Silliman's Blog

I think videogames, their approach to narrative, perspective, text and image, etc. are far more interesting than the middlebrow crap that traditionally gets assigned in many English curricula.

Myself, I would rather play Dreamfall than to read or teach fucking Snow Falling on Cedars or the ilk, which seems to be our answer to the "educational" alternative to video games.

When it is no longer possible to look at something like Gertrude Stein or even, say, Dostoyevsky, why would looking at video games be any more of a significant "downgrade" than any of the pablum we have officially embraced.
 

Great news of Hinton's anthology of translations from the Chinese.

But the Brooklyn Rail should probably take down the big picture of Eliot Weinberger's Chinese anthology and replace it with a picture of Hinton's book!

Kent
 

I love DH's trans. of
The Late Poems of Meng Chiao.
That was so like "Tang Gothic"
amazing. The old chinese poetry world
is sort of like an old tea bush still producing. Here in Portland at the Tao of Tea, you can drink tea plucked from some of these 1000 yr old tea bushes, and read Meng Chiao!
 

@Mark - Planescape: Torment. Would love to teach it. But how to construct a curriculum around a game in which people won't just find different interpretations, but different texts depending on their playing style?

A serious question, incidentally.
 

I might be able to offer one of many possible answers to the question posed by the guardian uk, vis a vis the death of M. Darwish, the marvelous Palestinian poet. In brief, they seem to ask what it might be like to be from the kind of society where poetry is a common cultural property, ubiquitously read and unanimously valued. And they seem to propose the question as though such a place would be an intellectual utopia of almost unbelievable pleasure.

But not very long ago I, a little-known and fairly unimportant young American poet, went to Bogota, Colombia to participate in one of South America's many, many, many "International Poetry Festivals." And, indeed, I was reading my own poems (or rather, my own translations into Spanish of my own poems) for audiences of hundreds, for kids at local and often disadvantaged colegios who could recite Jose Asuncion Silva by heart, and people wanted photos and autographs and wanted also, very much, to tell the poets what they thought of their poetry, both for better and for worse. And in many ways it was impressive and curious and delightful.

But there is a flip-side, I think, to this proposition, at least for poets. (Or perhaps this is to say that the reader's poetic utopia and the poet's poetic utopia are not necessarily the same?) Because when everyone thinks of poetry as being common cultural and intellectual property (which I think it is) and is personally invested in the poetry, its making, its understanding, its purposes and processes, the audience for poetry can become very resentful of poets whose work does not conform to their collective idea of what poetry ought to be and do and say, how poetry ought to function, and what makes poems good, bad, or something utterly other.

And in fact, by American standards, a fair amount of South American poetry is ponderous, discursive, sentimental, and still sort of exists in a High Romantic moment. This is not exclusively true, obviously - the "microtextos" of the Argentinian poet Jorge Mendoza, for instance, are little-known in English but are genuine delights. The books of poetry whose title best translates as "Paper Bottle" by a Colombian poet Rafael something (sadly, his last names escape me at the moment) are also truly startlingly great. But a lot of "O, la muerte, la muerte," and that sort of stuff that people positively EAT UP. And some of these great poets aren't even national, household names specifically because their work departs from the collective cultural poetic ideal.

So, while I am all for people reading and memorizing poetry, I think we would do well to be realistic about what everybody being of one mind really means - for any art, any idea, any individual. The risk of oppression is the price of shared tradition, I think, and perhaps one of the only reasons to celebrate the disparate and occasionally neglected poetries of our own place and time.