WRB—Nov. 8, 2025
“a far-off glorious life”
I, too, dislike the WRB.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
Links:
In Public Books, Jonathan Elmer on two ways of disliking poetry:
Perhaps I should describe the feeling more strongly: my failure to understand was a kind of humbling. The “perfect contempt” directed at poetry, its spotlight of scorn, spills over to take in the reader as well. We are invited in—“I, too, dislike it,” [Marianne] Moore writes (emphasis mine), as if we were in cahoots—but also quickly shown the door. Moore’s poems play hard to get.
Moore’s point, I think, is that you have to read poetry to dislike it; poetry is, for some of us, an everyday annoyance. Those who never pick up a book of poetry may be indifferent or dismissive, they may mock the very idea of poetry, but they can’t really be said to dislike poetry, much less have a purified, a perfected, contempt for something they do not encounter.
But if we’re reading poetry at all, we are already luxuriating, dawdling in a space in which love and contempt—for the poem, for poetry itself, for ourselves—are inseparable.
[Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt.
Elmer bases his comments off the three-line version of “Poetry” referenced in today’s opening joke, which first appeared in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967). Arthur Gregor, in an essay about knowing Moore late in her life, has a story about her cutting most of the poem for that edition:
During one of my visits with Marianne in preparation of the Complete Poems volume, she made the startling announcement to Ed Kennebeck and to me that she would omit some poems and was planning to cut her famous “Poetry”—perhaps her most widely anthologized poem—to three lines. A drastic cut. Over the years the poem had undergone several revisions and now it was to be shortened by twenty-six lines (counting the run-on lines as single ones). Would Marianne state her reasons for this in a Preface, an Author’s Note, I asked. No, she said, no preface, no author’s note. “Omissions are not accidents,” she added, in her characteristic manner of summary and precision. To my, “Why not use this?” she did not reply but when the book appeared, it said in the upper right-hand corner of the page preceding the Table of Contents,
Omissions are not accidents.
M.M.
—Steve]
In The Paris Review, Sarah Bochicchio on Virginia Woolf’s postcards:
Woolf’s preferred ink color was violet, which she felt lent a softness to her correspondence. Purple had become a popular color for inks and textiles since the patenting and mass-marketing of the synthetic dye, aniline purple in the 1850s. George Eliot linked violet ink to “lady novelists” in a sardonic essay about her contemporaries, though she used it as well. The purple may have held some feminist connotations, as it was one of the emblematic colors of the suffragette movement.
Woolf usually typed as a courtesy to those who struggled to read her scribbly handwriting. She felt a distance from the machine—her handwriting was an extension of herself in a way that the typewriter was not. Even as an intensely modern writer, her stationery preferences were holdovers from the Victorian marketplace.
Here, her struggle to type—awkward spacing, irregular ink, backspaces—is visible as she asks her nephew Julian for help locating the source of a quotation: “For Heavens sake tell me where does ‘Die like a rose in aromatic pain’ come from? Pope? And what is the right quotation? And where are your xxxxxd poems.” It was unusual for her to type a note to Julian—but imperfection, of memory and of typing skill, offers a different kind of intimacy.
[For those playing along at home, “Die of a rose in aromatic pain” is from Pope’s Essay on Man:
Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n,
T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n?
Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,
To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore?
Or quick effluvia darting thro’ the brain,
Die of a rose in aromatic pain?
The way Woolf remembered it is certainly a better line out of context, making the flower giving off its scent a kind of bleeding out. —Steve]
In Granta, Madhu H. Kaza on Telegu’s fondness for reduplication:
Such words and the rhythms and sensations they produce do not translate well between Telugu and English. I don’t mean to distinguish the particular music of Telugu—a vowel-heavy language—from that of English. I mean rather an affective relationship to sound and rhythm itself. Wunker-tinker and all manner of reduplicated words reveal the strictures of good taste in English. English has its share of such words: willy-nilly, namby-pamby, hokey-pokey. But these tend to be perceived as childish or indecorous, testing the boundaries of English decorum.
When English reduplications originate in other languages, the words often undergo a devaluation. “Mumbo-jumbo” is a prime example. “Maamajomboo” likely referred to a ritual figure in the Mandinka language of West Africa, but as it entered English, the term became shorthand for nonsensical, suspect speech. Similarly, Hobson-Jobson, the foundational dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms, takes its title from colonial mimicry of the sound patterns English officials heard in India. The Shia mourning chant, “Ya Hassan! Ya Hussein!” took on a pejorative cast and eventually mutated into “Hobson Jobson.”
The colonial attitude towards the rhythms of Indian languages is not surprising: English embarrasses quickly around reduplication. The primary English form of improvisational reduplication, is the schm-, which comes from Yiddish. We can say Joe Schmo or fancy-schmancy, but also improvise: morning-schmorning or yellow-schmellow. Yet even here, the schm- can sound overly dramatic and, well, schmaltzy.
[One of the three English examples of reduplication Kaza gives was coined mockingly. “Namby Pamby” is the title of a 1725 poem by Henry Carey in the form of a mock-lullaby that attacks Ambrose Philips (hence “Namby”) for his insipid and childish verse. (Perhaps literary culture would be in a better place if people were still writing things about each other like “Now he pumps his little Wits, / Shitting writes, and writing shits, / All by little tiny Bits” and “Now he acts the Granadier, / Calling for a Pot of Beer: / Where’s his Money? He’s forgot: / Get him gone, a drunken Sot.” Who can say.) And “hokey-pokey” is an alteration of “hocus pocus,” a phrase that might also have its origin in mockery. The OED takes a dim view of that opinion, though: “The notion that hocus pocus was a parody of the Latin words used in the Eucharist, rests merely on a conjecture thrown out by [John] Tillotson.” (Tillotson: “In all probability those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.”) —Steve]
Reviews:
In Engelsberg Ideas, Derek Turner reviews a book about weird sounds (The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination, by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen, November 11) [An Upcoming book today.]:
The ethereal sounds made by winds were of great matter to the Greeks, from Æolus who gave Odysseus a bag of winds to blow him home, to the zephyrs that rustled oracular leaves in sacred groves. The wistfulness of wind-music has ever since inspired, seen in England in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”—”a soft floating witchery of sound” caused by wind passing through strings, enchanting his country cottage and family. He wondered, “ . . . what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely framed?”
A more surprising love of wind-noise was evinced by Thoreau, for whom the telephone line newly erected across his Walden Pond seemed to carry rumors of “a far-off glorious life.” That image ineluctably evokes another sample of American audio, another lonesome romantic hearkening to a line—Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” of 1968: “I hear you singing in the wire / I can hear you through the whine.” After the Japanese tsunami of 2011, many relatives of those who had died found comfort by weeping into the “wind phone” in the town of Ōtsuchi—an unconnected phone in a kiosk set up by a landscape designer so he could “talk” to his drowned cousin.
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door
Instrument and music are one; the music (as with the Æolian harp) seems to play itself.
A few days after Thoreau wrote the line in his journal that Turner quotes, he would explicitly compare the wire to an Æolian harp:
At the entrance to the Deep Cut, I heard the telegraph-wire vibrating like an Æolian harp. It reminded me suddenly,—reservedly, with a beautiful paucity of communication, even silently, such was its effect on my thoughts,—it reminded me, I say, with a certain pathetic moderation, of what finer and deeper stirrings I was susceptible, which grandly set all argument and dispute aside, a triumphant though transient exhibition of the truth.
In Walden, though, he would take a different view of the communications carried by the telegraph wire and its meaning as a symbol: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
And the lineman in “Wichita Lineman” also finds himself moved to something like reflections on eternity by the shimmering sound of the wires: “And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time.” I recall once hearing someone argue that writing a great country song is one of the hardest things to do in art because the permissible ingredients (as it were) are so simple and so restrictive. This is perhaps not quite true of “Wichita Lineman,” with its harmonic sophistication absent from the vast majority of country music, but it is absolutely true of that lyric. —Steve]
In The Point, Michael Barron reviews one of this year’s big books (Schattenfroh, by Michael Lentz, translated from the German by Max Lawton, September 9) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 3, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Sept. 6, 2025.]:
A year after its announcement, Schattenfroh has now come out during a glowing season for postmodernism, alongside Thomas Pynchon’s sunset novel, Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win and the long-awaited publication of Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s collaborative Your Name Here (October). Despite the federal funding cuts that delayed the novel’s publication and threatened numerous adventurous small presses, it’s an auspicious time for Deep Vellum to deliver the first of its promised tomes of badass avant-garde masterpieces. Schattenfroh easily lives up to the label: the novel is unquestionably the magnum opus of its author Michael Lentz, a writer and performer of several acclaimed postmodern works and compositions more modest in ambition. Set in the psycho-realm of his own mind, Schattenfroh is a phantasmic allegorical journey charted by autobiographical references, lexical machinations and visual legerdemain, along with a humanities department’s worth of allusions. Its variegated DNA appears as an index within the narrative, numbering well beyond a hundred works to include those by German-language writers (Kafka, Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel) and non (Lewis Carroll, Ray Bradbury, Dante Alighieri, Michel Foucault), as well as studies of Northern Renaissance painters, cryptography and code breaking, psychology and phenomenology, Gutenberg printing methods, uprisings in medieval Germany, and survivors and enablers of the Third Reich. Works of Judeo-Christian theology abound, with Kabbalistic mysticism being something of an obsession. Lentz also lists two treatises on Church law penned by his father, Hubert Lentz, and even one of his own books, Motherdying (Muttersterben), a eulogy for his mother that reads like a prose poem. Schattenfroh is included too—as being written by Schattenfroh.
N.B.:
The Farmers’ Almanac is going out of business. [From this I learned about the intense rivalry between the Farmers’ Almanac and The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the latter of which would like you to know that it is “still going strong.” I am vaguely annoyed that the one based in Maine is going out of business while the one based in New Hampshire survives. —Steve]
Dying while hunting catfish. [Some of the stories in here are as close as we can get to Beowulf and Grendel’s mother duking it out at the bottom of a lake. Has anyone imagined Grendel’s mother as a catfish before? The largest catfish on record was nine feet long and weighed 646 pounds, which is monstrous enough, but we can do bigger. Japanese myth tells us of the Namazu, a gigantic underground catfish that causes earthquakes, and perhaps even Leviathan is simply a catfish of unfathomable size that God will bread and fry at the end of time.
And the catfish is certainly good enough for European oral tradition; after all, it’s good enough for American oral tradition:
Well, I wish I was a catfish
Swimming in a deep blue sea
I would have all you good-looking women
Fishing, fishing after me
Surely too the catfish would be less out of place at the bottom of a lake than it is here. Catfish do not live “in a deep blue sea,” after all—once again rhyme is causing poets to express things “worse then else they would have exprest them,” as the man says. The catfish is also not high on the list of animals with erotic associations. (The sexy cat is a staple of Halloween parties for a reason, but I doubt we will see anyone take the next step.) The poets, I suppose, will continue to catfish us. —Steve]
New issues:
Granta 173: India | Autumn 2025 [As linked to above.]
New Left Review 155•Sept/Oct 2025
Duane Roberts, the inventor of the frozen burrito, has died. R.I.P.
Poem:
“The Good Life” by Tracy K. Smith
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
[I have never been quite the degree of broke alluded to in this poem, but I am also prone to romanticizing my early 20s, when I paid my rent in cash and had no lease or insurance or in fact windows. Despite the romance of the final lines, there is something a little brutal and alienating at its center. Smith is always alone in her material circumstances. “Some people,” (those found in the first line of this poem) have been abandoned by the good fortune that Smith laments. At the same time, it is also “everyone else” who regularly enjoyed the privileges—roast chicken, red wine—that were once so scarce for Smith, the memory of which pursues her through her life of abundance apparently achieved. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | November 11
The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare
by Daniel Swift
From the publisher: Between 1576 and 1598, a playhouse called the Theatre stood in the northeast suburbs of London, until it was secretly torn down and its timbers used to build the much more famous Globe. Dreamed up and run by a former actor and notorious brawler named James Burbage, the Theatre was the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London. It was plagued by litigation, heavily in debt, and the target of endless condemnation by preachers and the Lord Mayor. It was also where the young William Shakespeare worked when he first arrived in London, and it was here that he wrote many of his early plays.
At the heart of the Theatre was the dream of making money from creating art. This was Burbage’s dream, of course, but it was also Shakespeare’s, who worked with a close team of actors and cowriters at the Theatre, building the foundations of his own career and devising a way to make money from writing. Nobody had ever really done this before: playwrights in his time were notoriously poor; and the idea that one might earn a living from writing remains a faint and tempting one today.
Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory is a story about art and money, creativity and craft, literary inspiration and the profit motive. The Theatre was a controversial, highly commercial factory for great and challenging art; into the dream factory walked the son of a Stratford tradesman, and out emerged the greatest writer in English.
Also out Tuesday:
Princeton University Press: Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World by John Blair [We linked to a review in WRB—Oct. 29, 2025.]
Reaktion Books: Conflict and Loyalty: Jacobitism in Europe and Beyond by Allan I. Macinnes [May it never be said of me that I do not keep the Jacobite subscribers to this newsletter in mind. —Steve]
The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen [We linked to a review above.]
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Spenser’s Amoretti. [The rare sonnet cycle that gets worse when the poet is thinking about Petrarch. The choice to mostly play around with the daily readings from the Book of Common Prayer suits Spenser because it lets him work with a fair amount of raw material and do whatever interests him. This ranginess, though, is at odds with Petrarch’s tight focus, and Spenser also lacks the inclination to sharpen a paradox. (The Faerie Queene is full of many paradoxes; its length testifies to his preferred handling of them.) When he tries, it seems obligatory, as if he is writing not from himself but from a sense that this is what the poet is supposed to do. For every sign of genius there is a sign of the dutiful schoolboy. —Steve]
He then started reading Anna Karenina. [You guys heard about this one? It’s pretty good! I picked up a copy of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation somewhere along the way, so that’s the one I’m reading. I cannot judge translation from Russian, but as far as writing English goes I’m mostly with the anti-P&V forces. That said, by and large I think they focus too much on infelicitous narration and not enough on dialogue that strikes the ear as somehow wrong. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- on “To His Coy Mistress” and a reworking of it in That Broke into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott (April):
Scott says: “the lyric poem is a kind of illumination device. It can unearth what has previously been buried. A song, in Seamus Heaney’s words, that might ‘set the darkness echoing’ with what has laid dormant or, on some level, been unknown. ‘Coy’ is concerned with difficult and excavated feelings. Andrew Marvell’s lyric language gave me a lexicon with which to speak when I was tongue-tied and uncertain. A way of stirring the darkness or touching it or connecting myself to it, again. It also pulled more out of me, via revelation, than I had previously thought possible.” “Coy” returns repeatedly to rubies as embodiments of preciousness and beauty that are also scars, like scabbed blood, markers of the places of hurt. Section 10 repeats the refrain “let go of / him? I cannot”; but also brings out imagery of a tide turning, and as the poem continues there is a sense of recovery through poetry: “I think rather I be found by this found song”; “No bird and no prey. None. Just still / and rest youthful. So transpires I, / my song.” “If my breast be a vault, then I gate him in— / him be the worm in my. Yet this worm do / sound and his sound ecchoing make my song / to sweetness.” I am not suggesting that the twenty-one sections trace a facile passage from traumatic hurt to healing and contentment: the hurt remains, and the later sections are as haunted by “him” as the earlier. But there is affirmation via expression, and growth: “Grow!” the poet tells himself. “At last I find / a pow’r hear: / I run to the sun. / I devour the / sun. O.” The last section catches the poet in motion, no longer running away but passing on in song, not in thrall to the crystalline stasis of his suffering.
[The only read on the thirty thousand years in “To His Coy Mistress” I have seen before is this: at “two hundred to adore each breast” the lady (whose responses we are left to imagine from what the poet says to her) does something to indicate that she thinks the poet is moving too fast. The speaker, who is obviously not anticipating this sort of reaction, hastily backs out with an awkward “no, don’t get the wrong idea, I like all of you” in which he includes the first big number that comes to his mind. Setting aside the question of why that specific big number, I have no strong opinion about this theory one way or the other. Roberts mentions a fragment of Empedocles as a possible source of the number; in the context of adoring the lady, and since “the conversion of the Jews” is mentioned a couple lines earlier, I might suggest that Solomon’s levy of thirty thousand men to work on the Temple is somewhere in there. —Steve]
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