Did Robert Graves steal from his mistress, Laura Riding Jackson? Mark Jacobs says yes: "Between 1926 and 1939, he was learning from her what she was doing and thinking," Dr Jacobs said. "He was taking her ideas, her research, he was simply shovelling it in to his own books.... She left her manuscript in Majorca. She later wrote to him [Graves] and told him to burn the manuscript. We now know that he didn't. It all appeared in dribble form in The White Goddess. He used it for his own ends without mentioning it to her. She only found out in the 1950s."
Relevant to last week's discussion of poetry & war: John Tipton has a new translation of Ajax-goes-to-Iraq: Tipton, who is highly conscious of the resonances of Sophocles' play with the current conflict in Iraq, includes a number of anachronisms, which anchor the play firmly in the present. For instance, his Ajax kills himself with Hector's gun, not his sword (a distracting mistake is that this Ajax also claims to be killed with "my own weapon," rather than simply "self-killed"); the Chorus compares Ajax to "a fast aircraft" and meditates on "the statistics of missiles." There are more obscenities than the conventions of Greek tragedy would have allowed: when Ajax realizes that he has "murdered farm animals" instead of soldiers, he shouts "Fuck. FUCK!" These details make it clear that we are to see these soldiers as modern combatants, struggling with the physical realities of modern warfare. (Via Philip Metres, who is I think too quick to identify Ajax & Achilles as sufferers of PTSD . . . .)
I commend to you PrimatePoetics, in which "Great apes using human language are creating a new literature": We are using the term poetry in a special sense. Poetry is a state of language in which we can't be sure to recognize it if we see it. Notice that our definition rejects as poetry most of the stuff written in broken lines which passes for poetry today. The very fact that there is still furious debate about the very existence of ape language shows that the language is still in its poetic phase.
Seth Abrams on the state of small poetry presses: out of the one hundred independent publishers of poetry in the United States I researched, I can only say for certain that two of them offer no-fee year-round readings of unsolicited full manuscripts.
Tess Taylor has a poem, "World's End: North of San Francisco," in Guernica: Here at the continent’s end, fortifications /linger for the end of the world. They greet / each California morning, these barracks in the fog.
Let me send American readers off for the holiday weekend with a beach-reading recommendation: Ciaran Carson's translation of The Táin, which came out in the US in February. The Táin is usually described as the Irish Beowulf--and there is *lots* of heroic violence, but also quick wit and raunchy fun for all! Screw Batman--I want to see Cú Chulainn: In that great massacre on Muirthemne Plain Cú Chulainn slew seven score and ten kings as well as innumerable dogs and horses, women and children, not to mention underlings and rabble; and not one man in three escaped without a staved head, or a broken leg, or a burst eye, or without being scarred for life in some way. And Cú Chulainn came away from that encounter without so much as a scrape or scratch on himself, or his man, or his horses.
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