Talk Talk

Keats is the one

This is the best letter I've read all week [New York Review, Sept.23rd].

KEATS IS THE ONE
To the Editors:

Brad Leithauser makes the important point that Gerard Manley Hopkins was in no way an obvious literary descendant of Wordsworth or Gray [NYR, April 29th]. Hopkins thought "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" a very great poem, but his own unique style does not use the classical diction that Wordsworth, or for that matter, Chaucer, or Pope, have as the basis for all their work. But I think the argument can be made that Hopkins had a very immediate ancestor in Keats.

One of the most distinctive qualities of his style, the compounding of words into participles as in "bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked,/river rounded..." in "Dun Scotus' Oxford" is one he shares with Keats. An example from the latter's "Ode to Psyche" is:

Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

Blue, silver-white and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass...

The tendency of this style is to contract words into each other and thereby intensify their meaning. What may be lost in immediate comprehension is made up by the energy forced into images by the compression of verb and noun and adjective into phrases like "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon." We linger over the image and see the words and the object in an unforgettable way. Hopkins's elaborate use of diacritical marks, which Mr. Leithauser notes, sometimes seems to me almost a smokescreen for his refabrication of words, something he saw in earlier poets, including Keats and Shakespeare, and that continues in poets who follow him, as when Dylan Thomas describes "the heron/Priested shore."

Lawrence Dugan
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I like it because I've been considering eliminating "those chunky word-clusters stapled together by hyphens," as Brad Leithauser called them in his reply, in my own work. Some of you may remember from my poem "Imago Dei" the line "We've heard in the quiet-night voice/dawn." Now they may have received a reprieve for a little while.

If you're still with me, Mr. Leithauser finished his reply to Mr. Dugan's letter by writing
...those compounds beloved by both poets...ultimately reflect a restless, deep-rooted, philosophical conviction that language must continually be remade if it is to reflect reality.

That I believe.
Carol

Dinner

Tonight's Dinner Menu*

Dinner on the spur of the moment for four. It's great to have the ingredients available.

Salad: butter lettuce and mélange de printemps (spring greens, I think) with avocado, tomato, feta cheese and a few black olives. Oil and vinegar dressing.

Main course: grilled swordfish with a bit of wasabi seasoning.

Side: roasted vegetables--yellow peppers, green squash, and red onions.

Wine: Red Bicyclette 2003 produit de France SYRAH vin de pays d'oc -- an absolute find, rich, full, and fruity.

No dessert. The night is young and Blue Mountain Mist, a coffee liqueur I bought last month in Jamaica, calls. But I am alone. Pat has driven to the Keys to board up as Hurricane Ivan threatens. (Yes, the third storm this month. It's a record.) So I'll settle for a cup of coffee instead.

*Helm, this is a South Beach approved dinner (Phase2 or 3). Honestly, the South Beach is turning us into better cooks!

Letter from Europe from Shisa (one of THE Poets)

I did ask you to write me letters. Who would believe such a great one would arrive so soon? This from Europe, just in....

Write Me One -- you say ...

I sent you wine labels with writing on the envelope, and a drop of wine (Judy was a bit horrified at that... -- poor mailman, she said).

Anyway, Carol, I LOVE the Pontchartrain, the writing on the label (that you guys wish me a happy 50th and love me too :)
It travelled very well across the Atlantic.

I started the bottle, that Grand Louis, last night with some cheese, and more than half is still here tonight -- sipping it in deep draughts waiting for pizza from the Pakistani boys who superseded the Norwegians on the corner -- rich Mississippi mud this -- like the sunrise over the Miss that Ernie made us watch.

Touched that you put The Poets first in your interests section. Cos you do mean US right, not Wordsworth, Longfellow and the dead ones?

Shisa With Much Love
Remembering the surreal pool conversation between the three single inmates of 2615-17-19 Chartres -- who else but poets would discuss a breakup a trois?! Bohemian values, writing their heartache all over the Internet!!

More about Frances

Okay. I have been hunkered down for 72 hours and I was getting cabin fever so I went out to Dunkin' Donuts (the only place I found open). The wind has really died down, the rain is off again-on again. We have had no damage to our house. Got a couple of pix. Hope the people in the northern part of the state fare as well as we did.

I can't BELIEVE how many trees are down for a storm that did not exceed 125MPH at land fall.

Saturday, the 4th

Rainy and blustery when I woke up, rainy and blustery still. Huge trees down--40 year old gumbo limbos, 50 foot ficus trees, seagrapes and coconut palms. The last key lime I know of. Forecast tomorrow? Rainy and blustery again.

Hurricane A Comin' (or not)

Fort Lauderdale --Thursday and Friday, the 2nd and 3rd

The media frenzy began on Wednesday. Hurricane T.V. news 24-7; lines of waiting cars at the gas pumps; sorry, no ice; empty shelves, empty stores; every Home Depot layin' in supplies ten truckloads at a time;
wind gusts; the odd tree down.

But frenzies do not last long. Two days is a long time to get ready for a storm. All who will board up have boarded up. All who will leave have left. The shops are closed. The town is dead. And Hurricane Frances is still in the Atlantic, maybe petering out. I think I'll get up and check.