Books I am reading today:

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

"Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock."

The list of particulars dates back at least as far as the heroic epics - the Illiad and the Odyssey, for one start. It shows up today in the work of Ray DiPalma in the current Chicago Review. My edition notes that Woolf saw the novel, c. 1920, as at an impasse, and was reading Euripides, Bacchae excitedly. How alive this prose is - sparkling with details, written thru the senses and memory- gaining focus thru its characters narrative wanderings. Want to read Nightwood after this. These are the first non-standard genre novels I've read since Dhalgren last year. Breaking out of my reading rut feels great. I chose this book because I remember there was something alluring and satisfying in Woolf's prose as an undergrad English major. Some type of ecriture feminine, is it? I am conscious of not wanting to read any male-written novels right now, at least none I can think of. A few minutes pass, and this dissolves. Woolf and Barnes first though.

Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes
A Christmas present last year, and here I am pouring over it. Having just finished Ronald Johnson's seminal radi os, a page-by-page "reduction" of the first four chapters of Paradise Lost into a bewildering and intensely alluring alchemic word-drone, in which whisps and suggestions of underlying stratas and a dozen or two startling lines rose out of 70 or 80 sparse and beautiful pages, Ovid's metamorhic tales make mighty sense. And yet I have no sense of Hughes' mode of translation, so I can take these only as work bearing some intimate relation to Ovid's 1900 years earlier, but from what I can guesstimate, this is a logonymic translation privleging "sense" as in semantic content.

I dont recall liking more than a few of the lines in Hughes "own" poetry, but "Creation; Four Ages; Lycaon; Flood" made for a great afternoon, and it turns more and more brutal with each page, a sort of restrained but pitiless death metal poem. We move from "Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/ Into different bodies" (go ahead Ted, tell me) thru the prehistory of the world, up to the flood, where we part 18 pages later, with: "Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread,/Floats like a plague of dead frogs." I certianly don't expect such work from Poet Laureates. It must be the magic of the classics - that his craft shines brightest in looking back at the work he first read as a schoolboy struggling with Latin.

I enjoy this and it also irks me that I do. Which is part of the point - my sense of lineage and my ideological leanings have cornered me to the point where reading is no longer fun, and is cut off from many of my desires. I don't yet know what to say of Ted's lines, how he works with them, they are themselves a sort of "rough" free verse where the line ends act as the main key to distinguish this work from prose, staggering the lines in tiers, slowing the reader down. The prose translations of Ovid I glanced at looked pale and dull - despite the stylistic diff. btwn us, I read Hughes lines in this poem with great warmth, and they slip easily, energetically down the throat like a tastier red bull. But they slip fast - there are only a few lines I re-read to savor or work out an image or turn of speech. It is - I keep feeling - such a different use of the poetic from what I have grown used to these last few years. It feels good to be in contact with it again, from this new vantage.

Like the Dalai Lama has said - any one faith would be a poor fit for all the various peoples of the world. Any one corporation, any one state, any one style... I agree.