The Washington Review of Books is like fiction to some people.
Links:
In The Paris Review, Anthony Madrid on ghazals in English:
I’ll give an example in a minute, but first I’m going to say something deep and deeply upsetting: Contrary to what you were told by teachers all your life, the formal parameters of poetry are not arbitrary, are not rules for the sake of rules, are not there as barbells for the poet to lift to show how strong she is. No, they are all designed to play to their languages’ strengths. They secure desirable effects—that is their warrant and their glory.
Because of the syntax of English, it is easy/graceful/elegant to start sentence after sentence with the same word, but it is not easy/graceful/elegant to end sentence after sentence on the same word. You wind up ending on some weak prepositional phrase that you would never be tempted to deploy in that way, except for the rule. You get no pleasure writing it; the reader has no pleasure reading it.
It should worry people very much that if you translate Urdu ghazals into, say, English, simply repeating back in English what the Urdu verses say, it is virtually never the case that the words at the end of the Urdu strophes stay at the end in English. What does that tell you?
[As I’ve said before, I think the only person who could really make the ghazal seem natural in English is Swinburne; unfortunately, he is currently unavailable due to having died in 1909. And the only real English successes I can think of with repeated line endings are the sestina and villanelle (which are completely different from the ghazal) and something like Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice,” with its rhymes of “call to me”/“all to me” and “view you then”/“knew you then.” All this makes me think that Madrid is right—if the ghazal in English is going to be anything, it will have to seem more natural. Few things in a poem are as bad as the sensation that the poet is forcing it. Housman, commenting on these lines of Thomas Campbell’s,
Yet remember, ’Midst our wooing,
Love has bliss, but Love has ruing;
Other smiles may make you fickle,
Tears for other charms may trickle.
writes that rhyme schemes “generally entice [poets] to use words they would rather not have used . . . The word trickle, in that verse, is not preferred to the word flow because of its intrinsic merit, but for quite another reason.” The form is in charge, and not the poet, and nobody wants to see the form in charge. There is, luckily, plenty of precedent for this adaptation of forms from one language to another; for example, the Shakespearean sonnet gives poets more flexibility with rhymes than the Petrarchan, which is useful in a language with fewer rhymes than Italian.
Finally, as someone whose first exposure to writing poetry was, I think, one of those 5-7-5 haikus in third grade, I appreciate Madrid’s willingness to denounce the things. They’re all so loosey-goosey, and not even in a way that lets the extra syllables produce an effect (think of how “apparition” stands out from every other word in the similarly condensed “In a Station of the Metro”). It probably gives the third graders the idea that poetry is mostly about counting syllables, too. —Steve]
In ,
against selected poems:This brings me to the second reason why I am lukewarm about volumes of “Selected Poems.” I often disagree about what counts as a poet’s best work. When I know a poet’s collections, I am often surprised about what has made it between the covers of the “Selected.” For sure, some of this is subjective—what I prefer will not be the same as what you prefer. I grew up on a small dairy farm in Pennsylvania, so I am often drawn to poems about rural life and nature. Because of such differences in taste, you may find individual collections, or poems within collections, more to your liking than a poet’s “Selected.”
But I want to make a stronger claim, beyond individual differences of tastes. At times poets leave out some of their objectively best work in terms of thematic complexity or interest, formal accomplishment, striking imagery, or the many other aspects of poetic craft to which you can appeal in a judgment of artistic merit. (At other times, I think they include decidedly weak poems.) In this regard, I am skeptical about one major argument that is sometimes offered for “Selected” volumes—that they winnow the poetic wheat from the chaff. I suspect that some wheat is often lost and that some chaff often remains. This is also why I tend to appreciate meatier “Selected” volumes, with healthy selections from each of a poet’s earlier collections, over slimmer “Selecteds.”
[“Selected Poems” is, to be fair, truthful, and not just by the standards of advertising—all it promises is that the poems were selected, as indeed they were. We will have to wait for bolder editors to give us collections with titles like “Good Poems.” (Or, I suppose, “Bad Poems,” for those of us who like to feel superior.) —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in the TLS; first, James Marcus reviews Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain (Mark Twain, May) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 10, 2025; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Apr. 30, 2025 and WRB—May 21, 2025.]:
One of Twain’s favorite personae—the brash, vulgar, truth-telling American—was on ample display in The Innocents Abroad, which he published after a lengthy trip to Europe and the Middle East. There was already a small canon of travel books by American visitors to the old world, including works by Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But these tended to be reverential: post-colonial curtsies to what was presumed to be a superior culture.
Twain was having none of that. The Parisian women, famed for their good looks, struck him as homely: “Thus topples to the earth another idol of my infancy!” He ridiculed the holy relics that he saw in Italy, and the profusion of Renaissance paintings (“I am glad the Old Masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner”). This was philistinism as performance art. Like the similar tirades delivered two centuries later by Tom Wolfe (who also copied Twain’s white suit), it can be bracingly funny in small doses, less so over the length of an entire book.
[R.I.P. Mark Twain; you would have loved “California Girls.” And every American (Henry James and T. S. Eliot excepted, I guess) has philistinism as performance art somewhere in the arsenal. Watch: I went to a football school in the Midwest, as American as it gets, and I don’t need any (I can’t pull off “I don’t need no,” alas) fancy notions or sophisticated schooling; I’m just an American telling you what I think, same as you can do. (I may regret writing this if Michigan grads start stealing the idea from me.) —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
A potential end to discourse about men reading (O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!)
Some good ideas for wraps
K. T. on a Poem by Arielle Hebert and paradise
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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