Jon wrote:

"I agree with Douglas Clark that the discussion here of the Muse and of love as inspiration has been aridly abstract. My own experience leaves me in no doubt about the nature and source of inspiration.  But I reserve personal comment on these matters for my poems.  I'll only say here that the worst thing a muse can tell her poet is yes. ==================================================
The Muse is literally the first person to appear in Western literature (Iliad 1.1.)  Following this line of thought, it's perhaps interesting that "anger" is the first word in Western literature."

Well, I don't think it is that the "Muse is literally the first person." She's invoked by Homer, "Sing, Muse, of the rage of Achilles," but she doesn't appear in any sense as a person. For me, Western literature begins with a command, a power structure, in which a male poet commands a muse, a feminine bestower of the song, to sing. So while the power to sing originates in her, it is a power which he commands as he also commands her. And so, of course, it's "anger," not love that she is meant to serve, here at the beginning, which is why, I think, it is Aphrodite who is driven shrieking and wounded from the field. 

When I look at my own work, there are a number of various incarnations of the Muse within it, the Muse as a grove of aspen trees, the muse as a child that I was nursing, the muse as an orange that I am unpeeling, the muse in the wounded infirmary of the muse,  in other words, rather startling incarnations of the muse. And this is, I think anyway, because as a woman poet I cannot take on this particular tradition but must in some sense go through it, as if through the Minotaur's labyrinth.  So one of the things I cannot do is make this kind of equivalency between the muse and the person I love. In your comments and Doug's, I think (perhaps wrongly) there is an assumption that if you are in love with a woman and write poems to her that she is ipso facto the Muse. That is a kind of identification between the person that one loves with the power that one means to evoke that I find myself unable to make. What is precisely missing is the "person," the her self of the Muse, the her self loved. And what I find in most poems that are written out of that tradition is a poem that reflects only the emotional, psychological, etc., reality of the speaker, a closed though perhaps beautiful box, from which she herself has fled.

I do feel that love is everything and everything in poetry, as in life, but for me, the traditional idea of the muse is constructed of power more than of love. We can hear this paradox in that line of Homer, commanding her to sing _his_ song. But in later versions where the Muse becomes more personal and romantic, the paradigm makes the commanding of the Muse equivalent to the sexual pursuit of the beloved. It's not necessarily the Muse that must say no, but rather the woman, if she is going to be an illustrous example of the Muse, Beatrice for instance, must say no. If the woman says yes, then she becomes one of those temporary muses as in Marvell, good for a few poems, and then gone to be replaced by the next 'muse'. 

But once that equivalency between the woman sought and the Muse commanded has been broken, I think it is possible to write out of a sense of love that allows the person, the other, and the real and mundane to exist in the poem. For instance, I think that in many respects my children, their presence in my life, my giving birth to and nursing them into existence, was a kind of presence of the Muse, that it very much gave me the power to speak, out of love for them, out of bodily life. Or when I more consciously invoked the muses as a grove of aspen trees because an aspen grove is despite its multiformed splender one plant, it was in a sense as if I were in love with those trees, a beauty but one of which I could never be said to be the "lover." Of course, I'm saying nothing but falling in love, but then like you I reserve that to myself. That seems too private and passionate matter for anything but a poem.  But I have to say that in my view the muse always says yes, she kisses one on the mouth and one begins to speak, which is not to say that she falls into bed with the poet, but there is always a yes which originates in the other, not commanded but given 


"I think Ruth Stone was being unfair to Wallace Stevens in her poem "Words," which criticizes Stevens's statement that "A poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman."  It's certainly unfair to distort his meaning by misquoting the sentence as  "A poet looks at the world as a man
looks at a woman," which makes it seem more dogmatic and prescriptive than it is. This is particularly important because the sentence  comes from Stevens's book of jottings Adagia,  a collection of speculative and deliberately provocative aphorisms. "

Well, as you say, they are meant to be deliberately provocative aphorisms. I don't think Ruth Stone's poem is "unfair" at all, but then I am a bit surprised at the idea that poems should be "fair." It seems to me that the best ones are always beyond consideration of fairness or unfairness. Wallace Stevens also made the comment "'womb' that filthy word."  And in his work from Susanna among the Elders to the she who sings the idea of order at Key West, women are never more than illustrative and then only when they are beautiful. I think he meant just what he said "a poet looks at the world . . .as a man looks at a woman." and the "somewhat" may make it less dogmatic but it certainly doesn't make it "he as a poet looks at the world with admiration for its beauty, a regret that that beauty will pass from consciousness through time and change, and an urgent and frustrated desire to know and explore that beauty before time and change take it away." 

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com


 

 
-------Original Message-------
From: Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 05/10/03 10:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Musings

> 
>                   The mountains look on Marathon,
                   And Marathon looks on the sea,
                   And musing there an hour alone,
                   I dreamed that beer might yet be free ...

==================================================
I agree with Douglas Clark that the discussion here of the Muse and of
love
as inspiration has been aridly abstract. My own experience leaves me in no
doubt about the nature and source of inspiration.  But I reserve personal
comment on these matters for my poems.  I'll only say here that the worst
thing a muse can tell her poet is yes.

==================================================
The Muse is literally the first person to appear in Western literature
(Iliad 1.1.)  Following this line of thought, it's perhaps interesting
that
"anger" is the first word in Western literature.  And continuing our
perusal
of Homer, I've always thought it delightful that we don't get more than
two
pages into the oldest book of our literature before we find some old fart
saying, "You know, back in the old days when men were really men ..."
(Iliad 1.259ff.)

==================================================
Sappho incidentally apparently didn't have a problem with the idea of the
Muses, since she says in so many words that her life was dedicated to
them.

==================================================
I think Ruth Stone was being unfair to Wallace Stevens in her poem
"Words,"
which criticizes Stevens's statement that "A poet looks at the world
somewhat as a man looks at a woman."  It's certainly unfair to distort his
meaning by misquoting the sentence as  "A poet looks at the world as a man
looks at a woman," which makes it seem more dogmatic and prescriptive than
it is. This is particularly important because the sentence  comes from
Stevens's book of jottings Adagia,  a collection of speculative and
deliberately provocative aphorisms.  It also includes, for instance, the
statements that "The death of one god is the death of all," and that
"Money
is a kind of poetry."  None of these statements is strictly true, but they
are all worth thinking about, which is what they are for.  In my opinion,
what Stevens meant  was that he as a poet looks at the world with
admiration
for its beauty, a regret that that beauty will pass from consciousness
through time and change, and an urgent and frustrated desire to know and
explore that beauty before time and change take it away.  This doesn't
seem
a viewpoint which should be beyond any person's understanding.

==================================================
I'm enthusiastic about the Voices project, but disappointed that there are
so far so few files.  It would be fascinating to have them from more
people.
  Surely everyone has some kind of access to make at least a cassette tape
-- if you don't have the equipment, your school or someone you know will.
This is your chance for vocal immortality!

==================================================
Thanks to Arni Ibsen for posting the Pandora and Havamal  link.  I hadn't
known about those.  For the classics I usually go to Perseus
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/), which has both texts and translations,
though the translations tend to be florid Victorian ones.

==================================================
Speaking of northern epos, can anyone recommend a good English translation
of the Kalevala?

==================================================
I'm not sure what there is to say about patronage that hasn't been in
dozens
of books. Since poetry has no commercial value, its producers in order to
produce it simply have to be given time, which means money.  The patron's
motives are perfectly understandable:  to gain the prestige of supporting
activity which has recognized cultural value, and secondarily to have a
few
flattering personal references in the output.  Patronage no longer exists
because we now live in a society in which there are no noncommercial
values,
so in general the only arts which can be produced, and the only ones which
are valued, are those which make money.  But the record of patronage, when
it existed,  at producing poetry is pretty good:  it's worth putting up
with
"O Maecenas descendent of many kings..." to have "Never seek to know,
Leuconoe,..."

==================================================
Quote of the week:

                    And this word first the goddesses said to me, the
Olympian Muses,
                    daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus:  "... we know how to
speak many lies
                    as if they were true, but we also know, when we wish,
to
utter the truth."

==================================================

Jon Corelis        [log in to unmask]
<a target=_blank
href="http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics">http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics</a>

==================================================

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