Frederick Pollack wrote:
> Seminar
>
>
> We were discussing (Bloom was discussing)
> “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
> by Browning, 1855.
> We had followed the hero off the road,
> across a poisoned stream and waste,
> past instruments of torture and a horse
> that “must be wicked to deserve such pain,”
> the hero tells us – Bloom interpreting
> at every step, or saying
> more interpretation was needed.
> At last the Tower lifelong training
> has failed to prepare him for
> astounds the knight (a “childe”
> is a knight apprentice). “And yet
> Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
> And blew. ‘*Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came*.’”
> “Why,” asked Bloom – that big voice partly
> a frantic angel’s, partly from the tomb –
> “that period? I really do not know.
> Why not a comma, or nothing? It isn’t a misprint.”
> I thought a long time
> (my fellow students looked like they were thinking)
> and said, “He becomes a song.
> The period is an equals sign.
> Everything to the left of it equals that sentence.”
> It was my finest academic moment.
>
> It was during his seminar on the Romantics
> in ’66. The affectations
> and manias we made a cult of smoothed,
> his clothes neater, Bloom became
> famous. One in that class
> was in Clinton’s White House,
> one died towards the end in Vietnam.
> Students became profs.
> Poems became footnotes.
> I appear to have become
> an Expressionist study of a knight on horseback.
> It isn’t a normal Expressionist motif.
> They would have preferred the unbounded, natural
> energy of the horse. With me on it –
> three-hundred-plus pounds of man and armor –
> and despite the fierce brushwork, it looks sad
> and seems to be going nowhere,
> the spear at my side to be elsewhere.
It builds to an operatic ending that reminds me not of Expressionism but
of Picasso's ink drawing of Don Quixote even without the
windmills--nevertheless it's a breakaway from what I gather (via
classmates who knew him) was the ability of Harold Bloom to suck the air
out of rooms, trains, planes, and automobiles. The flogging of the text
called "interpretation" puts me in mind of Sontag's call for an erotics
of art rather than what I expect was a hermeneutic. Albeit my kids in
English II are late-term freshmen, I read them a bunch of stuff today
from some probably disprized poets like Li-Young Lee and Alan Dugan and
said "I don't know what they MEAN. Stop worrying about what they mean.
Do what you did with the Berrigan sonnets, let them happen and absorb
themselves into you."
If the textbook would allow it, I'd like to take them on a tour of
Berryman's Dream Songs. Most of these poor naifs are only now getting
the idea that most poets are whackjobs. I may just produce my own
copies. Stuff from anthologies tends to run to crap.
Ken
--
Ken Wolman http://bestiaire.typepad.com http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with a strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden."--Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande
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