19 May 12 Finished the 6th Draft of The Parliament of Poets

Yesterday, May 18, 2012, I finished the 6th Draft of The Parliament of Poets.

Having written by hand all five previous drafts, I typed the entire manuscript of my epic poem for the first time on the sixth, revising throughout along the way. I’ve actually been quite surprised to discover I think I’m much further along toward completion than I had expected. I believe it’s really a result of my having written each previous draft by hand, which kept the poem very fluid and malleable, in my mind as well as on paper. Each sweep through allowed me to remold and revise more than I tend to once I’ve actually typed a manuscript. With a handwritten manuscript, I think I tend to concentrate on the thought and language much more deeply and am drawn entirely into it. So I’m delighted at the feeling that I’m close to a final manuscript. There are only a few short scenes, of probably only several lines, in a few places, that I want to add. Mostly, from here, I want to continue polishing at the level of phrasing and the line, nothing on the macro scale.

Having begun writing in March of 2008, at a little over four years now, I feel, looking back, quite thankful to be at the point that I am. It’s been a hard struggle, though, every inch of the way, thirty years, truth be told, my earliest notes dated 1982, a long journey. To have the poem finally out of my head and on paper is an incredible feeling. Whether the epic ever makes its way to readers or not, I have accomplished much of what I set out for decades ago.

Almost all of the notes I made over the years are also now incorporated into this draft, which I’ve worked at on each successive pass through. During the writing I had eventually arranged all my notes into folders corresponding with each of the twelve books in order to be able to handle them, on a practical level, so as not to become lost in the enormous number of themes I was trying to grapple with and reconcile. I think the method I evolved into helped to accomplish all that, and there are now very few details I want to add, everything now largely incorporated into the sixth draft. The last cache of notes and material I must go over before I’m done, during the 7th draft, is largely the epic notes I’ve complied for years on my computer, roughly arranged again by the twelve books. Most of it is less germane to the structural and thematic levels of the poem but essential in my mind as background material and thinking, so I feel I must pass through it again to make sure I’m not leaving anything out that has helped to form the poem through the years. Since each draft has required less and less time to write, I don’t anticipate the 7th to take months, but, I hope, perhaps only some weeks.

At 264 pages, formatted for a 6 x 9 book, I’ll probably add several to about ten more pages. I have half of the headnotes for each book mostly done from writing them for this blog, although quite sketchy. They will need considerable revision at this stage, but give me something to begin with. The other half will have to be written from scratch. I intend to add a short introduction of two to three pages, basically discussing my versification and rational for the form of blank verse I’ve used. My thoughts and practice of blank verse go back to my book-length narrative poem The Bower of Nil and the dramatic monologues of Into the Ruins. It is quite important to me that I have always thought in terms of reviving the epic form and creating on the technical level, as well as thematic, the means for renewal. Aristotle’s reflections on epic have been the essential influence on my own, though I would not want to leave out Longinus, Sidney, Milton, Matthew Arnold, E. M. W. Tillyard, and other poets and scholars.

I’ve thought long and hard about length. I don’t believe a modern epic can be as long as Vergil or Dante’s 12,000 to 19,000 lines. Even Milton at 10,565 lines is too long, in some books, for most readers, especially people without a literary background, of varying English command, which would be a very hard ordeal and take the enjoyment out of it, and there are such people who read Milton. I want to reach all of them, too, so I’ve intentionally carved down the form to about 8,600 at the moment. I have much that I want to say to international readers as well as in the West. I’ll add another hundred or so lines, still 9,000 or less total. I believe form and symmetry are more important than length. Aristotle’s old saw about the poet choosing the right details and so on have always remained in my head. Focus and selection, to help the reader pick up the epic and read the whole thing is more important than length.

I think, too, since the epic covers the major regional civilizations, religions, and literatures around the globe, the book needs a glossary of some terms, even though I’ve tried to use those that are already fairly well known and universal. Inevitably, for some readers, especially given the extent to which academic specialization and nationalistic insularity narrow perspective, a glossary would help other readers. One of my concerns in writing a universal epic has always been the difficulty in reaching and helping a reader understand the scope of the poem itself. I believe I have found and used many strategies to accomplish that while circumventing the poem becoming a research project, instead of keeping the narrative flow engaging the reader.

My goal at the moment is to aim for the epic to be completed by July 1, 2012, with a publication date of November 1. I believe I can adhere to this schedule and hope to have review copies available for select readers by very early July so that they might have two or three months to read and consider it, reviewing it if they feel so inclined.

For nearly half of Book III, watch my two poetry readings on YouTube. First, to view in sequence, watch the one at the Albany Word Fest, then the one at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair:

“I found myself sitting in my study, dozing
over a book, Cervantes’ Don Quixote…”

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL21F9D6C4DA6FE818

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, draft, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, manuscript, Parliament of poets, poem, poetry

29 Apr 12 The Decentralization of the Post-Gutenberg Age

The Decentralization of the Post-Gutenberg Age

“‘E-books make the Gutenberg system, which still characterizes the industry after 500 years, absolutely obsolete,’ insists Jacob Epstein, the veteran publisher who invented trade paperbacks and founded the New York Review of Books.” “E-publishing radically decentralizes the marketplace,” Jacob Epstein.

The decentralizing of  post-Gutenberg publishing is something that I can speak about with intimate knowledge and ties in with my book of poems Into the Ruins and other books. In the mid nineties I became disgusted with the conventional avenues of cultural and literary publishing, both books, journals, and magazines. I had more than a decade of rejection slips from ignoramuses who demonstrated not the slightest understanding or familiarity with the manuscripts I sent them, along with a number from highly respected editors at major publishers, one, for instance, telling me he thought my book The Grove of the Eumenides should receive a hearing but did nothing to make it happen. I came to think very little of nepotism, especially in publishing. Other editors, publishing their post-modern drivel, enjoyed indulging themselves at my expense, they apparently thought. I quite consciously walked away from the whole conventional publishing scene, and the university in 1996, and began seeking ways to go around the stranglehold of both, directly to the reader.

I first thought the way to go around the decadent post-modern establishment and open a new path for literature, seeking to revive and renew its deepest humanistic traditions, was the time-honored route of typical self-publishing and brought out Into the Ruins through the printer McNaughton Gunn in 1999 under my own independent publishing company, Earthrise Press. While I sold some books through Borders and Barnes & Noble, through Baker & Taylor, I found them all to be opposed to an independent voice. A selection from the approximately twenty Reviews from that time are on my website. Despite a few insightful reviews, no one really understood what I was fully attempting with Into the Ruins. Thus far, the same has proven to be the case with The Bower of Nil in 2002 and The Grove of the Eumenides in 2007.

Along the way, I evolved into using POD (Print on Demand) technology through Lightning Source and thought the way around the stultifying post-modern status quo would lie in that direction, which nevertheless opened up the way to the global reach of the Internet booksellers to an amazing degree, shocking me that I could sell books around the world. Very early I recognized the value of Jason Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine, though it’s yet to fulfill its potential.

Along in there, too, ebooks increasingly became a possibility, and I published all of my books into ebooks, available worldwide and going around all of the conventional gatekeepers. The record of much of the evolution of my thinking is in my Publishing in the Post-Gutenberg Age
http://www.fglaysher.com/Post_Gutenberg_Publishing.html

Like everyone else, I’ve evolved along the way with a website since 1998 and a blog, eventually Web 2.0 social networking… Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Through all that, I continued to study and work towards my epic poem, the earliest notes for which are from 1982, recently finishing the fifth draft in March of 2012. It’s not only the methods of publishing that I’m talking about, but how the identification and promotion of disparate views and visions of life, in literary terms and otherwise, evolve and reach the broader culture. I have not devoted over thirty years of my life writing an epic poem to allow a corrupt, conventional corporate publisher ever to touch it. Everything I’ve written is about the freedom of the individual soul, and the poem must be published in such a way as to affirm it.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: ebooks, epic poetry, eReading, eBooks, Frederick Glaysher, Google Books, Post-Gutenberg, Post-Gutenberg Age, Post-Gutenberg Publishing, Publishing

23 Apr 12 Poetry Reading, Albany Word Fest

My reading from the fifth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets at the Albany Word Fest, Saturday, April 21, 2012, in Albany, New York, at the Albany Public Library. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher. From Book III, still on earth, in the midst of things… the birds and hoopoe, and so forth.

http://youtu.be/CJ_xbSXbN7k

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Albany Word Fest, Cervantes, Dante, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, New York, NY, Poetry Reading, Virgil

14 Apr 12 Sixth Draft, The Parliament of Poets

I finished the fifth draft of The Parliament of Poets at the end of March, so it’s on to the sixth… I think I now have to type it up because on the last pass through I discovered I had written the same several-line incident twice, in different books! I suppose, running around in my head, I wanted to be sure I worked it into the poem. Anyway, I’ve decided writing seven drafts by hand is no longer the way to go. I have probably over 98% of the poem on paper and need to be able to search the text to avoid repetitions and polish foreshadowing, things like that. Why not take advantage of technology Tolstoy didn’t have?

Also, I found reading from Book III in Buffalo, and preparing for it, that I revised passages and lines more in terms of oral and colloquial impact, though I had usually or often read the poem out loud to myself when writing the previous drafts. I think now that this is what I must do for the sixth draft. Read it as much as possible to a live audience and think and hear it, reflected back to me, really, in that way. I’ve always remembered hearing that Dickens would often try out different versions on audiences during his readings, revising accordingly. Something like that…

I’ve been astonished that I felt like the figure on the Rhapsode Amphora, lifted to that realm of transcendent song. I can not imagine ever having too much of that experience.

I’ll be reading from The Parliament of Poets at Austin International Poetry Festival in September, but two to four times a month between now and then would really help. If you know of any place willing to listen, let me know… use Contact under About.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Leo Tolstoy, Parliament of poets, Poet, Poetry Reading, Revising

12 Apr 12 Poetry Reading at the Albany Word Fest

Friends,

I’ll be reading from the fifth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets at the 2012 Albany Word Fest, Saturday, April 21, 2012, 1:15 pm, in Albany, New York, at the Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12210. Main Library Large Auditorium. You’re invited!
http://www.albanypoets.com/wordfest/

For a previous excerpt, see my reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, Buffalo, New York, March 24, 2012, from Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

“Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab,
My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

YouTube: http://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4

Tags: Albany, Albany Word Fest, Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Frederick Glaysher, New York, NY, Parliament of poets, Poet, poetry, Poetry Reading

05 Apr 12 The Poet’s Religion of Rabindranath Tagore

“The Poet’s Religion of Rabindranath Tagore.”  Just published in Rupkatha Journal Volume 3, Number 4, 2011 (400—416). Rupkatha.com (Kolkata, India).

I cannot write about Tagore without writing about what he has meant to me as a poet during the course of more than forty years of reading him. In the early 1970s he became for me a model and mentor, an example of the poet’s life, one which resonated deeply with my own experience, especially in spiritual terms, which I eventually learned was taboo even to mention in the learned halls of American universities, where God was and is usually dead, and no one desiring intellectual respectability had better utter the slightest syllable otherwise….

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, Decadence, Frederick Glaysher, Leo Tolstoy, Poet, Rabindranath Tagore, Religion, Tagore, Unitarian

31 Mar 12 Finished the Fifth Draft of The Parliament of Poets

I finished the entire fifth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets, after four years of writing, on March 30, 2012. I’d welcome invitations to read from it.

See my reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012, from Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

“Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab,
My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

YouTube:  http://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4

Tags: Apollo 11, Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Literature, Parliament of poets, The Globe

26 Mar 12 Frederick Glaysher, Buffalo Small Press Book Fair

Frederick Glaysher reading from the fifth draft of his epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012.

FROM Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

Reading from The Parliament of Poets, Book III, “Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab, / My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, earthrise, Epic, global, moon, Parliament of poets, poem, Poet, poetry, Poetry Reading

17 Mar 12 Rodin’s Gates of Hell, Cantor Art Center, Stanford University

III
The Thinker

Staring into the portal I see humankind
stretched out on the rack of this century,
gassed in the trenches of Europe,
vivisected in the meat shops of Germany,
forced to kowtow in China and India,
in Africa and the archipelagoes,
by the British, the French, the Japanese,
by all those intent on empire,
intent on the worship of themselves.

Staring into the portal I see ourselves
revealed in the terror of what we are,
of what we cannot face, cannot bear,
try always to ignore,
while the cost grows greater and greater,
while like Ugolino we grope over the dead,
the victims of our rapacity,
our devouring lust.
“O Master, the sense is hard.”

Copyright (c) 1999 Frederick Glaysher. My Rodin sequence has a I & II…
http://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html 

Rodin’s Paolo and Francesca… “our devouring lust.” They’re writhing in Hell. Dante saw them there on his visit… wrought them in immortal song, Rodin in immortal bronze. White’s translation:

“There is no greater grief
Than to recall a bygone happiness
In present misery….

While the first spirit told her tale, the other
Wept with a passionate grief that mastered me;
I felt a faintness, as it were of death,
And like a corpse fell headlong to the ground.”

Apparently, Dante must have had cause to faint…

“…while like Ugolino we grope over the dead,
the victims of our rapacity,
our devouring lust.
‘O Master, the sense is hard.’”

Copyright (c) 1999 Frederick Glaysher
http://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html

Bronze, of course… The Thinker pondering Hell below… perhaps the greatest art work of the 20th Century. Guernica next comes to mind…

One of only two or three full exhibitions, worldwide, of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell.  ‎…awe-inspiring for me. I first saw it in a special exhibition in Detroit in the early 1980s. I wrote a series of poems about it, in my book Into the Ruins, if interested, “Rodin’s Gates of Hell”: http://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html

…A creative mounting of Rodin’s The Thinker, five or six feet off the floor, from The Gates of Hell. New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 11, 2012.

Tags: Cantor Art Center, Francesca, Frederick Glaysher, Into the Ruins, Paolo, Rodin, Stanford University, The Gates of Hell, The Thinker, Ugolino

16 Mar 12 Rhapsode Amphora, by the Berlin Painter

Photo of the rhapsode amphora that I took on a recent visit in February, 2012, to the New York Metropolitan Museum.

A personal indiscretion… if a fifty-foot tsunami hits New York, forget everything but save this amphora… The artistry of the rhapsode is so  exquisite that none of the pictures I have ever seen or taken do it justice, including what the MET has available on the Internet at the link below.

Rhapsode. “A rhapsode (Greek: ῥαψῳδός, rhapsōdos) or, in modern usage, rhapsodist, refers to a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.”

Terracotta amphora (jar). Attributed to the Berlin Painter.
Period: Late Archaic Date: ca. 490 B.C. Culture: Greek, Attic ; Gallery 157, New York Metropolitan Museum.

“This work is a masterpiece of Greek vase-painting because it brings together many features of Athenian culture in an artistic expression of the highest quality. The shape itself is central to the effect. Through the symmetry, scale, and luminously glossy glaze on the obverse, it offers a carefully composed three-dimensional surface that endows the subject with volume. The identity of the singer is given by his instrument, the kithara, which was a type of lyre used in public performances, including recitations of epic poetry. The figure on the reverse is identified by his garb and wand. While the situation is probably a competition, the subject is the music itself. It transports the performer, determines his pose, and causes the cloth below the instrument to sway gently.”

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130015398?rpp=20&pg=1&ft=56.171.38&pos=1

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: amphora, Berlin Painter, Epic, epic song, Greek, kithara, MET, New York Metropolitan Museum, rhapsode, Vase