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

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

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

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

13 Dec 11 Catalogue of the Ships

While I had hoped for three more drafts by the end of 2011, I’ve only completed another one, for a total of three. Life, alas, placed many other demands in my way, intervening in the time and peace of mind I needed.

Yet I managed to write a thirty-page essay on Rabindranath Tagore, which I am told will be published this month in India in the journal Rupkatha.com. I began reading Tagore as a very young poet many decades ago and have often thought of writing about him, but dismissed the idea until prodded by the editor, giving me the determination to take a seeming detour into the months of  reading needed to shape my thinking into form. Actually, I had felt for the last year or so that I had to engage with Tagore at a deeper level before finishing The Parliament of Poets, and now feel he has opened further for me a perspective that is highly congruent with what I have already written.

Homer’s catalogue of ships at the end of Book II of the Iliad suggested the third draft of The Parliament of Poets. I was actually quite surprised by the development. As a young writer I had always had an animus against the form. Reading Melville’s Moby Dick, I found his chapters on the history and practice of whaling infuriating. At times I couldn’t control the impatience I felt with his method, wanted to throw the book across the room! A diligent student, I, nevertheless, wasn’t one who could skip chapters, ploughed through them, while salivating for the thread of the plot to return. As an older and perhaps wiser writer, I have made my peace with the form. The catalogue serves a literary and intellectual purpose I’ve come to respect, indeed, come to realize I need, for the good of my story and my reader, though there might be some out there someday annoyed as I once was. I hope they’ll come as I have to respect Homer and Melville’s practice, among other writers who have found similar devices necessary, and consider there are reasons and purposes that only the epic catalogue can fulfill.

Homer recounting in Book X the warriors of his epic, Agamemnon in Book IV reviewing his troops, Virgil in his catalogue of the Latin forces and the Etruscans, Milton that of the fallen angels, all tell us something very important about the epic drama under way. Such devices open out and broaden the scope and elevation of the poem. How much more needed in a global age when we have come to view the earth even from the moon. How much more necessary in an age that embraces so much in terms of human experience.

 Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Dante, Epic, epic catalogue, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Homer, John Milton, Rabindranath Tagore, Virgil

04 Aug 11 Back from the Voyage.

Back from the Voyage.

August 4, 2011

I finished the second full draft of The Parliament of Poets a few days ago. It’s now a readable manuscript, entirely cast in verse.

For decades I really didn’t know how to begin, though I made notes and thought about the book endlessly. I had written The Bower of Nil as a book-length narrative poem thinking it would be a bridge to writing an epic. In my mind, the three sections were based on the Greek choric dance, which I didn’t actually make clear until the ebook edition in 2010. Nevertheless, the enormous amount of reading of philosophy that I had done for The Bower of Nil helped me to understand how to handle and structure a theme around a cultural story in dramatic, literary terms. That in itself was a considerable leap forward from the lyric poetry of Into the Ruins, at times a story told or suggested in lyric sequence. The universal epic scale proved far more difficult, even arduous. It was extremely difficult and challenging to absorb and synthesize the decades of reading, my whole life, truth be told, and beyond my own personal life, into a literary, epic form that might hope to speak to our global age.

It was Virgil who finally made me realize how to begin. He had written out the Aeneid first in prose and then worked it into verse. I thought of that for years. That opened the door for me. And then the time was right.

I know I can’t possibly be objective about the book. I’ve been completely wrapped up in it. It will be for others to judge if it flies as a universal epic. For me, after decades, since the early 1980s, I feel I’ve at last crossed a threshold and can look back, as it were, from earth to the moon, back at the earth from the moon, the physical manuscript on my desk proving I have made the voyage.

I have three more drafts planned which I hope to finish by the end of this year, each one working on smaller levels of detail, tying up the loose ends. And then perhaps a few more drafts for further polishing, like a cabochon stone.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Aeneid, Epic, epic poetry, Greek Choric Dance, Into the Ruins, The Bower of Nil, The Parliament of Poets, Universal, Virgil, Voyage

21 Jul 11 John Milton. Harold Bloom.

John Milton. Harold Bloom.

Abdiel Agonistes…. October 24, 2000

John Milton’s reputation has unjustly suffered a diminution during the last two centuries. The romantics, repulsed by his religious theme of the earthly pilgrimage of the soul, corrupted his poem by maliciously interpreting Satan as the hero, despite Milton’s unequivocal condemnation of Satan and his equally lucid characterization of the repentant Adam as the true hero. T.S. Eliot and those who ape his opinions also find Milton the man and his religious beliefs repellent. The poets of the modern era deride Milton because, in general, they have abandoned religious belief and turned to vague forms of idealism, as in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and to the creation of idiosyncratic ersatzes, as in Poe’s Eureka. John Keats’s Endymion and the Hyperion poems fail as much because of their superficial content as their poor structure and execution. In Auden’s analysis, “the modern problem” hamstrings the romantics as much as Yeats or Pound. Milton never suffered from such a malady and hence the envious detestation he has received from minor poets who are unquestionably his inferiors. Milton possesses a serious vision of history and humankind that could only achieve full expression in the most demanding form of poetry–the epic. But most poets of the last few hundred years have not found themselves entrusted with such a vision. Much to the contrary, they excel in every imaginable type of turpitude and triviality that the human mind is capable of producing. Like Yeats they have often thrown together every decadent principle or superstition that has ever happened along. This sorry state of affairs has become so common in postmodern poetry that anyone who would attempt to restore epopee to its glorious heights of noble seriousness and serenity would find ranked against him every academic hack and, as Milton phrased it, every “libidinous and ignorant” poetaster who has “scarce ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem.” Milton knew the “consistence of a true poem,” and both Paradise Lost and many passages scattered throughout his prose attest to it. In The Reason of Church Government he surveys the abilities of such masters as Homer, Virgil, Job, and Sophocles. Along with the modern loss of belief in God has gone his high and serious belief in the office of the poet. Equally banished from the modern conception of poetry is all respect for positive values, morals, and virtues. The story of twentieth-century literature is the abuse and misguided replacement of such healthy standards with the perversions of modernism and postmodernism. In brief, “the modern problem.”

Unlike in the work of Jacques Derrida and his academic flies, the “presence” of God is a reality for Milton. Here in the abstract Milton gives us what throughout Paradise Lost he has been dramatizing–the “principles and presuppositions” to which Adam, representative man, must obediently submit, not merely in Eden, but for the fulfillment of his life during his journey on the earthly plane. In Satan, Milton presents the picture of the rebel, almost a type of the Renaissance hero Benvenuto Cellini, who through pride usurps power and whose fundamental actions and motives have their most appropriate modern analogue, as many have observed, in the archvillains Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Such men fully embody the will to power that the nihilist Nietzsche, as Thomas Mann put it, glorified. Such totalitarian dictators were the inevitable product of the romantic fascination with Satan, as though he were a hero and not an arrogant aspirant after power. Such cultural confusion reveals itself in Goethe’s Faust as well as in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Such errors in judgment, such fundamental confusion of values, mark the modern era and set it off from the spiritually healthier times of Dante, Langland, Spenser, and Milton–healthier only in terms of possessing to a degree a unified spiritual vision that provided universal standards with which to confront the damnable deeds of their day. Far from the banal optimism of the modern era, as in Whitman, they know that the long hard way of man is through suffering and turmoil and that the assurance Michael gives Adam about future generations abides eternally: “Doubt not but that sin / Will reign among them.” Despite Freud’s “freeing” man from sin, the twentieth century proved to be the most sinful in history, precisely because the unique spiritual reality of each soul and its fundamental limitations were denied. The violent, arrogant, insidious deeds of the archvillains of modern political nihilism alone account for the suffering and deaths of hundreds of millions of people, while much of the so-called intelligentsia of the West and East defended or prepared the way for the slaughter. Whereas Virgil denounced war except as the last resort for establishing peace, modern poets have often ignored the inhumanities of our century–save for those like Pound whose totalitarianism abetted the brutalizing of millions of innocents and the early Auden who approved “the necessary murder.” Here at the end of the twentieth century when humankind still stands technologically capable of destroying much of the vast expanse of the globe and much, though not all, of its population, here when a more trustworthy political form has yet to be securely established to channel the will of the citizens of the international community, epopee must again take account of the social domain and man’s earthly journey through these immense atrocities. For by faithfully treading the dark way of horror, by weighing the modern loss of belief, humankind may begin to regain the path in the twenty-first century, and, like Dante’s persona, attain the highest summit of peace and glory.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Dante, Epic, epic poetry, Ezra Pound, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, John Milton, Spenser, T. S. Eliot, Virgil

02 Jun 11 Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

As of May 27, 2011, I’ve revised each book of The Parliament of Poets through Book VII, since finishing the full rough draft of the entire epic in early February. Past the half way mark of revision feels very good and inspires me to want to push on through the rest of it during the next several weeks, perhaps before the end of the summer, a readable draft of the entire book.

It was as a young poet, holed up in some rental room or house, choosing to live in poverty in order to have the time to study and write, in Detroit or in the country, none of my family or friends understanding what I was doing, that I first read Aristotle’s Poetics, some thirty-five years ago. I reread it many times, or parts of it, going back to it through the years. It is the touchstone of the literary art.

Aristotle was right, in so many ways, nowhere more than when he wrote, in the Poetics, a useful critical work, rightly revered by poets for millennia, unlike the vapid theories that have been for decades the scourge of American and English poetry:

“So from these considerations it is evident that the poet should be a maker of his plots more than of his verses, insofar as he is a poet by virtue of his imitations and what he imitates is actions.” (Tr. Gerald F. Else)

The plot presents the most formidable challenge to an epic poet, selecting the incidents and structuring the chain of events, as well as the  perspective on them, the hammer in the stonemason’s hand. After long decades of pondering and searching for the Idea, a dream in the night can come as from another realm. In contrast, one thinks of Ezra Pound’s plotless, rambling attempt at epic, and other modern efforts, without exception mere series of poems, pastiche, or mock epics, though there is no reason a universal epic for our time cannot include humor and delight along with wisdom. The great epics, East and West, need not bind our hands but guide them.

And beyond sophistry,  Aristotle observes, “imitation comes naturally to us, and melody and rhythm too”; talking of already ancient epic, “the soberer spirits were imitating noble actions and the actions of noble persons,” which I have always read as the rare qualities of character exemplifying humanity at its best, ideally, for instance, as with Dante’s persona, his longing for Beatrice. Further, too, I should say, the language of an epic, in our lingua franca, must be carefully chosen if it is to have any chance of reaching a global readership, of speaking to people around the globe. While not condescending to their audience, the greatest epics were simple and direct, seeking to communicate with their listeners and readers.

Of the embellishment of poetic style, Aristotle writes,

“But by far the most important thing is to be good at metaphor. This is the only part of the job that cannot be learned from others; on the contrary it is a token of high native gifts, for making good metaphors depends on perceiving the likenesses in things.”

Similarly, anthropologists have argued precisely that the distinguishing attribute of Homo sapiens is the ability for symbolic thought and metaphor. I would add metaphor comprises many levels of language and form, shading into structural devices and image, grounded in sensibility, temperament, and in that regard Aristotle is correct that metaphor can’t be learned, but lived, lived into, is a way of thinking. The prerequisites for that journey presuppose a search of the highest order.

Epic problems and their solutions lead to mimesis, imitation of things, in one of three ways: “the way they were or are; the way they are said or thought to be; the way they ought to be.” Homer and Sophocles set the best example by “portraying people as they ought to be.” Epic poetry can do no less than strive to approach their standard and is ultimately judged by its own failure and success.

Aristotle’s Poetics are as universally applicable to the greatest epics of Eastern and Asian literature as they are to those of the Western Greco-Roman and English tradition, applicable to all of world literature.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Aristotle, ars poetica, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Homer, Horace, Poetics, Sophocles