13 Dec 11 Catalogue of the Ships

Catalogue of 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

02 Jun 11 Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

Aristotle

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

04 Dec 08 In Medias Res

Looking Back at Earth, Half Way to the Moon

It was in medias res that took me decades to figure out, repeatedly pouring over Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, and every other epic poet and form, struggling again and again for the right structure. I knew the plot of The Parliament of Poets was the backbone of the book itself, the very crux, first and foremost, for it to work, to draw the reader into it, and to play on the great tradition, evoke it, honor it, raise everything to a higher level of seriousness and import. It proved to be the hardest part of the epic form, a seemingly insurmountable challenge over which I stumbled, trying one idea after another, rejecting sketch after sketch, setting my notes aside knowing that way and that idea wasn’t it, wouldn’t work.

And then it came to me, while I was doing some trivial task of life, and I rushed to my study to write it down, lest I lose it after all these years. I knew I had it with the certainty of that’s it! get it down on paper, before the phone rings or whatever, before it’s gone forever–surprise, relief, elation.

With a rough draft written of the first three books, I now sense that I can finish writing The Parliament of Poets, see my way to the end of it, a sense of confidence I’ve never had before, since it was always entirely in the future, the book I would write, God willing, one day, as notes accumulated, as decades went by.

Now the challenge has become time, acquiring it, holding on to it, and worrying over the unpredictability and evanescence of life, of completing what’s begun.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Dante, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Homer, in media res, Milton, Virgil