John Barton

The editor of The Malahat Review (whose table I had joined) expressed the view that I expect too much of poetry editors.

I wish now that I had thought of Pound putting blue ink on Eliot.  Or the need of an editor for John Clare.

My own assertions confounded these three: to burnish a key and to remove burs from a key and to use a bur to work metal.  And yet I insist that to buff a key is not to sand a key.  And burnish suggests the shiny new key, its ridged edges like brushed metal.  A new key is brushed, not sanded.

But perhaps even memory failed me, and the irritation of the sanded key is to be found in a recent number of The Fiddlehead ....

See: 'deburring brush' and deburring newly cut keys; dental burs; burr holes, trephine, trepan and other things we need about as much ...

End-User CSS Stylesheets for poetry pages

One case for a poetry browser or at least end-user stylesheets for CSS has to be the blood-red on black Rilke pages.

Most browsers will now let you specify a style sheet to try to ensure that text will be your chosen colour or font and the background neither blazing white or utterly black.

A poetry browser would provide a better set of links for a page than a simple bookmark and a more useful way of making notes or linking alternate translations.

Rilke has many translators and I favour one for this and another for that.  Then there is the question that underlies the issue that I raised yesterday: access to views of source texts, canonical editions, author corrections.

Bookmarks do not provide this and tools such as Microsoft OneNote, while helpful, are far from what I find useful.  A poem does need an outliner.  It needs an unobtrusive mode of presentation and then options - but perhaps not the "full morphic" of early Self and of the current Squeak Smalltalk 4.1 release.

For the Rilke page, I wish that this Chrome browser had a simple right-click to "sane view".  All right - "preferred view".  It is what we routinely get with astronomy charts: white on black or black on white.  To save battery power for text on my netbook I often opt for yellow text on a deep blue background. I never opt for a the default white background as I prefer something closer to "linen".

Many browsers allow a default to be set for the minimum font size to be permitted so that text remains readable for the user - for the reader of a poem.

My ideas for poetry browsers are usually tracked by my "aule" posts and pages for "aule browser" and "aule pages" as either aule-browser or eclectic-pencil.

My alternative poetry pages can be found at poets.aule-browser.com but will require the reliable MIT Curl plugin as I use the Curl language for the poetry markup.

One useful option is to be able to switch easily to an invisible HTML BODY element and a black or very dark background rather than using an annoying screensaver.  It's like closing a book on a real bookmark for a moment to reflect, to pause or to contemplate.  I think of it as the silence missing between tracks of separate compositions on audio media ... or radio broadcasts ... or before mandatory applause.

Will the web ever give us a programmable option for a blank screen for a few moments after obnoxious adverts?  Just the time to count to ten before they display red text on a black background ...

Question: last line should end with Schoß  or  Schooß  as both are on the web in text and in web images such as that at Google Books ?

Regardless, the Cohn translation falters at the end.  For feathers, see http://www.earthlife.net/birds/feathers.html with calamus, rachis, barb, barbules and filoplumes, remiges, retrices, inferior umbilicus.

I have tried

feeling, as he now felt, the root 

of each and every quill 

warming, reddening, in this flesh.

as you have to reject "every inch" and "quivering" out of hand.  I would like something of the cygnet fledging but have not arrived at it yet.

Title Poem

I was irked to hear a poet say of his celebrated book that first the title came to him and then months passed as he worked at (or did he say "waited for" ? ) a poem to be the "title poem".

On that basis so many poets would struggle to write a piece to be titled "New Collected Poems" - especially when the collection is new but not all of the poems are new.

A local poet can sport many badges of the authentic, the regional, and I distrust them all - age especially, that years make for "genuine".  Some prefatory remark had primed me to be irked so readily.

And I could not swear that a title has never occurred to me before a poem took full shape.  This must often be the case with the poem commissioned or demanded by some occasion, the death of a poet, the death of a parent, a sibling, a child, a mentor, or a spouse.  A muse.  A beloved cat. Monody.

Robert Hass must have known he would one day write a piece in memory of Milosz.

But though irked, I did not boo or groan.  The Greeks were not so reticent, nor, I imagine,  was the real Dr. Johnson.  See the many remarks of Pepys on sermons as found in his diaries.

Assignment: write something with the title "The Death of Virgil".  Truly, this
is irksome to consider.

But can a title be decisive in the sales of a book of poetry?  Is it because of how that title will appear on the page in the reviews?  Is it that so many titles of books of poetry are not memorable, and the title poem less so?

For painters with work for a gallery, the name of the show is needed for the brochure, the poster, the rest of the mechanics of commerce.

And with fame, eponymous will triumph, as does the name of Heaney for a few pages of a foreward to a thick book by many hands.  More than the title, the name will move so many to pull the book from the bookseller's shelf - and that purchase is essential to the survival of just what - authentic, genuine, poetry?

If a poet is to be trusted by the attentive listener, reader, then sometimes the less said, the better.

Temptation: to talk to your listening audience for a longer time than that which will be taken to read the work.  Translations of fragments and short gems to be excused in advance - along with the reading of commissioned epitaphs.

Critical Comment: "that awkward effort to shock your reader mars your work."

Doubtful Response: "and I do that to provoke this very discussion!"

Of that title poem, the poet said that his reading might fall or falter between the poem as remembered in its coming to him and the poem as transcribed from memory by him.  Then it should have been read until so revised as to be ready to be read from the printed book, for it is now confessed to be less than ready to support the title.   Imagine the architect, standing in the foyer before those gathered for the occasion, and making this declaration of his structure, its design, its finishings and furnishings.

Perhaps the next printing, the next edition, will find the poem revised - or under a new title.