Tuesday, October 2, 2012

A Message from Letters From Caliban

Dear readers,

The output has been a little less than prodigous these last few weeks.  Allow me to explain.

Before I started this blog I kept much of my writing on my computer.  Computers, as you know, can be temperamental -- especially mine.  Out of what I imagine must have been pure spite, my laptop some how did away with dozens of my documents a few weeks ago.  (An IT guy can probably help, but that would mean a lot of work that I'd rather not do.  The lazy will inherit the earth.) 

Among those documents were two or three short stories and several finished poems.  Luckily, I had printed copies or rough drafts of most of them; the task of late has been to dig them out of file drawers and backpacks, transpose them onto the computer, and tidy them up so as to be presentable.  Don't worry, you'll see them soon.

So this week, if I can offer you nothing else, at least let me give you an idea of what the editors here at Letters from Caliban are reading.  The mood here has been decidedly modernist:  Ulysses (at the point where Bloom encounters the Citizen-Cyclops); the Cantos (having left the thirteen hundreds, Jefferson and Adams are writing each other about money and freedom); Isak Dinesen's Winter Tales; and a little bit of Baudelaire.  And also Tad Szulc's Chopin in Paris.

I admire Pound, but I don't see much that I can borrow (read: steal) from the Cantos for my own poetry.  That's not to say I haven't learned from him.  My poem "7 September" is based in part on Pound's explanation of Chinese characters in the beginning of ABC of Reading.  But those choppy, heel-pounding Poundian rhythms (pound Pound pound), such as you see later in Gary Snyder and some of Robert Lowell, are not a key that I can sing in. 

As far as Joyce goes, I have found in Ulysses a voice from heaven, a complex of word and feeling and thought and image sublime in its dimensions.  Only once have I ever read anything like it, and that was the Divina Commedia.  Faust comes close, but is too fragmented in its form and its music, not nearly as perfectly controlled a vision as Dante's or Joyce's. 

In practical terms, I have the most to learn from Dinesen.  At first I didn't like Dinesen.  She struck me as too artificial, overwraught.  But I've read more craefully this time around.  What primal power!  She is a teller of tales, the voice of all the legends of childhood - the Arabian Nights, Robin Hood, the stories from Homer and Ovid and the Eddas.  More importantly she is a surgeon and a craftsman of the highest grade.  She presents a story; but she has already dug deep into the weird, murky, eternally dark cavity of the story and found its mad beating dreamheart.  Having seen this strange subterranean soul, she returns to the surface story and dresses it with such elegance that the reader has no conscious idea of its primal force.  But she does.  That's the sly smile that characterizes Dinesen.  It's not the postmodern wink that promises emptiness beneath the gilding.  It's the opposite.  The gilding is unimportant.  There is a heart in the story, buried but beating. 

My dear readers and friends, don't hesitate to comment or ask questions.  And expect more stuff, soon.

-Carlo

To ride; to string a bow; to tell the truth

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