The Workshop That Wasn't

In addition to the sabermetrics workshop I taught earlier this summer, I also wrote a curriculum for a poetry workshop that didn't run. Much as I loved teaching sabermetrics, a part of me was even more excited to teach the poetry course. Why? Because I love the idea of reading awful, awkward poetry written by high schoolers.

Actually, I love the thought of introducing high schoolers to great poems, and sparking their own desire to write. Not necessarily poetry, per se, but poetry is as good an entry point into writing as anything. Maybe the best. Why? Because poetry forces you to be conscious of rhythm, forces you to be pithy, and forces you to use precise diction. Even poor poems usually follow some structural and lexiconical (a word I'm inventing because it's the middle of the night) rules. The result is that, even we poor poets of the world (people like me; there's a reason you don't really see my now exceedingly rare poetry on this blog) learn something about writing in the process.

Beyond learning about writing broadly by writing poetry, I think there's also something to be said for reading poetry. Good poetry is, cheesy as it sounds, highly inspirational. Poets like T.S. Eliot or Langston Hughes make you feel like you're getting more out of their words than the words themselves. Indeed, in Eliot's poems sometimes the worlds themselves feel like complete nonsense. But somewhere in those mess of symbolism and metaphor is that grain of magic that makes you smile, stand up, and read aloud. Like the opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table

Disturbing and surprising? Sure, but awesome too. Eliot rhymes with so much purpose in Prufrock that it's hard not to fall in love with the poem, even though it's so pompous.

I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Such lines! That is what separates those precious few great poets from the proverbial masses. Anyone can write a sonnet (or any other form) with enough patience and effort. Anyone, indeed, can even invent their own wild, Anne Sexton-like form. But the inspiration that results in lines so simple, so mundane, yet so effective is a rare gift.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep... tired... or it malingers

Malingers and fingers! My God, man, where does that come from? We might say that even inspiration is the work of effort and is an acquired ability. Indeed, I am suspicious of the notion of innate talent - pure genius - in the work of the mind. But there is no question that, whether by virtue of some genius or by virtue of the mere acquisition of the mantle of greatness for no particularly good reason, we have such poems as Prufrock and react to them with so much fervor that there must be something there.

The conversation about Prufrock, I promise, would have been more focused than this, because it's too late in the night and the week to get all analytical with poetry. I wouldn't say, however, that analysis and joy are opposed. It's far too easy to say that studying a work of art makes you appreciate it less: makes you lose that innocent, unadulterated love you have for the words by turning you into a cynical, self-righteous, pompous ass (or "connoisseur," you might say). I disagree. Sure, you may become more selective and discerning, and you may abandon some poems and poets (or songs and musicians, or paintings and painters, and so on), but those poems you do love become all the better when you study them closely. I've read Prufrock countless times, and yet I always find something new to love about it, which is a part of why it is great.

The workshop - which this post is about, remember - was not all about Eliot. Indeed, Prufrock was only going to be one day. In addition, we were going to study the following:

Walt Whitman - Song of Myself

We were only going to get to a small part of this one, because it's very long, and it takes a few readings and, I think, a little bit of time to get into those long, rambling lists of images in the middle. The beginning and the end were going to be our focus. Some choice lines:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

How brilliant. In a vast, large, rambling poem that undoubtedly offended the poetic sensibilities of many of its original readers, could you find a more perfect statement? How many writers have tried to say this and taken pages to do so? For Whitman, it takes fifteen words.

T.S Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

We've already got some lines from this one, but in the vein of the Whitman quotation, here's one of my favorite lines:

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Gabriela Mistral - Los Que No Danzan

I planned on using the wonderful translation of Ursula Le Guin, who I have recently decided is clearly a modern Virginia Woolf in that she's so brilliant at so many different things (best-selling, award-winning science fiction and amazing translations of Chilean poems? What gives?). But for the feeling of the poem, the Spanish is better. Since I'm guessing you don't know Mistral, I'll put in the whole poem.

Una niña que es inválida
dijo: -«¿Cómo danzo yo?»
Le dijimos que pusiera

	a danzar su corazón...

Luego dijo la quebrada:
-«¿Cómo cantaría yo?»
Le dijimos que pusiera
a cantar su corazón...

Dijo el pobre cardo muerto:
-«¿Cómo, cómo danzo yo?»
Le dijimos: -«Pon al viento
a volar tu corazón...»

Dijo Dios desde la altura:
-«¿Cómo bajo del azul?»
Le dijimos que bajara
a danzarnos en la luz.

Todo el valle está danzando
en un corro bajo el sol,
A quien falte se le vuelve
de ceniza el corazón.

I only discovered Mistral - a Nobel winner - in the course of writing this curriculum. Given that the class didn't run, I think finding her poetry is the hidden meaning. This poem in particular stood out to me because I read it first while reading Carol Shloss's biography of Lucia Joyce, a dancer herself who clearly didn't fit into her world. Dancing was taken away from Lucia, but I like to think that, like the girl from the first stanza, she (as Le Guin has it) "did her dancing in her heart."

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Renascence

There's a chance you know Millay, and the opening lines of this poem may sound familiar to you:

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.

From such admittedly mundane beginnings* this poem takes off. Go read it. Seriously. You'll see what I mean. Millay wrote it as a young woman, entered it into a competition, and finished fourth to the outrage of even the poets who finished ahead of her. The winner called his victory "an embarrassment," and with good reason. Renascence may be the work of a young poet, but for that it has an exuberance - a refusal to admit that, even in a highly restrictive formal structure, it can't do everything. It does do everything.

* Though undoubtedly steeped in symbolism, I'm still calling this mundane. Remember that three anythings is usually a dead give away that something funky is going on.

Here's what I mean by "It does do everything:"

I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense.

And that's before it really gets going.

Freidrich Schiller and Ludwig Van Beethoven - Ode to Joy

Yeah, yeah, I couldn't help myself. Actually, the activity I had designed around this poem and song combination was, I think, a highly under-represented part of the writing process: deleting stuff. The idea is this: the Schiller poem is quite long and unwieldy, and even though the last movement of the 9th Symphony is 20+ minutes long, it simply can't get through the whole poem. Beethoven, however, does not simply take the first two stanzas and throw them in. He judiciously picks the stuff he wants, and mixes around the order to fit his needs. How does he decide? That's the real question.

The lesson, then, is that you have to do that with your own work sometimes, too. It's alright to change the order of your paragraphs around sometimes to make the flow better. It's also alright to excise whole sections of text if they don't meet your needs. It's even good to start over. As one of my middle school English teachers said (and yes, I remember my middle school English classes; I'm just like that): "Sometimes you have to kill your babies." That awesome line you wrote might ruin the poem, so take it out and use it in a different one. Or, more to the point, that awesome line you wrote isn't actually awesome. Kill it.

Langston Hughes - A Dream Deferred

I tried, more or less, to avoid horribly cliche high school poems, but I couldn't dodge this one. For one thing, I'm not convinced people actually read this.* For another, even if they do, it's just so amazing that it's worth reading again and again. In case you don't recall, here it is (after the posterisk).

* Don't they? Isn't this poem like a part of getting a drivers license or something? It's only, like, the most iconic poem in American history.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Even without the context this poem was written in, it packs a huge punch. Add in the context, and it's even better.

In a typical Paul move, I was going to pair this with reading the "I Have a Dream" speech, partially because there's a certain, obvious thematic link, but also because the course would have been gearing up towards a final poem-reading symposium, and King was a marvelous public speaker. Best to learn from the best.

I also planned on having a student choice day, which I was going to leave pretty wide open. I'd be fascinated to know what poems students came in to the course interested in, or if, on the other hand, they'd want to take a look at pop-song lyrics. Either way, frankly, I think we could have had a fruitful conversation. Alas, the course did not run, so no conversations.

Nevertheless, writing the curriculum was a worthwhile experience, not only for the practice in curriculum construction, but also because I learned about poetry in the process. Millay and Mistral, for example, were vague names without words or meaning attached to them. A Dream Deferred was "that civil rights poem I read in high school." There's something to be said for returning to those works you weren't ready to read in high school for that reason: as an adult they mean so much more - and sometimes so much less - and you can get so much further into them. There's also something to be said, however, about reading those poems in high school, even if you don't get into them, because without that exposure, how do you even know where to begin to look when you really do want to know what happens to a dream deferred?

Towards Defining Great Music, Part Five: Nicht Diese Tone

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is, of course, one of the most famous pieces of music ever recorded. Who hasn't heard the "Ode to Joy?" Which young piano student doesn't learn the melody?

Of the many reasons for the fame of the Ninth Symphony, however, the most curious is the presence of a choir. Not only was this a new addition to the symphonic style, it was also new to Beethoven. In a time when opera was the rage - and in the shadow of the master of opera, Mozart - Beethoven curiously composed only one opera (which was not successful) and a spattering of songs. In short, lyrics were not his forte, and composing for the human voice was essentially unknown to him. How odd, then, that his perhaps best known melody (up there with the opening of the 5th Symphony) is one of the very few he wrote for the voice.

Why did Beethoven compose so little music for the voice? Why is the Ninth Symphony, on the contrary, the Chorale Symphony? Those questions hardly seem to address the problem I've been dancing around for the last month, but I believe they are actually at the heart of the question. Great Music ought, I believe, to speak for itself, and no composer is as systematic in his rejection of lyric - in, we might say, his elevation of pure, instrumental music - as Beethoven. His symphonies and sonatas claim that they are comprehensible to the musical mind without the attendant translation of singers and words. Their purpose, indeed, might be inexpressible except through music alone.

If any music is great, then, to my mind, this is a key ingredient: it must be the music which is great. Music with lyric may very well be great, but by removing the lyrics, we can find music pure, and see whether greatness is even possible. Indeed, the question, "Is there Great music?" should be reconstituted thus: "Is there music which speaks for itself, and which expresses something words cannot." Perhaps all music does that, perhaps only some. But Great music would almost certainly do it and do it well, expressing not "I'm extremely sad in a way words cannot express," but revealing, instead, we might say, what the non-linguistic root of sadness is. What, indeed, the spiritual, emotional, mythical, or animal root might be.

Because we are moving - by necessity - into the realm of pure music, words will almost certainly fail us soon. Nevertheless, let us push on a little further, so we can see what lies at the borderlands between language and music, and see whether that further realm is fallow or fertile.

So let's start with a piece. The Kreutzer Sonata. Not quite "early" Beethoven (whose music is notoriously similar to that of his mentor Haydn), but still fairly early in his life. The first movement, which I have linked to above, is a stunning adventure through what sounds, more than anything, like the frustrations of tremendous romantic desire. And yet also it could be a lover's quarrel. Either way, it is violent and intense, raging from major to minor and back again, displaying a dizzying give and take between the piano and violin that is not quite cooperative, but is not quite confrontational either.

I must confess that my interpretation of this piece is colored by two sources. Tolstoy wrote a short story called "The Kreutzer Sonata" about this very piece, and it is a dark and disturbing work about jealousy and violence in love. In addition, the movie "Immortal Beloved" places this piece centrally in its narrative, claiming that it is the result of a frustrated Beethoven when his carriage gets stuck in the mud, causing him to miss his rendezvous with his beloved.

Neither of those specific images, however, really captures the meaning of the piece, as I understand it. Rather, exactly what makes the Kreutzer great is that it can accurately be conveyed by two such disparate physical situations. Why can it do that? Because it is not limited by any words you can apply to it. The spiritual and emotional processes behind it - the feelings that it reveals to us - are expressible most completely exactly by sonata, and that same feeling can be traced to both Tolstoy's story and the movie.

I won't go into depth on the Kreutzer now - rather, I want to save for future posts exploration of Beethoven's works - so instead I can point out a couple other words that I find comparably profound, as further argument for Great Music.

Consider the Spring sonata as well.* While not as intense as the Kreutzer, the Spring is one of, I think, Beethoven's most intensely romantic works. Unlike much of his "romantic" music, the Spring is not rife with conflict or frustration, capturing instead the lighter and more playful side of love (the "Spring" side, if you will). I point to it as a contrast to the Kreutzer, and because it is also a violin sonata. It is worth finding violin sonatas by other composers and comparing them to Beethoven. No other composer comes close to his mastery of the interaction between violin and piano, if only because he is not afraid to understand the instruments as lover and beloved, rather than merely as instruments. Beethoven's violin sonatas have a built-in sexual tension that is unmatched elsewhere.

* In all four movements.

I've linked to this before, but here's Beethoven's Appassionata sonata in an excellent performance. This, like the Kreutzer, is an intense and almost violent work. Its title is telling, but "passionate" doesn't really explain the nature of the passion on display. And yet, listening to the appassionata, one cannot help but "get it" without really being able to say what it "gotten."

There are other pieces I could mention, but I want to jump forward to the 9th Symphony, since I think I've paved the way for my ultimate point.* What is fascinating about the 9th Symphony - as I mentioned at the outset - is that Beethoven puts a choir in the final movement. It's more than worth listening to the entire thing on the way to that choir, of course, because of how they make their entrance: "O Fruende, Nicht Diese Tone..."

* Karajan conducting.

"Oh friends, not these tones. Let us sing yet more joyfully." Beethoven wrote the opening to the choir's lines, and then borrowed the remainder from Schiller. Legend has it that he anguished over those opening lines, unsure whether to introduce Schiller's "Ode to Joy" by name, or to signal instead some of the key themes of the text to follow. He settled, instead, on looking back, "Not these tones." The 9th Symphony is in D minor, until this moment, at which point it switches to D Major.

What is important to remember, however, is that the choir does not sing right away in the final movement. Instead, the orchestra by themselves play exactly what the choir is about to sing. The meaning is already there, the choir is just there for clarification. Indeed, Beethoven is cautioning the listener not to take too seriously the lyrics, or at least to be a little critical of the deeper meaning. Which words does he, in the end, emphasize? Which sections are presented with some musical sarcasm? Humor? Sincerity?

I'll return to the 9th Symphony at some point - possibly in a recapitulation of my senior thesis at St. John's - but for now I want to point to this: Beethoven creates a whole realm of spiritual meaning in the body of his work, meaning that would be diminished by lyric. When he finally did incorporate lyrics into his music, in his final symphony, it was done with slyness and humor.

Perhaps that doesn't answer any of our questions about Great Music. For my part, I'm not sure there is a conclusive argument to be made about music, if only because we each have such different experiences. Nevertheless, there is a reason that musicologists and theorists study Beethoven and Mozart and Wagner (and even some non-Germans) so closely. Their music, if you can unlock your ear, speaks a language divine. Perhaps music of any genre can do that, but I wonder whether the complexity of the harmony in what is broadly called "classical" music isn't actually an essential part of that language, a part we too often leave out nowadays.

Either way, there is a modern conception that Beethoven and his ilk - those long-dead white men - wrote music that is boring. That is a terrible mistake. Whether you accept any of my premises, trust me on this: all of those stereotypes that we associate with classical music - old foagies sitting around listening to boring, fluffy violins while they smoke their pipes - are not true. Beethoven has more to do with what you listen to today than you think, and if that does not make his music great, it at the very least makes it important.