Poetry workshops continue: screening of Keats film in the autumn

The workshop I ran a week ago here in Hamburg about writing Renga - ancient Japanese group poems - produced wonderful results, which I hope to be able to publish here soon in the next few days. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who took part - you made it special!

Meanwhile, my poetry education work continues on Saturday, 15th September, 2.30 pm, with a public screening of Jane Campion's film about Fanny Brawne and John Keats at the Naturschutzhaus, Fischbeker Heideweg 43, 21149 Hamburg. After the film there should be the possibility to participate in a poetry writing workshop (writing in German & English), using Keats' poetry as a starting point. Here, below, is a piece that I wrote for the London Review of Books blog in spring 2010 about the film, which they didn't take. (Occasional fascinating stuff on that blog, but the set-up appears to be rather a carve-up. They won't take a post on what maybe the first decent English language bio-pic of a poet, but they will post a LRB writer superfically plugging his latest novel.) Anyway,

I still stick by what I wrote about the film, LRB publication or no .....

Jane Campion's film Bright Star (view trailer)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2009/nov/20/bright-stark-film-trailer,
the love story of Fanny Brawne and John Keats, has been in UK
cinemas since the autumn, and is still running in London.
So far, no one from the LRB has wanted to write about it
 either in the print edition or on the blog. That surprised me.
A good film about a great world poet comes
along every 50 years or so if we're lucky. It's been no
box office hit - you can work out from the box office
takings http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2009/BRSTR.php that
c. 300,000 people have seen the film world-wide. Yet even
that should make it the biggest event in the
popularisation of Keats since the intense wave of
editions of his poems published between the 1850s and the
1880s.

 So who is Campion's Keats? He's humorous and good at
playing with Fanny's younger brother - a young teenager -
and sister - aged 7 or 8. He's a hundred times more
likeable than the romantic poet stereotype, lone and
palely loitering, that colours how we have read him. And
yet Campion still foregrounds his death - and one
particular conception of his death - too strongly.

 After the point in the film when the news is brought to
London that Keats is dead, Campion puts this simple
message across the screen: "Keats died believing he was a
failure." Campion wants to give us closure. Andrew
Motion, Keats' biographer, acted as advisor to the film.
His chapter on Keats' death confirms Campion's message on
the one hand - and on the other shows it to be
negligently misleading. The depressive even suicidal
thoughts are obviously there - how could they not be? - a
young man dying under a painful and terminal illness,
knowing that his life's work has received next to no
positive critical resonance. Yet in the midst of that he works on an inscription for his tombstone, choosing a
metaphor of water to describe himself, a metaphor of
unceasing movement and transformation. This doesn't match
with Campion's Keats, just thinking himself a failure:

 "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

 That's the line that Keats wanted on his headstone. Has
anyone else noticed how uncannily close Keats' lines are
to Rilke's final lines of "Sonnets to Orpheus", which,
coming close before his death, can also well be
understood as the poet's final words of self-conception? - 

 "And should the world itself forget your name
 say this to the still earth: I flow.
 Say this to the quick stream: I am."

(Taken from Don Paterson's Orpheus: A version of Rilke, 2006)

 And can we do anything with this water? I did something.
Inspired by Campion, I re-read "To a Nightingale" - and
aged 34, and despite the handicap of having an English
degree - I got it for the first time. Thankfully, I'll
not detail this process. But I got it.

Picking bones or grinding them? - Lewitscharoff vs. Jelinek

         The non-English literary novel continues to be a globalisation resistant artefact, in an age where it’s the quality of a product and not where it’s made which normally determines whether we’ll buy it or not. Figures like Gabriel García Márquez remain exceptions: just try playing "name three contemporary German novelists we all really enjoy" at the end of your next dinner party if you need further proof of this fact. So why should we bother our heads about a recently famous and deservedly so, German literary great? – Sibylle Lewitscharoff, whose 2009 novel Apostoloff is due out in Katy Derbyshire’s English translation on Seagull Book's German List  in December of this year.
                Because Lewitscharoff's newest creation, her speech on accepting the Austrian Arts Award prize this January, can be read as a compelling manifesto for the future of literature, equally applicable to novels or plays originally written in Persian, English or German: a plea for less realism, and more idealism. In doing so she appears herself to consciously write in the tradition of German idealism; she also writes for the German Schiller Society. Lastly, Lewitscharoff uses the speech to demonstrate her likeable, Alan Bennett-esque “I’m not standing for any old nonsense” quality, in her thinly-veiled attack on Austria’s 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Nicholas Spice wrote about Jelinek in the London Review of Books in 2008 (here), praising the work but damning the specific English translation under review – the novel Greed translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpent’s Tail, 2008). Spice: “It’s hard to imagine that Jelinek’s reputation in the English-speaking world will ever recover.” In her speech, Lewitscharoff principally attacks her plays, which stands to reason, as Jelinek’s had premieres of five new works in German and Austrian theatres since 2009, while her last published novel came out in 2008. What Lewitscharoff calls “atrocity theatre” - a Jelinek play - looks like this on the stage. Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre’s production of The Merchant’s Contract which premiered 2009 was performed for the last time in Hamburg on 8th June 2012.
             This is what Lewitscharoff thinks of theatre like that – and what she proposes as a more deserving alternative for our attention:
       “With regards to atrocity theatre, which is – let’s please be clear about this – mostly of aseptic dreariness: this kitsch stopped being sweet long ago and is now gone sour. The chirpy sparrows, so loved by Peter Handke, have blasted it clean from the roof-tops with the strength of their song. People trying to impress us with their atrocity-wallowing who in their childhoods never got so much as a slap around the ear. Who brag about having looked into the heart of darkness, when they’ve never known anything other than rather drab, regular doses of life, provided for in every way. And who then go and put on the war paint for a big night out. 
        I don’t want to name any names in connection with this matter in this speech; it’s not for me to attack some Austrians who’ve made a comfy home for themselves amid the pornographic, while skinning bodies, in grinding bones, in hate-sex, in a deeply ridiculous play-feminism and in the unceasing activity of Austria bashing.
        The annoying thing about literature monsters like this is that they always march waving the flag of the Enlightenment before them. They’re telling it like it really is, or so they claim, about the Darkness of Mankind or of Austrians respectively. Poppycock I say, a dirty lie. In order to progress towards the heart of darkness, you’ve also got to be able to describe the wayward goodness of humans. People are complex, that’s what’s so devilish about them: the sublime and the loathsome, the generous, the cruel and the beautiful, all living side by side in different chambers of the heart. Only those who are capable of capturing at least a part of that complexity deserve our attention and our affections.
        Because – hand on heart – what’s the good of literature, if it doesn’t conceive the abyss of human turpitude as being anything other than a transgression, in the constantly new task of establishing integrity in humans. Treachery against a process of civilisation, which may only be achieved through perseverance, and to which all the arts should submit themselves. In a huge and unforeseeable variety of forms, naturally.”
(Translated from Lewitscharoff speech as printed in the 1/2012 of Volltext, a bi-monthly, print edition Austrian literary newspaper.)
        Would David Foster Wallace have disagreed with Lewitscharoff? I don’t think so. Hard to imagine Franzen disagreeing either. There may be many good reasons, however, for British novelists being disinclined to take up the mantle of idealism.

The holy - and holy shit.

I just had my first encounter with poetry from Franz Josef Czernin, born 1952. As there’s no published English translation to quote from, I’ll quote the first four lines of his poem sonnet, with the plough taken from his 2002 collection elements, sonnets in my own translation:

with flames. tongues, out and playing at us, up, wild lashing

and edged vivacious wheels which are hot in our hands,

what heaves us up to heaven, fiery in their prompting

until it off it flies, reveals, far off and still akin:

This sonnet sequence is built from, as the title of the collection suggests, the four antique elements and aims – according to Michael Braun writing in the latest issue of the literary newspaper Volltext  - at embodiments of star constellations in concrete poetic material. Braun reads Czernin as writing using the poetics of the early German-language romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis to your man on the street) & Clemens Brentano. Not really knowing these writers myself, Czernin reminds me above all of Gerald Manley Hopkins on first impressions – the way stressed syllables appear to be crammed into a line (the original first line has got 8, my impromptu translation 7), the alliteration, the readiness to break with colloquial idiom & grammar for poetic effect.

Czernin hasn’t only been interested in poetic effects, but also in the subject of affectedness, how the standards with which publishers & literary establishments judge texts in any given period constantly need to be questioned. That’s what lead him to write and publish, in conjunction with Ferdinand Schmatz, a book of purposefully bad poems at the start of his career: Journeys. Around the World in Eighty Poems (1987, Residenz Publishers) tricking his own publishers in the process – a piece of holy shit, in other words. It only became clear that Czernin & Schmatz had done this when they brought out, later the same year, an exposé of what one may have been nothing more than a clever publicity stunt: The Journey. Into the Whole Deep Ditch in Eighty Squashed Dogs (1987, Droschl); - I guess Residenz didn’t have the guts to publish the exposé after the first book had left them looking foolish. Shame.

Is bad poetry, or to go a step further, intentionally bad poetry, possibly just as rewarding & useful to read as the poetry that they’re claiming is good? And what if Czernin enjoyed that early confidence trick of his so much that he’s simply gone on playing it with his audience & his reception into the literary establishment, writing on through his acceptance into the Darmstadt German Academy for Language and Poetry – continuing to write what many readers will experience as in some way holy, though it might only be holy shit? My gut feeling is that Czernin isn’t doing this; but I’m going to keep close tabs on his future poems. And if these turn out to be the latter of these two holys I may keep it up my sleeve; it’s often better to let Squashed Dogs lie.

To those who we have not yet wikipedia 'ed

Christian Morgenstern (1871 - 1914) is a poet who I've as yet only read and heard accidentally, when his work has chanced my way. It appears that the poems can be split into the mischievously humorous and the ethereal, Christian mystical. Discount store shopping last night had given me enough of reality; I didn't want to push it by continuing with the epic realism of the David Foster Wallace novel I've got on the go. Instead, I went for the slim 1940 original (German) edition of Morgenstern's collected poems, whose title translates as Time and Timelessness.

The first Morgenstern I ever heard was ' The Architect ' in English translation, in 1999, during the London Waldorf Teacher Training Seminar, taught with gusto by Brien Masters, in the dress trousers with strong middle crease & the smart striped shirts he wore, with even the top button still done up. ('An architect who saw this thing / Stood there, one summer's evening / ….. / And built his castle's in the air.')

Anthroposophists like Morgenstern, partly cause they like conventional metres – Morgenstern's steady iambi – and end rhyme: far easier to get a class of 30 kids -  (teaching being the obvious vocation for an anthropop) - reciting Morgenstern or Wordsworth, then to get them declaiming Don Paterson en choral mass.

So no surprises that my next Morgensterny encounter was also at a anthroposophic institution, this time the Institute for Steiner-Waldorf Education in the Ruhr conurbation. In this poem 'Falling leaves' the mood had shifted from the moral quippery of 'The Architect' to an extollation of stoicism, which, after the 9th recitation in the theatre class wore thin:

   …. / strips clean the final branches. / You but, who with heavy heart / Who'd like to wail to wake the dead / Stay strong, stay strong and silent! '

My first emotions with the 1940 edition were of enjoyable incongruity. The poems are backed by a short note from Margareta Morgenstern in which she explains that while some of the pieces published are taken from previous collections, the majority are published for the first time. Here in the middle of a still strong totalitarian state, Nazi Germany, people were going out to buy poems of romance & whimsy. The fraktur type face is also a welcome distraction to those who aren't used to reading it at normal speed. While you're deciphering whether a B, W or S is meant, you're forced to slow down, allowing a-modern images to float by you. Not anti-modern, or pre-modern, but rather in determined ignorance of modernity. Like these ones in the poem Autumn Evening (p.22 of the 1940 edition):

' The stove snuffles like a dog in a dream.
    The breeze passes like a mood from the room . .

That breeze that's come from distant stars
    That's eavesdropped by my soul with love. '
   
And after a few poems like these, equally memorable     or forgettable depending on your attitude to a-modern whimsy, you stumble upon this what follows (p. 18 of the 1940 edition); it gives you the creeps, & somehow, with hindsight, you thought you saw it coming:

' To Germany
As seen from Norway

There you sleep far from my sight  . .
While I lie sleepless in the night
Yet dream up still to the clear stars
That which does make my soul delight.

You great wolf, for whom I rhyme,
You highest good of the love I give,
Whichever way my thoughts are turning
I'll remain your flesh and blood.

And if I should, with heart and head
into eternity dissolve
noone in that air, those pains
will understand me like you did. '

Well, why not. In a poem written c. 1912, why shouldn't Morgenstern make such nationalistic statements? Perhaps M. can remain in the ranks of the unsullied dead, one who we've had as yet no reason to wikipedia.

Why can’t he say it?

“Why do I keep quiet – have kept quiet too long –  
about what is blatant, about what they practice
in games of war, at whose logical end
we will survive as footnotes at the best.”

So begins Günter Grass’s prose-poem published 4th April in the Süddeutsche Zeitung under the German title of Was gesagt werden muss – “What must be said.” (Full German text here.) The piece was occasioned by the delivery of a further German submarine to Israel – a submarine which Grass claims could be used to launch strikes against an unproven Iranian nuclear capability – and by Netanyahu’s Washington trip three weeks ago – discussed by David Patrikarakos in the LRB blog yesterday – which Grass interprets as Israel demanding the right to the first strike. The poem has been met by a well-choreographed staging of outrage, performed by the German political establishment in a co-production with the New York Times. The N.Y.T. first leaked they were going to publish an English version of the poem, then did a U-turn, and published a one-sided critique instead.

Staged outrage at what though? At this? - “Why say it only now / Aged, and with final ink: / The nuclear-power Israel is a danger / To peace in a world that is cracked already?” Hardly an original thought and probably not great poetry. Yet the poem isn’t about originality, but rather about pronouncing publicly thoughts that have been rattling around Grass’s head for decades, which he hasn’t published because of German taboos on criticising Israel. After dealing with Iran in just one stanza – (“a people under the yolk of a braggart / steered towards organised cheering”) – Grass moves on to discuss the tabu:

‘But why do I forbid myself,
to call that other country by its name,
in which for years  – although kept secret –
a growing nuclear potential stands ready,
but out of control, as no inspections
have been permitted?

The general silence on this fact,
to which my silence subordinated itself,
is a burden for me, a lie,
a compulsion: the punishment in sight
as soon as you step out of line;
the verdict of “antisemitism” is commonplace.’

If you’re experiencing this tabu-breaking as pathetic, then you’re in agreement with many German reactions to the poem, from the left and from the right: why not just get on and break the tabu, rather than talking about doing so? And is there really a tabu in Germany on criticising Israel – and specifically in discussing their nuclear arsenal?

Klaus Hillenbrand, writing 4th April in the left-wing independent daily Die Taz (here) argues this is nonsense, citing the countless articles already published in German criticising Netanjahu’s politics. I would argue for greater differentiation: tabus are experienced more strongly in the circles in which you live and work – for Grass the circles in which he lives and works – rather than in a society as a whole. I’d say the tabu within the confines of Germany’s ruling class is alive and kicking. After ten years here I continue to be astonished about the narrowness of the scope which the German establishment permits itself, to discuss the actions of Israeli governments, past and present. Read the otherwise intelligent weekly Die Zeit for a few weeks – and see this happening. The tabu maintainers fiercely uphold the tabu against those groupings who ignore it in their writings or in actions. Hear this happening in the reaction of Andrea Nahles, speaking for the centre-left SPD party: “In the context of the political situation in the near east, I find the poem irritating and inappropriate.” What, more or less inappropriate then Netanjahu demanding a nuclear-free Iran, while refusing even to acknowledge his own country’s nuclear capacity?

The nobel prize-winner is being attacked for his inconsistencies, the easiest tactic for not responding to the main content of the poem at all, or for acknowledging the gist of the poem, while begrudging Grass the right to say it now. In this vein, weapons-experts cue up to harangue with the fact that Iranian atomic sites, embedded in bunkers as they are, could only be destroyed by special US bunker-breaking bombs, and not by nuclear war-heads stationed on submarines delivered by the Germans, war heads which – oh do keep up! – are of course only there to serve as a deterrent. Is that meant to legitimise the symbolism of the German government delivering what could be used as a nuclear submarine in this phase of what – as Grass calls it – the “planned games” ?

Grass must have hoped that his status within the German establishment gave him one last chance of fundamentally breaking the tabu. Unsurprisingly, this seems initially to have had the opposite effect. And now he’s being forced back into the role he was given in 2006, when he first admitted to a wider public to having been a member of the SS, aged 17, in 1944 – I’ve been misunderstood! There’s a campaign against me!

If it’s not yet working how he hoped, does that mean he shouldn’t have published? No. While it may be true, that Grass, at times like these, has no gift to set statesmen right, he also knows that fact can not excuse him, it can’t absolve him of the repsonsiblity he feels. As little as our limited gifts in influencing stateswomen and statesmen can absolve us. However hopeless it may feel, however weary individuals may be of repeating the same, stuck-record messages, those who want peace have no choice but to speak out. (Mündig sein! – Speak out! – a core theme in Grass’s work.) Or, to let Grass speak in his own words:

"Admitted, I’m silent no more:
the west’s hypocrisy makes me sick, and I hope,
that many may be freed from silence
and demand a refusal of violence
from those who’ve caused this recognisable danger.
Demand unrestricted and permanent control
of the Israeli atomic potential
and the Iranian atomic sites
by an international body
acknowledged by the governments of both countries.”