I hope everyone had a relaxing Thanksgiving. As we have for the past two years, we spent the day with my brother and his family just across the border in North Carolina. Unfortunately, I came down with the flu and spent the rest of the break in bed or shuffling around the house in slippers. My wife tells me that I probably work too much if I get sick every time I have some time off. But the flu did give me the chance to finish Charles Shield’s biography of Stoner novelist John Williams. It’s a quiet bio of an excellent minor writer. I won’t give the thing away since I have a review to file for National Review, but if you’re a Stoner fan, you should buy it.
OK, let’s get the life-sucking stupidity out of the way first. Rose Tremain complained last week that most contemporary poetry isn’t very good: “Having binned all the rules, most poets seem to think that rolling out some pastry-coloured prose, adding a sprinkling of white space, then cutting it up into little shapelets will do. I’m fervently hoping for something better soon.” It was an interview, not an essay, and a response to a question about overrated writers. It’s hard to disagree with her. A lot of contemporary poetry is terrible, with hundreds of poets either mindlessly aping the “radical” formal experiments of some supposed “post-avant-garde” or aspiring to become the next Billy Collins. Then, of course, there are the Insta-poets.
But Sandeep Parmar sees something devious in Tremain’s compliant. You see, what she is really saying is that she can’t stand non-white writers. Watch closely, kids. This is how it’s done. Parmar first restates her complaint in terms of “craft” and associates a defense of craft in poetry with “conservative” principles. But “radical” poetry (poets who base form on Marxist ideology, that is) are also interested in “craft” of a sort, so Tremain really isn’t complaining about “craft.” She’s complaining about the influx of poets who are not like her—a white woman. “So this isn’t a question of craft at all. Tremain and others might more accurately say that poetry is rapidly changing. And although it has always changed, recent new voices have radically altered the landscape of poetry – for some, beyond comfortable recognition. What no one dares to say aloud is who these new poets are and why they are such a threat to the supposed status quo…Is it coincidental that the so-called rotten state of poetry has recently begun admitting increasing numbers of diverse poets as prized citizens, rather than treating them as interlopers? A turgid defence of so-called poetic craft, based on false notions of a formal tradition, silences the possibilities offered by new voices.” So you see, any critique of “craft” in poetry is by definition racist because words like “craft” are never serious. Parmar knows what Tremain really means. Add a few anecdotes, a little post hoc ergo propter hoc, and voilà. Parmar in effect is telling Tremain to espouse Parmar’s theory of poetry or keep quiet.
There’s a debate to be had on the difference between the ideologically-driven view of form and what I’ll call a sort of natural law view. Many conservative critics and poets have written at length on the topic. Rarely do critics and poets from the other side respond. Instead, at least in the case of Parmar, they latch on to a 50-word interview question response.
In other news: Andrew Roberts reviews the 21st volume of The Churchill Documents: “For many years now, Hillsdale College has been engaged in the mammoth task of publishing every significant original document relating to the life and career of Winston Churchill. It is a stupendous work of scholarship that will comprise some 20 million words. The present volume is the 21st, and it covers the period in 1945 from New Year’s Day to July 31. It ends with Churchill having lost the general election and his premiership. The astonishing size of this volume—2,149 pages—is explained by the extraordinary amount of work that Churchill squeezed into each day. Given his naps and lunchtime alcohol, one does not immediately think of Churchill as a workaholic, yet he very clearly was, relishing his task of looking into every aspect of the prosecution of the war. Although Volume 21 opens with the Battle of the Bulge still under way, it was clear by this point that the Allies were going to win the war. And so Churchill was already worrying about what sort of Europe would be left from the continent-wide funeral pyre.”
Previously unpublished stories by Naguib Mahfouz will be published later next month and translated into English next autumn.
Rowland Bagnall reviews A. E. Stallings’s latest collection of poetry, Like.
What to make of Hermann Hesse? Here’s Philip Hensher: “Musil was horrified by ‘the poor and common German… the barrack-room style… the clumsy pacing, the dilettantism, and the unwieldy construction’. Even Thomas Mann, who supported Hesse for years, talked of him in an unmistakably patronising way. When the Goethe prize and the Nobel came his way in the late 1940s, it was largely as a reward for being a Good German in the preceding years. I suppose in the end, he ranks somewhere between Somerset Maugham and the eccentric autodidact mystical English novelist, Charles Williams. The best of Hesse’s novels are unforgettable in their weird conviction.”
Essay of the Day:
In the Atlantic, Rene Chun writes about a grape heist in Virginia and “other tales of agricultural banditry”:
“Tuesday, September 11, 2018, was supposed to be harvest day for David Dunkenberger, a co-owner of Firefly Hill Vineyards, in Elliston, Virginia. He got to the fields early, eager to get this year’s grapes picked before the backwash of Hurricane Florence rolled in. As he scanned the vines, though, he began to feel queasy. His entire crop, about 2.5 tons of grapes, had vanished.
“In the days that followed, Dunkenberger grieved the loss of his 2018 vintage and considered the ramifications. Factoring in sunk labor costs and lost sales, he figured he was out $50,000. He thinks that the job was planned by professionals—amateurs could never have snipped three acres clean so quickly—and that it likely would have required a crew of seven pickers, aided by headlamps and two pickup trucks. As for who would be motivated to carry out such a theft, Dunkenberger says he is reluctant to accuse a fellow grower, but can find no other logical explanation. Wine grapes are too sweet to eat. They perish quickly, so they are typically crushed or pressed within 24 hours. ‘A lot of people are under contract to grow grapes,’ he told me, adding that this year’s wet weather had led to disappointing harvests. ‘If you can’t fulfill that contract, you don’t get paid.’ When I spoke with Lieutenant Mark Hollandsworth of the local sheriff’s department, he supported Dunkenberger’s theory: ‘The rain this year did spoil a lot of grapes.’
“European grape growers have also been targeted. A particularly audacious caper made headlines in October, when thieves used a large commercial harvester to steal 1.8 tons of pricey Riesling grapes from a vineyard near a busy supermarket in southern Germany. And last year, several French vineyards reported huge thefts, including a total of more than 7.5 tons of grapes stolen from various Bordeaux farms. Bad weather that summer had cut crop yields drastically, making local growers the prime suspects. As one observer told Agence France-Presse on condition of anonymity, ‘There’s a great temptation to help oneself from [the vineyard] next door.’
“Or, apparently, from any type of farm that grows what’s known as high-value produce—think avocados, nuts, exotic fruits.”
Photo: Frozen Amur River
Poem: Charles Southerland, “Wretched, We Sail On”
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