of galaxies, an approach which made life more difficult for subsequent discographers. In the Nineties Arista did rather better for itself with the debut album of Toni Braxton, who AFAIK is no relation.
the free-jazz stylings of Anthony Braxton […] In the Nineties Arista did rather better for itself with the debut album of Toni Braxton
I’m not sure if I’m correct in reading into that that you are more impressed with Toni than with Anthony (“free-jazz stylings” seems to me to drip with contempt), but since I am someone who has a shelf full of recordings of the latter and cares nothing about the former, I am glad Arista threw some money his way. I was unfamiliar with those recordings, but I see Mosaic put out an 8 CD box of The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton — alas, as is normal with Mosaic limited editions, it’s long out of print, and whoever is selling a copy wants $250 for it. Never mind, I’ll stick with my Delmark, SteepleChase, HatART, Leo, and Black Saint sets.
I like Anthony Braxton just fine, I was just puzzled by what Arista’s business plan to make money from him had been if they indeed had had one. I recently listened (via the ministrations of Spotify) to the _Five Pieces 1975_ album, which holds up well. It’s not even particularly dissonant or abrasive, although it does, in the best free-jazz tradition, refuse to be drawn into discussions about what key anything is in and when/where we might expect the downbeat of the next measure to fall.
Atlantic Records still having a toe in the serious non-fusion jazz business as of ’75 can be attributed to the personal taste of the less powerful Ertegun brother and his more powerful brother being content to let him do his thing as long as he didn’t come in too much worse than breaking even on the jazz portfolio, but I’m not sure who was calling the shots at Arista in this regard. I mean, Clive signed Patti Smith that year but the obvious intent was to try to make money on her as the Next Big Thing rather than run a benevolent non-profit for experimental artists.
Arista’s other jazz artists of the time included e.g. the Brecker Brothers, Gil Scott-Heron (when he was teamed up with Brian Jackson), and the Eleventh House feat. Larry Coryell, all of which were more fusion-adjacent at a time when fusion was still selling well. OTOH, Arista that year also did e.g. a reissue of a decade-old Albert Ayler LP plus licensed for U.S. release an LP of Cecil Taylor performing live at Montreaux in ’74, so there was some weirdo somewhere in the corporate structure with some budget and some freedom of action. The late Michael Cuscuna (1949-2024) appears to have been involved in many of these cooler projects, but there must have been some suit who approved of what he was doing.
Arista that year also put out a promotional-only “Freedom Sampler” with quite a range of interesting-but-unlikely-to-sell-well players. https://www.discogs.com/master/3449378-Various-Arista-Freedom-Sampler
I like Anthony Braxton just fine
Ah, sorry for misreading you! Arista was certainly dabbling in a weird mix of stuff in those days.
@rozele: Sorry, “academy” wasn’t the right word. I should have said “poetry establishment”, or what J. W. called the P-I complex. I admit I was shocked to see that Rukeyser isn’t in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1979) or The Harper Anthology of Poetry (1981). On the poetry-establishment side, she got a Guggenheim and a number of her poems appeared in Poetry and The New Yorker—other prestigious journals are too hard to check. For the actual acadermy, she was a Yale Younger Poet, and long after her death, her collected poems were published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and her selected prose by Cornell U. Press.
From where I sit, that sounds like a favorable view from the academy, but what I wanted to say was that I wasn’t talking about really popular poets such as Edgar A. Guest and Rod McKuen. Publishers don’t release sales figures the way movie producers do, but I can hardly imagine any of Rukeyser’s books, despite being from major publishers, sold a tenth of what McKuen’s did.
As for hermeticism, maybe I shouldn’t have picked up on that word either. I certainly didn’t mean the preference of the poets of ermetismo for poetry that had no educational aims, as I learned today. I meant hard on the brain, to use Hat’s terminology. I’ve never seen a movie by Godard or any of the French New Wave (I haven’t seen a lot of movies), but from what I’ve heard and can see on the Internet, comparing Rukeyser’s methods in “The Speed of Darkness” to Godard’s is quite a strong argument that her poem is hard for most Americans to understand or enjoy.
Finally, I am not in any way criticizing Rukeyser’s artistic or activistic (if that’s a word) decisions. I do think that in the passage I quoted, she was oblivious to something that seems obvious to me: whjy so many Americans could understand certain techniques in film and found similar techniques in poetry incomprehensible, if not repellent or frightening.
Do you consider Emily Dickinson “hermetic,” or perhaps “self-marginalizing”? Because I’m pretty sure most people would find an average Rukeyser poem easier on the brain than a great deal of Dickinson.
Certainly some of Dickinson’s poems are hard on the brain, and she was extremely self-marginalizing since she wrote only for herself (or an imaginary reader?). As I understand it, her popularity rests on a small number of relatively accessible poems. I haven’t read enough of Rukeyser to locate an average poem. If you want to come up with one, I’ll give your question a shot.
It doesn’t really matter — our views of poetry are too far apart for meaningful dialogue. You seem to be opposing the “poetry establishment” (which apparently means any venue that exists to publish poetry) to — what, “real” poetry? The poetry of the Man in the Street, which is passed on from mouth to mouth in smoky bars/cafes? I dunno, I can’t figure out where you’re coming from. I would think anyone who actually reads/likes poetry should have no problem with Rukeyser, but you seem to be saying any poetry that can’t be gobbled up like an op-ed piece is “hermetic,” “self-marginalizing,” or whatever.
And yes, the percentage of the population that willingly interacts with poetry has plummeted in the last century-plus. This is a complex issue that has to do with any number of cultural and educational factors, and putting it down to “self-marginalizing” poets is blaming the victim.
A previous mention of “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,” as well as comparisons of poetry to jazz.
To clarify, I haven’t said anything about what I have a problem with.
I’m only talking about that plummet of the percentage of the population that willingly interacts with non-rap poetry. And I think that the great difference between poetry of the present in, say, Poetry or Rattle, and the poetry of a century-plus ago, you’ll see that most contemporary poetry is much harder on the brain and aiming at a much smaller readership. (There are exceptions, of course.) The story of that plummet is complex, as you say, but I think the change in prestigious poetry is a big part of it, not to be discounted by saying that mentioning it is blaming the victim. And I think that’s a lot like what J. W. was saying.
What I meant by the poetry establishment, which publishes what I just called prestigious poetry, centers on the magazines that pay noticeable amounts of money, the major prizes, and academia. (That’s not every venue that exists to publish poetry. You may not be aware of some little, mostly on-line magazines that publish whatever they get, or one poem from every submission, or ditto if it fits their theme of spiritual uplift or mutual emotional support. A lot of their poetry is very accessible and I like very little of it. I know about them only because some people in my on-line poetry workshop publish in those places. Some of those people also have published books of their poetry. I haven’t dared to look into the financial arrangements.)
I’m not really any good with modernist poetry, except as parody.
Inherited from Middle Persian 𐭣𐭯 (dp /dap/), ultimately from Sumerian 𒁾 (dub, “tablet”).
What?
Is this an AI hallucination? I cannot find a Middle Persian 𐭣𐭯 in a meaning ‘drum’ or the like in any glossaries of Pahlavi, book or inscriptional, or any editions of Pahlavi texts. And no glossaries of Manichaean Middle Persian and no published Manichaean texts that I could find have a word dp or db in an appropriate meaning. What does exist is a Parthian ⟨db⟩ daβ ‘deception, trick’.
There is however Middle Persian ⟨dpyrˈ⟩ dibīr ‘scribe’ beside ⟨d(p)ywʾnˈ⟩ dēwān ‘archive’.
The only relevant dap I could find is دپ dap ‘daf’ given in an early Qajar-era description of the dialect of Shushtar entitled لغت محلی شوشتر Loghat-e maḥallī-ye Shūshtar.
My housemate plays the daf in a street duo with a santur player and in other Kurdish street bands, so I have extra interest in this word, which I had always just assumed was ultimately onomatopoeic in origin.
Oh dear. I apologize for passing on such wretched misinformation!
The Wiktionary also still has the dubious derivation of Arabic أدب ʾadab ‘literature’ from Sumerian DUB here… Discussion here on LH — I just love your joke in the comments there, Hat. I just wish the Wiktionary would require that all stages of the etymologies be referenced.
assuming they aren’t both simply onomatopoeic
Chris Frantz
Lameen’s point is extremely important and well-taken.
Other words of the shape tVp-, dVb-, tVm-, etc., referring to various kinds of drum, just off the top of my head: Japanese 鼓 tsuzumi /tudumi/; Persian تنبک tombak, Middle Persian tumbag; Arabic دمام dammām, دبدبه dabdaba, طبلة ṭabla, etc.; Hebrew תֹּף tōp̄, Ugaritic tp, etc.; the extensive family of French tambour and its antecedents; the family of English drum, German Trommel, etc.; and of South Asian origin, English tom-tom…
ultimately from Sumerian 𒁾 (dub, ‘tablet’)
Where did the Wiktionary editor get this etymology from?
Leaving aside the possibility of an onomatopoeic origin for Arabic duff, daff for a moment to consider a link between Sumerian DUB and Arabic duff (variant daff) ‘frame drum’…
The Arabic lexicographic tradition has something a little along these lines. For an Anglophone readership, this can be summarized with Lane’s entry for the root dff and the noun دف daff ‘the side of anything’, beginning in the first column here. This is the entry for duff, variant daff in the middle of the second column:
And then immediately underneath (boldface added):
From Stephen A. Kaufman (1974), The Akkadian Influence on Aramaic, p. 46 (abbreviations silently expanded):
All this is very woolly, and it seems unlikely that further investigation will yield anything more certain, so I’ll just leave it here.
As an addendum… I found that the late Akkadian adapu (usually, ‘a genre of Sumerian hymn’, also perhaps ‘the kind of musical instrument to which such hymns were performed’, in lexical texts), from Sumerian adab, has also been invoked to explain duff, daff ‘frame drum’, etc. (As here, p. xiv.)
However, the exact meaning of Sumerian adab is disputed. Recently, Michalowski (2019) has denied that adab was an instrument at all (with an overview of attestations of the word), while Sánchez Muñoz (2021) disagrees.
the shape tVp-, dVb-, tVm-, etc., referring to various kinds of drum,
Table playing/instruction has an extensive vocabulary for different ways of striking the two drums. The sharp ringing tone striking the edge of the smaller, the muddy two-syllable down-up in the middle of the larger, … All onomatopoeic, to my ear. And there’s a corresponding set of dance steps: striking the flat of the foot, the outer edge, the toe, the heel, heel-then-toe … hand-claps …
Performances then consist of a call-and-response competition: the dancer makes some sequence of steps (usually naming the sounds), the tabla must respond with the same sequence, at first each taking 16 bars, then 8, then 4 … It’s mesmerising.
There’s a bit of the vocab in here. (But youtube is giving me mostly belly-dancing — I’d better go scrub my viewing history.)
I did a post on names for drum rhythms in the first years of LH — I could swear it had “paradiddle” in the title — but I can’t find it.
Other words of the shape tVp-, dVb-, tVm-, etc., referring to various kinds of drum
Also Mooré lʋnga, plural lʋmse “drum” (stem lʋm-.) Reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta *lʊm-.
Onomatopoeia Rules OK.
Table playing
Duh Tabla! Bloody autocorrect! OTOH I’ve drummed on some very fine tables …
DRUM LANGUAGE. 2011
(no “paradiddle”, nor any other kind of diddle)
I learned the basics of the daf (Mardin Kurmanji erbane) with the syllables tom, beg, and çep, as in this video (in Turkish) here from a teacher in Amed (Diyarbakır). The Kurmanji word çep literally means ‘left’, as in ‘left hand’, but it makes a nice syllable for constructing patterns with.
Also “heart” as in Chinook Jargon:
qʰáta máyka tə́mtəm
what 2sg heart
“What do you think?”
Those syllables I mentioned before can be heard in action here in this video from the same daf teacher.
DRUM LANGUAGE. 2011
No, that one’s easy to turn up, but as you say it has no “paradiddle” or any other kind of diddle. The one I’m thinking of is from the first year or two of LH and was specifically about percussion terminology; the title was something like TWO PARADIDDLES AND A FLIM-FLAM (although the specific terms may be wrong). I remember there was a fairly lengthy comment from Songdog, who had been a drummer in his youth.
Googling flim-flam site:languagehat.com finds posts with flim-flam and flimflam, but none of them fit.
https://languagehat.com/a-drag-paradiddle-and-a-pataflafla/
Thank you!
It’s very odd that a Google search turns up nothing with either pataflafla or paradiddle.
@hat
Duck Duck go site search with drum turned it up. Maybe DDG, Google et al. do not recognise your other terms.
I have tentatively concluded that I do not exist.
*makes steeple of fingers*
How long have you had these feelings of nonexistence?
makes steeple of fingers
That’s so good! I’ve never heard it before, only “touches/puts tips of fingers together”.
It’s pretty common, often with “steeple” as a verb. “He steepled his fingers.”