I grew up in a house filled with books. Many of them mysteriously old and impenetrable. Ornately bound sets of Dickens, Gibbon, Francis Parkman, Macaulay. But there, magically, sandwiched among those ancient tomes, but actually accessible to me, resided a complete series of 1900s-era boys’ books my dad and his brothers had doted on and dogeared when they were ten-year old kids like myself: the fifteen-volume Dave Porter series, “by” Edward Stratemeyer.
That’s what I asked myself when I first glimpsed the Latin title of Pope Leo’s recent Encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. The meaning of those words seemed to me clear, at least in English: “Magnificent Humanity.” But then immediately I was puzzled. What “Humanity”? We cruel, self-destructive creatures? And “magnificent”? What is the Pope talking about? Do the Pope and I live on the same planet? With our persecutions of each other, our greed, our racism, our wars, our trashing of our environment—“magnificent”?
One way I’ve found to escape or at least ease the angst that thoughts of mutability arouse in me is to check in on what others before us, and especially poets, have had to say about the word and the anxiety underlying it. Two great English poets, from very different eras, come quickly to my mind: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).
Yes, I know: a flat-out contradiction. How can space be eloquent? or speak at all? Space is a nothing, isn’t it? An absence. A way of indicating a separation. The words around it speak, not the space itself. But if you think that way, you’ll find yourself challenged to think otherwise by the recently published This and That: Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater.
Narcissus, one of many mythical figures in Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is too important a character in our lives today to be dismissed as a word-jumble. That’s because Narcissus’s story forms the basis for the psychological malady called narcissism. It’s a malady characterized in one dictionary as “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.” Maybe close reading Narcissus’s story will help us figure out who is who the next time we look in the mirror.
After reading Dr. Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” again and again over many years, and reading it again now, I don’t find it depressing at all. Quite the opposite. I find it invigorating. And that’s in large part due to its language, maybe especially to its vigorous, often surprising adjective-noun combinations.
Five years after reading her poem at President Biden’s Inauguration, Amanda Gorman offers us two new poems addressing public affairs—but now not in a hopeful time, but in a time of grief, fear, and outrage at I.C.E.’s brutality towards the members of the “homeland” it claims to secure—towards Renee Good, towards Alex Pretti, towards all of us.
Loose talk recently emitted by powerful people about the possibility of exploding nuclear weapons again made me recall Beat poet Gregory Corso’s marvelously playful shape-poem “Bomb.” In 1960, when it was included in Corso’s poetry collection The Happy Birthday of Death, because of the poem’s length, “Bomb” was inserted into the binding in a compressed fold-out accordion format. When expanded, the poem revealed the exploding bomb itself.
This phrase took me aback. Not that I hadn’t already been happily startled by other passages in the book where I’d come across it: David Bentley Hart’s brilliantly, playfully pugnacious The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. But somehow the phrase I’ve used as my title stood out for me.
I hadn’t realized how narrow my understanding of this blog’s title—“Close Reading”—had become until a friend loaned me a fine new book, Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Yong’s book has reminded me what “close reading” is for, as described by Slant Books’ own definition: …the art of close reading reminds us that great literature deepens our respect for mystery and the divided nature of the human heart—and in so doing offers us hope for healing and reconciliation.
In the Preface to The Drunken Silenus (2020), the first volume of Morgan Meis’s “Three Paintings Trilogy”—which continues with The Fate of the Animals (2022), and culminates in the just published The Grand Valley—Meis tells us why he wrote this first book: “I was working on a style.”
Virginity is on trial here, and virginity’s crime is…? Tolentino summarizes one writer’s terms for it: “that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties.” As if virginity is metastasizing like cancer or multiplying like rabbits. Then Tolentino quotes another writer who gives the offense an economic spin by calling it a “sex recession,” as if virginity were the fall-out from bad investments.
It’s no longer the student who’s shocked by the unwelcome demands made on him or her by the first writing assignment. It’s the teacher who’s shocked, this time by the question of what’s to be done with the result, since it wasn’t the student who wrote the paper, but a computer. But if today’s English teachers are shocked at getting “perfect themes” because AI is writing them, why are they giving assignments for which “perfect themes” are the correct responses?
Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking them.
My question throughout my reading of these three very different treatments of Hitler, has been: What theme—if any—unifies them, beyond the scandal of their subject? I suggest that that theme has to do with each work’s willingness to picture Hitler dramatically, as a figure of tragedy.
W. D. Snodgrass’s master poetic work, The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle, was years in the making. Finally published in 1995, the work reflects his care in adjusting not only the tone but the shape of each character’s poetic speech to model his or her personal character. Speer’s stately, self-serving monologues are presented as a sequence of triangles (reflecting Speer the builder). Himmler’s dry monologues are divided into individual letters imprisoned in graph paper grids. And so on.
In her memoir, called Y2K, Colette Shade accomplishes the feat of critiquing “millennial nostalgia,” beginning by reenacting the frenzied eagerness that prompted it. She stacks up like houses of cards the accumulations of places, people, products, and promotions that once entranced her, and then undercuts them, so that they flutter to the floor, wilted and weightless.
The poems we hear in Tim Hunt’s new collection embody, for me, Jack Kerouac’s teaching: that to accept loss forever is, paradoxically, to embrace it in the present—to treat it as an ever-present reality, one that reveals unexpected beauty and solace, but only if we become part of that revelation.
And right there is the ageless appeal of Ben Jonson: a wit that never rests, never ceases to “deceive their malice”—the “their” in this case being all of us who tend to react without thinking to the words we hear and say and so doom ourselves to a fate of lonely, narrow literalism.
My bedside dresser is a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. That’s a photo of it you see here. Too many books piled in every direction, about to fall over. My wife Peggy counts them from time to time, calling out the growing number so that I can’t fail to hear it. She refuses to straighten the piles herself, much as she’d like to. She wants me to do it myself.